Peter Thiel, a dark guy to begin with, is utterly lost in his own ‘profound’ metaphors, which is a pretty reliable working definition of insane. Fortunately, Matthew Gault — new to me, but I’m already a fan — is on it:
To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new age. Thiel uses ancient, I’m sorry “ancien,” spellings of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the grand unveiling of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What’s the real story behind the JFK assassination? Was COVID-19 a U.S. bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the behest of the Biden administration?
The most important lesson I learned from studying theology — and, note well, Thiel is the one who brought up “apokálypsis,” not me — is that every writer tells you how to read their work. Bazillionaires are almost all alike in one key respect: their wealth has made them exclusive, so they conclude that their ideas are exclusive as well — which makes them either esoteric (the beneficient Soros model, which his commitment to “openness” struggles against) or occult (the authoritarian Thiel model, which he seeks to impose by hook and by crook). In his own mind, Thiel is so brilliant that he floats above the naive distinctions that imprison us mere mortals — say, earnesty versus cynicism. So, when he writes something like this, we should read it both as a heartfelt expression of his innermost beliefs (some dog’s breakfast of TESCREAList nonsense) and as cynical signaling (“Shocktrooops — man your posts!”).
The Daily Beast, which sadly has become one of the more reliable journalistic outlets in the US mediasphere these days, has a mini supercut of reactions. When a libertarian has lost even the CATO Institute, you gotta wonder. Because, apparently, Thiel’s cinematically creepy antics like allegedly injecting himself with the blood of young people wasn’t enough to make enough of us wonder. (Or maybe he never really did that? TechCrunch’s denial — that a company in that space “cannot directly hire the teens,” and that “[d]ue to fairly strict regulations, people can’t be compensated for their blood” — sounds like the kinda non-denial you’d get from a bloggish outlet that knows he put another one out of business.) It might seem a bit of a scurrilous reach to bring up that blood thing again years later, but far from it: the symbolism and reality of how and why blood circulates is precisely one of those things that can tell you a lot about a society. And when someone is earnestly (and cynically) committed to changing a society, that tells you a lot about them.
In his 1970 book The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, Richard Titmuss’s “contrasts the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is largely in the hands of for-profit enterprises and shows how a nonmarket system based on altruism is more effective than one that treats human blood as another commodity.” I co-wrote that blurb when I worked with the New Press, which reissued The Gift in 1997, at a time when HIV and AIDS seemed more urgent. If they seem less so now (they should not), that’s due in large part to the stunning advances in immunological theory and therapy enabled by organizations like NIH/NIAID, where my mother worked for decades under Tony Fauci. That Thiel, alleged to be a gay man (I’ve seen no proof that he’s actually a man), would align himself with the Trumpist forces besieging leaders like Fauci and institutions like NIH for fun and profit is, I’m tempted to say, very Thielian.
So, with all that in mind — in particular the rule that every writer tells you how to read their work — it’s worth re-reading his piece.