Peter Thiel on the Bible - May 2021

Jerry Boyer, I'm talking today with Peter Thiel. Peter is many things: author of Zero to One, um, which I read, reread, um, in preparation for this interview. He's a founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, the earliest investor, outside investor in Facebook, early investor in SpaceX and LinkedIn. He's an entrepreneur, and he's an investor. And I think you're going to find during this interview that he's somebody whose knowledge is far broader than technology and entrepreneurship. First of all, Peter, thanks for being with us.

You know, you gave a speech at The King's College on All Hallows' Eve 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. And you said, we read the Bible, but in a very, almost more real way, the Bible reads us. What did you mean by that?

Well, it might take a while to unpack, but... but there's always probably a conceit that we are above the Bible, that we are above the Revelation, that it's something that happened in the past. And of course, if it's true, then it must in some sense be above us or ahead of us or still tell us something about the future. You know, I was very influenced by René Girard as an undergraduate and ever since. This French intellectual, I think, in some ways, perhaps one of the more important Christian thinkers of the late 20th century. And Girard always thought that—he did a lot of work, he always said that there's been a lot done in Christianity and theology, you know, the nature of God. But if it's true, if the Bible is true, it must also contain anthropology.

It must tell us something about the nature of man, something that we would not otherwise know. And for Girard, it had to do with violence, the way in which human sin is deeply conflictual, deeply violent, and deeply obfuscated, and that the city of man was built on hidden victims. And he did a lot on comparative mythology. And so you take something like the myth of Romulus and Remus versus the story of Cain and Abel. They're very similar stories. One is Romulus and Remus's story about the founding of Rome, the greatest city of the ancient world. Cain and Abel is the founding, maybe, of the first city in the history of the world. They are parallel stories, but the perspective is different. The Roman story, like all of mythology, takes the point of view of the city, of the human community of Romulus, and says that the murder of Remus is justified.

It's a founding murder, but it's justified. And this is what you have to do. And then even at the beginning of the Bible, even at the start of Genesis, the Bible takes the side of Abel, whose blood cries from the ground, and takes the side of the victim. And in some ways, that's sort of this explosive potential in Christianity that gets developed through Israel, through Moses, through the prophets, and then... with Christ, and then this revelation has continued through the last 2,000 years of Christian history and still powerfully animates our time.

Christ puts himself in continuity with Abel even. Thanks to Jimmy, who sent over some quotes from the Woes of the Pharisees that René Girard had cited in a lecture: "This generation will have to answer for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world." We can talk a little bit about what that means, "since the foundation of the world," from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. And Jesus is predicting that he's going to be killed. So he is in that line from A to Z, from Abel to Zechariah.

Yes, so there's certainly some sense of continuity, and there's also some discontinuity where... you could say that Abel to Zechariah were relatively innocent, but not absolutely innocent. And so, you know, in the Orthodox Christian context, which Girard would not have questioned, they were still under original sin. And so, you know, in some sense, they were scapegoats, but then in some sense, perhaps, you know, they had not been perfect human beings. And so you couldn't say they were absolutely innocent. And so there is a way in which Christ is continuous with that line. But then there is also a way in which he is radically unique. He is completely innocent. And in some sense, the human community is completely guilty in the case of Christ.

And so there's, yeah, it's both.

He's monogenes, right? He's only begotten. Abel isn't. And Abel doesn't resurrect. Abel is not resurrected. Abel is replaced by Seth, Sheth, right? Appointed. Jesus is not replaced. He's raised, which is the vindication, which doesn't play a big role in most of Girard's writing, I guess, because he's writing from within an anthropological context rather than from within a theological context.

Well, Girard would always stress that there's some way in which the crucifixion and the resurrection are separate events. There are three days separating them. And so even though there are all sorts of ways in which they're linked, and obviously if Christ hadn't died, he wouldn't have been able to be resurrected. Girard wanted to stress the discontinuity of those two events in a way where the crucifixion was, you know, even if there was something providential or there's some way in which God could bring something good out of this, it was at its core an evil act and a fundamentally bad thing. And then the resurrection was something very separate. And, you know, it was truth had departed, departed from the world for those three days.

