The Technological Republic: The Sunday Times bestseller from the great minds behind Palantir

We should now build something together in its place.

The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks. But the rejection of any form of life in common does as well.

Our argument is that the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.

They were at their core collectivist endeavors, populated by intensely individualistic and freethinking minds. It is true that the communal experience that Silicon Valley firms were selling itself became commoditized. Yet the atomization of daily life in America and the broader West left a lane open for technology firms, including ours, to recruit

The interpersonal tether that makes possible a form of imagined intimacy among strangers within groups of a significant size was severed and banished from the public sphere.

At present, the principal features of American society that are shared are not civic or political, but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity, and fashion. This is not the result of some unbridgeable political division.

“The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy,” but rather “to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies.”

descent of the republic around him, as Catiline attempted a coup and was later killed by the Roman army. Sallust wrote that28 “as a result of riches, the youth were suddenly consumed with luxury and greed, together with insolence.” And they grew disinterested in anything beyond their own enrichment.

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his empero