Peter Thiel’s Religion

Long time horizons aren’t just psychological. They’re cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as, sociologist Elise Boulding once said: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”

“There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people get all tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers… It’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students.”

Strauss did not believe in transparency. He believed that even in the most open-minded societies, many truths were too problematic to be shouted. His contemporary disciples, like Thiel, conceal their words. They hide controversial ideas in esoteric language.

If there was ever a silver bullet, Thiel believes living with a long time horizon is it.

Thiel defines the four quadrants as such:1) Definite Optimism: The future will be better and we know how. 2) Indefinite Optimism: The future will be better and we don’t know how. 3) Definite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we know how. 4) Indefinite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we don’t know how. 

Human culture began with a murder. That culture was fueled by rage and rivalry, which led to violence. Managing that violence is the secret reason for all religious and political institutions.

We all form our identity by looking towards others. Since everybody copies, we can improve society by encouraging people to copy the right people.

Thiel opposes the idea that luck is all-powerful. He encourages human agency and believes in the power of a single individual to bend the future to their will. Thiel believes we attribute too much to luck, which stops us from actually doing things.

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”In an email to Ryan Holiday, Peter responded as such: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they get it really right.”

 When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’ Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their... See more