And so when Peter denies Christ, the threefold denial, the human community has closed in on itself. There is no truth left in the world. And this is very, very different from, let's say, the death of Socrates, which is sort of the classical counterpoint where Plato and Xenophon both write these apologies for Socrates and defend Socrates. And they pretend that philosophy always preserved the truth. You could say that the gospel story, it's many things, but one of the things that it is, is also a deconstruction of the Platonic-Socratic story. The Gospels tell us that Peter ran away, like everybody, even the person whom the church was founded, would run away, and it tells us what Plato did. When Socrates died, he wasn't preaching philosophy; he was somewhere

running away, hiding, at best. And the lie that philosophy tells us is that it's, it's somehow strong enough to, to preserve the truth in a purely naturalistic, uh, rationalistic sort of way, which isn't in the, in the Socratic dialogues, right? We don't see the disciples of Socrates

running away. They try to create the impression that Socrates speaks, he does his philosophy thing, and Plato just, 'All right, thank you, master,' and just goes on and keeps philosophizing.

Yeah, it can act in a way that's quite autonomous. And this is always a theological problem in Christianity, or theological issue, where if you say that everything was in the classics, that was in... you know, in the Judeo-Roman—sorry, in the Greco-Roman tradition that you have in the Judeo-Christian—there's always a question, you know, why do you need it at all? What does the revelation tell us that we couldn't, you know, already know? And so on the level—and what Girard wanted to say was even on the level of knowledge, there were things we could not humanly know. They had to be revealed, and one of them was, you know, the absolute innocence of Christ.

I've heard you refer to this as key knowledge. So in the tradition that you're alluding to somewhat negatively, Plato and Aristotle basically had almost all of it figured out. We just needed a little extra to go to heaven. But you have a Logos, and the Logos is the second person of the Trinity. So they were really close to it. That's that story. And I think that's imposed on the Areopagus, you know, discourse. And I think what you're suggesting, what Girard is suggesting and you're suggesting, is that it's mostly subverting the pagan story, including the Socratic-Platonic story. Yes. Which really was just, uh, while pretending that it's demythologizing, was just creating another mythology, a more intellectually respectable mythology than Zeus raping, you know, some poor maid.

But, but in essence, the Gospels are—they're not just turning the pagan myths upside down. They're turning Platonism, Aristotelianism, the whole project upside down.

Yes, Girard would always stress more the discontinuity between mythology and Christianity. And you have certainly a lot of, you know, you know, of the great medieval theologians like Aquinas who tried to synthesize the two. And Girard would say that we should also perhaps stress some of the differences and some of the ways in which Christianity was radically different. And then, of course, on a cultural level—and maybe there were a few idiosyncratic people who could sort of figure some stuff out and they were too scared to tell anybody about it and sort of say, 'What did that really matter?'—but when the idea of a victim, the idea that the victims exist is, you know, is, is, uh, it comes from Judeo-Christianity and nowhere else.

You know, if you, if you sort of imagine Christ in the time of Pontius Pilate, if he had told Pilate, you know, 'I am a victim,' this would have made no sense whatsoever. You know, Pilate would have said, 'No, are you a Roman citizen or not?' And, you know, um, and, uh, the idea that you were a victim made no sense at all. And Girard would claim that this was gradually, as the Christian story became internalized, as it became the basis for a Christian culture in the Middle Ages, it was partially Christian, partially not, but you gradually got the society and then you get to all sorts of ways where it's—it's maybe deformed, maybe gone crazy in modernity where we talk about victims and nothing else.

When you say, 'If Christ had said to Pilate, "I am a victim," that would have meant nothing to Pilate,' I think you're talking about a situation where Christ would have allegedly been invoking his victimhood as having moral status.

If you said, 'It's a mob dynamic, I'm the scapegoat, I'm the victim'—yeah, you could not say that. And what Girard would claim is that when people started to think of different classes of people as victims, maybe already in the Middle Ages, maybe as the centuries progressed, it was actually always interpreting it through this sort of Christian story.

So Jesus creates the—actually, the Gospel accounts create this idea that the victim can be innocent, and suggest that these humans, this thousands and thousands of years of human sacrifice, these victims were innocent. Maybe not perfectly innocent, but they were innocent of the charge. They weren't witches.

