Girard, Thiel and the Antichrist Lectures

Peter Thiel's ideas sit underneath much of this series, and the key to them is René Girard. Girard's mimetic theory says desire is borrowed: we want what others want. Borrowed desire produces rivalry, rivalry produces crisis, and communities resolve the crisis by uniting against a scapegoat. Thiel met Girard at Stanford and turned the theory into business doctrine: competition is for losers, so build a monopoly in an uncontested space. In his hands it also became a political theory, one in which politics is a machine that needs enemies.

I named Girard as the topic I'd most like to open with on this show, and I mean the mechanism itself, not just Thiel's version of it. It's a bigger and stranger claim than anything in tech. It's elegant enough that I don't fully trust it, and I want to test whether it's true or just a satisfying story about chaos.

The Antichrist lectures, which by reported accounts have run in San Francisco, Rome and Nashville, apply the same framework to the present: a figure who channels collective rage and offers a false peace. That's where I part ways. When the theory is aimed at a specific pope or politician, it becomes unfalsifiable. If the target speaks, that's exploitation. If he stays silent, that's complicity. A theory that can't lose isn't analysis. I called the pope comment a cheap shot dressed up as theology.

The deepest irony is that the scapegoat mechanism also describes the pattern I see across this cast: declare an institution captured and let the crowd supply the evidence. Girard would probably recognize it.

What would move me is a Girardian prediction specific enough to fail.