Peter Thiel is trying to save the world

> In short, he's trying to save the world from apocalypse.

I would call that accurate in two senses. Thiel believes the world faces an existential threat and that the threat is non-fictional.

I wrote an essay with similar sentiments called "Peter & the Wolfe", where I described it as a future where the world has Alzheimers. In the fiction book 'The Book of the New Sun' there is a powerful and deeply convincing realization of what that is like. Unfortunately it is difficult to explain why without actually reading it. A more analytical understanding can be had from Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.

If the West falls, it does not get replaced by a younger empire such as China. A power vacuum of this scale cannot be filled. What happens is that the whole world falls into universal stagnation and disrepair which takes down any incumbents with it. This is not Occidental bias, this has happened before. This is why the fate of the Roman Empire is so relevant today. When it fell, it was inhabited by Visgoths and others roleplaying as Romans. It didn't work. Unable to replicate.

People who claim a thousand years of darkness were anything but that are pulling the wool over your eyes in favour of faux sophistication. They're mistaking the periodic local maxima for global maxima because intellectuals enjoy contrarianism and poking the previous iteration of intellectuals. We cannot credibly think massive depopulations, people forgetting how to read and write, the culture retreating to more primitive forms of well, everything, is something like an alternative lifestyle choice.

I know a lot of people think this is just crazy. We have the Internet now. Surely we couldn't simply fall apart like that. But we can. The Roman Empire built an incredible network of roads and other infrastructure and they still fell prey to rot and decay. Stagnation is a very weird place to be because bits start falling off and nobody really knows why. And it always starts at the peripheral, not Washington, not New York, the provinces are the first to become dysfunctional, places in our world system like Venezuela or South Africa. They go from bad to very bad and we don't notice because we cannot tell the difference.