From Philosophy to Power:

René Girard’s Legacy

This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.

As it turns out, I know exactly where this illegitimate claim to Girard’s legacy started. For several years in the 1990s, I was part of a small reading group that met bi-weekly on the Stanford campus in a trailer left over from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The group—a kaleidoscope of visiting scholars, a few former students and some of Girard’s campus friends—was led by Girard himself, and though he was already an influential thinker at the time, and though his theories and ideas pervaded our discussions and were the reason we gathered, one member of that intimate group of ten or so has gone on to eclipse Girard in terms of visibility and political influence: Peter Thiel.

That Thiel participated in this study group has been noted in a small subset of the countless articles that reference his connection to Girard. Journalists, podcasters, and young entrepreneurs alike have hoped to find in Thiel’s acknowledged devotion to Girard’s work a master key that, properly handled, could unlock the mystery of Thiel and explain everything from his success as a venture capitalist to his 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump. That some wannabe billionaires have ordered Violence and the Sacred or Deceit, Desire and the Novel from Amazon and scanned its chapters in search of an “open sesame” to affluence is as surreal a proposition as it is doubtless something that actually occurs—the aspiring mogul’s equivalent of clicking on one of those “one weird trick” links that promise a hack to making money and improving your health.


Understanding Thiel through Girard:
Looking for a Master Key

A mirror image of this shortcut-thinking is visible in those who scan Girard’s books with the opposite goal: to demystify and discredit Thiel. “Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought,” exclaimed Sam Kriss in Harper’s, in an essay referenced in a ninety-minute discussion between the co-hosts of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast and essayist John Ganz, entitled “René Girard and the New Right.” This podcast discussion stands out as an informed, thoughtful, and wide-ranging presentation of Girard’s work. Nevertheless—like Sam Kriss in Harper’s—the trio are unconvincing when they suggest a causal link between Girard and Peter Thiel’s right-wing politics. Indeed, all the critical discussions I have seen regarding Thiel’s reverence for Girard share a single pattern; they seek an opportunity for a negative judgment of Girard—believing this will help them cut Peter Thiel down to size and further their efforts to obliterate the reactionary right. Just like Thiel’s followers, these critics have followed Thiel to Girard. Only the one weird trick they hoped to pull off was not getting rich, but getting reassurance—confirmation that an assumed pillar of Thiel’s worldview was as shaky as they assumed it must be.

However, the real concern isn’t about misreadings from afar but about how Girard’s ideas are actively distorted by Thiel and other influential figures within powerful right-wing circles. This manipulation carries real-world consequences. Thiel’s profound engagement with Girard’s work has been instrumental in shaping his worldview, yet he selectively twists Girardian concepts in ways that distort their original meaning. This extends beyond Thiel to figures like his political protégé, J.D. Vance. Examining how both Thiel and Vance misconstrue Girard’s themes shows how their misreadings shape the way power is understood and exercised, affecting not just academic debates but the actual conduct of political life.


J.D. Vance: Inverting “The Modern Concern for Victims”

Girard’s mimetic theory posits that human desires are not innate but are shaped by imitating others. This imitation leads to rivalry as individuals compete for the same objects or status, escalating into conflict. To restore order, societies historically resorted to scapegoating—transferring collective aggression onto an innocent victim. This act temporarily unites the community but perpetuates cycles of violence concealed by myths that portray the scapegoat as deserving of punishment.

According to Girard, the Judeo-Christian tradition is primarily responsible for unmasking this mechanism by giving voice to the victims, revealing the injustice of scapegoating. Psalms and stories like those of the Suffering Servant and Joseph and his brothers, for example, begin to expose the mechanisms of mimetic rivalry and sacrificial violence, leading societies to recognize and reject these destructive patterns.

The importance to Girard’s work of what he labeled “the modern concern for victims”—which emerged as a specific focus during the reading group years of the 1990s—cannot be overestimated, and we’ll return to it later in this essay. Girard believed the concern for victims was the Absolute of our contemporary world. As he said in 1996:

The concern for victims has all the attributes of a genuine Absolute. It can withstand all assaults; it is the one principle invulnerable to all possible forms of skepticism…As soon as we become aware that our concern for victims might be our real Absolute, many clues can be gathered that point to the extreme pertinence of that Absolute as a synthetic concept, which would explain our history. We can see that our whole history seems to converge upon that theme…

According to Girard, the concern for victims is a moral imperative emerging from this tradition—but one with a shadow side: the manipulation of victimhood to justify aggression against others.

In today’s world, political leaders and influencers often invoke victimhood to justify aggressive policies or silence opposition. Claims of oppression become a rhetorical strategy, turning the concern for victims into a justification for making additional victims.

Our growing awareness of how scapegoating works affects the culture in strange ways. Coming to understand scapegoating as wrong, we increasingly justify our violence by portraying ourselves as victims, or by aligning ourselves with others we allege have been victimized by our enemies. This paradox lies at the heart of many modern political movements, where claims of victimhood mask new cycles of exclusion and violence.

In a meeting from February 1993, Girard observed, “We have reached a stage where the only way you can be violent is against the violent ones. That’s why everything today is propaganda… . You always claim to be fighting the violence of others.”

Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance both exemplify how the knowledge of scapegoating can be misused, even by those who claim to appreciate Girard’s philosophy.

Consider a real scenario involving J.D. Vance, who claims Girard’s work opened his eyes to his own tendency to scapegoat. In a 2020 essay titled “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and Becoming Catholic,” he wrote that Girard’s “theory of the scapegoat…made me reconsider my faith.” Girard taught him how we “shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim.” Recognizing these patterns in his own life, he vowed, “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating.”

Yet four years later, during the presidential campaign, Vance helped spread false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Alongside Donald Trump, he promoted the debunked narrative that these immigrants were stealing and eating pets. By amplifying these baseless claims, Vance engaged in classic scapegoating, targeting a vulnerable community as a source of societal problems.  Vance inverted the concern for victims to justify marginalizing immigrants, claiming to defend residents supposedly harmed by outsiders. This inversion demonstrates how easily Girard’s ideas can be misapplied to perpetuate the scapegoating they warn against. Vance knows from basic mimetic theory that certain “preferential signs” tend to attract and justify the actions of violent mobs—Girard’s “stereotypes of persecution,” which include social marginality, cultural differences, misfortune, and economic vulnerability.

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield fit these stereotypes to a T. They are socially marginal, arriving in a small Ohio town with few resources or connections. Their cultural differences—speaking Creole, maintaining traditions unfamiliar to the locals—set them apart in a community unused to such diversity. Their misfortune is evident: refugees fleeing political instability, arriving with little beyond the hope for a better life. And their economic vulnerability makes them easy targets for resentment, as they are perceived to compete for limited jobs or strain public resources.

Another stereotype of persecution Girard identifies is “behavioral deviance.” In this case, the Haitian immigrants were accused of bizarre acts like eating their neighbors’ pets—an absurd but potent fabrication that reinforced their otherness and justified hostility against them.

Mobs intuitively gravitate toward such signs because these markers make it easier to project blame and vent violence. The Haitian immigrants become scapegoats, bearing the burden of a community’s unresolved tensions and fears.

Vance stated on the record, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This admission underscores his willingness to propagate falsehoods for political gain, directly engaging in the scapegoating mechanism Girard cautions against.

Rooted in either staggering hypocrisy or self-deception, this approach allows Vance to cast his non-Haitian constituents as the “real” victims—along with their cats—while explaining away, to himself and others, the harm inflicted on the immigrant community—a perfect example of how the concern for victims can be inverted to justify one’s own scapegoating.


“Hardcore, Unreconstructed Girardian”

Vance’s engagement with Girard appears more performative than deeply considered. This becomes troubling when paired with his new political influence. In Springfield, he amplified unfounded fears about a vulnerable group. Coupled with his support for sweeping mass deportations, this rhetoric evokes chilling echoes of history, where dehumanizing narratives laid the groundwork for systematic cruelty. What begins as a failure to grasp Girard’s lessons risks becoming a playbook for turning vulnerable groups into scapegoats on a national scale.  

Peter Thiel may not have taught Vance to misread Girard, but Thiel’s prestige in Vance’s eyes—and Girard’s prestige in Thiel’s—made Girard a mimetic prize Vance couldn’t resist, even if his understanding of Girard remains incomplete. Thiel played a key role in shaping Vance’s political trajectory and introducing him to Girard’s ideas, which Vance has used as both a framework for self-justification and a marker of intellectual credibility.

As we turn our attention to Peter Thiel, whose understanding of Girard is far more sophisticated, and whose wealth provides him the power to have a wide and lasting impact on the political scene, the stakes may be even higher. Thiel’s real grasp of mimetic theory, combined with his significant influence, presents a complex challenge that demands critical examination. He appears to interpret Girard’s insights into escalating cycles of rivalry and the increasing strain on societal institutions as a mandate for bold, preemptive action. Thiel has argued that America’s “constitutional machinery” can impede the bold action needed to address what he perceives as the West’s existential threats. For Thiel, engaging with Girard’s ideas appears to imply that securing the future of the West might require dismantling traditional democratic safeguards, even if that means subverting constitutional norms.

Thiel, who I met when we were both in our twenties, was an intelligent and fully engaged member of the discussion group. Anyone familiar with his career knows that his enthusiasm for Girard and mimetic theory has always been sincere. He recently called himself a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian.” He has applied his deep understanding of mimetic theory in innovative ways, investing in businesses that leverage rivalry, competition, and the desire for prestige—endeavors that have contributed to his immense wealth.

