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How has Rene Girard shaped Peter Thiel's worldview, investing strategy, and religious faith?
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“I suspect that when the history of the 21st century is written circa 2100, he [Girard] will be seen as one of the great intellectuals” - Peter Thiel
Girard was clearly a huge influence on Thiel. Some of the key pieces:
1. Mimesis as the driver of people's preferences: In the video, Thiel notes that people can be "disturbingly herdlike". One justification for this 'herd' view is given by Girard, who argues that people form desires based on what others around them want. This is true of everything aside from basic evolutionary needs (e.g. hunger).
Girard calls this the 'mimetic mechanism'. People take their cues from the people around them, using them as a 'model', and unconsciously copy their desires for the same objects.
A few examples of how this has influenced Thiel:
2. Mimesis as the cause of conflict: Girard's view is that conflict is rooted in the mimetic mechanism: people fight because they model their desires on each other, come to desire similar things, and end up fighting over them. Because of this imitiative process, they tend to become more and more alike - “Violence is generated by this process; or rather, violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means” (Girard).
Thiel appears to subscribe to this view. From Blake Masters's transcripts of his lectures:
(Source: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/p...)
3. The scapegoat mechanism: Girard's theory of social change, in high level summary: societies gradually become more and more conflicted due to mimesis, until a crisis is reached. This crisis is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism: people decide that one person is responsible for the social discord and execute the person. The cycle then repeats. A good example of this is Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which shows Rome following this pattern.
Thiel subscribes to this view, as is evident from his lecture on the founder as god (http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/p...). You can see, from the lecture, that it affects his views on the justice system (where the jury isn't rational, you often get perverse outcomes because of the scapegoat mechanism), society (the celebrity rise/fall phenomenon), politics (the right wing / left wing polarization, resulting in each side having their own scapegoats; the Occupy movement). I recommend reading the lecture, which goes into more detail on these.
4. Religion: Girard is a Christian. One of his arguments in this area is that Christianity is a unique religion that represents a turning point in human history.
His reasoning: throughout most of human history, society has been sacrificing essentially random people (scapegoats) to restore social order. Christanity is the first religion to call humans out on this monstrous behaviour, by showing us very clearly that the person being scapegoated is totally innocent - by definition, since he's the son of God. The four Gospels are basically the story of social conflict played out, but with the innocence of the victim emphasized throughout: Christianity is therefore a religion centred around the innocence of the victim in history.
Because the scapegoat mechanism is so crucial to restoring social order, breaking it would make things difficult for society. Christianity does exactly this, showing the scapegoat mechanism to be a sham, and therefore showing humanity their own flawed nature. The implication of this for modern history is that, in the absence of the ability to resort to the scapegoat mechanism, society could potentially get more and more conflictual without having a clear way of resolving conflicts.
Thiel is a Christian as well. No public statements go into detail on his religious belief, so I can't make claims about it: however, it's probable that Girard's view of Christianity was a key influence. Note that Thiel - like Girard - seems to believe that society could potentially get more and more conflictual, and that things could get far worse ('bad mimesis'). This is in line with the Girardian view that humanity's nature has been revealed to itself, and contradicts the usual assumption that things must necessarily get better.
Girard was clearly a huge influence on Thiel. Some of the key pieces:
1. Mimesis as the driver of people's preferences: In the video, Thiel notes that people can be "disturbingly herdlike". One justification for this 'herd' view is given by Girard, who argues that people form desires based on what others around them want. This is true of everything aside from basic evolutionary needs (e.g. hunger).
Girard calls this the 'mimetic mechanism'. People take their cues from the people around them, using them as a 'model', and unconsciously copy their desires for the same objects.
A few examples of how this has influenced Thiel:
- In the stock market, the Girardian view implies that the average agent is not a rational maximizer who looks at investments based on a sober assessment of the fundamentals. Rather, the stock market is fundamentally herd driven. Therefore, there are opportunities to be exploited as people form collective blind spots, taking their cues from each other. Hence Thiel's contrarian investing strategy that resulting in him calling the housing bubble, for example.
- In education, Thiel believes that the decision to invest so much in higher education is irrational, but because everyone believes that getting an education guarantees safety, people do it without questioning it too much. This overinvestment in education is fundamentally driven by the mimetic mechanism.
