Political Observer on Peter Thiel and the Gordian knot?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Apr 19, 2025

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1. The Enlightenment’s mistake.

“You can distinguish the intellect and the will. The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect. Modern people tend to believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.”

According to Thiel, the worst mistake made by Enlightenment was sweeping crucial questions under the carpet. To forget about the turbulent years of religious wars and social unrest, the “Age of Reason“ abandoned the important question of human nature or the power of faith.

Thiel, in “The Straussian Moment“ highlighted the ineffable trait of the Enlightenment of not being brave enough to ask hard questions, bringing up the figures of crucial philosophers, for example, John Locke.

“In the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable “X.” This awareness of ignorance provides the low but solid ground on which the American Founding takes place. The human “X” may have certain wants and preferences, but nobody is in an authoritative position from which to challenge those desires.’

John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers and a key figure of the Enlightenment. His modern “liberal“ thoughts deeply influenced the Founding Fathers of the USA and gave fresh air, spreading the grasp of optimism around Europe. Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law or social contract.

Locke, among other Enlightenment philosophers, developed a concept of the social contract. According to their concept, the government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority. Social contract theory provides a rationale justification for the notion that legitimate state power should be derived from the consent of the majority of society.

And by Thiel’s explanation, the concept of the social contract is the central lie of the Enlightenment that allows avoiding asking hard questions about human nature, white-washing problematic and often violent character of human beings. Peter Thiel considers social contract as the main myth:

“The enlightenment always white-washes violence. There are many things we can’t think about under enlightenment reasoning, and one of them is violence itself. If you go to the anthropological myth of the enlightenment, it’s the myth of the social contract. So what happens when everybody is at everybody else’s throat? The enlightenment says that everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down, has a nice legal chat, and draws up a social contract. And maybe that’s the founding myth — the central lie — of the Enlightenment. Girard says something very different must have happened. When everybody is at everybody’s throat, the violence doesn’t just resolve itself, and maybe it gets channeled against a single scapegoat where the war of all against all became a war of all against one and somehow gets resolved in a very violent way. “

According to Thiel, the end of humanity would be marked by the definitive abandonment of all the hard questions, but there would no longer be any conflict.

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https://www.playforthoughts.com/blog/peter-thiel-straussian-moment

Editor: In a mere 488 words Thiel inties that Gordian knot!

Political Observer confronts the Thiel conundrum?