As dramatized in The Social Network, Facebook began as a platform rooted in competition, and arguably, sacrificial elements. Mark Zuckerberg’s original “Facemash” website at Harvard involved students comparing peer photos in a “hot or not” game, effectively gamifying rejection and exclusion. Recognizing the mimetic possibilities, Thiel became Facebook’s first investor after hearing Zuckerberg’s pitch, and the rest is history. Whether Girard would have been amused or not—and he probably would have been—he has been called “The Godfather of the ‘Like.’”

Thiel’s ventures demonstrate a remarkable ability to tap into the mimetic Zeitgeist—not just through competition, but by leveraging social validation and the drive for connection, developing platforms like LinkedIn and Spotify that millions engage with daily. However, when it comes to his political philosophy, we see a far more troubling picture of his relationship with mimetic theory.

While Thiel applies mimetic principles effectively in business, his political philosophy has been slipperier and less consistent, both in general and in its alignment with a Girardian outlook. As a baseline, he is conservative. In 2023, he described his student self as “a right-wing campus-Libertarian type.” Since his Stanford days, Thiel has been a fierce opponent of political correctness. Along with his friend David O. Sacks, he published a book in 1995 called The Diversity Myth, which critiques multicultural policies, particularly at elite universities. The book argues that such frameworks undermine merit and intellectual rigor by enforcing ideological conformity and promoting a culture of victimhood. He asked for and received a book jacket endorsement from Girard: “Two recent Stanford graduates document the situation there with a thoroughness that should help stiffen the spine of university administrators”—a reserved, mildly observational note that nonetheless lent Thiel validation from an admired former professor.

This favor, in the form of a tepid blurb lacking specific support for Thiel’s ideas, was—as we’ll see—part of a pattern where Thiel took such measured gestures and comments of Girard’s as implicit ideological support, a pattern that persisted even where Thiel’s ideas diverged into stances far apart from Girard’s own views.


Thiel’s Other Mentor: Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Peter Thiel had another lesser-known mentor in mimetic theory whose influence sheds light on his political divergence from Girard: Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Stanford’s campus minister and a fervent Girar- dian, Hamerton-Kelly was a religious scholar with a Calvinist-inspired Methodism that lent his worldview a grim pessimism akin to Hobbes or Machiavelli. His take on human nature blended Christian exceptionalism with a violent ontology bordering on Gnostic beliefs.

Hamerton-Kelly openly disparaged fellow Girard scholars for their emphasis on “positive mimesis”—where the capacity for imitation produces snowballing effects in a constructive and non-violent direction— dismissing them as misguided and naïve. He pushed beyond Girard’s nuanced view of mimetic violence as a pervasive but complex tendency, arguing instead that humanity’s history of sacrifice wasn’t just a universal feature of cultural development; it was the result of an automatic mechanism hardwired into our species.

This rigid stance, as one critic noted, succumbed to “the temptation to make Girard’s ‘anthropology of revelation’ systematic.” By treating the violent results of mimesis as automatic, he disregarded crucial nuances of the theory, acting as if Girard’s insistence that mimetic desire is an “extreme openness” to others—and that violence and war are not triggered by our biological make-up—was merely a concession to Enlightenment-friendly sensibilities rather than an essential facet of his anthropology.

Understanding Thiel’s engagement with mimetic theory requires acknowledging Hamerton-Kelly’s influence. It was Hamerton-Kelly who organized the Girard reading group and attended every meeting, often interjecting to share opinions or debate points with René. For those unfamiliar with him, his presence could be overwhelming. I brought a tape recorder to the sessions but found myself discreetly pausing it when Hamerton-Kelly spoke, prioritizing Girard’s contributions.

Thiel had known Hamerton-Kelly since his student days and joined the reading group via this connection. The context of their friendship is crucial because it amplified Thiel’s engagement with mimetic theory through a Calvinistic lens that resonated with his interest in thinkers like Schmitt and Machiavelli, who harbored stark views on human nature. Hamerton-Kelly’s influence provided a selective interpretation of Girard, one that dismissed themes of positive mimesis and the contingency of structural violence in favor of a deterministic view—a perspective that arguably shaped Thiel’s later political thinking.

One should note as well that our group of eager listeners was hardly the kind that would draw out Girard’s sharper edge. With us Girard—still intellectually towering in his seventies—was not surrounded by his French intellectual contemporaries, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whose rivalries had honed his ideas and sometimes provoked him to defend himself with vigor. In a 1983 exchange with the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, for example, Castoriadis remarked, “You continue to see the Greek myth in terms of victims!” To which Girard snapped back, “I’m not continuing anything. I’m the first to see the Oedipus myth in terms of victims.” In contrast, our meetings at Stanford were more subdued, with Girard allowing discussions to unfold without stepping into frays he didn’t find necessary.

Hamerton-Kelly’s role in the reading group was akin to that of a high school basketball coach who regularly brings his players to scrimmage with an NBA-star friend of his—a friend he inevitably insists on going one-on-one against at every meeting. I don’t mean to suggest Girard didn’t appreciate what Hamerton-Kelly had to say, just that the dynamic often gave the impression Hamerton-Kelly was eager to use his face time with Girard to draw out comments that might reinforce his own theological views. Meanwhile, Girard seemed to simply enjoy sharing his latest ideas with a receptive group of scholars and former students. Maintaining equilibrium in the discussions often required picking one’s way carefully through the conservative currents that occasionally surfaced—a balancing act I sensed Girard himself managing with quiet ease.


“The Straussian Moment”: Thiel in 2004

Since his first financial success in the late 1990s, Thiel has navigated dual identities: on one hand, a career capitalist; on the other, an intellectual—a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian”—committed to mimetic theory and other big ideas. In the twenty-plus years since, Thiel’s wealth and visibility have steadily risen. Across countless panels and interviews, he has been courteous and thoughtful on a range of subjects, sharing his views openly and generously, if not always transparently.

There’s something elusive about Thiel. Nate Silver, after interviewing him for his recent book On the Edge, recounted for Ezra Klein how his initial question, intended simply to gauge if Thiel considered himself lucky, triggered a 30-minute answer seemingly designed to bury an admission (that he believes in predestination) under a mountain of other observations. It’s clear that Thiel, a former chess champion, layers his verbal moves with positional complexity and camouflage. What’s less clear is when this is for sport and when it’s to keep his true intentions concealed beneath a carefully arranged structure of thoughtful ambiguity.

In my opinion, the 2004 conference and the paper delivered there by Thiel titled “The Straussian Moment” reveal a remarkable glimpse through the camouflage. For whatever reason, at that time, Thiel put many cards on the table. Even twenty years later, his paper and the conference itself—how it came about and who funded it—offer perhaps the clearest view of the intellectual and political ambitions he envisions for himself. For anyone curious about how this student of Girard’s thinks, this 2004 paper is a treasure. It reveals not only how deeply persuaded he is that a mix of Machiavellian violence, originary ruthlessness, and Calvinistic original sin best describes humanity—and how he tries to fuse these with a flattened mimetic theory into a vision of the future—but also how strikingly cavalier he is in outlining ways his perceptions of reality could translate into political and even military action. Ironically, it is his other mentor and conference co-organizer, Robert Hamerton-Kelly—with, as we saw, his own uncompromising view of human nature—who steps in with a not-too-subtle hint in an introductory essay to the proceedings, cautioning that Thiel’s seeming readiness to launch a holy crusade against Islam might need to be dialed down a bit.

“The Straussian Moment” is a very strange document. In it, Thiel argues that the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment—rationalism, individual rights, and the primacy of economics—are insufficient for addressing the dangers posed by ideologically driven adversaries. The events of 9/11 reveal a fundamental weakness in the liberal worldview, he argues, as liberalism’s tolerance and belief in peaceful negotiation fail to recognize the inherent conflict in politics, the primal undercurrents of violence, and the limits of rational appeals, especially when faced with actors motivated by religious or existential goals. Thiel contends that the West must reconsider its foundational assumptions about human nature, invoking thinkers like Carl Schmitt to propose that survival will require a realist approach to politics, taking a hard line to overcome liberalism’s vulnerability to its own permissiveness.

What’s strange is that the essay exists at all. In 2002, Thiel had sold PayPal to eBay, making him a billionaire. He had become a founding investor and board member in a new company called Facebook. His hedge fund, Clarium Capital, was thriving, managing over $250 million and gaining recognition for its bold macroeconomic bets. Yet here he was, in 12,000 words across twenty-five pages, confidently citing Augustine, Leo Strauss and Roberto Calasso; making short work of John Locke; calling Thomas Hobbes a coward; and issuing dozens of haunting pronouncements:

Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment…

For when one chooses not to decide, one still has made a choice— invariably a mistaken choice, which implicitly assumes that humankind is fundamentally good or unproblematic…

For the Straussian, there can be no fundamental disagreement with Oswald Spengler’s call for action at the dramatic finale of Der Untergang des Abendlandes…

In the middle of a string of green lights for his business ventures, Thiel took the time to construct a complex argument that reads like a sophisticated engagé graduate student paper, a call-to-arms polemic for the “Christian statesman or stateswoman” to do “what must be done” to preserve the values of the West in the face of radical Islam. He co-organized a small insider-only conference called “Politics & Apocalypse” at Stanford —which he completely underwrote, to which he and Hamerton-Kelly invited René Girard. He then facilitated the publication of the conference proceedings, including his essay and Girard’s, in book form with Michigan State University Press—with funding provided through Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital.

