4 ms·

On Liberthielism

32 points by kawera 6y ago

Yaa101 6y ago
It's about life as human being, people or even generations are progressive if they have a world to win. Once they have what they need, they will have a world to lose and become conservative. The majority of people in the west are risk adverse often in extremo and becoming more and more conservative. Funny is that they will lose a lot due to this behavior, and the cycle start will all over.
- api 6y ago
  Liberalism -> risk-tolerance and experimentation -> wealth -> conservatism -> risk-averseness and stagnation -> poverty -> repeat...?
  - elefanten 6y ago
    How does poverty cycle back to liberalism? Empirically and historically it does the opposite. Institutions are much easier to destroy than to build, and some institutions can only be built on a sufficiently solid foundation. Let's hope your cycle hypothesis is wrong. But there's a different pseudo-saying out there that works on a generation level which has been feeling more and more relevant lately. It's the one that goes: Hard times create hard people, hard people create good times. Good times create weak people, weak people create hard times.
    - api 6y ago
      I think I just said the same thing. Conservatism postures as strength, but it's actually based in fear.
oxymoran 6y ago
If the republicans were smart, which they mostly aren’t, they would let Thiel be their nominee for president next time around. I would vote for him over nearly anyone the dems are going to throw out there.
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  Peter Thiel was born in Germany, acquiring American citizenship only later, and is presumably not eligible to be president of the US on that basis.
  - uoaei 6y ago
    Proudly declaring "I have a great solution that no one has ever thought of before," without putting in the due diligence to understand feasibility and consequences, is close to the literal definition of the reactionary mindset. More concisely, it is hubris plus gumption minus diligence.
    - axguscbklp 6y ago
      The "hubris plus gumption minus diligence" mindset can be frequently found among adherents of all sorts of ideologies. If anything, reactionaries are likely to shy away from solutions that no one has ever thought of before in favor of solutions that they think have worked before.
      - naravara 6y ago
        “They think” is the key word here. It’s usually informed by woefully misinformed understandings of history and science. That’s what makes it “gumption-based” rather than “evidence-based.” This is what differentiates the reactionary from the conservative.
        axguscbklp 6y ago
        To some extent I agree with you, which is why I wrote "they think". Most people's ideologies are based on misinformed understandings of history and science. Reactionaries are probably more likely to be misinformed than conservatives and, in general, other kinds of moderates are. But I doubt they are more likely to be misinformed than progressives are. I think maybe in general, moderates are more likely to be well-informed than extremists. Gumption-based approaches are common among progressives and reactionaries alike. Maybe even more common among progressives, although I wouldn't put money on it.
dools 6y ago
Reading this type of stuff becomes more difficult once you understand Modern Monetary Theory. All this libertarian nonsense about what effect crypto might have on currencies and what crypto is just reads like posts on a flat earth Facebook group. I'm not saying that this article is a poor analysis, but that it's analysing a fundamentally illogical and broken ideology (libertarianism) as if it were something other than a collection of insane and contradictory ramblings that all boil down to "the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves". Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all have ridiculous broken understandings of economics and it shows in their political leanings and ideologies. Bill Gates is far closer to understanding how things actually function, and you can see it from how he speaks about the world.
- slibhb 6y ago
  Funny, because MMT reads like "flat earth Facebook group" to plenty of mainstream economists.
  - cantankerous 6y ago
    Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.
    - tclancy 6y ago
      Especially compared to all the other systems that do a lot better which we haven’t adopted.
      - kvgr 6y ago
        For example?
        tclancy 6y ago
        I think you figured it out.
slibhb 6y ago
> I’m not here to weigh in on whether Peter Thiel is a goody or a baddy. 3 paragraphs later and that turned out to be a big old lie.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I thought it was incredibly even-handed. At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record).
  - slibhb 6y ago
    > At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record). Is that a good thing? It's unfortunate that we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions.
    - bckr 6y ago
      > we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions I think this is a situation that will happen periodically, when there is more overall conflict around us.
- stonogo 6y ago
  Can you elaborate?
cantankerous 6y ago
I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.
- _jal 6y ago
