Peter Thiel’s Religion

Author: David Perell URL: https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ One-line: To understand Peter Thiel, begin with Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory — human culture began with a murder, and Thiel’s entire worldview (business strategy, view of time, and Christian eschatology) is an attempt to escape runaway mimetic violence by refusing to copy his neighbors, believing time moves forward, and preparing for a future that will be radically better or radically worse.

Key claims

• Managing violence is the hidden reason for religious and political institutions. Human culture began with a murder (Cain and Abel); without religion, peace cannot be maintained and violence erupts.
• Peter Thiel’s worldview rests on three statements: don’t copy your neighbors; time moves forward; the future will be different from the present. The essay is structured around unpacking each in turn, then closes with Thiel’s practical advice.
• The key influence on Thiel is Rene Girard and his Mimetic Theory, which Thiel studied under Girard as a Stanford undergraduate in the late 1980s — a relationship that became a lifelong friendship (Thiel spoke at Girard’s memorial service). All cultural behavior, beginning with a child’s acquisition of language, is imitative — “a theatre of envy” where we mime each other’s desires; the fiercest rivalries emerge between people who are alike, not different (Shakespeare’s Montagues/Capulets, Freud’s “narcissism of small differences”).
• Girard’s ideas shaped how Thiel ran PayPal and picked investments. As CEO, Thiel restructured PayPal’s org chart every three months so no two employees shared the same evaluation metric, defusing mimetic conflict before it started. His $500,000 seed investment in Facebook was partly informed by Mimetic Theory — Thiel called it “doubly Mimetic” because it spread by word of mouth and is about word of mouth. Thiel’s business philosophy (from Zero To One, “All Happy Companies Are Different”) is that avoiding competition and pursuing monopoly-through-differentiation is the only way to create and capture lasting value — contrasted with the airline industry’s brutal, undifferentiated competition versus Google’s outsized profit capture.
• Linear vs. cyclical time is the essay’s second pillar. Christianity broke from cyclical (Eastern/ancient) conceptions of time and introduced a linear arrow from the Garden of Eden to a future Kingdom of Heaven — a shift the essay traces through St. Augustine’s The City of God. Thiel treats short-term thinking as “the essence of sin” and argues that a lack of definite, long-range plans (the Apollo Project, the Manhattan Project, Nixon’s war on cancer) is why modern institutions (the Reber Plan, Golden Gate access road vs. the original bridge, the Freedom Tower vs. the Empire State Building) have gotten slower and less ambitious, not faster.
• Thiel’s four-quadrant view of the future (from Zero To One): Definite Optimism (better, and we know how), Indefinite Optimism (better, we don’t know how), Definite Pessimism (worse, we know how), Indefinite Pessimism (worse, we don’t know how). See Definite Optimism. Post-2008, Thiel argues America drifted from Definite Optimism into Indefinite Optimism and Definite Pessimism, evidenced by declining intergenerational mobility, stagnant real wages since 1973, and rising housing/healthcare/education costs relative to inflation.
• The Book of Revelation is central to Thiel’s philosophy, per Perell’s inference (Perell is explicit this is his own interpretive reach, not something Thiel has said in public): humanity faces either civilization-ending apocalypse (runaway mimetic violence, e.g. nuclear war) or “a new heaven and a new earth.” Thiel’s 2004 conference “On Politics and Apocalypse” and his essay The Straussian Moment tried to fuse Girard’s Mimetic Theory with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt around the problem of existential violence.
• Thiel is a professed but non-evangelizing Christian: “I believe Christianity to be true. I don’t feel a compelling need to convince other people of that.” (New Yorker profile.) His reading of Christianity is heterodox — non-violence as the antidote to mimetic conflict, and Definite Optimism as “Christian theology cloaked in secular language.”
• Thiel’s closing practical advice, framed around the Ten Commandments: search for secrets (echoing Leo Strauss’s esoteric-writing tradition and Thiel’s job-interview question, “What very important truth do very few people agree with you on?”); be careful who you copy (imitate people you cannot compete with — Thiel is said to admire Elon Musk for SpaceX’s singular, decades-long mission to Mars); and follow the Commandments’ structure of looking only to a transcendent reference point rather than to peers.
• Thiel doesn’t believe in luck as a governing force: “you are not a lottery ticket… you can either dispassionately accept the universe for what it is, or put your dent in it, but not both.” He recommends Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World as the book that best captures his search-for-secrets philosophy.
• Not all of Thiel’s bets paid off: his hedge fund Clarium Capital fell 13% in August 2008 and 18% in October 2008, losing money three years running; AUM fell from a $7.8B peak to $850M by September 2009, most of it Thiel’s own capital.

Notable quotes

“Human culture began with a murder. That culture was fueled by rage and rivalry, which led to violence. Managing that violence is the secret reason for all religious and political institutions.”

“I believe Christianity to be true. I don’t feel a compelling need to convince other people of that.” — Peter Thiel, in a New Yorker profile

“[Girard’s ideas are] a portal onto the past, onto human origins, and our history. It’s a portal onto the present and onto the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It’s a portal onto the future in terms of where we are going to let these Mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence… There was almost a cult-like element where you have these people who were followers of Girard and it was a sense that we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did.” — Peter Thiel

“When I left [Sullivan & Cromwell] after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’… Because their identity was defined by competing so intensely with other people, they could not imagine leaving… On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out.” — Peter Thiel

“Compare [the airlines] to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone.” — Peter Thiel

“The twentieth century was great and terrible, and the twenty-first century promises to be far greater and more terrible.” — Peter Thiel

“The entire human order could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence — famine, disease, war, and death. The final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, even gives a name and a place: The Battle of Armageddon in the Middle East is the great conflagration that would end the world. Against this future, it is far better to save one’s immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal City of God, than it is to amass a fleeting fortune in the transient and passing City of Man.” — Peter Thiel, “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”

“Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue.” — Peter Thiel

“The big secret is that there are many secrets left to uncover. There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

“The cliche goes like this; live each day as if it were your last. The best way to take this advice is to do exactly the opposite: live each day as if you would live forever.” — Peter Thiel

Embedded tweets

The fun part about living right now is we get to see how it ends

— Megan Amram (@meganamram) · Feb 28, 2018 · View on X

How it connects

• The Meme Economy - Research — a “What I’m Reading” piece feeding The Meme Economy. Mimetic Theory is the deep root of Memetics: if desire is imitative, then memes (Greek mimeme, “that which is imitated”) are how those imitated desires propagate at the speed of the internet.
• Religious Intellectualism — Christianity-as-true held without proselytizing; religion as the institution that manages violence.
• Definite Optimism — Thiel’s future-orientation quadrant, also the organizing frame of Kyle’s Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation notes; this essay is the deeper philosophical (Christian/eschatological) grounding for that same idea.
• Contrarianism — “don’t copy your neighbors” is Thiel’s business and life philosophy distilled from Girard; Kyle’s existing Contrarianism page already tracks Thiel’s “contrarian and right” standard.
• Founders Fund, Palantir, Facebook, Zero To One — the companies and book through which Thiel’s monopoly-over-competition philosophy plays out in practice.
• People: David Perell, Peter Thiel, Rene Girard, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Leo Strauss, Elon Musk. Concepts: Mimetic Theory, Memetics, Definite Optimism, Contrarianism.

Reading log

• April 18th, 2020 — Kyle’s Roam daily note, verbatim: “Flagged Peter Thiel’s Religion by David Perell - #articles-to-read”