- In business/tech, Thiel's tends to look for startups doing fundamentally new or different things, rather than copying existing ideas. This is a consequence of the Girardian view, which implies that people will over-crowd certain areas (e.g. social web applications) and under-crowd other areas (e.g. transport). From the Founder's Fund (Thiel's investment fund): "VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances."
2. Mimesis as the cause of conflict: Girard's view is that conflict is rooted in the mimetic mechanism: people fight because they model their desires on each other, come to desire similar things, and end up fighting over them. Because of this imitiative process, they tend to become more and more alike - “Violence is generated by this process; or rather, violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means” (Girard).
Thiel appears to subscribe to this view. From Blake Masters's transcripts of his lectures:
So which perspective is right in the tech world? How much is Marx? How much is Shakespeare?
In the great majority of cases, it’s straight Shakespeare. They grind each other down through increased competition. And everyone loses sight of the bigger picture.
(Source: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/p...)
- In business/tech, Thiel believes that a myopic focus on your competitors can be a dangerous thing if it compromises your own vision. In the lecture above, he uses Google/Microsoft as an example, noting how e.g. Microsoft's decision to go after Google in search has cost them billions of dollars. The counterargument here (made by Reid Hoffman in the lecture is, of course, that Microsoft is rationally going after a lucrative part of the internet. Thiel, however, disagrees: "It isn’t just rational calculation because tremendous effort is spent on things that, probabilistically, aren’t lucrative at all."
- In hiring/business, I believe this is the source of Thiel's 'extreme focus' philosophy (see Keith Rabois's answer here: Keith Rabois' answer to What strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter, Max, and David have at PayPal?). This is the idea that each person, in an organization, is given one thing to focus on and therefore one contribution that they will primarily be judged by. The rationale makes sense from a Girardian point of view: if you give people more than one thing, the probability of overlap increases; increase the overlap, and you end up with people wanting the same thing and therefore conflict, something Thiel takes pains to avoid within a company. ("Most companies are killed by internal infighting, even though it may not seem like it.")
3. The scapegoat mechanism: Girard's theory of social change, in high level summary: societies gradually become more and more conflicted due to mimesis, until a crisis is reached. This crisis is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism: people decide that one person is responsible for the social discord and execute the person. The cycle then repeats. A good example of this is Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which shows Rome following this pattern.
Thiel subscribes to this view, as is evident from his lecture on the founder as god (http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/p...). You can see, from the lecture, that it affects his views on the justice system (where the jury isn't rational, you often get perverse outcomes because of the scapegoat mechanism), society (the celebrity rise/fall phenomenon), politics (the right wing / left wing polarization, resulting in each side having their own scapegoats; the Occupy movement). I recommend reading the lecture, which goes into more detail on these.
4. Religion: Girard is a Christian. One of his arguments in this area is that Christianity is a unique religion that represents a turning point in human history.
His reasoning: throughout most of human history, society has been sacrificing essentially random people (scapegoats) to restore social order. Christanity is the first religion to call humans out on this monstrous behaviour, by showing us very clearly that the person being scapegoated is totally innocent - by definition, since he's the son of God. The four Gospels are basically the story of social conflict played out, but with the innocence of the victim emphasized throughout: Christianity is therefore a religion centred around the innocence of the victim in history.
Because the scapegoat mechanism is so crucial to restoring social order, breaking it would make things difficult for society. Christianity does exactly this, showing the scapegoat mechanism to be a sham, and therefore showing humanity their own flawed nature. The implication of this for modern history is that, in the absence of the ability to resort to the scapegoat mechanism, society could potentially get more and more conflictual without having a clear way of resolving conflicts.
Thiel is a Christian as well. No public statements go into detail on his religious belief, so I can't make claims about it: however, it's probable that Girard's view of Christianity was a key influence. Note that Thiel - like Girard - seems to believe that society could potentially get more and more conflictual, and that things could get far worse ('bad mimesis'). This is in line with the Girardian view that humanity's nature has been revealed to itself, and contradicts the usual assumption that things must necessarily get better.
Here's a link to an interview with Peter Thiel wherein he discusses Girard's influence on his worldview and investing strategy.
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