Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn't do it justice.

I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually agree with him.

The block for me is admittedly his politics. It's not that his political views may be different from mine. That's fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don't fit into it.

I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet-style communists, and there is at least one case where I've backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I've also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.

To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.

So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.

So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn't believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.

I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas.

To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.

I think the defeat of Germany in WW2 has proved that's true.

So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists.

explicit advocacy of genocide

Since this article's off the front page, it probably won't hurt to delve into politics for a bit here. So I have to ask: What specifically are you talking about?

I'm referring to his association with a certain milieu of people who are important figures in the development and promotion of what is today termed the alt-right.

Association with movements like that (or the others I mentioned) is sort of special. Movements like the alt-right are different from (for example) mainstream Christian conservatism or Randian Objectivism or democratic socialism.

Totalitarian movements whose goals would be considered insane or evil by a large number of people adopt the structure of a manipulative cult. When you encounter the Scientology guy on campus he offers to give you a weird kind of personality test. You have to be pretty deep in before you find out about galactic emperor Xenu.

The outermost surface of the alt-right (termed the alt-light in its own terminology) are people who superficially advocate nationalism, question political correctness, and so on. A layer below that you have a more hard-core layer that introduces racism, explicit anti-democratic strong-man politics, and misogyny. A layer below that you have the hard core of the movement where you find explicit advocacy of absolute totalitarianism, terrorism, and genocide.

Maybe I'm wrong but what I see is an onion that looks like:

Peter Thiel -> Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolis -> Richard Spencer -> Andrew Auernheimer, 4chan /pol

The people on the right hand side represent the true beliefs and goals of the entire onion. You see it revealed in things like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where the layers mix.

Compare this to for example Randian objectivism or democratic socialism. Everyone in those movements more or less espouses the same ideas. There's no onion because there's not much to hide.

In general when I see a movement with this kind of structure where the innermost people seem to espouse different ideas than the outermost I see it as a huge red flag. What are they hiding? The other thing about movements like these is that if you associate seriously and persistently with the outer layers of the onion I assume you probably know about and accept the inner layers too.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated when I saw evidence of Thiel's backing of that movement. Zero to One is still by far the best book about business I've ever read, and I found myself agreeing with I'd say about 90% of it. Thiel is also one of the few people who has seen what I've seen for years, namely that core technological development (what I call fundamental innovation) has slowed since the early 1970s. I rationalize it by acknowledging the human capacity for compartmentalization. It's possible for someone to have very rational views in one area and be completely nuts in others.

I'm curious about why you accept the idea that the smallest, most extreme versions of certain ideologies are the true beliefs, while the more widespread and moderate versions are just nascent extremists. The extremists definitely advocate this kind of idea, but why accept it?

If you accept this kind of layered idea of right-wing ideas, you could just as easily accept the same construction for the left-wing, saying that democratic socialists are just nascent Stalinists, and that totalitarian socialists represent their true beliefs.

In a way, this has been playing out since at least the French Revolution. There's a very clear connection between the modern left and the left wing at the Estate General. Of course, the name has remained the same, but also the core idea of remaking society as rational and egalitarian has persisted. The idea that we can be wiser than traditional culture with modern insignts also drives the technology industry. But it has undeoubtably led to unimaginable suffering and raised up many totalitarians.

I'd offer that the extremists do not in fact represent the true versions of either left or right-wing ideologis. They are idealogues caught in the mental trap of pursuing the purity of their ideas without the ability to accept that ideas are only abstract expressions. They may even believe that their ideas are beyond abstractions, as you will see with may people who advocate for racial purity. They want to find something real, beyond ideas, although in reality they just found one more idea that won't offer the satisfaction they're looking for.

So don't believe the extremists when they tell you that everyone remotely like them will eventually be just like them. That's just elevating their power. If people like you cut off ties with anyone conservative because you think they might be proto-fascists, the diversity of thought within their social group will shrink until eventually maybe the extremists will win after all.

Those are very good points.

I haven't stated my own personal views. I think I'd call myself a kind of disaffected libertarian. I don't use the L-word much anymore because it's been twisted and debased just like every other word in political discourse that used to mean something. I'd say I'm disaffected because I've sat here for a few years with my mouth hanging open watching a large number of libertarians put on Nazi brown shirts without blinking. That's a little weird given that libertarianism is supposed to enshrine ideas like voluntarism and equal rights. It makes me doubt the basic functional integrity of the human brain.

I also kind of consider myself a liberal, but like the other L word I don't use that much anymore either. It's also been debased to the point that it basically doesn't mean anything.

Put those words together and pretend they mean something and you could say I'm a voluntarist who is skeptical of authority, believes in minimal government and decentralization, but also believes our goal should be to improve the condition of the world for conscious beings.

That means I'm willing to entertain the possibility that consistency on libertarianism might at times merit compromise in favor of a higher consistency on topics like basic human dignity and well-being. I think health care might be one such case. Extreme environmental problems might be another.

The inverse is also true from time to time. There are times when we must tolerate awful things (child porn on encrypted networks, money laundering with cryptocurrency, gun violence if we are free to own guns) because the only other practical options on the table involve too great an intrusion into liberty and personal autonomy or tend to lead to a slippery slope where further intrusions are inevitable.

As such I can find plenty to dislike on both the left and the right and there are definitely "onions" on the left.

But the alt-right is something else entirely. I have never in all my years on this planet seen a more repulsive and vile political movement. I consider the movement evil, and I think this is the first time in my life I have ever actually used the E-word to describe anything in the political realm. I have a tough time thinking of any left-wing movement that's quite as bad and that has more than a tiny handful of followers. I guess totalitarian communism might work but when I scan across the Internet I am not met with countless totalitarian communists sporting anime avatars spewing memes adorned with Lenin and Stalin quotes praising gulags.

I really think you just have to disown people like that, especially if you have associations and positions that might label you as a supporter. It's the political ideology equivalent of having a best friend who turns out to be a serial murderer. People are going to ask questions.

I'm not an alt-right supporter, but if you look at something as deep as the Richard Spencer level of extremism in your diagram, I'd say it's not so different from the kinds of ideas that would be mainstream in China or Japan. It's close to an American version of European identitarianism, which advocates for the continuation of a specific cultural and racial identity. I honestly struggle to see how this is very different from the ideas of the mainstream Chinese Communist Party except for a demographic shift. Of course, Chinese encompases several ethnic identities, but they're related in the same way as a pan-European identitarianism. I'm not saying that I agree with this or that it's the right way forward for society, just that it's not in any way new or uncommon.

It's also clearly a reaction to the extremism of center-left rationalism and cosmopolitanism. While I actually like those things, I have to admit that any push to change society will invevitably result in a reaction against it from people who prefer traditionalism. I think it's very important for those of us who might like to change society to understand those who prefer traditional ways, and not just in an abstract sense but to have personal relationships with mutual respect.

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