They were relatively innocent. But, more disturbingly, that the human community was relatively guilty. And there always has been a way in which atheist philosophers in the Enlightenment thought that Christianity was uncomfortable because it blamed humans for too many things. You had the noble savage and the state of nature, or there's all sorts of ways that if humans were left to themselves, they would just be wonderful. You could just put children in a kindergarten, there would be some return to the Garden of Eden or something like that. And there was some way in which Christianity said this was always not quite true.

Because the community was built on killing the innocent victim.

And it told lies about that. It told lies that said that the victim was innocent or that the victim was guilty and that the community was innocent. And then as those lies, you know, have gradually unraveled, you know, we had this, we sort of got to this very, very strange late modern world we're living in now. Gerard always thought of Nietzsche as sort of the strange philosopher who is somehow extremely close to the truth of Christianity, because, you know, what Nietzsche always says is, you know, Christianity is this belief for slaves, it's this thing that people who have victims, for whom things hasn't gone well in life, they like to explain, and we need to go back to this sort of harsher, more pagan world in which we have no problem with sacrificing humans, and we don't

we're not so sentimental and all these things. And Girard would claim that perhaps Nietzsche understood almost better than anyone in the 19th century that Christianity had subverted all of the values of the ancient world. You know, there's the story of, again, you have all these sort of comparative mythology things where you have the story of Dionysus, who's sort of this god who gets killed by his worshippers, versus the story of Christ. And they're sort of parallel stories, but, you know, there are differences of perspective where, you know, Christ is innocent, the community is guilty, and Dionysus, it's just this... this wonderful pagan ritual and it's, you know, the mania is just this wonderful expression of humanity.

And so Nietzsche would have said, you know, that Dionysus was somehow life-affirming and Christ was life-denying. And yeah, he saw a lot of it, but he just put the moral valence very, very...

Didn't he sign his letters "Dionysus" sometimes?

And sometimes "the Crucified One," so... Well, at the very end, when Nietzsche went insane, he finally saw that Dionysus and the Crucified were the same. And so I think it was his very last letter just before he went insane that he signed "the Crucified."

We can have some hope, maybe.

Maybe that's what finally drove him mad was when he realized they were in some sense the same. And of course Nietzsche in some sense tried to turn himself into someone who was crucified. You know, maybe he you know, this is probably not not totally correct history, but maybe maybe he intentionally went insane so that he could, you know, he could become elevated in this way. It's not something like that happened to.

Well, yeah, in some ways he's anticipating the victim culture. So let me fill in some blanks. In the ancient world, you have these victims. They're not identified as victims; they're evil. They, you know, "He slept with his mother, he killed his father, that's why he deserved to die." And then the social order is built on these human sacrifices. And then along comes the Gospel accounts, and it's the first ancient literature that acknowledges the true story, which is that the victim was innocent, not guilty. And then, as that story is told throughout history, as you just suggested and Girard did, anytime somebody's picking up the stone to throw it at somebody, they stop. Or, if they've heard that story, they say, "Well, maybe this is like that Jesus story. Maybe this victim is innocent." So the ability to create order by killing an outsider is weakened.

And eventually, in the modern world, we essentially just have that concern for the victim, no forgiveness. We have the mob says, "Victim, victim, victim," and then there's competition and there's Victim Olympics, but we don't actually kill anybody. So we can't get the pagan order. We don't forgive, so we can't get the Christian order. And that's essentially what progressive, woke mobism is.

Yeah, there are many different ways. This has worked its way out in modernity. So there's certainly, if you think of it as almost like a drug, because, you know, the Greek word for—there were these people called pharmakoi, the same root as pharma, pharmacy. And they were sort of kept in reserve. And if there was a crisis in Athens, you'd bring these people out and parade them through the streets and then kill them. And so it was like this almost medical formula for restoring order to the community. And these people had the same root. And so if you think of scapegoating as a kind of drug... But that only works when you don't know how it works. So, you know, there's some problems in the village.