This raises a pivotal question: Why would a newly minted billionaire immerse himself in an academic endeavor that reads as a call-to-arms?

It seems the answer lies not merely in his response to a significant world event and its aftermath, but in an internal crisis—a struggle between, and in a sense beyond, his dual identities as a successful businessman and a serious intellectual. Thiel, at 36, grappled with a profound sense of purposelessness. He had achieved immense wealth through ventures that nevertheless fell far short of his great expectations. PayPal, for example—initially envisioned as a global, decentralized, new kind of money that would begin to free people from government-issued currency—had become a caboose for eBay purchases hitched to regular old banks. He lamented the direction of Silicon Valley investment, which was overly focused on social media and incremental tech instead of bold, transformative projects. Savvy enough to know Facebook would be huge, Thiel was equally aware the platform would be fueled by what Girard—following Pascal—called “divertissement”: the thousand-and-one ways human beings find to avoid the existential crossroads. Was it any better that he was the change agent responsible for bringing such channels to life? No—it was worse. His support of divertissement could mean only one thing from a mimetic perspective: he was engaged in his own next-level divertissement. Highly competitive, Thiel was just the sort of “hyper-mimetic” person he had read about in Girard’s books—those who want nothing to do with easy victories. Was he not proud of his success, pleased with his wealth? No doubt he was. But it wasn’t enough—as he made perfectly clear through the chiding manifesto headline of the venture capital fund he started a few years later: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”

Rather than dissecting every argument in “The Straussian Moment,” it’s more valuable to approach the essay as a reflection of Thiel’s ambitions—an expression of his will to intellectual and political power. In working to apply his mimetic knowledge to external existential threats, Thiel is also being moved by his own imitative desires—the same competitive striving for status and superiority that he would preach about to J.D. Vance’s law school class a decade later. Being caught up in mimetic desire—a process he knew could elude even the most adept mimetic theorist’s attempts at mastery (as Girard remarked, “Almost no one is aware of his own shortcoming”)—was nothing new for him as he pondered the theory’s real-world implications. Girard has pointed out that even such lofty activities as scientific research can be mere desire—mere divertissement—for someone unaware of all that drives him. As Girard said in a 1988 interview, “There are many people who give themselves a good conscience in political action when they are simply motivated by ambition.” This does not mean that Thiel—in turning his attention from Silicon Valley to intellectual realpolitik—wasn’t sincerely ambitious to solve difficult world issues; it just means that other ambitions may operate beyond our conscious awareness. Thiel surely holds himself to high standards of self-consistency regarding his own mimetic entanglements, but he is doubtless aware that potential blind spots abound when a wealthy ideologue—influenced by his own philosophical research—attempts to inject personal influence and ideas directly into the body politic. He is taking such risks with his eyes open, which may suggest how urgent he feels the crisis is—a crisis he believes necessitates decisive action, even if it means operating outside conventional norms.

Thiel’s background in philosophy (he earned his B.A. from Stanford in the subject), along with the considerable time he’d spent studying mimetic theory, made him an unusually reflective figure in the venture capital world. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he revisited the works of historical theorist Oswald Spengler, political philosopher Leo Strauss— whose ideas he had presented at the Girardian roundtable—and German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose reflections on business—“business is the superbly functioning means to some pathetic or senseless end”—echoed Girard’s critique of divertissement. It’s easy to imagine Thiel circa 2003, driving along Highway 280 in his Audi S5 between meetings and intensive reading sessions, immersed in a state of mimetic restlessness—what Girard describes as “the unfulfilled megalomania that is literally forced upon men by the undefined status of the individual in the modern world.” At that moment, he was at the halfway point between his B.A. in Philosophy and his speech for Trump at the Republican National Convention. “I’m Peter Thiel. I build companies…” is how he would introduce himself to the American people on that stage in 2016. But he was also still Peter Thiel who reads deeply, who engages with the world’s great thinkers. He always felt the tension between intellect and action. What he later told Peter Robinson in a Hoover Institute interview—“We have to always go back to intellect, mind, and rationality as core values…but it can’t be just interiority; we should be acting in our world”—was surely a refrain even before the terrorist attacks intensified his internal dialogue.

Driven to channel this restlessness into meaningful action, Thiel conceived the “Politics & Apocalypse” conference, a project that allowed him to assert himself both philosophically and politically. It compelled him to finally put down on paper the post-liberal ideas he’d been mulling over since college. Sharing them with a gathering of professors and scholars—including his hero Girard—was an intellectual act that both addressed his restlessness and marked a first step on a path that fused his intellectual self-conception with his desire to make a significant impact on the world.

So “The Straussian Moment” is a post-9/11 political call-to-arms that is also Thiel’s personal call-to-arms. The geopolitical “moment” overlays his existential crisis, marking the birth of Peter Thiel as a political player. The essay reads as an intellectually compelling but deeply conflicted attempt to respond to a world he perceives as broken. Thiel envisions a future shaped by figures willing to act unilaterally, sometimes in secret, and, when necessary, outside democratic norms to stabilize a world in crisis. This vision aligns with ventures like Palantir—the data analytics firm closely tied to government intelligence that he had just founded in 2003—and his later commitment to reshaping the political landscape through substantial backing of candidates willing to disrupt democratic processes they consider ineffective. The entire endeavor—the research, writing, conference, and publishing—emerges as his attempt to resolve an internal crisis, to assert a meaningful role in shaping the world, and to bridge his intellectual reflections with concrete action.

“The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundation of modern politics,” Thiel writes. Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, tolerance, and individual rights, he argues, offer insufficient protection against the existential threat posed by radical Islam and other adversaries who do not share our moral values or abide by liberal principles. While this stance reflects the familiar neoconservative “clash of civilizations” rhetoric from the Iraq War era, Thiel elevates it here with a display of intellectual rigor, drawing heavily on Schmitt and Strauss.

Thiel attempts to weave together Schmitt’s political theology—with its emphasis on the friend/enemy distinction—and Strauss’s advocacy for esoteric wisdom and hidden hierarchies. However, as we’ll see, Girard’s insights complicate this blend.


Carl Schmitt and the Friend/Enemy Distinction

The most striking aspect of Thiel’s argument is his deep engagement with Carl Schmitt’s view that “the political lies in the task of distinguishing between friend and enemy.” Thiel states: “Politics is the field of battle in which that division takes place, in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies.”

Thiel aims to guide the “Christian statesman or stateswoman” toward wise, decisive action. Yet this guidance relies on a distinction at odds with the inclusive moral vision central to the Christian tradition he invokes. Dividing humanity into friends and enemies mirrors what Girard calls the “pagan religious gesture par excellence”: an exclusionary act that sustains a sacred-profane boundary. Paul’s declaration, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” for example, suggests a humanity beyond the rigid divisions of insider and outsider.

Thiel’s stance directly conflicts with Girard’s later work, especially Battling to the End, where he critiques Schmitt’s friend/enemy framework as both obsolete and perilous in the modern world. Girard argues that today’s heightened concern for victims and global interconnectedness have undermined the clear boundaries essential to Schmitt’s model. As we grow more aware of shared humanity, dehumanizing the enemy becomes harder, making the friend/enemy dichotomy more destructive than ever.

According to Girard, as the old hierarchies and sacred boundaries that once channeled violence weaken, mimetic rivalries intensify. With the resulting undifferentiation (the loss of stable “degree, priority and place”—to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase), conflicts become more direct, and the community risks tipping into disorder. Girard’s theories challenge Schmitt’s foundational assumptions, leaving Thiel’s manifesto haunted by unresolved tensions.

The attempt to define enemies in absolute terms has historically led to both extreme violence and genocide. Girard warns: “Carl Schmitt’s legal voluntarism has proven vain because the aftermath of World War II has shown that the escalation to extremes has been relentless. His cause is lost.”

Even Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who filters all of Girard’s insights through a grim, deterministic lens of baseline, automatic human violence, acknowledges the limitations of Schmitt’s framework. In his introductory essay to the Politics & Apocalypse conference proceedings, Hamerton-Kelly subtly rebukes Thiel by noting that while Schmitt’s friend/enemy definition of the political is “marvelously clarifying,” it clarifies precisely by revealing that the political, so-defined, is sacrificial.

Although the sacrificial structures once used to channel violence weaken as we uncover their mechanisms, Girard insists that trying to reassert the rigid barriers of the past amid today’s complexities will only intensify conflict, emphasizing instead the need to manage the mimetic erasure of differences destabilizing our institutions.

If he read it, Girard would have been alarmed by the combative rhetoric in Thiel’s paper. In Battling to the End he warns against aligning with those eager to accelerate conflict, particularly as the modern concern for victims complicates the distinction between legitimate political action and its opposite, thus “depriving us of our enemies.”

Schmitt’s legacy is, of course, profoundly clouded by his alignment with the Nazi party in the 1930s, helping to justify the regime’s authoritarian and antisemitic policies. Though Schmitt was eventually dismissed from his official roles in 1936—reportedly due to suspicions within the Nazi party as to his loyalty—he never publicly recanted or apologized for his support of the regime. This history casts a shadow over his intellectual contributions and complicates any engagement with his work today.

While Thiel nominally disclaims a full return to Schmitt’s “robust conception of the political,” the sheer extent of his engagement with Schmitt leaves a lasting imprint on his argument. By framing his critique of modern secular values so heavily through Schmitt’s lens and devoting such effort to articulating Schmitt’s ideas, Thiel’s argument retains an affinity for Schmitt’s worldview that’s hard to shake.


