Peter Thiel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is it possible that we can read the Old Testament, conclude essentially, history is something really bad? That’s the central message of the woke. Then just say, “The woke basically are correct; we should side with the woke.” They have all these excesses. Those are terrible, but they’re, in a way, a method of advertising the fundamental conclusion that history is bad. They’re the ones who make us deal with that, and thus, you and I should be woke. What’s wrong with that line of reasoning? Yes, I think the history was very bad. I think it’s always a mistake for conservatives or anti-woke people to whitewash it too much. So, if we say that there used to be slavery, but the slaves were all happy people, they were all happy slaves — that is a loser argument, and you shouldn’t do this. I would say, again, the rough Christian frame on this is somehow, the history is really bad. I think Christianity — probably, it is much worse than Islam or Judaism on this because Islam and Judaism — it would be inconceivable that you could murder God in the form of a person. If someone claimed to be God, and he got killed, that would just prove that he’s not God. The original sin, the violence, in some sense, is far greater in a Christian context, but then there is some way that we’re all part of that matrix. You need to have forgiveness. If you want to maybe outline three rough possibilities, there’s this hard-to-define Christian in-between one, which is, the history’s terrible and it’s awful, but we need to try to find a way to forgive people. Then there is, let’s say, a woke version, where the history’s terrible, but we’re going to forget about the forgiveness part. Then there is maybe a right-wing Nietzschean, Bronze Age Pervert alternative, which is, we’re going to forget about the history. It’s oppressive. I’m sick of this guilt trip and don’t want to hear anything more about the history. Somehow the in-between Christian one, I think, is the most tenable, even though there are all sorts of tensions in that. There was a recent Harvard talk you gave where, if I understand you correctly, you suggested the left needed to learn how to relativize its victimhood. What did you mean by that, and how does it relate to what you just said?…

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