Nobody's getting along. We're going to identify this woman as a witch and kill her. You know, that can be socially efficacious only if you don't know what you're doing. And then as you know what you're doing, yeah, the basic thing that happens is it doesn't quite work anymore, but one kind of thing you can try to do is just increase the dosage of the drug—multiply the number of victims. And Girard saw the big totalitarian movements of the 20th century, fascism and communism, as these attempts to turn the human community in on itself and to increase the dosage. And maybe if you had millions of victims, you could get the old formula to work again.

One victim's not enough; needs to be six million Jews and four million Jews. It was never enough. Because if it's a drug, it's never enough, right?

There are ways in which, you know, fascism and communism were quite similar. And I tend to think people often, you know, on the left sort of, you know, make them more different than they were. But one difference that I do think is interesting between the two is that fascism was sort of an attempt to go back to the past. And it was, you know, it was to say, you know, the victim—the historical victims really were guilty, you know, the homosexuals, the disabled people, the Jews, the... you know. And whereas you can think of communism as actually sort of more modern, sort of hyper-modern, and in some sense (this may be a confusing word), you know, almost a form of ultra-Christianity where it's, 'We're going to take the historical victims as real, and we're going to victimize the victimizers.'

And so we're going to go after the aristocrats, the capitalists, the landlords, you know, all these sorts of people who were historically victimizers, and we're going to turn them into victims.

We're going to scapegoat the scapegoaters.

And in this sort of vaguely, you know, in this powerfully Christian world, that's actually the much stronger move. And in some sense, that's the more dangerous one. You know, if you say, you know, take the Middle Ages, where people would have said that the second most important attribute of Christ after his divinity was his poverty. And if you saw a beggar on the street, it might be Christ in disguise, and you would be held to account at the Last Judgment for how you treated that person. And then, you know, in some sense, you could think of, you know, even the forerunners of Tolstoy, all the sort of forerunners of communism sort of weaponized this. And, you know, 'We are going to be more Christian than Christians.'

You know, the poor shall inherit the earth, but we're going to have a violent revolution and the proletariat will get it in the here and now. And, you know, even though on a philosophical level, of course, Marxism isn't a materialist, atheistic type of philosophy. The sort of ethical moral valence always comes from saying something like, the Christians aren't Christian enough, and we need to be you know, we need to be even more Christian than the Christians.

So its power depends on a partial appeal to a distorted version of the Gospel.

Yes, yes. But, you know, sorry, we're jumping all over the map here a little bit, but one of the... "Jump wherever you like." One of the Gospel passages that Girard always liked to refer to was the curses against the Pharisees, where the Pharisees were these... people who were saying that if they lived in the time of the prophets, they would have honored them, but somehow the fact that they said that suggested the opposite was true. They thought they were better than other people, and as a result, they didn't realize how they were in the same... they were acting just like the people who were going to persecute the prophets, and then when they—and they were about to do to Christ what their forefathers had done to the prophets.

And so somehow, in claiming that they were better than the people who had come before them, they were just proving they were going to repeat things in this cycle of violence.

So by emphasizing their discontinuity with the past, they inadvertently put themselves in— "Preserved the continuity." "Yes. Exactly. Because they won't let the text read them, starting off, you know, where we were." "Exactly."

Going right back to the beginning.

Exactly.

And Girard thought—so we have, you know, the two parallels in, you know, in the past, the time of the prophets, the present for the Pharisees, where Christ is about to be killed. But Girard thought that this was also a prophecy about the future, and it happened, in a way, in medieval Christianity where anti-Semitism was justified because the Jews had killed Christ, and the conceit was that if we lived in the time of Christ, we would not have been like the Jews who killed him. And so there's a way in which medieval anti-Semitism, where you're saying you were better than the people who had lived in the time of Christ, you were more Christian than they were—and then they killed Jews, and then you somehow, in some way, you repeated the cycle.

And then, of course, Girard would have extended it, this also to the 20th and 21st century, where, let's say, atheist leftism, atheist liberalism, atheistic communism—the moral conceit is we're better than the people who lived in the Middle Ages, and if we'd lived in their time, we would have been so much more wonderful and so much more tolerant. And when people say this stuff, you should be very skeptical, because almost to tell that the opposite is true. And then this is, of course, dramatically true of something like communist movements and the... in the 20th century, but there probably are versions of this with a lot of the phenomena that sort of get broadly labeled under political correctness in one form or another.

