Peter Thiel

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1,088 appearances 12 recordings 11 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 15 Jun

Peter Thiel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

But then the Girardian alternate story of why the witchcraft trials ended were that at some point people realized that this sort of collective scapegoating in some ways was like a version of the Death of Christ, you know, the witches were not absolutely innocent like Christ, but they were relatively innocent. It was a community that went crazy.

And then you, you know, and then once you know that the witches are innocent or are relatively innocent, then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations. You know, if you don't think that it was, you know, I don't know, the Jews that poisoned the wells in the Middle Ages. Right.

Or some devils or- Eventually, or, you know, this was during the Salem witch trials, there were these, you know, you had these competing sermons on Sundays and, you know, the initial ones were sort of that, yeah, these women had made a pact with the devil, but then the way it got reconstructed, because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended and people sort of realized pretty fast they'd kind of collectively lost their minds.

And the alternate one was, the devil had entered the whole community and had possessed all of Salem. And those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath of the witchcraft trials. And then in that sort of a context, maybe science was also a way a way to find, you know, you can steel yourself to find natural explanations.

When you're in an archaic, you know, thing, scapegoating is always an explanation. It's a, you know, this person did this, that person did this, it's that person's fault. And when you say those explanations won't do, maybe you're forced to do scientific explanations. So there are all these different threads one can stress. I think you have to always ask this question

What was specific about the Christian message that really enabled this? I think there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned. And people, I don't know, if you compare the Talmudic abilities already in the Middle Ages to understand the Bible, to read it. It was as good or better than anything that the Christian scholastics were doing.

But somehow it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way. But again, it's obviously a complicated history.

I think it was somewhere in Karl Marx where he says that all social criticism starts with the criticism of religion. And then the Christian addendum, I would always say, was that Jesus Christ was the first person to actually do that, really, and started that whole process, where you can think so much of it was calling into question the social institutions, the religious institutions,

in a way, deconstructing them. And there's something about this that is,

know i i think is true i i think um i i think there is something about it that has an unraveling character um and i don't think you can go back we can't go back to these these pagan institutions once they once they have been deconstructed and you know maybe maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena

But, you know, that doesn't sound like, you know, the way you really bring Zeus back, you know, into the way it would have been understood by, you know, the average person in ancient Greece or something like that. But, yeah, I think... You know, one of the other dimensions that, I mean, it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology

But also, there was always a psychological dimension to Girard. And the psychological intuition in Girard is that there's something about human beings being imitative that's very deep, very important, very underexplored. And it is... It is that you have something like, I believe it's in Aristotle, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.

And then you could say this is like, you know, and of course Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes. And the apes, they ape, they imitate. And so we differ from the apes in being more ape-like than the apes. If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the Darwinian one, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way. And then the problem...

The good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted. This is how you learn language. Without imitation, nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work. And then the thing that's dangerous is it's not just on a representational level. It's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate. It's also on the level of desires, of things they want.

And when everybody wants the same thing, this becomes this incredibly, incredibly violent thing. And then, in Gibrard's understanding, the point of, you know, a major point of a lot of the laws, divine laws in these archaic societies was to, in some sense, stop imitation, to prevent imitation, to, you know, the job you do will be the same job that your father did.

if your father's a baker, you will be a baker. And this creates, you know, a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and it all goes, everybody's at everybody else's throats. And then somehow, you know, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did

before we had anything cultural at all, before we had invented, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence. And so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is,

is, you know, it's what makes our society dynamic, but there are no natural barriers, and that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, and again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it has this super open-ended dimension where it can go in all these different ways, you know.

There's probably, again, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here, there probably is you know, something about the loss of the transcendent, where, you know, if you have some transcendent reference, you're not in mimetic competition. Yeah, okay, I want to return to that.

And so one of the intuitions Girard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list. The first commandment, you know, only worship one God, there's one God above you, that's who you worship.

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