“The Question of Human Nature”

“The enemy is the one whose very presence forces us to confront the foundational questions about human nature anew,” Thiel says, before quoting Schmitt directly: “The high points of politics are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”

He clearly has in mind Osama bin Laden, whom he name-checks eight times, and also Islam itself—the “providential enemy of the West,” as he labels it at one point. “When bin Laden declares war on ‘the infidels, the Zionists, and the crusaders,’ Schmitt would not counsel reasoned half-measures,” Thiel says. “He would urge a new crusade as a way to rediscover the meaning and purpose of our lives.”

Thiel’s combative intensity out of the gate seems inspired by Schmitt. For more than half the essay the prose is fueled by the intellectual permission granted by Schmitt to aggressively argue that Enlightenment liberalism has left the West anxious and defenseless against an enemy that views the unfolding confrontation as more significant than life and death.

“Schmitt’s troubling challenge” is essentially the necessity, post-9/11, for the West to be willing to die for its beliefs. “A side in which everyone, like Hobbes, values this earthly life more than death is a side where everyone will run away from fighting and confrontation,” Thiel says, “but when one runs away from an enemy that continues to fight, one is ultimately going to lose.”

It’s noteworthy that Thiel, identified on his essay’s title page as the CEO of Clarium Capital, is not merely eager to engage in intellectual debates about the future of the West; he appears to be envisioning a role for himself beyond scholarly discourse—perhaps even contemplating a personal confrontation with the enemy.

Throughout his essay, there emerges an image of Thiel wrestling with himself, seemingly inspired by recent events and his reading to discover who he is and how he can contribute. He seems to be seeking “a new crusade as a way to rediscover the meaning and purpose” in his life. Thiel argues throughout that the West has forgotten about “human nature”—a term he uses interchangeably with euphemisms like “older tradition,” “state of nature,” and “nature of humanity.” In all these cases, he is ultimately referring to what he sees as humanity’s innate violence and evil. (At one point, he even uses the single word “humanity” to signify our species’ presumed default violence.) Thiel adopts the violent ontology championed by Schmitt and aligns himself with the thinkers Schmitt venerates as the only bona fide political theorists: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, and a select few others. As Schmitt famously asserted, “All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil… all agree on the idea of a problematic human nature.”

Yet Girard sees the mimetic capacity of human beings, though deeply susceptible to conflict and violence and their self-reinforcing patterns, as “intrinsically good” because it represents an “extreme openness” to others. This openness is the source of our freedom to follow good role models, and enables humans to progress away from evil and the envy-driven mimesis that leads to conflict. Though mimetic desire persistently leads to violence, it is also the foundation of all positive aspects of human relationships.

As Girard states, “Mimetic desire is everything. It can be murderous, it is rivalrous. But it is also the basis of heroism, and devotion to others, and everything.”

Girard distinguishes between creation, which he considers fundamentally good, and culture, which arises through the mimesis-driven scapegoating process. This capacity for imitation—this “extreme openness” to others—even if regularly resulting in violence, is not inherently violent. He points to a child’s desire as an example of positive mimesis, oriented toward connection and learning. In Girard’s view, violence and sacrifice emerge not as automatic results of creation but as self-reinforcing but not inevitable outcomes, however overwhelmingly common.

He once told me he was in essential agreement with British theologian John Milbank, a leading figure in postmodern theology, whose view holds that violence and negativity do not have an ontologically necessary role but rather a tragically necessary role once violence has entered human arrangements as a contingent but self-perpetuating outcome. As Girard explained in his paper “Ethnic Conflict and Mimetic Theory,” “The idea of an inherently violent humanity is just as unconvincing as the idea of an inherently gentle humanity. If violence and war were triggered by our biological makeup, individual human beings would be unable to repress their aggressive impulses and many of us prove every day that this ability is theirs.”

Thiel and Hamerton-Kelly, on the other hand, do conflate the widespread historical reality of human sacrifice with a hardwired mech- anism inherent in the species. For Hamerton-Kelly, this reflex is absolute prior to Christian revelation—a perspective that reinforces his stringent Christian exceptionalism, which has drawn criticism for its exclusivity. Thiel—shaped by his immersion in the ideas of Schmitt, Strauss, Hobbes, and Machiavelli—similarly reduces human nature to a baseline drive toward violence. This reduction enables him to envision a moral land- scape sharply divided between good and evil, a stage upon which he can potentially play a significant role.

It’s clear that Thiel follows Hamerton-Kelly into a view of mimetic violence that is more absolutist and pessimistic than Girard’s. What’s less clear is when and to what degree he is aware of this divergence.

As mentioned, just a year ago he described himself as “a hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian,” but given Thiel’s skill at layering his public comments with artful ambiguity, it’s difficult to determine whether this professed allegiance reflects a genuine hope for alignment with Girard or serves another purpose.


“The Enemy is Our Own Question as a Figure”

A striking example of Thiel’s divergence from Girard—and his deeper alignment with Schmitt—is his handling of a well-known line linked to Schmitt: “The enemy is our own question as a figure.” Thiel cites this phrase to reinforce his argument about the necessity of recognizing and confronting external enemies. He writes:

Politics is the field of battle in which that division takes place, in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies. “The high points of politics,” declares Schmitt, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” The enemy is the one whose very presence forces us to confront the foundational questions about human nature anew; “the enemy is our own question as a figure.” Because of the permanence of these always contentious questions, one cannot unilaterally escape from all politics; those who attempt to do so are suffering from moments of supreme self-delusion.

But Thiel misinterprets the meaning of “The enemy is our own question as a figure,” transforming what is an invitation towards self-reflection into a justification to focus on external enemies. The phrase originates not from Schmitt himself but from his friend, the poet Theodor Däubler. In the context provided by the scholar Heinrich Meier—in The Lesson of Carl Schmitt frequently cited by Thiel—the line is an invitation to self-examination:

We know ourselves insofar as we know our enemy and insofar as we define our enemy by defining ourselves. We recognize as our enemy the one who calls us into question, or whom we call into question as we come to know ourselves and make ourselves known to ourselves and others. The enemy becomes, against his will, our ally in the journey toward self-knowledge, and our self-knowledge can suddenly become a source of enmity when it takes on a visible form.

According to Meier, Schmitt’s concept of the enemy is tied to introspection and self-definition. The enemy challenges us to confront who we are, serving as a mirror, and compelling us to engage in meaningful reflection about our identity and values.

Thiel, however, misses this introspective dimension entirely. He employs the quote as a call to action against external adversaries. Instead of asking the question of himself, he aims it at others. In effect, he is posing the question, “Why have you forgotten about evil?” to one of his perceived enemies—Enlightenment liberals—about the other: Islam.

This framing takes what could be a profound self-inquiry and turns it into a rhetorical device aimed at reinforcing the friend/enemy distinction, a move that aligns with Schmitt but not with Girard.

This misreading is fascinating because it inadvertently reveals Thiel’s own internal struggle. In his eagerness to adopt Schmitt’s aggressive stance and to find a “providential enemy” that could “give meaning and purpose” to his life, Thiel overlooks the opportunity for self-examination that the quote offers.

Self-examination is entirely absent from his 12,000-word essay. Thiel’s call to action at a moment primed for introspection reflects a pattern: his understanding of mimetic conflict and his Christian faith are invoked not to foster humility or empathy, but to justify doubling down on the pursuit of enemies.

This reaffirmation positions Thiel in stark opposition to Girard’s perspective on political action. While acknowledging there are “legitimate, healthy political actions,” Girard maintained for decades a profound caution about how easily politics can devolve into a mimetic spiral that accelerates conflict. He once told an interviewer: “We are caught in a whirlwind of transformations over which we have little control, and which we must try to manage as best we can [nous devons essayer de gérer le moins mal possible]”—a reminder that any political initiative must not become hostage to mimetic desire. Girard stated that personal relations and motivations fueled by resentment frequently influence political thought and action. Thiel’s essay, marked at points by a lack of careful self-awareness—suggested by his misinterpretation of the Däubler quote—and with its emphasis on enemy identification and forceful measures, reflects the kind of approach Girard would likely have regarded with profound wariness.

Thiel briefly gestures toward rejecting Schmitt’s framework, acknowledging the intersubjective process through which we become like our enemy: “A dangerous dynamic lurks in Schmitt’s division of the world into friends and enemies. It is a dynamic that destroys the distinction.” The dynamic he refers to is none other than mimetic rivalry, where conflict between rivals who want the same object—far from separating good and bad—erases differences, turning them into doubles.

In a kind of “now you see it, now you don’t” manner, Thiel concedes that the more we engage in binary thinking, the more we become like our enemies.

But even as he alludes to it, he tries to wriggle free of the bind in which his deep knowledge of mimetic theory has cornered him. His formulation, “One must choose one’s enemies well, for one will soon be just like them,” is a bizarre sort of half-measure. It’s almost as if Flaubert, having blurted out, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” had quickly backtracked, declaring, ‘But that’s not the point—I still despise her and her type!’”

Thiel is on a dead-end path here, many decades after Schmitt and his ideas had become a lost cause, yet he incorrigibly plays on, preserving the friend/enemy categories and merely advocating more discerning enemy selection.

