Suggested reading The scapegoating of Peter Thiel
By Jack Hutchison
Girard believed in the existence of “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (which is also the title of his magnum opus.) He argued that there are important truths to be discovered in the world, truths which are covered up by layer upon layer of mimesis and lies — lies which are themselves propagated through uncritical, imitative behaviour. It’s an anti-nihilist position.
“We live in a world today,” wrote Girard, “especially in the humanities, where the very notion of truth has become the enemy. The idea is you must have plurality. So, today, the interest of plurality takes precedence over the search for truth. You have to say ahead of time that you don’t believe in the truth. In most of the circles in which I move, decency is equated with a skepticism verging on nihilism.”
It’s not hard to see why Girard was not popular in academia, or why Peter Thiel is not popular among people who graduated from Ivy League schools with degrees in the humanities. One of Thiel’s initiatives, the Thiel Fellowship, pays entrepreneurial students $100,000 to drop out of college and work on their ideas for two years. The psychology of being a student at these schools is reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Thiel tells me. Disappointment is inevitable. (At a freshman orientation at Yale in the early 2000s, the Dean supposedly said something like: “Congratulations, you’ve made into Yale. You’re set for life.” Does anyone believe that anymore?)
But, despite the headline of the new biography, Thiel is not fundamentally a contrarian. A hardcore contrarian sticks a minus sign in front of whatever the majority thinks — which can be a miserable, counter-productive, way to live. But when I interviewed Thiel for my book, Wanting, he told me that he bet on Facebook (Thiel made the first outside investment in the company) precisely because he saw the vast majority wanting to use it. “I bet on mimesis,” he said. People would want to be on Facebook because other people wanted to be on Facebook. And part of Facebook’s power was the need to talk about what was on Facebook — so it was doubly mimetic. (Today, something very similar is happening in cryptocurrencies: people who love cryptocurrencies don’t just invest in them; they talk about investing in them.)
Most nihilists are not contrarians. It’s easier to go with the flow rather than put yourself at risk of ostracisation because you believe something to be true. And in a purely relational framework in which acceptability and consensus are more important than what is true, to be a “centrist” is seen as something unequivocally noble. Yet it’s often the case that the sacred centre — the place of consensus — is simply the place where the greatest number of lies are told.
Thiel, then, is not a strict contrarian, but a Girardian: he believes that the truth exists, that the truth is rare, and that the truth is almost always obscured by the majority and the minority alike. They are locked in their own battle for power; whichever narrative is more fashionable often passes for the truth in any given milieu. Thiel’s own book, Zero to One, makes his position clear. “You can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them,” Thiel writes. “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen likes to say that a successful businessperson gets two magazine covers: one on the way up, and one on the way down. Thiel certainly got his first one. He was lauded as one of the “PayPal mafia,” the group of early PayPal executives who nearly all went on to successful second (and sometimes third) acts. At that point, mimesis worked almost entirely in his favour — but now the tables have turned.
A fundamental part of Girard’s theory was that when human beings mimic one another, conflict is inevitable — and is often resolved by what he called “the scapegoat mechanism”. Just as mimetic desire can converge on one person and make that person an overnight celebrity (see Tik-Tok), blame converges mimetically on one person, too. We might call this a “Girardian moment”. It can be, for the life of the scapegoat, a very dangerous moment.
Peter Thiel’s Girardian moment came on 21st July 2016, the year after Girard died. Thiel took the stage at the Republican national convention in support of Donald Trump. He had fantasies, perhaps, that Trump might disrupt our sclerotic government. (Disruption came — but not in the way anyone, including Thiel, probably imagined.) He must have known what he was doing at the time, throwing his hat in the proverbial ring — a ring that was, in fact, an amphitheater filled with many hungry lions, and with billions of spectators working themselves into a frenzy over the Trump association.
On that day, the mimetic forces began to converge against Thiel. There has been a non-stop barrage of stories painting him as an ever-more extreme and controversial figure ever since. The media can’t resist making him Trumpian totem, digging up Roth IRA investments he made 20 years ago — a decision to place a risky bet that took advantage of our antiquated tax code. He is seen as the kind of dangerous figure that should be purged from our midst.
The sensational new biography of Thiel has solidified, perhaps, his status as a Girardian scapegoat. But Thiel might find comfort in the words of Girard himself. “Books themselves will have no more than minor importance,” he wrote, speaking of history’s unfolding. “The events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing and describe poorly, even in simple and banal instances.”
Books are often just symptoms of our underlying condition. They are products of the culture from which they emerged. Ours is a scapegoating machine.
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