But in this particular case, because we're a Gospel-haunted culture, we at least are not to the point where we... we don't kill people, so we don't reestablish the order, so it just keeps going and going and going. And, you know, I... I don't know if it's... A lot of books say that they're René Girard's last book, but Battling to the End might be right. Um, he talks about how this just keeps going, and we keep having these rivalries. "Who's the victim?" "No, I'm the victim." "No, you're the victim."

And then we're going to... "Well, it's both. There is a dimension of late modernity where it's potentially..." Yeah, we sort of know too much and we can't motivate ourselves to... to really kill people in certain contexts. In other contexts, obviously, you have the totalitarian catastrophes where people didn't seem to have that problem. And Girard would argue that there's actually something latently apocalyptic about late modernity, and that perhaps this was somehow related to the apocalyptic prophecies of the—and Girard saw the prophecies of the Christian apocalypse not as something that should be read mystically, but as an almost scientific prediction of what humans would do to themselves in a world that had been informed by Christianity, but which had not fully taken the Christian message to heart.

Because if you were informed by Christianity, you know, certain forms of scapegoating wouldn't work. You couldn't blame human causes. You would start looking for natural causes. You know, if the Jews or the witches didn't cause the plague, maybe you'd look under a microscope and gradually figure out it was a bacteria that caused it. And so there would be sort of this—so even the whole history of science can be seen as a byproduct of what happens in a world where certain crude forms of scapegoating work less and less well.

So this is the idea I've heard you say of Girard, that we didn't stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.

And that seems correct to me as just a matter of history. Like, you know, in the 18th century, there was no comprehensive scientific theory that witchcraft was impossible. You can still go to a bookstore in Berkeley and get a book on how to be a witch. And so we still haven't proven that something like this is impossible or that maybe it was a long-lost art or something like this. But we know that the witches were innocent. And it's an amazing thing because, you know, you had trials. You know, in some cases they produced the contract the witch had signed with the devil. And we're sitting here, you know, 400 years later and saying these trials were kangaroo courts and they were travesties of justice.

And Girard would claim this is, again, is sort of another way that the revelation is working its way out. So we have a reverse witch hunting now. Let me just come back to the other point. Girard would have argued, though, that there was a dimension of this where things had the potential to spiral out of control, that there was a potential for limitless violence and the sort of conquest of nature. Girard was focused on nuclear weapons, but there certainly are a number of other ways in which science or technology are potentially limitless in their violence. And perhaps in the post-1945 world, you know, we're always living in the end times for Christianity, but perhaps post-1945, there's some sense in which that's more true than it was in the 19th centuries that went before.

And so, yeah, so if you fast-forward to someplace like 2021, in the United States, there's one level in which you can analyze it where it's all these sort of super-dysfunctional, chronic relationships. It rarely gets acute. You have crazy wars on Twitter. It normally doesn't lead to actual scapegoating.

Twitter doesn't have an execution button, so we can't actually end it by killing somebody. We can cancel them. But if you cancel them, they just become conservative celebrities, so you haven't really killed them and the war goes on.

Yeah, it's sort of complicated. But, from an archaic perspective, there's one way in which it's shockingly nonviolent. But there's always a thought that it can snowball. There is, in theory, no limit to it. And so I think people—Girard would also have felt that people weren't entirely wrong to somehow feel the sense that the violence was potentially unlimited, because the sort of mimetic aspect of Girard is these things do have the potential to snowball, you know, out of control like crazy. So mimetic is imitative, right?

Just to fill that in for people. And Girard was concerned about mimetic rivalry, which is, we imitate other people and are rivals with them rather than imitating Christ, who's not the rival.

Like, in some ways, there's the Steven Pinker view of our world where it's just gotten less and less violent, and you look at the number of murders and all these things, and if you believe the statistics, we're at an all-time low in relative violence. But this can't be the full story, and we also have 10,000 nuclear weapons. And the potential violence seems greater than ever. And there's some sense in which we're in this strange intermediate zone where we are perhaps not insane enough to push the nuclear button and go all the way to limitless violence. But we're not sane enough to embrace the Gospel wholeheartedly and reject violence in all its forms. And so we're in this sort of in-between zone of what Girard would call like sick revenge, where, you know, we still think we should be enacting revenge, but we don't really believe in it.

