Peter Thiel and his buddies really feel they now not belong to our species.
Amongst plutocratic reactionaries, Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, is a trendsetter. In 2016, even billionaires who had been hostile to liberalism and shared Thiel’s views on the need of radically decreasing authorities to empower huge enterprise had been hesitant to help Donald Trump, seeing the candidate’s populism as a menace to the established order. Thiel himself knew that betting on Trump was of venture—nevertheless it was a guess he thought was not simply clever however essential. For a few years, as he makes clear in a lengthy interview with Ross Douthat in The New York Instances printed final Thursday, Thiel has fearful that Western civilization had entered a interval of long-term stagnation within the Nineteen Seventies which is able to proceed until there’s a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: decrease financial progress, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a common cultural malaise.
Trump, Thiel hoped, would not less than open up a dialog about why progress was stalled. This was, he admits, “a preposterous fantasy.” Though his political investments haven’t fairly paid off in overcoming stagnation as he’d hoped for, Thiel continued to spend money on politicians—a few of whom have been elevated to the nationwide stage because of his largesse (he was a notable patron of Vice President JD Vance).
Thiel’s evaluation of stagnation as requiring a radical right-wing political flip has additionally had a profound affect on his friends in Silicon Valley, who to larger and lesser levels now share his worldview. They may be extra circumspect than Thiel about how intently they’re prepared to align with figures like Trump and Vance, however they appear to have been received over to his broader evaluation.
In line with Thiel, he’s had debates about his stagnation thesis with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) in 2012, enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in 2014. All three first rejected the concept stagnation is an issue however, Thiel claims, “have, to various levels, up to date and adjusted.” This shift, he asserts, is “deeply linked” to the flip of Silicon Valley elite away from supporting mainstream Democrats akin to Barack Obama and towards embracing in various levels the Trump agenda.
The thought of stagnation is itself not an absurd one—nor inherently reactionary. Many left-wing historians and economists (notably the late Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial 1994 study The Age of Extremes and the financial historian Robert Brenner in his crucial 2006 book The Economics of International Turbulence) have analyzed a “lengthy downturn” that started within the early Nineteen Seventies when the most important capitalist nations entered a interval of slower technological innovation and decrease financial progress. To be able to roll again the labor victories of the postwar period (which had develop into more durable to justify within the wake of falling income), American elites each empowered finance capital (resulting in a collection of bubbles) and embraced deindustrialization, with many industries shifting to the International South (notably China).
Present Difficulty
Even when one doesn’t settle for each level made by Hobsbawm, Brenner, or comparable Marxist thinkers, their evaluation not less than has a sturdy foundation in political economic system and materials actuality. In contrast, Thiel has a bizarrely cultural evaluation of stagnation that doesn’t even go the chuckle check. The Western world, he claims, entered into 5 a long time of anemic progress due to the counterculture of the Nineteen Sixties. In line with Thiel, “in my telling of the historical past of the Nineteen Seventies…the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock began three weeks later and, with the advantage of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies received.” Thiel provides that “everybody turned as deranged as Charles Manson.”
Due to the hippies, says Thiel, Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and security that stalled technological progress.
Extra just lately, the environmental motion has taken maintain, which blocks progress much more. Thiel refers to local weather change activist Greta Thunberg because the Antichrist. He isn’t being metaphorical on this description, since he makes clear that he believes the biblical account of the Antichrist is to be taken as a literal depiction of the hazards going through humanity. Thiel says, “Within the seventeenth century, I can think about a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type particular person taking up the world. In our world, it’s much more more likely to be Greta Thunberg.”
That is all an excessive amount of for even so conservative a determine as Ross Douthat, who not unreasonably objects, “Greta Thunberg is on a ship within the Mediterranean, protesting Israel.”
One might add that the hippies didn’t win within the Nineteen Sixties; Richard Nixon did. After Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher received and had been the dominant figures of our age. Their resolution to the issue of stagnation is in truth the identical as Thiel’s: deregulation and decrease taxes for the wealthy. That is additionally the components Donald Trump has adopted along with his “big beautiful bill” now making its approach by means of the Senate.
