Peter Thiel: preference

Transcript context

…Is Schmitt missing out on a certain possible cyclicality in history? The notion that liberalism will collapse in Weimar Germany of the 1920s — obviously, that was the correct prediction. But if you reappear in West Germany of 1948, it was a completely incorrect prediction. Just as well, liberalism had collapsed leading up to World War I. It tends to come back. Why isn’t the cyclical perspective the correct one? Well, that’s a big question, but I think that you can stress the aspects that are timeless and eternal. I prefer to stress the aspects that are one-time and world-historical. I think that, in some sense, every moment in history only happens once. I think there is some kind of meaning to history. I think it has a certain type of linearity to it. That is, let’s say, the Judeo-Christian view of history as distinct from, let’s say, the classical Greco-Roman one. I don’t know if you can have a concept of history that’s cyclical. If you look at Thucydides, where it’s this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta. So the Periclean age somehow then gives way to this great conflict. Then people came back to studying Thucydides right after World War I because there were some certain parallels. A hundred years of peace between the Napoleonic Wars, and then it led to this great conflict, but there’s nothing particular in the history. None of the details matter in Thucydides. He makes up all the speeches and so on. You contrast this with something like the Book of Daniel in the Bible, where it’s a succession of four kingdoms, and it is a one-time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated. There’s a sense in which I would say the real first historian was Daniel, and Thucydides isn’t even close. We talked off the set a little bit about, well, what about the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire? Isn’t the European Union sort of like the Roman Empire? My response is, well, we have nuclear weapons today, and they didn’t have those, even in 1900. Even just on the science and tech arc, things are so different, and I would not trivialize the importance of science and technology. So, you think now, the stakes are too high for the cyclical version of history to work because, at some point, it’s just not possible to come back?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.