I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
If Thiel’s goal is to maximise human flourishing until the, inevitably bad, end, isn’t that goal quite similar to more standard goals of keeping societies open, innovative and prosperous? Does Thiel see some additional spiritual element here (e.g. number of souls saved)?
Why is longevity so important to Thiel? It would seem to me that lifespan matters less personally if you’re a Christian. And on a societal level, longer lifespans might decrease dynamism and increase stagnation through more deeply entrenched interest groups, etc.
Thiel is definitely not following “standard theology” on some of the stuff you mention!
“Jesus will win for certain.” “If chaos is inevitable… why [bother trying to accelerate economic growth]?” Peter Thiel is constantly railing against this kind of sentiment. He literally will not shut up about the importance of individual human agency, so much so that he has essentially been pascal’s mugged by the idea of the centrality of human freedom and the necessity of believing in the indeterminacy of the future. Some quotes of his:
“At the extreme, optimism and pessimism are the same thing. If you’re extremely pessimistic, there’s nothing you can do. If you’re extremely optimistic, there’s nothing you need to do. Both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism converge on laziness.”
“I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos the last time in 2013… And people are there only in their capacity as representatives of corporations or of governments or of NGOs. And it really hit me: There are simply no individuals. There are no individuals in the room. There’s nobody there who’s representing themselves. And it’s this notion of the future I reject. A picture of the future where the future will be a world where there are no individuals. There are no people with ideas of their own.”
“The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world. A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
“COWEN: What number should I keep my eye on? Let’s say you’re going to take a long nap and I need someone to tell me, “Tyler, we’re out of the great stagnation now.” What’s the impersonal indicator that I should look at?
THIEL: I disagree with the premise of that question. I don’t think the future is this fixed thing that just exists. I don’t think there’s something automatic about the great stagnation ending or not ending. I think — I always believe in human agency and so I think it matters a great deal whether people end it or not. There was this sort of hyperoptimistic book by Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; we had all these sort of accelerating charts. I also disagree with that, not just because I’m more pessimistic, but I disagree with the vision of the future where all you have to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold. I think the future is open to us to decide what to do. If you take a nap, if you encourage everybody else to take a nap, then the great stagnation is never going to end.”
He is constantly on about this, mentioning the point about optimism/pessimism both leading to inaction in almost every interview. In some of his christian stuff he also talks about the importance of how God gave us free will, etc. Not sure exactly how all the theology adds up in his head, since as you point out, it seems very hard to square this with taking christian ideas about the end times 100% literally.
Similar situation regarding longevity and human flourishing versus a literalist take of tallying up “number of souls saved”—he definitely doesn’t seem to be tallying souls in the usual way where it’s just about telling people the Good News, rather seems to think of the kingdom of heaven as something more material that humanity will potentially help bring about (perhaps something like, eg, a future transhumanist utopia of immortal uploaded super-minds living in a dyson swarm, although he doesn’t come out and say this). When christian interviewers ask him about his interest in life extension, he talks about how christianity is very pro-life, it says that life is good and more life is better, that christianity says death is bad and importantly that it’s is something to be overcome, not something to be accepted. (The christian interviewers usually don’t seem to buy it, lol...)
“Isn’t that goal quite similar to more standard goals of keeping societies open, innovative and prosperous?”
I think Thiel might fairly argue that his quest to conquer death, achieve transcendence, and build a utopian society has a pretty strong intrinsic spiritual connotation even when pursued by modern bay-area secular-rationalist programmer types who say they are nonreligious.
He might also note that (sadly) these transhumanist goals (or even the milder goals of keeping society “innovative and prosperous”, if you interpret that as “very pro-tech and capitalistic”) are very far from universal or “standard” goals held by most people or governments. (FDA won’t even CONSIDER any proposed treatments for aging because they say aging isn’t a disease! If you even try, journalists will write attack articles calling you a eugenicist. (Heck, just look at what happened to poor Dustin Moskovitz… guy is doing totally unobjectionable stuff, just trying to save thousands of lives and minimize existential risk entirely out of the goodness of his own heart, and some unhinged psycho starts smearing him as the antichrist!) A man can’t even build a simple nuclear-battery-powered flying car without the FAA, NRC, and NHTSA all getting upset and making absurdly safetyist tradeoffs that destroy immense amounts of economic value. And if you want to fix any of that, good luck getting any nation to give you even the tiniest speck of land on which to experiment with your new constitution outlining an AI-prediction-market-based form of government… you’d have better odds trying to build a city at the bottom of the ocean!)
From a podcast conversation with Ross Douthat, trying to explain why his interest in transhumanism and immortality is not heresy:
ROSS DOUTHAT: I generally agree with what I think is your belief that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still also seems like, yeah, the promise of Christianity in the end is you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God’s grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
PETER THIEL: Well, it’s. Let’s, let’s articulate this and you can.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Have a heretical form of Christianity. Right. That says something else.
PETER THIEL: I don’t know. I think the word nature does not occur once in The Old Testament. And so if you, and there is a word in which, a sense in which the way I understand the Judeo Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things.
And the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen. And that that’s the natural thing in a Christian sense is that you’re messed up. And that’s true. But, you know, there’s some ways that, you know, with God’s help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.
