Peter Thiel Is Poised to Become a National Villain
nymag.com
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They don't understand Thiel because they simply have not been listening. I don't think they can wrap their heads around his ideas. They have no desire to get outside of their usual frame of reference.
I wrote this essay (from my HN comments) about Peter Thiel before Trump got into power.
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
And here is the original comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
Here is a teaser:
"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.
If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."
"This is why the hated Trump is so beloved, notice how the
campaign slogan isn’t ‘Make America Greater’, it is ‘Make
American Great Again’. This admission of a failure is
fascinating (for a politician) and utterly ignored by the
press."
And absent mental illness, few people's motivations are as specific or esoteric as you argue Thiel's motivations. It's important to realize this, because it explains why it's so easy (and usually so meaningless) to accuse people of petty contradictions. You'll always find contradictions between behavior and ideology if you assume the latter to be as specific as the former. Conversely, if you make the opposite assumption, or whitewash or fill-in the gaps of someone's ideology to make it more specific, you can rationalize their behavior however you want. That's what Trump's base does, and maybe what you're doing wrt to Thiel.
Unless they have some form of mental illness, people usually have very abstract ideologies and motivations made concrete and specific by context. However concrete you think an idea is in your head, it's not. It's a mental illusion. If you want to understand why Thiel is supporting Trump, the place to start is with the fact that Trump is now the President-elect. And that Thiel, like everybody, is fundamentally an opportunist. And that many successful people are especially good at seeking out and discovering opportunities, balancing agility with focus. One thing we can be sure of is that Thiel sees opportunity with Trump. Trying to pin-down precisely what that is, or even assuming his aims are yet concrete, makes the same error as you accuse journalists of making.
Also, the term "technology" in economics doesn't just mean inventions and science. It also means process, like democracy, bureaucracy, or management style. Or culture, like admitting women into the workplace. Technology, in the vocabulary of economics, is a word that describes an outcome--improved productivity leading to a net increase in social wealth--not necessarily anything specific or even physical. Maybe Thiel believes technological progress has plateaued in America, but getting from there to why he supports Trump is quite a leap, whatever his philosophical predilections.
Can you restate this. I cannot parse all of what you're saying.
I think I have the gist of it so I'll make this comment:
Thiel is very consistent. He is not insane.
I have been watching the guy talk, reading his essays for a decade. I don't know him personally, but I do know his ideas. They stay the same. It is a coherant worldview that does explain his actions in a concrete way.
"Opportunist" is not a good characterization of Thiel.
An opportunist is somebody who can go back and forth, a weathervane. Thiel has very concrete, fixed ideas of what is going on. He does not think reality is subjective. Just objective with many complex interwoven layers.
In other words, his actions are not random. They are guided by a central narrative. That is what my essay is trying to explain. It is extremely difficult because most people simply do not really grasp what he is saying, the concepts just slide out of their brains because their frame of reference is utterly orthogonal to Thiel's one.