Peter Thiel

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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

The 10th commandment is the one about, you know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being too your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things. And it's basically when you, you know, when you stop looking up, you start looking around and when you look around too much, It's not a wisdom of crowds. It's a madness of crowds.

And then that is... That's the envy issue. And then that is sort of where, again, we're not even talking about what to do about this, but this is just sort of a... Well, kind of. Looking up is partly what to do about it. As a description, I would say there is something about...

late modernity a society that's not dominated by a supernatural being that's sort of you know it's it's atheist the liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal it's it's a lot of very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it um

And that would be sort of a Girardian description of this world where mimesis is far more out of control than ever before. Don't think we can go back. But there are all these ways. It's frustrating, unsatisfactory. It may be apocalyptic, but that's a way to, again, understand this history. And it's in some ways downstream of Christianity. It's downstream of these things being revealed.

In some ways, it's the opposite to it. Because one of the questions, Gerard, if you asked Gerard, you have this theory about mimesis, and there are all these bad forms of mimesis. We have the wrong role models, and then isn't it just, okay, you should be less mimetic? Yeah, no. And then, of course, Girard was, no, this is just the nature.

You can maybe choose your role model, you can choose Christ, but you can't choose not to be mimetic. By the way, that's the Ayn Rand answer, where in Atlas Shrugged, The bad people are all the people who imitate. They're the second handers. They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else. And then the really great people are the unmoved movers.

They're like Aristotelian gods. They're not influenced by anybody. And it's all from within. But they're united by the same ethos across the entrepreneurs. But the Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be people like that don't exist. We all exist. grow up deeply in a social context. There's a developmental part to human biology.

Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children because children are incredibly imitative, both good and bad. This is just the way we are. But so, yes, Girard's answer was never that you could get rid of mimesis or anything like this. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen. Or even that some kind of psychological approach would be, you know, that you talk about your memetic stuff with your therapist.

That might make it worse, right? Because you'd focus on it even more, and then you'd conclude... As in so much therapy, it gets marketed as self-transformation, and it crashes out as self-acceptance, and then you probably just conclude, I'm just a really mimetic person, I can't help it.

Into self-acceptance, let's say.

I wish it would stop there, but it doesn't. And then I think Girard's answer would still be something like, you should just go to church.

The way I believe it was sort of this somewhat optimistic, you know, just positive society's progressing through imitation.

Yes, he was.

Well, let me see. There's many different threads here, but I would say, Gerard would reference people like Piaget and said that, you know, they underestimated imitation massively. They whitewash it. It's, you know, if you ignore this all-important runaway violence dimension and things like this... Yeah, well, Piaget was not a psychopathologist, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then I think Gerard... intuition was much more that, in some sense, the so-called normal case is the less important one. It's the extreme case. It's the madness of crowds. That's an extremely important case. Hey, fair enough. Because Piaget also wasn't an abnormal psychologist. Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell, in the wisdom of crowds.

The crowds are wise because they imitate each other, and this is how a lot of stuff works.

All these ways were still within some structure, but... But you could always say this is a basic difference between enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is, you know, in the Bible, the crowd is always wrong. The crowd is always crazy. It is mad. It's, you know, the Tower of Babel, it's in part, it's the unanimity. The Israelites. It's the unanimity.

And enlightenment rationality, it's always, you know, democracy is good. The more people vote for something, the more rational it is. Although, you know, at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea. And so, you know, it's a very important question. When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds?

And I think the Girardian, and I would say Christian intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than you have to, than you think. And that, you know, and this is, yeah. And so that's sort of one dimension. I don't know if I would anchor it as much on sacrifice, though, as the key feature.

And again, this is one of the places where Girard argued that it's Christianity was, in Girard's telling, is anti-sacrificial. It is a move away from sacrifice. All these theories about the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death. But even if we go

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