I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
If Thiel’s goal is to maximise human flourishing until the, inevitably bad, end, isn’t that goal quite similar to more standard goals of keeping societies open, innovative and prosperous? Does Thiel see some additional spiritual element here (e.g. number of souls saved)?
Why is longevity so important to Thiel? It would seem to me that lifespan matters less personally if you’re a Christian. And on a societal level, longer lifespans might decrease dynamism and increase stagnation through more deeply entrenched interest groups, etc.
Thiel is definitely not following “standard theology” on some of the stuff you mention!
“Jesus will win for certain.” “If chaos is inevitable… why [bother trying to accelerate economic growth]?” Peter Thiel is constantly railing against this kind of sentiment. He literally will not shut up about the importance of individual human agency, so much so that he has essentially been pascal’s mugged by the idea of the centrality of human freedom and the necessity of believing in the indeterminacy of the future. Some quotes of his:
“At the extreme, optimism and pessimism are the same thing. If you’re extremely pessimistic, there’s nothing you can do. If you’re extremely optimistic, there’s nothing you need to do. Both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism converge on laziness.”
“I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos the last time in 2013… And people are there only in their capacity as representatives of corporations or of governments or of NGOs. And it really hit me: There are simply no individuals. There are no individuals in the room. There’s nobody there who’s representing themselves. And it’s this notion of the future I reject. A picture of the future where the future will be a world where there are no individuals. There are no people with ideas of their own.”
“The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world. A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
“COWEN: What number should I keep my eye on? Let’s say you’re going to take a long nap and I need someone to tell me, “Tyler, we’re out of the great stagnation now.” What’s the impersonal indicator that I should look at?
THIEL: I disagree with the premise of that question. I don’t think the future is this fixed thing that just exists. I don’t think there’s something automatic about the great stagnation ending or not ending. I think — I always believe in human agency and so I think it matters a great deal whether people end it or not. There was this sort of hyperoptimistic book by Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; we had all these sort of accelerating charts. I also disagree with that, not just because I’m more pessimistic, but I disagree with the vision of the future where all you have to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold. I think the future is open to us to decide what to do. If you take a nap, if you encourage everybody else to take a nap, then the great stagnation is never going to end.”
He is constantly on about this, mentioning the point about optimism/pessimism both leading to inaction in almost every interview. In some of his christian stuff he also talks about the importance of how God gave us free will, etc. Not sure exactly how all the theology adds up in his head, since as you point out, it seems very hard to square this with taking christian ideas about the end times 100% literally.
Similar situation regarding longevity and human flourishing versus a literalist take of tallying up “number of souls saved”—he definitely doesn’t seem to be tallying souls in the usual way where it’s just about telling people the Good News, rather seems to think of the kingdom of heaven as something more material that humanity will potentially help bring about (perhaps something like, eg, a future transhumanist utopia of immortal uploaded super-minds living in a dyson swarm, although he doesn’t come out and say this). When christian interviewers ask him about his interest in life extension, he talks about how christianity is very pro-life, it says that life is good and more life is better, that christianity says death is bad and importantly that it’s is something to be overcome, not something to be accepted. (The christian interviewers usually don’t seem to buy it, lol...)
“Isn’t that goal quite similar to more standard goals of keeping societies open, innovative and prosperous?”
I think Thiel might fairly argue that his quest to conquer death, achieve transcendence, and build a utopian society has a pretty strong intrinsic spiritual connotation even when pursued by modern bay-area secular-rationalist programmer types who say they are nonreligious.
He might also note that (sadly) these transhumanist goals (or even the milder goals of keeping society “innovative and prosperous”, if you interpret that as “very pro-tech and capitalistic”) are very far from universal or “standard” goals held by most people or governments. (FDA won’t even CONSIDER any proposed treatments for aging because they say aging isn’t a disease! If you even try, journalists will write attack articles calling you a eugenicist. (Heck, just look at what happened to poor Dustin Moskovitz… guy is doing totally unobjectionable stuff, just trying to save thousands of lives and minimize existential risk entirely out of the goodness of his own heart, and some unhinged psycho starts smearing him as the antichrist!) A man can’t even build a simple nuclear-battery-powered flying car without the FAA, NRC, and NHTSA all getting upset and making absurdly safetyist tradeoffs that destroy immense amounts of economic value. And if you want to fix any of that, good luck getting any nation to give you even the tiniest speck of land on which to experiment with your new constitution outlining an AI-prediction-market-based form of government… you’d have better odds trying to build a city at the bottom of the ocean!)
From a podcast conversation with Ross Douthat, trying to explain why his interest in transhumanism and immortality is not heresy:
ROSS DOUTHAT: I generally agree with what I think is your belief that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still also seems like, yeah, the promise of Christianity in the end is you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God’s grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
PETER THIEL: Well, it’s. Let’s, let’s articulate this and you can.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Have a heretical form of Christianity. Right. That says something else.
PETER THIEL: I don’t know. I think the word nature does not occur once in The Old Testament. And so if you, and there is a word in which, a sense in which the way I understand the Judeo Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things.
And the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen. And that that’s the natural thing in a Christian sense is that you’re messed up. And that’s true. But, you know, there’s some ways that, you know, with God’s help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.