Originally published on June 20, 2024 within Dulla's Archives.

A Straussian Moment

In an interview of Peter Thiel at the Hoover Institute over 4 years ago, Peter Thiel discusses how he sees three futures for Western Europe, and while he didn’t make mention of it in the interview (probably so as not to seem alarmist), I’d think he would extend these 3 futures to the US as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRleB034EC8), 39:20).

These 3 futures laid out were:

Islamic Sharia Law
Totalitarian AI ala China, where the computers track you and everything you do all the time (ie Eye of Sauron)
Hyperenvironmentalism, where you drive an e-scooter and recycle

Thiel goes onto say that although he’s not a radical environmentalist, with those 3 choices he can see why the green movement is winning.

Earlier in the interview, the interviewer brings on an essay Peter Thiel had written years earlier called “The Straussian Moment”, in which Thiel discusses how via an increasingly online world, people have become less concerned with politics in favor of entertainment. The interviewer quotes:

“The world of entertainment represents the culmination of the shift away from politics…”

The interviewer then places a read on Thiel’s position by saying the Enlightenment was about asking important questions, but as time has gone on, often times many people no longer ask themselves these important questions. He goes onto quote from Thiel’s essay:

“Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts’, as in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death.”

With the quote presented, Thiel in the interview then goes to elaborate further in saying:

“This has been the trend of modernity.”

“But it’s not as if politics has disappeared, it’s just that politics has gotten displaced in various ways.”

“But yes, there is this incredible degree with which we’ve substituted the realities of politics for these increasingly fictionalized worlds, and that’s probably a very, very unhealthy thing. There is a slightly different frame that I’ve given on this is in the last 40 or 50 years, there’s been a shift from exteriority—which…doing things in the real world—to the interior world, which can be thought of as a shift from the world of politics to entertainment, or something like that, and the powerful frame I give is that almost 50 years from today in July 1969, men reached the moon, and 3 weeks later Woodstock began, and with the benefit of hindsight we can say that is when progress ended and hippies took over the country…or something like that…and then we’ve had this incredible shift toward interiority in the decades since then, and I would include things like the drug counterculture, I would include video games, maybe alot of entertainment more generally, there’s sort of parts of the Internet that can be scored both ways…but certainly there are all these things where we’ve shifted toward…the world of meditation, yoga…this world of interiority.”

“In Paradise Lost, Satan says “if I can change my mind, I can change where I am” and that’s not quite true: there is an external reality. But somehow the temptation to turn everything into something therapeutic, something psychological, something meditative has been a very powerful one in the post-1960s America.”

The interviewer then goes onto bring up the position from the later philosopher and mutual friend of both the interviewer and Thiel, Rene Girard, of which Thiel had previously discussed in his essay. The interviewer reads:

“For Girard, there remains a denial of the founding role of the violence caused by human mimesis and, therefore, a systemic underestimation of the scope of apocalyptic violence. What if mimesis drives others to acquire [nuclear] weapons for the prestige they confer…The word that best describes this unbounded apocalyptic violence is ‘terrorism’.”

Peter Thiel in the interview clarifies further with a simple statement:

“The Enlightenment always whitewashes violence.”

Further, he elaborates:

“There are many things we can’t think about under Enlightenment reasoning, and one of them is violence itself.”

"If you go to the anthropological myth of the Enlightenment, it’s the myth of the Social Contract. What happens when everyone is at everyone else’s throats? What the Enlightenment says is everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down and has a nice legal chat and draws up a social contract…and maybe that’s the founding myth, the central myth of the Enlightenment, if you will. And what Girard says is that something very different must’ve happened, where with everybody at eachother’s throats, the violence doesn’t just resolve itself, and maybe it just gets channeled to a specific scapegoat, where the war of all against all becomes the war of all against one…and that somehow then gets resolved but in a very violent way.”

“And so I think what Girard or Schmitt or Machiavelli or Judeo-Christian inspiration all have in common is the idea that human nature is problematic, it’s violent, it’s not straight forward what you do with this. It’s not utopian. It’s not saying that everyone is fundamentally good. Where Girard and Schmitt disagree is that Girard believes that once you describe this, it has this dissolving effect, so scapegoating violence only works if you don’t understand what you’re doing…and so if you say “we have a crisis in our village; we’re gonna have a witch hunt so that everyone can get out all their negative energy, and we’ll target this one elderly woman”, that only works if you don’t think of it as a fake psychosocial thing. Once you think of it in those terms, it stops to work…and so there is this sense of late modernity where there is this unraveling…and for Girard this unraveling is both a bad thing because we had these cultural institutions that were are only way of working and they are now unraveling, but it’s also inevitable and we can’t somehow put the Genie back in the bottle. So the Girardian critique of Schmitt would be that where Schmitt says “politics is about friends and enemies”, he’s being so explicit, and where Schmitt would think that by being so explicit he would think that he is strengthening politics, but maybe it has this effect of undermining it.”