Again, Thiel really knows this. But to actually abandon this distinction would require discarding the basis of his essay’s entire call to action, which insists on the necessity of defining and opposing existential threats. Thiel seems to find the challenge of constructing a worldview beyond the friend/enemy distinction as impossible as imagining a chess- board without two opposing sides.

After briefly seeing that adopting a holy war mentality would force him to become “just like them,” just like his enemies—thereby losing all that supposedly distinguishes “us” from “them”—Thiel openly acknowledges the problem. Rejecting the “incredibly drastic solutions” favored by Schmitt in his “dark musings”—which we are left to assume is an allusion to his involvement with the Nazis—Thiel finds himself beached. “We are at an impasse,” he says.

In this moment of impasse, he does not linger on the moral horror of mass murder itself. Instead, for Thiel, what renders Schmitt’s drastic solutions unworkable “after 1945” is the dawn of the nuclear age: “The incredibly drastic solutions favored by Schmitt in his dark musings have become impossible after 1945, in a world of nuclear weapons and limitless destruction through technology.”

That his focus lands on technological progress, rather than the dynamics of persecution that culminated in the Holocaust, is an unsettling oversight, to say the least. His moral revulsion at the genocide remains oddly unspoken—a silence partly explained by the concomitant failure of Schmitt’s friend/enemy framework, the acknowledgment of which would only serve to undermine Thiel’s reliance on it.


“Proceed with Caution”

For Thiel, there is really nothing worse than an impasse. Still, the next section’s subtitle—“Proceed With Caution”—assures us that the impasse was only temporary. Thiel has recourse to Leo Strauss, whose work provides the intellectual adrenaline shot Thiel needs to move forward. Strauss championed the idea that great thinkers often hide their most controversial insights beneath layers of esoteric writing—a concept that undoubtedly appeals to Thiel’s strategic mind. The notion of hidden meanings and the elite guardianship of profound truths must have been music to his ears.

Schmitt may have dead-ended searching for a legal framework for his friend/enemy distinction, but Strauss appears to hint at enough extra-legal avenues to give Thiel hope. “There are,” he says, “more possibilities for action than first appear.”

Strauss believed modernity and the Enlightenment had eroded the foundational myths that once unified societies. According to Strauss, the Enlightenment’s obsession with reason and transparency stripped away the noble lies that kept the social fabric intact. Thiel sees in this a license to circumvent the “political paralysis” he so despises. If open democratic debate is inadequate and the masses are oblivious to the grim realities of human nature, why not sidestep the whole charade?

He yearns for a return to grand, unfettered leadership—a modern-day Alexander the Great to cut through the Gordian knots of our age.

So, what’s Thiel’s solution? He hints—surprisingly incautiously—at the need for “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy.” He muses about “exceptional frameworks” involving intelligence and espionage that could “effectively supplement the American regime.” In other words, Thiel flirts with the idea of an elite vanguard operating in the shadows, unencumbered by democratic oversight.

Strauss’s concept of esoteric writing dovetails with Thiel’s ambitions. If certain truths are too dangerous for public consumption, then it’s not just acceptable but necessary for the enlightened few to guide society without explicit consent.

By invoking Strauss, Thiel revitalizes his quest for action just when it seemed stymied. Far from actually proceeding with caution, he uses Strauss as a platform to rationalize an agenda that could undermine the principles of the open society. Democratic institutions, transparent debate, and the familiar political order become impediments to what he perceives as urgent, extraordinary measures.

And yet his argument carries an uneasy recognition that the friend/enemy distinction can’t stand on Schmitt’s terms once Thiel acknowledges the moral dead end it leads to: the ruthless “ferocity” necessary to defeat the enemy takes away any moral superiority and undoes the distinction.

Failing to fully resolve the impasse via Strauss, Thiel now turns to Girard. He tries to conscript Girard’s words into a narrative that human nature is inherently evil. To achieve this alignment, Thiel invokes Girard alongside Schmitt and Strauss, insisting that Girard, too, acknowledges a disturbing truth about human violence “whitewashed away by the Enlightenment,” and that “there will come an hour when this truth is completely known.” Here he highlights, completely out of context, a quote of Girard’s: “No single question has more of a future today than the question of man.”

This “question” lifted from Girard joins others in Thiel’s essay: “the question of origins,” “the question of the City,” “the question of religion”—all orbiting around “the question of human nature.” The last of these—as we’ve noted—is Thiel’s euphemism for suggesting that nature is evil, a question to which all his intellectual idols, save one, answer affirmatively.

He would like Girard’s question to be one and the same as “the question of man’s dangerousness,” as Schmitt phrased it.

But in fact, the Girard quote, from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, concerns the unique qualities of humans—particularly mimetic behavior—and the evolutionary mechanisms that differentiate us from other species.

But Thiel needs more: he needs Girard to endorse the view of inherent and persistent human evil, because if—as Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Schmitt believe—the individual is fundamentally evil, then the binary survives, an enemy can be named, and decisive action can still be taken—just as in the less constrained past.

By returning to this point, he is essentially re-arguing a case he has already lost, pressing Girard into service as if the original collapse of the friend/enemy distinction could be reversed merely by invoking a new authority. In doing so, Thiel betrays how tightly he’s trapped: he really knows that the old binary, exposed by mimetic theory as a mirror, cannot truly be revived, yet he strives to animate its corpse with apocalyptic urgency and Girard’s borrowed gravitas. He recruits Strauss and Girard to convince himself and his readers that—even if it makes us “just like them”—some decisive action must still be taken against a “them” more ruinously evil than “us.”


“Action Will Be Taken”

In the Girard section, Thiel offers a largely accurate summary of mimetic theory. He explains that, according to Girard, humans are fundamentally mimetic creatures—“gigantic imitation machines”—whose capacity for imitation extends beyond language and culture to desires themselves. In archaic societies, mimetic conflicts culminated in a “war of all against one”—where the community unites to sacrifice a single victim, whose death restores peace. However, in the modern world, “the cat is out of the bag”; we now recognize the innocence of scapegoats, and the sacrificial mechanisms that once contained violence are unraveling.

“For Girard, the modern world contains a powerfully apocalyptic dimension,” Thiel correctly states. As structured violence—the order provided by our institutions and rules rooted in sacrifice—breaks down, it gives way to the growing threat of uncontained conflict.

But just when it seems Thiel is faithfully conveying Girard’s insights, he executes a sleight of hand. Having started the previous sentence with “For Girard…” and accurately summarizing Girard’s view, in the next he pivots to “From a Girardian perspective,” and begins to smuggle in his own agenda—a move designed to blur the lines between what he finds in Girard and what he wishes Girard would say. He ends up telling a story in Girard’s name that argues for political action of a sort Girard would caution against, or reject outright.

Throughout his essay, Thiel expresses frustration with thinking that avoids decisions. “A decision can’t be made to avoid all decisions,” he writes, and, “The decisions that are avoided are always too important.” Most of these comments are in the context of dressing down Enlightenment liberals, the U.N. (“tales told by idiots”), and other easy targets. But Girard is a target of this exasperation too. Girard’s combination of an apocalyptic outlook and political caution is deeply frustrating to Thiel. From a certain perspective, Thiel’s essay can be read as a series of probing maneuvers, with Thiel testing Girard’s intellectual defenses for vulnerabilities that might accommodate his aggressive worldview.

It’s a tricky process—especially since he presented this paper at a conference in which Girard also participated—demanding equal parts smudging and flattery. Thiel elevates Girard, suggesting his mentor’s work has revealed “the truth of human history for the first time.” Yet, even as he flatters, Thiel tries to force that truth into a framework serving his own ends.

There’s an undeniable energy infusing Thiel’s essay—a restless drive that, on one hand, fuels his remarkable success and, on the other, carries a frightening intensity. George Packer’s 2011 profile of Thiel in The New Yorker includes an anecdote of college-age Thiel sweeping the chess pieces off the board when he realized his king was trapped. Reading Thiel’s essay, one is reminded not just of that profile but also of Heinrich Böll’s short story “Action Will Be Taken,” whose protagonist laments never having enough telephones to match his driving energy.

Thiel’s “Straussian perspective” suggests a post-political approach where an elite might enforce unilateral policies without public discourse. This is a perspective he surely knows would never gain the support of Girard, which is why he is so careful, when crafting his “Girardian perspective,” to avoid directly stating that Girard holds such views. By merely nudging readers toward that assumption, he both shields himself from direct criticism of misrepresentation and encourages us to associate Girard’s authority with his own agenda.

In the Girard section, Thiel’s calculated ambiguity turns into straight-up gaslighting. By presenting his own violent ontology along with a view of the present sufficiently grim as to require extra-legal elites working in secret outside the constitution as a natural extension of Girard’s theory, he leverages Girard’s authority to lend weight to an alarmist narrative. The failures of our “current political debates” will result in “a synthesis of violence and globalization in which all boundaries on violence are abolished.” According to Thiel, recognizing and preemptively combating inherent human violence is not only necessary but urgently demanded. It’s a deliberate strategy to advance his agenda under the cover of Girardian thought.

