Peter Thiel: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] But you can be both. I think there are probably redeeming things I can find in Calvinism. It’s so anti-utopian that it’s probably helpful in the battle against communism, but I don’t know if that’s the only way to be anti-communist. If you do five-point Calvinism, it’s total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. I don’t know if I agree with even one of those five things. I would say a Girardian anthropological frame is that there is this deep link between gods and scapegoats, and we have these scapegoats we turn into gods. We project our violence onto them, and this is what archaic religion does. This is, in some ways, what atheist liberalism does. You blame everything on Mr. God. Isn’t Calvinism just an extreme form of scapegoating, where Mr. God did everything, he determined everything? He’s why you’re wearing that blue jacket, and everything you did wrong — it’s all Mr. God’s fault. We should be deeply distrustful of scapegoating Mr. God for everything like that. That’s an anthropological argument against Calvinism. Then the intellectual reason I’m not Calvinist is that I think we should be trying to make sense of the world. If you’re so depraved that you can’t even think, which is, I think, a core Calvinist thing, we shouldn’t be having a conversation. If I were a real Calvinist, we wouldn’t even be able to have a conversation here. There’s a Thomistic distinction between the intellect and the will, and the medievals believed in the power of the intellect, the weakness of the will. The moderns — it’s in some ways reversed. If you take an effective altruist, East Bay rationalist — these people, they’re much closer to Calvinism. They claim to be rationalists, but if you’re in a rationalist Bible study equivalent, and the outward-facing thing is that you’re rational and you’re pure and you’re thinking, the inward-facing thing — it’s all just spaghetti code. You can never be right about anything. Maybe you can be a little bit less wrong. So, I’m against both Calvinism and so-called rationalism. Here’s then the puzzle I’m faced with. Let’s take all of that at face value. Why is it you just don’t slide into Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox, belief in free will? There’s some middle position. Why is your middle position stable? You could either be Catholic or, for that matter, Mormon, where there’s plenty of room for free will, right?…

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