Peter Thiel's contrarian worldview of the future.

(Thread)

In the spring of 2004, Peter Thiel organized and funded a six-day conference with eight scholars to discuss and explore the philosophy of René Girard, who is one of Thiel’s major philosophical influences.

That was later turned into a book as a collection of essays.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true

In that book lies Peter Thiel’s most underrated piece of writing – an essay titled ‘The Straussian Moment’.

As I began to read that essay, I recalled Thiel’s book on Startups – Zero to One.

Now, these two pieces of writing couldn’t be more dissimilar.

One is a philosophical injunction to reexamine the world, and the other is, well… it’s kind of the same but for startups!

That brings me to Thiel’s fascinating views on How to build the future.

If you take away one idea from Peter Thiel, let it be this –

The Future is not deterministic and automatic.

Thiel puts forward the claim that The Future is not just a point in time that lies ahead. It also has to meaningfully differ from the present.

"If nothing changes for 100 years, then the future is over a 100 years away."

Complacency kills The Future.

If you assume that The Future is this automatic thing that just happens and that the things will continue to get better, you’d be in the indefinite optimism quadrant. That is where the US finds itself since the early 80s.

Another framework that Peter invites us to think through is Outward vs. Inward.

"This shift began to take place in 1969, when the United States put a man on the moon; three weeks later Woodstock took place, moving the culture in the direction of yoga and psychological retreat."

Thiel would much rather prefer an Elon putting a Tesla in space than a generation that only knows to withdraw into the confines of their minds using the latest psychedelic substance.

How do we get back to the future?

Thiel says that three things are required for that to happen.

First, there has to be a definite vision of the future. We have to find a way to paint a compelling and optimistic vision of the future.

Currently, our options are limited to Globalization, AI communism, and hyper-environmentalism.

Second, we need bold, visionary, and relentless entrepreneurs building the future.

So we can’t sit back and relax looking at our phones that distract us from how old everything else is.

We have to get back to work.

Third, dare to act as if you are not a lottery ticket.

We have to abandon Rawlsian and Gladwellian philosophy that says successful people are only successful because of a “patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages”.

Finally, the best way to build the future is via starting companies.

"A startup is the largest endeavour over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket."

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