Thiel’s grim worldview extends into laments about cultural stagnation, epitomized, for him, by the absence of the utopian futures imagined in Star Trek and The Jetsons. Contemporary science fiction is “about science that is bad or doesn’t work,” he told the Wall Street Journal. According to Thiel, the dominance of dystopian narratives in today’s science fiction signals a deep cultural malaise. But couldn’t this shift in the sci-fi genre suggest artistic evolution, market dynamics, or (per Girard) imitation-driven copycat trends rather than a true indicator of societal despair? While it’s difficult to dispute that we are living in a rapidly changing and often unsettling world, Thiel’s nostalgic invocation of an idealistic past doesn’t just lament cultural stagnation—it validates his mounting impatience with the status quo. For Thiel, the absence of technological marvels like undersea cities or flying cars offers another rationale for the radical political changes he’s increasingly advocating. His argument—rather than seeking solutions to stagnation within existing frameworks—posits that the very societal structures impeding progress must be challenged and overthrown. This positions his ambitions toward political intervention not solely as a critique of contemporary life but increasingly as a call to radically reshape the future.

Thiel’s penchant for risk-taking further amplifies the stakes. His bold contrarian strategies haven’t always led to success, as evidenced by the catastrophic losses at Clarium Capital during the 2008 financial crisis. That mindset now risks being transferred to grand social experiments, with potentially far graver consequences.

Thiel must find the sheer number of Girard quotes that contradict his agenda to be a maddeningly persistent obstacle—causing enough cognitive dissonance it may even feel like a personal affront.

We cited one quote earlier: “We are caught in a whirlwind of transformations over which we have little control and which we must try to manage as best we can”—literally “as least badly as possible”—far from a call for radical action.

Thiel’s extrajudicial, post-political vision is more than a plan to manage such a whirlwind; it’s a vow to create his own. By rejecting centralized governance, which Girard acknowledges as flawed but necessary, Thiel risks unleashing the very chaos he claims to oppose. Girard’s warning is as clear as it is damning: dismantling the structures that contain violence—however imperfectly—only invites greater violence and destruction. Thiel may posture as a defender of civilization, but his proposals risk hastening its collapse.

Here are a few other relevant Girard quotes:

Changes take place rather quickly, and those who want to accelerate the movements too much have motivations that are not far from resentment.

There are many people who give themselves a good conscience in political action when they are simply motivated by ambition.

Above all, what must not be done is weaken the differences that still exist.

This last statement is central to Girard’s thinking and extends into his argument in “Ethnic Conflict and Mimetic Theory,” where he elaborates on why weakening differences—even when motivated by the desire to reduce conflict—can have catastrophic consequences:

If such is the case, if wars do plague all forms of social organization, we can truly understand why some people think that the only solution to the problem of wars is to do away with all social organizations, especially centralized organizations. This principle is seductive no doubt in a world such as ours where centralized powers are the rule and most wars are initiated and pursued by centralized organizations. But the broader picture disproves it. If as a rule centralized organizations are prone to conflict, their breakdown is even more likely to produce violence and to create suffering on a scale much greater than even the worst possible wars. The anarchists remind me of the man who would try to protect himself from the rain by jumping into a lake.

Girard’s warning applies with chilling precision to Thiel’s post-political vision. By rejecting our centralized governance—flawed but essential for containing violence—Thiel courts chaos on a catastrophic scale. His belief in elite interventions mirrors the anarchist delusion Girard critiques: the notion that dismantling imperfect systems can lead to better outcomes without unleashing unchecked violence. But what sets Thiel apart is even more alarming. Thiel wants the lake. Frustrated by the slow rain of modernity’s slow motion sacrificial crisis, he seems ready to dive in, embracing chaos as a catalyst for the radical transformations he envisions—whatever the cost.


The Spenglerian Moment

If Thiel’s essay begins with a bang—“The twenty-first century started with a bang on September 11, 2001”—it ends with an unmistakable whimper: “In determining the correct mixture of violence and peace, the Christian statesman or stateswoman would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace.”

So after hammering home the apocalyptic stakes of humanity’s mimetic violence and the need for out-of-the-box, norm-disrupting solutions, Thiel ends by gently suggesting that future leaders do their best to balance violence and peace?

For an essay so often voicing disdain for moderation, debate, and constitutional checks and balances, this finale is a real anticlimax. Thiel’s fiery rhetoric collapses into a positivistic plea to measure peace and violence—ironically echoing the incrementalist thinking of the Enlightenment liberals he derides.

It’s an extremely odd note to end on: Thiel seeming to retreat into the kind of careful deliberation he mocks elsewhere. Haven’t we just spent two dozen pages being told that conversation and discursive agreements should never be allowed to replace inevitable decisions? This rhetorical deflation appears to undercut the bluster of his essay, as if, despite his relentless attacks on the “liberal consensus” and his praise of decisive politics, Thiel, in parting, can only muster advice indistinguishable from the very incrementalist reasoning he professes to despise.

What are we to make of this?

Maybe Thiel found himself, like Strauss before him, confronting the perilous gap between theory and practice. As Thiel noted earlier about Strauss’s challenges, “As soon as the theoretical esotericism of the philosopher is combined with some sort of practical implementation, self-referential problems abound.”

If even Strauss struggled to reconcile abstract philosophy with actionable strategy, perhaps Thiel, in approaching his essay’s final words, sensed the fragility of his own arguments when taken beyond the page. Perhaps the bricolage of carefully selected supporting quotes from his heroes couldn’t quiet moments of self-doubt. Reaching the end, he may have recognized himself in a vulnerable light—as Girard once remarked about another hard-hitting, radical manifesto that promised proof of the will to power: “I only see the small child playing all alone with his toys.”

We shouldn’t accept this anticlimactic ending at face value. Knowing Thiel’s penchant for strategic ambiguity and his admiration for Strauss’s esoteric writing, it’s more plausible that the subdued finale is a deliberate misdirection—a Straussian maneuver designed to obscure his true intentions.

The real crescendo of “The Straussian Moment” occurs not at its conclusion but earlier, in the section titled “Proceed With Caution.” Here, Thiel aligns himself with the German historical theorist Oswald Spengler’s fatalistic and anti-democratic vision, embedding his core declaration where only the attentive reader might notice.

He writes: “For the Straussian, there can be no fundamental disagreement with Oswald Spengler’s call for action at the dramatic finale of Der Untergang des Abendlandes…” Thiel then quotes the final four sentences of Spengler’s Decline of the West, leaving them untranslated in the original German and Latin:

Für uns aber, die ein Schicksal in diese Kultur und diesen Au- genblick ihres Werdens gestellt hat, in welchem das Geld seine letzten Siege feiert und sein Erbe, der Cäsarismus, leise und unaufhaltsam naht, ist damit in einem eng umschriebenen Kreise die Richtung des Wollens und Müssens gegeben, ohne das es sich nicht zu leben lohnt. Wir haben nicht die Freiheit, dies oder jenes zu erreichen, aber die, das Notwendige zu tun oder nichts. Und eine Aufgabe, welche die Notwendigkeit der Geschichte gestellt hat, wird gelöst, mit dem einzelnen oder gegen ihn. Ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.

Translated, it reads:

But for us, who have been placed by fate into this culture and this moment of its becoming—in which money celebrates its final victories and its heir, Caesarism, quietly and inexorably approaches—the direction of our will and necessity is marked out within a narrow circle, without which life is not worth living. We do not have the freedom to achieve this or that, but only the freedom to do what is necessary or to do nothing. And a task that has been set by the necessity of history will be accomplished, with the individual or against him. The Fates lead the willing; the unwilling they drag.

This is Thiel’s true dramatic finale and core declaration—a covert call to action embedded within the essay, a dog whistle aligning his manifesto with the work of a strategist intent on dismantling democratic norms in favor of a post-liberal, elitist order. By placing this portentous and deterministic proclamation in an earlier section and cloaking it in untranslated German and Latin, Thiel is employing a Straussian technique of esoteric writing. He signals—to those “in the know”—his alignment with Spengler’s rejection of liberal democracy and embrace of an inevitable authoritarian future, while the casual reader may gloss over this hidden climax.

Thiel’s deliberate emphasis on Strauss’s concept of esoteric writing earlier in the same section reinforces this interpretation. He spends considerable effort explaining how philosophers might conceal dangerous truths within their works, accessible only to the discerning few.

Perhaps he’s playing with toys after all: laying out the rules of a game he’s inviting us to play—a game where the real message is hidden in plain sight, waiting for those astute enough to find it. Thiel notes:

Strauss is convinced that he is not the first to have discovered or rediscovered these truths. The great writers and philosophers of the past also had known of these matters but, in order to protect themselves from persecution, these thinkers used an “esoteric” mode of writing in which their “literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.”

By drawing attention to Strauss’s methods, Thiel is openly setting up his own esoteric signal—the Spengler quote—as the true culmination of his manifesto. He even mentions that such writers might include “three or four sentences” that capture their genuine message, which aligns exactly with the Spengler excerpt he provides.

The apparent anti-climax at the essay’s end is intentional misdirection, a way to deflect scrutiny and avoid “capital punishment,” a term Strauss uses with ironic seriousness to warn of the risks faced by those who reveal dangerous truths too openly. Thiel is playing at being Strauss—embedding his real message where only the initiated will find it, while offering a placid conclusion to placate or mislead the uninitiated.

Thiel’s genuine finale is a bold endorsement of a fate-driven, post-democratic order, aligning American democracy with Spengler’s fatalism and his embrace of “Caesarism” as the inevitable heir to a decaying liberalism.

This realization lends credence to the concerns shared with me by a prominent Girardian scholar who knows Thiel personally. According to this scholar’s speculation, Thiel’s political actions aim not to preserve our institutions but to topple them. His support for Donald Trump reflects a cynical gamble—a belief that chaos will serve as a catalyst for creating the kind of radical, post-liberal order Thiel desires. Thiel doesn’t see Trump as an authoritarian to be controlled but as a chaos agent whose destabilizing influence could force Americans to embrace drastic changes aligned with his vision.