  There is a common progression, though, from certain 'outsider' ideologies when one is an outsider to a particular form of conservatism when one gets power. I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? Power-hungry people only hate it when other people have it.
- analog31 6y ago
  Indeed, any sufficiently mature ideology can be rendered self consistent, either on its own or by applying layers of apologetic obfuscation. Yet innumerable self consistent ideologies are mutually irreconcilable. Self consistency is the lowest of low bars for any ideology to surmount.
starchild_3001 6y ago
Peter Thiel is the most disappointing persona of the Trump era. I had respect for his out-of-the-box thoughts for the longest time. Not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, he's now part of the white supremacist, nationalist, anti globalist, anti free market movement. Completely anti-libertarian.
- lolgibbreak 6y ago
  What white supremacist movement? Trump denounced white supremacy on camera something like seventeen separate times. The only white supremacy is in the addlepated imaginations of America's journalists, academics, and the increasingly delusional Democrat Party, led by radicals like the Justice Democrats. For those of us in the real world, thanks to the aforementioned delusional leaders, you're much more likely to encounter racism day in and day out being bandied about at work and online by neo-racists who have the absolute gall to call themselves and their movement Antiracist.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  I know you edited your comment, but Lenin when he came in power did pretty much exactly what he said he would do. Stalin not so, but he wasn't really that much a politician before backstabbing his way into power.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
paxys 6y ago
This is a good article. You can be the biggest free market capitalist in the world but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the American government-industrial-military complex has propped up this capitalist paradise for the better part of a century. You can be bullish on a crypto future but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that at the moment the "decentralized" part is mostly a myth, and a few early whales + Chinese miners wield a disproportionate amount of power. None of these views are contradictory or hypocritical. The problem is really that the boxes of possible viewpoints and philosophies keep getting smaller and further apart, and everyone is expected to neatly fit into one of them. Peter Thiel, like everyone else, makes decisions in order to maximize his own benefit, not for the sake of presenting consistency of thought to the world. Not being libertarian when it suits you is perhaps the most libertarian thing of all.
legerdemain 6y ago
It's pretty simple. Libertarians want to minimize a state's power over them. Some ways to do that are to shrink the state or somehow secede from the state. Thiel has found a third way to be a Libertarian, albeit one that only one person can pursue at a time. He can just own the state. So whereas the Seasteading people have to worry about the US stepping in and invading their boat, Thiel's boat is America and he has to defend it from China.
jklinger410 6y ago
Holy crap is this missing the forest for the trees. Thiel is a libertarian and America is his playground. There is nothing contradictory in protecting the country that his projects rely on.
waserwill 6y ago
If anyone is interested in Thiel's motivations and interests in politics, I recommend Geoff Shullenberger's discussions: Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection: Broad discussion of Thiel's writing and actions pre-2016 (when the essay was written), along with his relationship to Strauss and particularly Girard. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/ https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-v... Theorycels in Trumpworld: Published recently, and on the role of postmodernist-adjacent figures, including Thiel, in justifying the politics of Trump. https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/ https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/
Leary 6y ago
Peter Thiel started Palantir. Palmer Luckey started Anduril. I'm waiting for a complete set of Lord of the Rings company that will "defend the West"
- samatman 6y ago
  Númenor would be the obvious choice for seasteading, right? Surprised it hasn't been founded already.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
If everything we know about a person, whether it be a Thiel, a Gates, a Soros, a Barak, a Trump, we learned through the media, and, we believe the media is biased, how much confidence should we have in our opinions of them? I spend a lot of time working out why I believe what I believe about people I know strictly from 2nd or 3rd hand information, and for the most part, it stands on pretty soft foundations. Hence, I remain flexible in my opinions in such cases. Meaning, I wouldn't write and publish articles that ascribe confidence in my conclusions.
tick_tock_tick 6y ago
Or here's a "hot take" he's not fucking stupid and knows something removing the USA's power without crippling China's means he's never going to get his libertarian utopia. The USA needs to win every battle against China if he ever wants his dreams to come true is it really surprising he supports it so much???

