Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist

On the other hand, the people Christ and his followers most often condemned were the rich and powerful.

>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.

I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.

With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.

Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.

What the heck would I do with billions?

The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"

The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"

You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.

Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.

Its what a normal person does with excess wealth, as opposed to sociopaths and megalomaniacs.

It's what a decent person does. It's not what a "normal" person would do.

just because they're not filthy rich =/= they'll be any nicer with big money.

For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.

And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.

If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.

Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]

[0] https://x.com/LouLakeyDraws/status/1488076999105323011

Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.

But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.

For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.

Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.

It's wild how just having the facade of wealth will get you a following in the US, for free.

Americans blindly idolize the wealthy. It's crazy. Truly a "not get millionaire" mindset for a lot of this country.

"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.

What are you talking about? The US was founded by getting people out into the streets and countryside to fight over politics. The Civil War was a fight over politics (the politics of slavery for the South where they wanted to keep it legal). The US has constantly had fights, actual violent fights with many deaths, over politics. It isn't something that just started after you were born.

Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.

> wasn't like that before my time

As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."

You haven't done much reading about history, did you?

...

> Communism ruins everything.

The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?

Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_you_money

I was unfamiliar with the second one, which is the one you give.

I was familiar only with the first one: the ability to leave your job, and burn your bridges behind you by swearing at your former co-workers. I think that's the older meaning; I found it in a 1970 book:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Deceivers/XoxBAAAAI...

Other books from the 70s appear to have that sense.

I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).

About the fact that people may tend to judge people as characters in a book and not as real people with influence.

I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...

I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.

We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.

This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.

For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.

From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.

You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.

I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.

More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.

If we can’t even return rocks from Mars, how are we ever getting a person back? It’s not even a given that we could get a human to Mars alive.

If people with your mindset were in charge, I think we would get there sooner, but there would be many lives lost and untold money wasted first. For what? To plant a flag?

As was most of South America to the European man when Magellan did his thing.

Since the 1960s, the worker-to-retiree ratio halved indeed, but productivity went 4x.

These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.

Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.

And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.

Forgive the rant; better to look at the stars.

The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.

He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.

There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".

Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?

That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".

Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.

"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.

A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."

It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.

Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.