Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…What is it you think that Schmitt missed that’s very important? I’ll just do one insight that I think is powerful, and then what’s wrong about that. One of his books was The Concept of the Political — what defines politics. It’s some of this division of friends and enemies that somehow is really foundational, and you shouldn’t get sidetracked with all these other things. There are all these interesting ways you could apply this. There’s a 1980s Reagan coalition question I always like to ask people, where the Reagan coalition was somehow the free-market libertarians, the defense hawks, and the social conservatives. If you ask what does the millionaire and the general and the priest — what do they actually have in common? We just imagine these three people are seated at a dinner table, and they’re having dinner. What do they actually talk about? It’s really hard to come up with an answer. Yet the coalition worked incredibly well, and the answer I submit that they have in common is they’re anti-communist, and they have a common enemy. That was incredibly powerful. It was, in some ways, my formative political idea as a teenager — junior high school, high school, late ’70s, early ’80s — was anti-communism. Then there was a way that when the Berlin Wall came down in ’89, this seemingly incredibly powerful political constellation disintegrated. There’s a natural Schmittian analysis of this. That’s where I find Schmitt quite powerful as a thinker. The place where it probably tends to always go haywire is, there’s always a question whether politics is like a market. Or is it a thing where, if you understand it better, it works better? Or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage-making factory? If you say, “We’re having a lot of conflicts in our village, and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft, so that will achieve some psychosocial unity as a village,” this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re that self-aware. Schmitt, in a way, had this optimistic Enlightenment rationality to it, where if we just describe politics as the arbitrary division of the world into friends and enemies, then this will somehow strengthen the political. It probably, actually, in some ways accelerated its disintegration instead. 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?…

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