There was a recent interview of Jeff Bezos where he was asked to comment about Peter Thiel. He said Peter Thiel is a Contrarian. He then said that Conventional Wisdom is generally right and Contrarians are generally wrong, but when Contrarians are right they are right in a massive massive way !
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's barbell risk management strategy: Avoid the middle in favor of the extremes. For investments, it means a combination of very conservative plus some high risk investments to win big. He applies it to many other areas, though, including health and politics.
Ayn Rand explicitly disavowed libertarianism, both big "L" and small "l". Her political/moral philosophy was Objectivism [0].
The primary focus of libertarianism is the promotion of individual liberty and non-aggression, leaving the individual to become as big (or small) of a philanthropist as she/he wishes, and never being viewed as a lesser libertarian because of their altruism, or lack thereof (in fact, many libertarians I know are very generous people).
Objectivism, on the other hand, specifically condemns altruism and philanthropy, and deems those who engage in altruism to be "bad" people. This is consistent with how Ayn Rand lived her life.
I don't know whether your phrase describing Thiel, "do good for myself and the world will be better", is accurate or not as a description of his personal philosophy (it does make some sense he would follow Rand instead of libertarian philosophy, given his recent activities both political and entreprenerial). But I am quite sure that the phrase is characteristic of Objectivism and not libertarianism (l | L).
Please don't confuse Ayn Rand with libertarianism. Many libertarians despise her writings, back then as in now (and she despised libertarians/Libertarians).
Having watched and listened to Thiel for several years now, I came up with a pet hypothesis I call 'The Wolfian World' that I feel describes what's going on more accurately than the newspapers.
I am an immense fan of BOTNS, it is perhaps the most cherished novel in my collection, several years after reading it I still haven't read another novel that has impacted me in a similar fashion (recommendations are welcome), however, while I don't object to your analysis of some of the book's themes, I think your connecting it to current political events is a pretty huge stretch and really only accurate in a somewhat superficial sense. Still, I can't say enough good things about that book so have an upvote.
My email is in my profile if you or anybody else wanted to talk about BOTNS and why there's a deep connection between Peter Thiel's ideas and those of Gene Wolfe.
I don't think it is a coincidence that Wolfe was an engineer during the same period that Thiel has been scrutinizing. There are many intriguing connections. The energy crisis in oil, the rejection of nuclear energy (the New Sun). I fancy I see allegory. Maybe I'm mad but I am fascinated by both sets of ideas and cannot help seeing a wonderful marriage. ;-)
Your comment was a very interesting read. A shame that it didn't get any further discussion. I'll give The Book of the New Sun a go. Thanks for your insights.
Thanks. You won't regret it. It is a most extraordinary masterwork.
That book changed my thinking in ways I find difficult to describe. It was as if the world suddenly developed richer textures. I don't know if he would agree, but I felt it was a very 'Thielian' book. A lot of his ideas and statements came into focus for me when I read it. Together with the recordings I mention it became quite an experience.
It's also linear extrapolation beyond everyone's individual abilities to react to the immmediate past. That at least is one thing our system enforces: the political cycle forces people to think about the presidency at least once every four years and the senate every two. A long term dip below progress is still possible insofar as the majority of the worlds population live nothing like the lucky minority.
You're saying that our intrinsic chronocentric thinking prevents us from seeing the danger of the have-nots abruptly encountering a Western lifestyle? That futureshock in large numbers could wind up causing disruption on a scale that would pull us all down?
In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones:
The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.
Interesting. You sold me on picking up a copy of BOTNS just now. Looking forward to reading it. Sounds like a fascinating story, regardless of any connection to contemporary political events one way or the other.
I found myself I couldn't finish it in one sitting. It was just too deep. I did it in a series of short sprints, accompanied by my weird music suggestion :)
Keep a notepad and pen handy, I found that useful to jot down various hypotheses that came to mind while I was reading it. Was useful for figuring out what certain words meant. Stay away from Google at all costs, the risk of spoilers is too great, don't even read the blurbs.
Sometimes I would think: is this thing I think I'm seeing really there, or is this the linguistic version of the Voynich manuscript? Then I'd read on and it was like being in a dark room and having a door open from a well lit hallway.
Will do. I'm still working on finishing the "Wheel of Time" series (halfway through book 13 now), so it'll just just a little while before I start BOTNS.
On a related note, do you read / have you read, any other works that fall into the "Dying Earth" sub-genre? A friend of mine recommended the Jack Vance works, and I'm think I'm going to add those to my list as well.
Jack Vance is a good choice. This 'dying earth sub-genre', its fantastical or science fiction attributes are a thin veneer on something real.
One major change to my thinking by Wolfe was that I used to assume history and progress were linear. I don't believe that anymore. There are too many glaring inconsistencies. More important than a chronological clock is the tick of the 'cultural clock'.
There are works that give me a, let's call it a dying earth vibe, but they are works of non-fiction such as Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, 1177 by Eric Cline (both are interesting but the first of which I strongly recommend to you), or texts originally written in dead languages like Aramaic or Latin of which I have a few in English. It is a very strange feeling to read a text thousands of years old and realize the author is more, not less comprehensible than a similar text from several centuries ago written in your mother tongue. It is stranger still when you find more examples of this happening. It is as if the newer authors had their thoughts clouded or confused, the way they form their thoughts on the page is less joined up. I have come to believe that society undergoes change in such as way that it is perfectly possible for one to have much more in common with the thoughts of an ancient group of people than a much newer one.
To my eyes, it is clearly the case that different periods in history are recorded at different rates of lucidity or joined-up thinking. That is a hamfisted description but it'll have to do. My suspicion is that when we become altogether non-lucid the writing disappears also. At other times it appears to me that the thinking of some authors is more sophisticated than our own. I cannot account for this, only to suggest that culture controls people's range of reasoning powers and that there are deep cycles we are utterly oblivious to.
On a related note I feel strongly that many books and film media created before the 1980s were more sophisticated than today's interpretations. I wrote something about this recently.
Peter Thiel thinks about this in a technological sense but it may also be true culturally with music, art etc.
People will state this is subjective, but I don't think it is. Just because you can point to works of excellence in any age doesn't mean there is no moving average. Perhaps we're hamstrung by access to easy answers that slot into place in our heads in place of difficult, but more original thinking that is our own.
