nostalgebraist

(I'm not a Christian, but I don't understand how this isn't just a heresy, btw, but idk.)

So from Girard, you get this sense that most people are herd animals, and that the unrestrained energy of mimesis is going to explode sooner rather than later.

That's the problem, and I think Strauss gives him the answer: An elite of wise men who guide the political leaders from behind the scenes.

In some versions of what Strauss is up to, you get that idea, at least. It's hard to know for sure. But Michael Anton, Thiel's friend for decades, made that case in mostly those terms in an essay for the CRB on Machiavelli.

That there is a secret truth—the nonexistence of the gods of the city—the knowledge of which warrants the philosophers rule over the gentlemen.

So Thiel's hostility to the open society isn't about Gawker outing him, or whatever, it's that he thinks there was a civilizational-scale made sometime during or before the Enlightenment.

In which The West abandoned the fixed Platonic hierarchy for Kant's "Sapere aude."

And I think that a lot of Thiel's writing—probably Zero to One for sure—reflects an exogenous/endogenous structure that he got from Strauss's work on secret writing.