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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I don't know if this is an alternate history theory, but I'm always into the James Fraser, Golden Bough, René Girard, violence, sacred history, where you have always this question about the origins of monarchy and kingship. And the sort of Girard-Fraser intuition is... that it is something like if every king is a kind of living God,
then we have to also believe the opposite, that maybe every god is a dead or murdered king and that somehow societies were organized around scapegoats. The scapegoats were – there was sort of a crisis in the archaic community. It got blamed on a scapegoat. The scapegoat was attributed all these powers.
And then at some point, the scapegoat, before he gets executed, figures out a way to postpone his execution and turn the power into something real. And so there's sort of this very weird adjacency between the monarch and the scapegoat. And then, I don't know, the sort of riff would be that the first pyramid did not need to be invented. It was just the stones that were thrown on a victim.
And then it somehow – and that's the original form.
A community stones a victim to death. A tribe runs after a victim. You stone them to death. You throw stones on the victim. That's how you create the first tomb.
And you get a pharaoh who figures out a way to postpone his own execution or something like this. I think there's—I'm going to blank on the name of this ritual, but I believe in the old Egyptian kingdoms, which were sort of around the time of the Great Pyramids or even before, it was something like— In the 30th year of the reign of the pharaoh, the pharaoh gets transformed into a living god.
And then this perhaps dates to a time where in the 30th year of the pharaoh's reign, the pharaoh would get ritually sacrificed or killed. And you have all these... societies where the kings lived, were allowed to rule for an allotted time where, you know, you become king and you draw the number of pebbles out of a vase and that corresponds to how many years?
Okay. That one right there. The ancient festival might perhaps have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively because of age or condition.
And then eventually, said festivals were jubilees, several of which were thrown for 30 years. And then every three to four years after that. So when it becomes unthinkable to kill the pharaoh, the pharaoh gets turned into a living god. Before that, the pharaoh gets murdered and then gets worshipped as a... dead pharaoh or distant god.
I think the motivational part is the harder one to solve. If you can figure out the motivation, you'll figure out a way to organize the whole society. And if you can get the whole society working on it, you can probably do it.
Well, this is always the anthropological debate between Voltaire, the Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century, and Durkheim, the 19th century anthropologist. And Voltaire believes that religion originates as a conspiracy of the priests to maintain power. And so politics comes first. The politicians invent religion.
And then Durkheim says the causation is the other way around, that somehow religion came first and then politics somehow came out of it. Of course, once the politics comes out of it, the priests, the religious authorities have political power. They figure out ways to manipulate it, things like this. But I find – You know, I find the Durkheim story far more plausible than the Voltaire one.
I think the religious categories are primary and the political categories are secondary.
You know, I think that's a whitewashed, enlightenment, rationalist description of the origin of politics.
I think it's far more vile than that. What you're giving me is a – Well, it's very vile.
Well, OK. That's more like it. Yeah. But what you gave me a minute ago sounds more like a social contract theory in which people sit down, negotiate and have a nice legal chit-chat to draw up the social contract. That is a complete fiction.
Well, I think at the beginning was madness and murder.
And I don't know... I don't know if it got that much more rational. I don't know if it's that much more rational today. Well, in some ways, it's not, right? This is, again, back to the progressive conception. Have we really progressed? How much have we really progressed from that?
But yeah, my version would be that it was much more, it was organized around acts of mass violence, like maybe you externalize it onto a mastodon or hunting some big animal or something like this, but the real problem of violence It wasn't external. It was mostly internal. It was violence with people who were near you, proximate to you. It wasn't even natural cataclysms or other tribes.
It was sort of much more the internal stuff. And it's very different, I think.
Showing 801–820 of 1,088 · page 41 of 55
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