And it just sort of keeps going like this. And we—we don't know yet whether it's going to end in the apocalypse or the Kingdom of God.

Okay, so that's a good point. We don't know yet, because in reading some of this stuff, one can get the impression that it's inevitable. And a big theme for you is that we do have agency over the future, right? Definitism. As you say, we don't just eat popcorn and watch what unfolds. We're participating in it. And we're not—and we don't have an Ananke. We don't—we don't have a fate which we're just being dragged to. Or maybe, maybe we do. I'd like to hear you speak to this. Can we avoid that apocalyptic scenario where we just—we, the sick revenge, we're not Christian enough to forgive, but we're not pagan enough to kill and tell a lie, so we just kind of go on, and maybe that gets to the point where it's dueling nuclear powers rather than Trump versus CNN, um, which is at this point just sort of rhetorically violent?

Does that have to happen? Or is there an off-ramp?

You know, I... Well, you know, the cosmic question is always hard. It seems ambiguous, you know, in... Christianity, even though if you had to take a side, you'd say that it certainly feels like the apocalyptic ending is more likely. And so Girard would have argued that there was an off-ramp for the Jews in the time of Christ, and if they had all followed Christ, you would have had—the Kingdom of Heaven could have happened then and there. And in a similar way, at the point where the whole world has heard the Gospel message, if it were to embrace it, there could be an off-ramp. And in some sense, it is a question of human agency and human free will. And that's implicit in Girard, but then there's also always this idea that

probably it's not what's going to happen, although we're not sure. Girard always thought that, you know, the haunting last question in the Gospel of Luke that Christ asks, you know, when the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on Earth? And it's framed in a way where it could be... In one sense, you could say it could be, it could not be, it could be either way. But certainly, it seems suggestive that there won't be that much and that somehow Christianity will have, you know, there's an element of Christianity that predicts its own failure, that it predicts people will hear the message, but then will reject it, even though certainly individually, they can choose otherwise. But I would say maybe another point on this question of the apocalypse I've always thought is that if one is too sanguine about it, that's probably a formula for it happening.

So if we're in a world where people are really worried about this stuff, and really worried about how we need to change, maybe something will happen. The sort of Steven Pinker formula, or Coué, the New Age thinker from the 1920s, who said that you just need to tell yourself, every day, in every way, "I'm getting better and better." If you just said that, that would be enough. The sort of utopian New Age formulas seem to me to be a recipe for apocalypse, and then maybe the only hope is somehow the opposite, to say we are in this crazy apocalyptic situation, and maybe there's some hope that if we're aware of it, we can get out. This is probably reading a little bit too much into Girard, but I often—

I think he vaguely thought of himself as like Jonah going to Nineveh, where it's like announcing the city is about to be destroyed.

Right, and it gets a stay of execution.

Then when they believe it's going to be destroyed, they repent, and then that paradoxically leads to a stay of execution.

Right. And then historians have always puzzled about, why does Assyria suddenly become so prosperous and stable around this time? Well, they believe Jonah, and there was—they stopped burning witches, so that maybe got some science. But then they became, as you say, sanguine about it. By the way, interesting choice of words: "sanguine," blood. So, but we're not sanguine right now.

Do you agree with that? We are probably—well, it's always impossible to sort of have a perfectly accurate reading of one's time. I think there are, you know, there certainly are ways in which it feels like some things are intense. There are some ways in which people are worried. There are a lot of ways in which these things are—it seems to be very, very poorly articulated. And then, so I don't know, it's always very, you know, I don't think it's impossible to have a feel for what's going on. And, you know, from my perspective, it seems that we have, you know, this crazy, I wouldn't say quite Marxist, but this crazy form of political correctness that's this insane deformation of Christianity.

And it's—it's too political, and it's not sanguine. It's very unhealthy. It might also be that, you know, so much of it is, you know, virtue signaling, LARPing. It's all like some video game people think they're playing.