By embedding his core message within the essay rather than at its conclusion, à la Straussian esoteric writing, Thiel both signals and masks his true intentions. This approach not only conceals his radical views from general readers but also serves as a test of intellectual acumen—only those astute enough to decode the message are deemed worthy of understanding his true position.

Thiel was not merely toying with grand ideas in 2004; he was declaring, albeit subtly, his commitment to a transformative political agenda that would reject liberal democracy in favor of a determined historical necessity—a move toward authoritarianism justified by fate.

The implications are profound. Thiel, a billionaire with significant influence, appears to be leveraging his intellectual idols to justify a radical restructuring of society. His use of esoteric writing suggests an awareness of the controversial nature of his ideas and a desire to disseminate them cautiously, avoiding open confrontation while still rallying like-minded individuals.

Recognizing this hidden climax within “The Straussian Moment” reframes our understanding of the essay. It is not an academic exploration ending in cautious moderation but a calculated manifesto advocating for decisive, even revolutionary, action. Thiel’s engagement with Strauss’s methods reveals a deliberate effort to shape political discourse from behind a veil, influencing the trajectory of society according to his own convictions.


“Motivations Not Far from Resentment”

In his essay “The Mimetic Desire of Paolo and Francesca,” Girard describes the tale from Dante’s Inferno of Paolo and Francesca, two lovers captivated by a book they read together—the story of the illicit affair between Queen Guinevere and the knight Lancelot. Inspired to im- itate the characters, their infidelity leads to their damnation, an outcome they could not resist, as the story’s passion blinds them to its inevitable consequences.

The most striking part of Girard’s analysis is his highlighting of the fact that Dante referred to the book itself as a traitor. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse. Galeotto was a treacherous figure in Arthurian legend whose name had become generalized to signify an instigator of betrayal. Dante says that when Paolo and Francesca imitated the romance they read about, the book and its author betrayed them. A book’s betrayal lies in its power to present a seductive model for action. Just as Galeotto was a go-between who facilitates Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, the book about the affair is not a neutral object for the couple but an active instigator of their ruin.

One cannot help but hear echoes of Paolo and Francesca in Thiel’s relationship with the texts that have shaped his life philosophy. Like the lovers blinded by the passions in their book, Thiel is captivated by the works of Schmitt, Strauss, Spengler, and Girard. Thiel was a self-described “rebellious undergrad” who has been described by others as a frequent target of bullying and cruelty. Thiel, the brilliant yet often isolated student, was drawn to contrarian professors and thinkers whose complex works and dark visions of our world reinforced a self-image as an intelligent dissenter, rejecting optimistic frameworks as naïve or conventional. Vast in their scope and ambition, these writers present models for understanding humanity’s struggles, offering not only diagnoses but sometimes blueprints for action.

Thiel’s intellectual journey mirrors Paolo and Francesca’s: he reads his chosen texts as scripts for action, models for how he might shape his world and his legacy. Rich with grand theories about power, fate, and human conflict, these books offered him a lens for seeing the world and his place in it. How can one discern when a model serves as a guide to reality versus when it becomes a betrayer? Thiel’s chosen thinkers may have acted as “diabolical go-betweens,” mediating his desires and leading him toward actions that could have significant societal implications.

Perhaps Thiel’s early fascination with these thinkers reflects both the allure of their grand narratives and the validation they offered his contrarian impulses. They seemed to elevate his outsider status into a mark of distinction, a sign of intellectual superiority. By embracing their critiques of democracy, liberalism, and modernity, Thiel could see himself not as a victim of social marginalization but as a visionary aligned with thinkers who questioned the prevailing order and promised ways to transcend it.

By the time I met Thiel in the 1990s—when he had already completed his undergraduate studies—he did not strike me as someone with a particular chip on his shoulder. He was invested and confident in his intellectual pursuits, respectful of everyone, and asked thoughtful questions. He gave a presentation in the reading group on Leo Strauss, which served as a dry run for some of the ideas he expressed a decade later in “The Straussian Moment,” and in 1995 he published The Diversity Myth, his anti-PC screed. I said with some surprise, “You published a book?” I remember getting the details from him, buying and reading it, and being thoroughly unimpressed. It wasn’t that Thiel, and co-author Sacks, didn’t have a point; it was just that the point was so obvious, and they showed so much eagerness hitting easy targets.

Thiel has never seemed to waver from the convictions he formed early on. Like someone who read Ayn Rand in high school and never looked back, he has clung to his anti-PC stance and favored thinkers with a tenacity that has only hardened over the years. He discovered Girard not because Girard was teaching a course on Shakespeare or Nietzsche; he sought him out—as he said in an interview—after hearing there was an interesting professor “who had an account of the world that was very much out of temper with the times.” This suggests an existential mindset defined by opposition to prevailing norms. Even before encountering Carl Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction seems to have permeated his modus operandi and thinking style, winnowing out ideas and professors preemptively based on perceived alignment and opposition.

Some have speculated that Thiel’s lasting reaction against political correctness stems from mistreatment he experienced as a Stanford undergrad; one fellow student observed, “He viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him.” Whether that’s accurate or not, Thiel’s reaction to political correctness at Stanford was profound; it impacted not only some who were targets of his polemics in The Diversity Myth and elsewhere but Thiel himself. It didn’t just color his worldview but became it.

From a certain perspective, “The Straussian Moment”—in its veiled critiques and underlying hostility—is a jeremiad aimed at political correctness that never explicitly mentions the term. But one can go further and ask whether Thiel’s fixation on political correctness involves some degree of self-deception: if Thiel has already—in Schmitt’s terms—defined his life by enmity when he comes across Schmitt in the first place, any application he then makes of the friend/enemy distinction he discovers in Schmitt is marked by the prejudice that, in effect, went in search of intellectual alignment.

If this is true—if Thiel’s outlook is oppositional at its core, dominated by a perceived alignment and opposition—then one would expect to find that any particular target, whether it’s liberal academia, a social networking site (he once told the Wall Street Journal that Facebook’s demolition of MySpace meant “the real people have won out over the fake people”), political correctness, or a geopolitical rival, is less critical to his purpose than the fact that there is a target. Such a pattern would echo Girard’s observation that “[T]hose who want to accelerate [political] movement too much have motivations that are not far from resentment.” The utility of conflict itself would ensure that the specific adversary shifts as needed.

We seem to have proof of this in Thiel’s evolving focus. Two decades after branding Islam as the “providential enemy of the West,” calling for a holy war against it, Thiel dismissed his earlier rhetoric in a 2023 interview, claiming, “I am not scared of Islam; I don’t feel anything that bad about Islam anymore.” Instead, he declared “It’s clear the real enemy is Xi’s totalitarian China.”

This pivot to a different “real” enemy is striking in that it suggests that, for Thiel, the particularity of the enemy is less important than its function. Progressive orthodoxy on campus and in Silicon Valley; Islam; China—all serve as focal points for an oppositional stance. Thiel relies on conflict as a means to galvanize purpose, justify action, and impose meaning onto the complexities of the world.

A case can be made that anti-PC has become something of an intellectual stumbling block for Thiel—for example, alienating him from someone like René Girard even as Thiel remains convinced that it brings them into closer alignment.

Thiel’s confidence in Girard’s alignment with his worldview is likely rooted in our Stanford reading group. As mentioned, the dynamics of our group differed significantly from the intellectual sparring Girard engaged in with philosophers in France and Stanford colleagues such as Michel Serres, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Robert Pogue Harrison—all of whom were politically progressive and close friends of Girard. Had any of them been present, the dogmatic perspective of Hamerton-Kelly would have faced sharper scrutiny, and the conservative undercurrent in the group’s tone would have been tempered. These dynamics surely contributed to Thiel’s mistaken belief that the hothouse of anti-PC grievances he had under lavish cultivation—and that would find expression in The Diversity Myth—were in line with the tolerant and politically moderate Girard.

It’s worth noting that Stanford in the late ’80s and ’90s was frequently singled out as a hotbed of political correctness, drawing national attention and strong reactions from cultural critics. Author Mark Helprin, in his introduction to Best American Short Stories of 1988, lambasted attacks on the literary canon by a new generation of university professors he compared to the Chinese Red Guard—singling out Stanford as a campus rife with “militant revisionist scholars” intent on replacing classics with works chosen for class, race, and gender. By the time Thiel was a student, such critiques had gained traction, and the backlash against political correctness was becoming a cultural flashpoint, both on and off campus. This environment no doubt shaped Thiel’s early worldview and contributed to his anti-PC fervor.


Two Totalitarianisms

Girard’s occasional remarks about political correctness were tied to his reflections on perhaps his most important theme: the modern concern for victims. While both Girard and Thiel criticized political correctness, their reasons diverged significantly. Girard viewed political correctness as a manifestation of what he called the “second totalitarianism”—a distorted appropriation of the modern concern for victims that seeks to outflank Judeo-Christian ethics on its own left. He warned this can—and does—lead to new forms of scapegoating and societal division. For Girard, political correctness represented a perversion of the genuine concern for victims, turning it into a tool for moral posturing and persecution under the guise of righteousness.

By the 1990s, when these ideas were influencing Thiel, both Hitlerism and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Girard observed that “at present, all totalitarian ideologies [of the first kind] have collapsed,” making the warning about the second form more pressing. Never downplaying the danger of the first sort of totalitarian ideologies—“They can be revived, and they probably will be revived”—the second form was alive and well. “This threat is on the ascendant,” he cautioned.