To sum it up, Thiel sees the future of politics as being less about politics for most people, and more about people being entertained, watching their favorite online spectacles, rather than people actually actualizing their legitimate interest in changing their current circumstances for the better through political means. He discussed how this specific iteration of this phenomena has been the case for many decades now (since the advent of radio and television), and how this trend is poised to continue on into the future. Harkening back to the Enlightenment, Thiel argues, we were put on this path with the myth of the Social Contract, and how it basically prevented thought and discussion of uncomfortable, gritty truths among polite aristocratic society and law creation. To cap it off, Thiel aligns with philosopher Renee Girard in his assessment that the observation and discussion of politics helps deflate such spirits toward politics, and otherwise undermines the creation of classes of people interested in building a strong political climate—and that this dearth of people of this type may be for the better or the worse.

Platforms and Content

When you really pan out and go bird’s eye view and then even pan out further above the birds, you begin to see, for lack of a better word, the inanity of many individual actions taken in the here-and-now that would theoretically be toward shaping the future.

For instance, one spending hours working at a job of which the company will be bankrupt in 50 years and to which the individual will eventually lose the skillset of the job when he moves to another job will have effectively wasted his time in the time horizon of the momentous events of the world.

Perhaps where we can see this best evidenced is with the amount to which people view screens to watch real-time and recorded content.

Think of a movie for instance that used visuals and audio to try to evoke emotion from the viewer, and then go and do a write-up on the plot of the movie. When you coldly write the plot of the movie out, a lot of the details that seemed important whilst watching the movie now seem irrelevant and inconsequential. The emotion is lost when you put that pen to paper to summarize, in large part because that story is not yours—but that’s really out of scope for what I’m getting at here.

People in this day-and-age spend a lot of time on their computers and phones, surfing the Internet. What’s particularly interesting about this is that for a good enough deal of people, they mainly do so mainly for entertainment…and what’s interesting about this entertainment is that it’s not even first-hand entertainment, but rather entertainment that has been reswizzled, repurposed from its upstream origination to delivery at its downstream location.

In the world where I’ve spent time online, I’ve seen an interesting trend where the “upstreams” largely consist of video games, Hollywood, and mainstream news outlets, and then get funneled into Wikipedia and then to social media, where the conversation really takes off amongst Internet users.

Below are a few of the different paths that content goes, starting from the upstream and going downstream:

Netflix —> Kiwifarms —> Twitter
Netflix —> Twitter —> Kiwifarms
Netflix —> Wikipedia
Video Game—>Video Game Forum—>Twitter
Video Game—>Kiwifarms—>Twitter
Video Game—>Wikipedia
MSM News—>Twitter
MSM News—>Wikipedia
MSM News—>Kiwifarms

As you navigate to these downstream locations and notice the amount of combativeness people have in critiquing one another on the truth about particular details, it’s easy to find oneself swept up in it. The conversation is often energizing to watch after-all.

But one must remember that in the grand scheme of things, these opinions will often be swept away or integrated and then soon forgotten.

Through this lens, one begins to look at things in a more high-level way, and a more important way (in my opinion):

It’s not about the content, it’s about the platforms.

While there may be valuable information on the platforms themselves, there’s a big emphasis on the word ‘may’.

As one may consider that on a long-enough timeline, a growing population of spirited public conversation on a particular platform will attract attention, and those moneyed interests that will have reason to become even larger moneyed interests will find ways to alter such attention away from being ‘free speech’ rather toward ‘their speech’.

In such a way, without a platform having strong values already established by its administration by which it abides, eventually somebody will capitalize on the freedom that exists there, insofar as there is no law preventing them from doing so.

All that being said, the one redeeming quality of a forum that exists over a long enough period of time—so long as it is maintained as organic—is its influencer network.

Influencers have 2 main stores of value:

They are effective in garnering an audience
Their speech patterns and rhetorical techniques

Even if, let’s say, the things they discuss and the platform itself is all artificial hogwash content, these two aspects to an influencer’s efficacy still show some redeeming skills that can be drawn upon by the casual passerby.

Beyond this though, one must assume the following, particularly now where we find ourselves:

New forums will have an organic userbase and distribution of content. Over time, this will become artificial.

One must contend with the fact that if they aren’t actively seeking out newly-established forums, they will largely be inhaling tired, downstream content and astroturfed influencers.

If one finds this notion unpalatable, there are two solutions:

Stop visiting the site.
Make your own.

There is something to be said for making your own—either through time dedication or by paying someone to do it—but that’s going to require your attention, and you have to ask yourself if you are really committed to that end, and to what scope.

But, undertake such initiative and you can be assured that the amusements that you discover and integrate into your website are of your own making, and to which you will more directly benefit from.

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