Peter Thiel: “Hypnotic Mass Phenomena”
This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn&#x27;t do it justice.<p>I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually <i>agree</i> with him.<p>The block for me is admittedly his politics. It&#x27;s not that his political views may be different from mine. That&#x27;s fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don&#x27;t fit into it.<p>I have no friends who are fascists and I&#x27;ve dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet-style communists, and there is at least one case where I&#x27;ve backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I&#x27;ve also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.<p>To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.<p>So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He <i>seems</i> to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.<p>So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn&#x27;t believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.