Knowing Girard considered the first totalitarianism in retreat and the second on the rise, Thiel felt justified channeling his resentment squarely at political correctness and what he saw as exaggerated left-wing claims of victim status. However, in doing so, he, like J.D. Vance, eventually became ensnared with elements of the first totalitarianism—those who embrace a cynical and callous attitude that dismisses the concern for victims altogether: a mindset Girard associated with “the most backward and reactionary forces in our society.”

Girard sought to move beyond the politics of victim culture, critiquing both left and right for misusing the concern for victims. In a 1988 interview, he observed, “There is something sinister in the way everyone today identifies with victims…The theme of the right is that anything said in favor of victims is hypocrisy. For the left, to put oneself in the shoes of the victim is to represent true Christianity. There is true and false in both statements. I would like to think about this question by transcending politics.”

Thiel’s emphasis on only the left’s abuses of victimhood skews Girard’s insights and blinds him to his own involvement in perpetuating these patterns. His silence when Vance engaged in blatant scapegoating of Haitian immigrants—a posture any student of Girard should recognize as reactionary brutality—suggests a selective application of Girard’s theory in service of a particular set of goals. Such distortions, emanating from someone with Thiel’s resources and influence, carry consequences that extend well beyond the realm of academic debate.

According to Girard, the earliest “anti-PC” voice was Friedrich Nietzsche. Girard notes that the period during which Nietzsche was alive “saw the beginning of political correctness,” which Girard defines as the sentimental or cynical exploitation of the Christian concern for victims. Nietzsche, according to Girard, made the mistake of conflating this concern for victims—which Nietzsche called “pseudo-humaneness”—with Christianity itself. “To Nietzsche…there is no such thing as genuine compassion; there are only the parodies of the ‘politically correct’ schemers,” Girard explains.

Nietzsche, then, is the original voice of the “first totalitarianism,” an anti-PC perspective that denies the validity of compassion for victims by labeling it fake and false—mere pseudo-humaneness. Nietzsche writes, “Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed, but the species only endures through human sacrifice… And this pseudo-humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.” (Nietzsche’s italics.)

In pointing to the radical nature of an anti-sacrificial ethos—and then rejecting it—Nietzsche is both perceptive and perverse here.

Thiel, a Christian, cannot follow Nietzsche down a “first totalitarianism” path that blames the perceived excesses of political correctness on Christianity. Instead, he follows him down that path via the maneuver of transferring the notion of pseudo-humaneness to the secular left and everything Thiel associates with it.

In the same 1996 paper, Girard observes that, although Nietzsche may well have been appalled by how the Nazis exploited his anti-PC attacks, his rhetoric nonetheless offered precisely the validation they required to confidently pursue their chosen path. They took Nietzsche “at his own word and turn[ed] his purely verbal deconstruction into a more concrete destruction.”  

What makes Nazi rule distinctive, even among the most violent episodes of our history, is its titanic effort to turn things around in regard to victims… In order to discourage the concern for victims, in order to humiliate it into oblivion, the Nazis decided to drown it under mountains of corpses, a deluge of arbitrary victims. They deliberately set out to demonstrate that this concern had no real influence in our world, that it could be massively disregarded with impunity and for reasons so flimsy that its prestige would be forever obliterated.

For Girard, totalitarianism enters the world as a negative reaction to the concern for victims and can be defined only in relation to it. In 1996, he emphasized the second type of totalitarianism because “at the present time, all totalitarian ideologies [of the first kind] have collapsed.” But, as mentioned, he was aware “they can be revived, and they probably will be revived.”

Today, with the rise of right-wing movements across continents, the potential revival of the first totalitarianism—even in places like Europe and the United States—seems alarmingly possible.

Thiel argues that totalitarianism—far from retreating entirely—is alive and thriving in “Xi’s totalitarian China,” where the first type persists in a present-day guise, blending ideological control with economic dominance. While primarily focused on strategic threats and economic imbalances, Thiel also references China’s exploitation of workers—whom he calls slaves—and rampant environmental destruction as evidence of a Leninist regime warranting decisive opposition.

Yet what might be a principled stand against statist totalitarianism is muddled by an ingrained hostility toward political correctness at home. By labeling DEI initiatives, certain Google executives, and even Bill Gates as “assets”—if not agents—of the CCP, Thiel veers into territory where legitimate geopolitical critique becomes tangled with his grievances and pet-peeves. Though framed as geopolitical concerns, his accusations often align with his animosity toward what he considers progressive ideological conformity in America, particularly in Silicon Valley—a “one-party state,” in his view. In his stance on China, Thiel’s enmity toward the “first totalitarianism” feeds—and is fed by—his longstanding animus toward the “second,” merging them in ways that blur principle and resentment.

It’s fair to question whether someone as openly contemptuous as Thiel has been for decades of anyone claiming to be a victim is truly critiquing victim culture to retrieve a genuine concern for victims. His bold rhetoric against totalitarian regimes sits uneasily alongside his support for Donald Trump, whose authoritarian tendencies and disregard for democratic norms echo aspects of the dangers Thiel purports to oppose.

Both forms of totalitarianism seem to thrive today in the no man’s land created by a modern concern for victims that is “depriving us of our enemies.” The loss of difference, resulting from the undoing of clear-cut binaries and the societal myths that rely on them, leads to a world where “there will no longer be any good quarrels.”

This does not mean that, for Girard, there will no longer be any more quarrels; on the contrary, there may even be more. There will just not be a way to legitimize aggressive actions without immediately running afoul of the modern concern for victims. As he put it in Battling to the End, violence is now “unable to fabricate the slightest myth to justify and hide itself.”

Girard keeps landing Thiel at an impasse. He can’t deny the truth of Girard’s reading of the contemporary situation as one where insisting on a good inside and a bad outside becomes increasingly untenable; yet Thiel’s drive for decisive action demands he locate quarrels and redefine them as good—good battles against evil enemies. To justify maintaining a distinction already in bad decline when Schmitt tried to shore it up ninety years ago, Thiel, as we’ve seen, leans on Girard’s warnings about the apocalyptic dangers of a world that can no longer fabricate enemies, attempting to reframe the collapsed binary as essential for survival.

But here again Thiel’s view of a proper political response to our world situation as laid out by Girard—where a “deconstruction-proof” concern for victims slowly grinds down the two totalitarianisms out to destroy it, with unknowable consequences—differs starkly from that of Girard’s own.

As Girard summarized in his 1996 paper: “The danger is real, I feel, but should not be exaggerated. Until now, our world has been able to absorb a tremendous amount of change and globalization without surrendering to these two enemy twins…”

Like Paolo and Francesca immersed in their chivalric romance, Thiel has been steeped for so long in anti-Enlightenment writings that the half-measures Girard recommends to navigate between the two totalitarianisms appear to him not just as surrender but as boring, perhaps even disingenuous.

After September 11th, interviewed in Le Monde, Girard said, “What we still need in the post-9/11 era is a more reasonable, renewed ideology of liberalism and progress.”

As noted, Thiel questions whether “any sort of politics will remain possible” after mimetic dynamics dismantle sacred categories and demystify the myths that once justified the enmity essential to Schmittian politics.

If politics does remain possible, will Thiel be satisfied with Girard’s prescription of “renewed liberalism and progress”? At first glance, this aligns with Thiel’s closing image of a statesman balancing violence and peace.

The difference is that Girard believes in it. Given all the clues Thiel has given us, it seems certain that if the politics that remains possible is the incremental sort of “liberalism and progress,” he wants nothing to do with it.

These head-fakes—seeming to lament the potential end of politics when actually hoping for its demise—epitomize the loops Thiel constructs throughout the essay. The careful measuring of peace and violence serves as a rhetorical flourish, not a meaningful conclusion. The real conclusion came when he advocated, in German and Latin and through Oswald Spengler, for “Caesarism”—a system led by a strong, charismatic leader who centralizes power, often bypassing constitutional norms, to restore order.

We speculated that in 2003, having sold PayPal and started Palantir, Thiel was wondering about a life well-lived, remembering boyhood dreams of flying cars and floating cities, feeling—as mimetic desire would dictate—a sense of purposelessness despite his success. To shake off that feeling, he immersed himself in intense reading—in-tellectual work that ensured there was no one else like him in Silicon Valley.

Thiel believes in the truth, in his capacity to understand the truth, and in the fact that, through his reading—especially of René Girard—he has encountered the truth. He sees himself as part of the “exceptional generation that has learned the truth of human history for the first time”—and as one of the even more exceptional fraction of that exceptional group—actually the only one—who is going to do something about it.

The problem is that the truth Girard offers leaves him at an existential crossroads, with few “possibilities for action” beyond a humanist and incremental approach to liberalism and progress that holds little appeal.

Following Schmitt, Strauss, and Spengler, he envisions a brave new post-democratic world. In 2003, Thiel—a believer in predestination and a new billionaire who believed he had learned the truth about human history—must have felt like a character in a novel who realizes he’s in a novel: able to do everything and nothing.

Now, in 2025, with a second Trump term beginning and his protégé J.D. Vance occupying an office in the White House, Thiel’s vision of dismantling democratic norms in favor of a post-liberal, elitist order is closer to reality than ever. This must fill him with excitement, as if something greater than even his dream of flying cars is on the verge of coming true. Let’s hope he discovers he’s still just one character in this unfolding story, and that the ending is not his to determine.