Benji
@benji
Benji
@benji
• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.
• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).
• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.
• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.
• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.
• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.
• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”
• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.
• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.
Remember that knowledge is a process, not a possession.
• Leaders use their charisma to influence others in very specific ways. By analyzing speeches given by charismatic individuals, one helpful model shows a distinct, three-stage use of emotion. First, the speakers model and amplify the mood prevailing among their audience (“We are angry because those people over there are bad!”). Then they introduce a dissonant emotion that actually confuses people (“But you know what? I don’t really care about that.”). Finally, they use that confusion to reframe the emotional environment and win over the audience to their view (“Because we should be happy that we are better people than they are!”).
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!