32 points by kawera 6y ago

It's about life as human being, people or even generations are progressive if they have a world to win. Once they have what they need, they will have a world to lose and become conservative. The majority of people in the west are risk adverse often in extremo and becoming more and more conservative. Funny is that they will lose a lot due to this behavior, and the cycle start will all over.

api 6y ago
Liberalism -> risk-tolerance and experimentation -> wealth -> conservatism -> risk-averseness and stagnation -> poverty -> repeat...?
- elefanten 6y ago
  How does poverty cycle back to liberalism? Empirically and historically it does the opposite. Institutions are much easier to destroy than to build, and some institutions can only be built on a sufficiently solid foundation. Let's hope your cycle hypothesis is wrong. But there's a different pseudo-saying out there that works on a generation level which has been feeling more and more relevant lately. It's the one that goes: Hard times create hard people, hard people create good times. Good times create weak people, weak people create hard times.
  - api 6y ago
    I think I just said the same thing. Conservatism postures as strength, but it's actually based in fear.

oxymoran 6y ago

If the republicans were smart, which they mostly aren’t, they would let Thiel be their nominee for president next time around. I would vote for him over nearly anyone the dems are going to throw out there.

jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Peter Thiel was born in Germany, acquiring American citizenship only later, and is presumably not eligible to be president of the US on that basis.
- uoaei 6y ago
  Proudly declaring "I have a great solution that no one has ever thought of before," without putting in the due diligence to understand feasibility and consequences, is close to the literal definition of the reactionary mindset. More concisely, it is hubris plus gumption minus diligence.
  - axguscbklp 6y ago
    The "hubris plus gumption minus diligence" mindset can be frequently found among adherents of all sorts of ideologies. If anything, reactionaries are likely to shy away from solutions that no one has ever thought of before in favor of solutions that they think have worked before.
    - naravara 6y ago
      “They think” is the key word here. It’s usually informed by woefully misinformed understandings of history and science. That’s what makes it “gumption-based” rather than “evidence-based.” This is what differentiates the reactionary from the conservative.
      - axguscbklp 6y ago
        To some extent I agree with you, which is why I wrote "they think". Most people's ideologies are based on misinformed understandings of history and science. Reactionaries are probably more likely to be misinformed than conservatives and, in general, other kinds of moderates are. But I doubt they are more likely to be misinformed than progressives are. I think maybe in general, moderates are more likely to be well-informed than extremists. Gumption-based approaches are common among progressives and reactionaries alike. Maybe even more common among progressives, although I wouldn't put money on it.

dools 6y ago

Reading this type of stuff becomes more difficult once you understand Modern Monetary Theory. All this libertarian nonsense about what effect crypto might have on currencies and what crypto is just reads like posts on a flat earth Facebook group. I'm not saying that this article is a poor analysis, but that it's analysing a fundamentally illogical and broken ideology (libertarianism) as if it were something other than a collection of insane and contradictory ramblings that all boil down to "the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves". Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all have ridiculous broken understandings of economics and it shows in their political leanings and ideologies. Bill Gates is far closer to understanding how things actually function, and you can see it from how he speaks about the world.

slibhb 6y ago
Funny, because MMT reads like "flat earth Facebook group" to plenty of mainstream economists.
- cantankerous 6y ago
  Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.
  - tclancy 6y ago
    Especially compared to all the other systems that do a lot better which we haven’t adopted.
    - kvgr 6y ago
      For example?
      - tclancy 6y ago
        I think you figured it out.

slibhb 6y ago

> I’m not here to weigh in on whether Peter Thiel is a goody or a baddy. 3 paragraphs later and that turned out to be a big old lie.

brundolf 6y ago
I thought it was incredibly even-handed. At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record).
- slibhb 6y ago
  > At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record). Is that a good thing? It's unfortunate that we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions.
  - bckr 6y ago
    > we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions I think this is a situation that will happen periodically, when there is more overall conflict around us.
stonogo 6y ago
Can you elaborate?

cantankerous 6y ago

I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.

