How they run the world with fear

Are you curious how the world got messed-up?

Read Peter Thiel’s 2004 Essay: The Straussian Moment. 

Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, and the President of Clarium Capital. His estimated net worth is above $10 billion. 

Billionaires routinely use their wealth to promote their own agenda.

Part 1 detailed how billionaires captured our mass-media by corrupting congress, making a mockery of the legislative process and our constitutional protections. The billionaire class determines the stories that are told and those that are silenced. 

Here in the Straussian Moment, Thiel bemoans how the enlightenment has failed us.

papers/straussian_moment.pdf at master · renebidart/papers · GitHub

According to Thiel, the 9/11 terror attacks prove that the enlightenment values underpinning western democracy are insufficient to meet the demands of our times. If we hope to survive, we must dilute civic freedoms and compromise cherished legal protections of the individual to contend with this new world. Western democracies, he says, must accept an increased level of secret powers armed with extra-judicial authority. 

What Theil prescribes is precisely what the Bush Administration did. The Straussian moment provides justification for the Patriot Act. What follows is the surveillance state, extra-judicial Guantanamo camps, water-boarding, torture, rendition and much else. This essay is a love-letter to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush. His message: you go for it, we’ve got your back.

A defining moment

This was a defining moment. Thiel and his buddies rallied the mass-media into an evangelical fever. But, whilst 9/11 might be the most sensational terror attack, it was not the first terror attack on US soil. Every nation has suffered terror attacks. For over a century, Irish Republican fighters planted scores of bombs and killed countless of civilians in London. During the 1970s, Italy’s radical left-wing Red Brigades gained notoriety for kidnappings, murders and sabotage. For 30 years, the Red Army Faction terrorized Japan. Freedom, liberation, independence fighters are as old as time. 

Few governments, in the modern era, have responded to terror attacks by suspending civil rights. The last notable time occurred in Germany, during the 1930s, following the Reichstag fire. 

Thiel does not scope any limits to the prescribed extra-judicial powers he recommends. Nor does he spell out the specific powers we need to confer upon these intelligence services, government agencies, and businesspeople. He contemplates neither accountability nor oversight.

end of constitutional democracy

What we really have here is a call for the end of constitutional democracy.  

The problem Thiel has with the enlightenment is that from the outset, the project developed in opposition to the privileged aristocracy. Modern day billionaires enjoy greater privileges than any aristocrat ever did. And he knows the opposition to privilege is the rallying cry of the both revolutionary mob and the enlightened.

Thus, the prescriptions Thiel proposes are indistinguishable from the counter-revolutionary arguments written by scores of aristocrats during the French revolutionary period; just before they lost their heads.  

It is the public that scares Thiel, not a random suicide bomber or Muslim extremist. He and they hate it when the Public defies the narrative and votes for Brexit or elects Trump.

Ironically, just as Theil’s mates grasped control of the mass-media, the Internet arrived and transformed how people accessed information. 

Not since the Gutenberg Press has a technology so rewired and transformed our thoughts and behaviors as the Internet. Over three-decades later, the chaotic animus it inspires continues at speed. Countless new profitable industries emerge overnight, whilst old blue-chip fortunes melt into the air.  

By any historical measure, the advantages gained by western democracies during the last 250 years are unprecedented. Life is not Hobbesian: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Even Thiel would admit, enlightenment values, civil rights, the sanctity of the individual are the defining attributes of a modern democracy. Unless you are of a mind to regress civilization back to a brutal past, why would you consider tinkering with the goose laying golden eggs?

Control or destroy

Thiel displays his contempt for the civic guardrails that allowed him to amass his fortune. He will not acknowledge the shoulders he stands on, he would sooner chance to control everything, even if it means destroying it.

When we pull-back the curtain, we expect it to reveal smart and crafty wizards pulling the strings not paranoid neurotics.

Secret extra-judicial powers lead to nowhere but hell. Whatever dangerous mass movement might loom, those old civil rights, embodied in our democratic constitutions, are all that stand between Thiel’s head and the proverbial noose. 

Two decades have passed since 2001. The Prescriptions against civil rights, extra-judicial powers and mass public surveillance continue to expand. The news is daily more insane. We continue to banish and cancel whistle blowers like Snowden. Julian Assange remains in captivity. We deem peaceful protests criminal insurrections. The new Social Media behemoths censor posts, and western democracies cross from censoring speech to criminalizing it. And there is always a new senseless forever war. In good conscience, how is any this consistent with a constitutional democracy?

Thiels Straussian moment is an endless nightmare.