Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”

says well we’ve had all these years of
warfare over religion we’ll stop asking
important questions and all these
decades these centuries after the
Enlightenment here’s the world we’ve
reached this is the way I read you you
can correct my reading but let me finish
quoting you instead of violent wars
there could be violent video games
instead of heroic feats
there could be thrilling amusement park
rides instead of serious thought there
could be intrigues of all sorts
in a soap opera it is a world where
people spend their lives amusing
themselves to death close quote
now that is a devastating indictment of
much of contemporary America correct
well it is I mean I think this has been
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the trend of modernity now it’s it’s
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it’s not as though politics has
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disappeared though it’s it’s often just
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gets displaced in various ways but but
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yes I think there is this this
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incredible degree to which we’ve we’ve
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we’ve substituted the realities of
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politics for these sort of increasingly
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fictionalized worlds and and it’s
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probably uh that’s probably a very very
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unhealthy thing there’s sort of a
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slightly different frame that I’ve often
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given on this is is that in in the last
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40 or 50 years there’s been a shift from
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exteriority which I which you know doing
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things in the real world to the sort of
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interior world which is sort of in a way
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can be thought of this also the shift
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from politics to entertainment or
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something like that and and the the from
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a dr. Phil a the powerful frame I give
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is you know almost exactly 50 years ago
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today and you know July of 1969 men
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reached the moon and three weeks later
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Woodstock began and with the benefit of
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hindsight we can say that that’s when
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you know progress ended and when the
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hippies took over the country or
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something like that and then we’ve had
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we’ve had this incredible shift to
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interior tea in the decades since then I
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would include things like the drug
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counterculture I would include
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videogames you know maybe a lot of
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entertainment more generally you know
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there’s sort of parts of the internet
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that can be scored both ways but but
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certainly there all these things where
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we’ve shifted towards the you know your
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world of yoga meditation there’s a world
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of interior culture that sort of and it
11:04
Rene Girard is in some ways the
addresses an aspect of human nature well
it’s it’s good it’s the very thing that
the Enlightenment says no no don’t even
think about such things right
yeah well the Enlightenment always
whitewashes violence it’s one of the
there are many things we can’t think
about an under Enlightenment reason but
one one is certainly violence itself and
and if you go to the anthropological
myth of the Enlightenment it’s the myth
of the social contract so what happens
when everybody is that everybody’s
else’s throat what the Enlightenment
says is everybody in the middle of the
crisis sits down and has a nice legal
chat and draws up a social contract and
that’s maybe maybe that’s the founding
myth the central lie of the
Enlightenment if you will and what
Gerrard says something very different
must have happened and when everybody’s
at everybody’s throat the violence
doesn’t just resolve itself and maybe it
gets channeled against a a specific
scapegoat where the war of all against
all becomes a war can of all against one
and then somehow gets resolved but in a
in a very violent way and so I think you
know what what Gerrard and Schmidt or
Machiavelli or you know the
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judeo-christian inspiration all have in
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common is this idea that human nature is
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problematic its violent it’s um you know
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it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s not
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straightforward at all what what you do