So we talk apocalyptically, but we do it from a place of safety.

It's the least serious we've ever been.

Right. So everyone says everything's terrible and it's about to blow up, but we really—it's a game. We feel safe, right? Yeah.

I mean, you know, one of my colleagues, you know, his dad was this Tea Party baby boomer a decade ago, and it was, you know, Obama was a communist who was going to destroy the country. And you ask the dad, "So, what are you doing?" It's, "Well, I'm just playing golf," and, you know, "Are you going around?" So, do you really believe that stuff, right?

You'd be acting in a very different way. And that's the ambiguity I also find right now, you know. Is AOC, is she really a communist revolutionary, or is she just a Fox News construct that's like some, some mirror image of the, uh, the, um, the bad, uh, the people in silly costumes that stormed the Capitol on January 6? So...

We're maybe not worried enough, therefore we should be worried. In essence, you're saying if we're worried about apocalypse, then apocalypse is less likely. If we're not worried about it, then it's more likely. And at this point, maybe a dominant cultural motif is we're pretending to be worried about it. But if you look at our actions, we're not really that concerned at all. I mean, is that basically an accurate sum up?

Yes, and with the big qualifier that I think it's always unbelievably hard to really know what's going on in our culture. Because you're in it. All these things can be qualified in all these ways. Even if we talk just about the nuclear standoff. It was really crazy from the '50s to the '80s. And there was probably something very dangerous about the brinkmanship of Kennedy or maybe even of Reagan at the end. But the brinkmanship worked because people were scared. And then the last 30 years, we still have nuclear weapons. And... but it's a very strange way how this deterrent works. If you take something like the totalitarian nightmare that is North Korea, and that country should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Any rational calculation says we should have just bombed them in 1994 right away. And, um, and instead we treat it as a sort of cartoon villain where, you know, they send videos of, um, nuking Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—they produce videos doing that—and, um, and, you know, if we took them seriously, we would, we would escalate. By, by not taking them seriously, we don't escalate, although, um, on some level, from a nuclear deterrence theory, it sounds, it feels like that shouldn't be able to work at all. So I think we're just in a very, very strange zone the last 30 years.

So does the domestic political apocalypticism, is that to some degree a distraction from the thing that could really destroy? No one's talking about nuclear missiles anymore. I mean, it's just not part of the discussion, but some conservative gets canceled or some conservative says, look, January 6th was terrible, but it wasn't a threat to the world. Uh, and so CNN can just talk about that all day and Fox News can talk about AOC all day, and there's a pantomime to it, and nobody—we haven't destroyed any nuclear missiles. We, the globe is still threatened by this stuff.

There probably are, you know, there probably are a number of other technologies that are quite dangerous. There's a question about AI. Biowar, maybe? The uncomfortable thing I always like to point out about artificial intelligence is that it should be thought of as primarily a military technology that will be used to kill people on the other side. And that maybe you need to have autonomous weapon systems that can work on their own because they'll be faster. It can even be justified as a humanitarian thing since, you know, our own soldiers won't be in the line of fire or something like that. But, um, but it seems at least potentially very, very dangerous. And so I think there are, yeah, there's sort of a number of, of these dimensions like this that we're, we're certainly, we're certainly not, not talking about. And, uh, again, my, my read on the culture would—

—would be that a lot of it is just attention redirection. If you pay attention to things, you can think about them, you can change them, you can do things about them, and probably the main way in which we don't improve ourselves or change ourselves is that we are in this semi-hypnotic trance, where it's this magic show where we're always paying attention to something that's really just a silly sideshow, and the main thing is not seen.

I'd like to talk more in the future, if you're willing, about what that off-ramp—about is there a path toward definite optimism, to use the phrase from your book. So maybe we can kind of set up now, because this is a little scary. And if you stop there, there's a little bit of hopelessness, right? But of course, you're not hopeless. You believe in human agency. Yes. So maybe, maybe a next conversation is what does an off-ramp look like? And I don't know that you know or I know. Yes. But is it at least worth talking about it and trying to figure out what an off-ramp, what the Imitation of Christ might look like as an off-ramp? So I hope you can come back and talk about that.

Let's do that. Peter, always a pleasure.