Reagan and Thatcher had been politically profitable, remaking even their center-left opponents akin to Invoice Clinton and Tony Blair into celebrants of streamlined authorities. However this political success has not in truth solved the issue of stagnation, which stays as extreme, by Thiel’s account, because it has ever been. Thiel and his cohorts have gotten all the things they need politically, however that has nonetheless failed to unravel the important thing downside of our time. The truth that he nonetheless advocates a failed financial program suggests the deeper stagnation is in his personal thoughts.
Standard
“swipe left under to view extra authors”Swipe →
Since politics has failed, Thiel and the opposite plutocrats are additionally toying with one other resolution: secession from society and the human species. Thiel has lengthy been an advocate of assorted post-human technological options that may permit him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to beat demise), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and synthetic intelligence.
In a telling second within the interview, Douthat asks Thiel what he feels about the way forward for the species:
Douthat: It appears very clear to me that quite a lot of folks deeply concerned in synthetic intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and both some sort of creation of a successor species or some sort of merger of thoughts and machine.
Do you assume that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you assume it’s simply hype? Do you assume individuals are elevating cash by pretending that we’re going to construct a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it one thing you are worried about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I feel you would favor the human race to endure, proper?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Effectively, I don’t know. I might—I might ——
Douthat: It is a lengthy hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit on this.
Douthat: Ought to the human race survive?
Thiel: Sure.
Douthat: OK.
Thiel: However I additionally would love us to radically remedy these issues.
Thiel goes on to speak about his hopes that expertise will permit humanity to unravel the issue of demise and obtain the long-held promise of Christianity of everlasting life and transcendence.
Within the interview, Thiel additionally alludes to Robert Heinlein’s science fiction basic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). In that novel, the colonists of the moon, disgusted by the corruption of earth people, launch a libertarian revolution beneath the slogan “There’s No Such Factor as a Free Lunch” with the help of AI.
Listening to Peter Thiel, it’s laborious to flee the conclusion that he and his fellow billionaires are sick of the human species. They wish to escape the inferior beings that encompass them. Lately, Mark Zuckerberg has radically cut back his philanthropy, preferring to present his cash to STEM analysis relatively than serving to poor folks. In the meantime, Jeff Bezos has basically rented the city of Venice to throw a multimillion-dollar wedding ceremony attended by his fellow plutocrats, an oligarchical orgy.
If the billionaires are so decided on quitting humanity, maybe it will be finest to present them what they need and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them.
Daily, The Nation exposes the administration’s unchecked and reckless abuses of energy by means of clear-eyed, uncompromising impartial journalism—the sort of journalism that holds the highly effective to account and helps construct alternate options to the world we dwell in now.
Now we have simply the precise folks to confront this second. Talking on Democracy Now!, Nation DC Bureau chief Chris Lehmann translated the complicated phrases of the funds invoice into the plain reality, describing it as “the only largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of laws in our historical past.” Within the pages of the June print subject and on The Nation Podcast, Jacob Silverman dove deep into how crypto has captured American marketing campaign finance, revealing that it was the highest donor within the 2024 elections as an business and received almost each race it supported.
That is all along with The Nation’s distinctive protection of issues of warfare and peace, the courts, reproductive justice, local weather, immigration, healthcare, and way more.
Our 160-year historical past of sounding the alarm on presidential overreach and the persecution of dissent has ready us for this second. 2025 marks a brand new chapter on this historical past, and we’d like you to be a part of it.
We’re aiming to lift $20,000 throughout our June Fundraising Marketing campaign to fund our change-making reporting and evaluation. Stand for daring, impartial journalism and donate to help The Nation right this moment.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
Extra from
Jeet Heer 
Mamdani laid out the technique. Now the left ought to observe his instance and first Ritchie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and so many others.
Donald Trump killed the anti-war proper—however presents an opportunity to revive the anti-war left.
The president is fickle, feckless, and simply swayed—which makes him a straightforward mark for militarists.
No! Hell no! By no means! The enemy of your enemy continues to be a corrupt plutocrat who needs to destroy democracy.