_jal 6y ago
There is a common progression, though, from certain 'outsider' ideologies when one is an outsider to a particular form of conservatism when one gets power. I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? Power-hungry people only hate it when other people have it.
analog31 6y ago
Indeed, any sufficiently mature ideology can be rendered self consistent, either on its own or by applying layers of apologetic obfuscation. Yet innumerable self consistent ideologies are mutually irreconcilable. Self consistency is the lowest of low bars for any ideology to surmount.

starchild_3001 6y ago

Peter Thiel is the most disappointing persona of the Trump era. I had respect for his out-of-the-box thoughts for the longest time. Not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, he's now part of the white supremacist, nationalist, anti globalist, anti free market movement. Completely anti-libertarian.

lolgibbreak 6y ago
What white supremacist movement? Trump denounced white supremacy on camera something like seventeen separate times. The only white supremacy is in the addlepated imaginations of America's journalists, academics, and the increasingly delusional Democrat Party, led by radicals like the Justice Democrats. For those of us in the real world, thanks to the aforementioned delusional leaders, you're much more likely to encounter racism day in and day out being bandied about at work and online by neo-racists who have the absolute gall to call themselves and their movement Antiracist.
sudosysgen 6y ago
I know you edited your comment, but Lenin when he came in power did pretty much exactly what he said he would do. Stalin not so, but he wasn't really that much a politician before backstabbing his way into power.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

paxys 6y ago

This is a good article. You can be the biggest free market capitalist in the world but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the American government-industrial-military complex has propped up this capitalist paradise for the better part of a century. You can be bullish on a crypto future but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that at the moment the "decentralized" part is mostly a myth, and a few early whales + Chinese miners wield a disproportionate amount of power. None of these views are contradictory or hypocritical. The problem is really that the boxes of possible viewpoints and philosophies keep getting smaller and further apart, and everyone is expected to neatly fit into one of them. Peter Thiel, like everyone else, makes decisions in order to maximize his own benefit, not for the sake of presenting consistency of thought to the world. Not being libertarian when it suits you is perhaps the most libertarian thing of all.

legerdemain 6y ago

It's pretty simple. Libertarians want to minimize a state's power over them. Some ways to do that are to shrink the state or somehow secede from the state. Thiel has found a third way to be a Libertarian, albeit one that only one person can pursue at a time. He can just own the state. So whereas the Seasteading people have to worry about the US stepping in and invading their boat, Thiel's boat is America and he has to defend it from China.

jklinger410 6y ago

Holy crap is this missing the forest for the trees. Thiel is a libertarian and America is his playground. There is nothing contradictory in protecting the country that his projects rely on.

waserwill 6y ago

If anyone is interested in Thiel's motivations and interests in politics, I recommend Geoff Shullenberger's discussions: Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection: Broad discussion of Thiel's writing and actions pre-2016 (when the essay was written), along with his relationship to Strauss and particularly Girard. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/ https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-v... Theorycels in Trumpworld: Published recently, and on the role of postmodernist-adjacent figures, including Thiel, in justifying the politics of Trump. https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/ https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/

Leary 6y ago

Peter Thiel started Palantir. Palmer Luckey started Anduril. I'm waiting for a complete set of Lord of the Rings company that will "defend the West"

samatman 6y ago
Númenor would be the obvious choice for seasteading, right? Surprised it hasn't been founded already.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

If everything we know about a person, whether it be a Thiel, a Gates, a Soros, a Barak, a Trump, we learned through the media, and, we believe the media is biased, how much confidence should we have in our opinions of them? I spend a lot of time working out why I believe what I believe about people I know strictly from 2nd or 3rd hand information, and for the most part, it stands on pretty soft foundations. Hence, I remain flexible in my opinions in such cases. Meaning, I wouldn't write and publish articles that ascribe confidence in my conclusions.

tick_tock_tick 6y ago

Or here's a "hot take" he's not fucking stupid and knows something removing the USA's power without crippling China's means he's never going to get his libertarian utopia. The USA needs to win every battle against China if he ever wants his dreams to come true is it really surprising he supports it so much???