I watched a recent interview with Thiel on YouTube and he really didn’t live up to the hype. He seems given to making sweeping statements which don’t survive much scrutiny. An example (among others): he claimed that our understanding of cancer had not really advanced much for decades, which is just plain wrong. In the wise words of Tina Turner: “We don’t need another hero”.

It is a fact that global population growth due to birth rate has stopped. Population growth today comes from increased longevity. That phenomenon will eventually end when the potential for increased average age hits the buffers – as it certainly will. Therefore the view of humanity as a global plague that will inevitably destroy nature ( including itself) is incorrect. Population growth is set to go into reverse. This fact combined with human ingenuity, inventiveness and thirst for knowledge, makes it possible to adopt a more positive and uplifting view of the potential prospects for our species than the depressing nihilism of the likes of Ms Thunberg. If their views prevail of course growth will be reversed and the present, let alone the future, will indeed be dark and depressing. It is therefore important that the incorrect world view of the terrified eco extremists is calmly but resolutely challenged (for their own sakes as much as ours) and not allowed to prevail. I am not sure I fully understand from this essay on which side Mr Thiel stands but I do very much hope it’s not with the eco extremists.

Interesting article and I find myself agreeing strongly with half the facts, diagnoses and analyses, but I fear I fundamentally disagree with the other half.
Yes, I agree with are in a crisis of “progress”, and both the notions of “progress” and of “crisis” are themselves part of the problem – a crisis which, incidentally, would immediately go away if we all indeed became “fully Epicurean” [why is this not capitalised in in the text?], and focused on a life of modest contentment and minding our own business.
It is ironic to compare this article, with its panegyric on the Victorians, with the hand-wringing self-criticism regarding the guilty pleasure of enjoying Flashman, that arch-Victorian, which appeared in Unherd just a few days ago.

I can’t stand the phrase ‘speaking truth to power’ made famous by Meghan Markle who initially had a lot of power and spoke very little truth. Her power has waned without a corresponding increase in truth. To me, it seems incredibly arrogant believing one is in possession of the truth, but then I was raised to believe truth is an aspect of God and have read Dante who has the arrogant punished by blindness. The arrogant have closed minds as do those who believe they know the truth.

On growth, on housing, I agree with him.

On the choice between Net Zero v IS v CCP AI – clearly the most desirable is net zero which is why it was chosen though the reality will almost certainly be a combination of the three. The key point being that no single outcome is achievable if it generates too much resistance that cannot be overcome.

On the renewal of Christianity, I agree and, to some extent this is happening through the growth of a type of cultural religious naturalism, not unlinked to net zero.

The reality though is that net zero fails if it causes too much pain and resentment.

But this is the most important part to me: “vast collective displacement activity. Notably, it’s often a delivery mechanism for resource competition, for example in universities where student numbers are ever-rising even as paid positions shrink, a pinch that “brings out the worst in people”. So much of what looks like an unhinged new ideology is actually the brutal office politics pursued by too many academics competing for too few paid positions? “Yes,” he says, “and maybe there’s some way to get people to be nicer to one another in a world of limited resources. But we never seem to be even able to talk about that.”

Education – it must be personalised so that people are deeply and intrinsically dedicated to the gifts they have been given and therefore contentedly productive – by choice, not external reward.

Education must change radically.

On transhumanism…well we can’t have everything, can we. We all have to have things to argue about.

He doesn’t seem to understand that we cannot have eternal growth on a finite planet. Nature is real and we rely on nature. The UK expanded, with the help of religion, to expand into an empty word ready to be exploited. The US has taken advantage of this for the last 2 centuries, but now we’re full as a planet. 8 billion people. We have to stop with the growth and build quality not quantity. Tech can still grow, but we need to stop polluting and destroying our greatest resource, the natural world, which has evolved perfectly until we came along.

I put off reading it till now – I knew the article would be painful to try to take in, and I suppose a couple reads, even notes taken, would be needed to really comment, but why bother – I got the feel of it. At each point I crunched the paragraph into a gist of something, and like the scale of Peer Gynt; came up with the mid range balance. Melt it down is my decision.

(Peer Gynt found at the end of life the one with the scale weighs your life, all the good and bad – the evil go to hell, the good to heaven, and the vast majority of people are neither, they are in the range of fully neither one or the other, and so their soul is melted down into the masses of the others neither here or there, and a new soul from that blending is set out into the world again to see what they become by life – and so it continues…)

Theil is not good enough – if he is good at all I could not find it, nor evil enough, to go to either reward. He is just grim and wearying. What he says is good is not convincing, what he says is wrong seems to miss the real issue. I got an overall dark feel from what Mary says Theil is about. Not at all uplifting – the world made into his ideals is as dark as the one made into what he disdains. No uplifting at all – just what shade of grey – dark gray? Light gray? No sunlit uplands in his imagining, no good and evil to fight for and against, just a better or badder, a correct and incorrect. A dreary cosmology, and it gives off a dreary soul aura

Loving the Lorenzo de’ Medici comparison (although I don’t see PT as a particularly magnetic character). The parallels between the shift towards oligarchy in the Renaissance city states and the PayPal Mafia of Silicon Valley 500 years later are undeniable.

Despite the Renaissance heralding the end of the feudalism, Silicon Valley is heralding a return to a different form of feudalism. Assessment of PT (and his coterie) as a reversion to historic norm is spot on.

I’m firmly in camp “malign plutocrat” but I’m constantly surprised by number of occupants in camp “Who?”. Whilst it seems wise not to supply some extremists with the oxygen of publicity, surely the opposite must be true of characters such as Peter Thiel? Denial is definitely dangerous, as is distraction; technological progression certainly is an effective smokescreen for economic decline.
As much as it saddens (and occasionally terrifies) me to witness the demise of democracy I do accept that we may well be on the path towards opting for the lesser of two evils. Resistance is not futile.

Interesting article. Thank you.

You make me wonder if perhaps Thiel’s right that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Another dollar store Bond villain with a daddy complex. His support for Trump and that swivel eyed loon Masters suggests that maybe he should keep his trap shut about politics.