Peter Thiel | Nationalism Breaks the Dogma Machine

It's a tremendous privilege to be back here as we reconvene from a little over two years ago. And there are so many different things we could talk about, but perhaps the theme I want to start with is some reflections on the incredible derangement of various forms of thought, political life, scientific life, the sense-making machinery generally in this country over the last few years and what we can perhaps do to counteract this derangement, what can be done, what must be done. Maybe there's many anecdotes one can start with, but I thought I'd start with one that involves a good friend of mine from undergraduate days at Stanford. Jay Bhattacharya. He sort of ended up pursuing sort of center-right, vaguely libertarian, ended up pursuing an academic career, got a PhD in econ, medical degree, eventually became a tenured prof at Stanford in health policy and spent decades plugging away, writing various papers and books on, you know,

what didn't work about socialist medicine of one sort or another, and then, you know, really found his voice in the last year or two as someone who started to question some of the conventional wisdom on COVID. And, you know, it began with him just a lot of just very nuanced debates about was the infection rate higher and therefore was the mortality rate lower and therefore was the panic overdone? If you were prioritizing COVID above everything else, how many cancer patients were dying? How many people in all other cases were not being taken care of? Were we sort of getting these very basic cost-benefit calculations right? You can sort of imagine how the movie roughly ended. It ended with posters of his face plastered around campus.

This terribly evil person. Probably the hope was that someone would muster up the courage and maybe beat him up on sight or something like that. Probably it's mostly kayfabe and LARPing. But that's sort of what people are hoping, I guess. And then a petition circulated by his faculty colleagues calling for him to be shut up so as not to, quote, "put lives at risk," unquote. So it was very uncomfortable for him to have this person who the university wasn't specifically telling to shut up and not talk. And if you want to sort of distill it down to the specific crime, I think there was maybe one sentence that he had in one of his things. And I'll quote it. Quote, "there is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the COVID disease from spreading," unquote.

And this was, of course, a nuanced thing. Didn't say there was no evidence. It was saying maybe there was quality evidence, but there was no high-quality evidence. And then, you know, there could be sort of a debate about this, which, of course, never happens. And one then suspects that, you know, the sort of natural suspicion I always have is that if we can't have a debate about the high quality, whether the evidence is high quality or not, that tells us the evidence probably wasn't high quality, and he's probably simply right. And of course, more generally, it raises questions about just this very, very strange way in which the mob goes against the individual, in which the consensus theories of truth seem to misfire so badly in our society, where

You know, when we look back, you know, a year, year and a half later, I think he was more right than wrong on these things. As far as I can tell, it's still complicated. Certainly, there was something deranged about a debate in which you could not have these sorts of, you could not have these sorts of discussions. And, you know, if you want to frame it politically, we always think of, you know, democracy as a good thing. In a democracy, the majority is more right than wrong. And if you get, you know, 51% is more right than 49, 70% is even more right. But, you know, if you get to 99.9%, maybe that's totally right or maybe you're in North Korea. And you have to ask this, you know, this very subtle question, a very all-important question: where do you sort of shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds?

Where do these things shift to becoming, you know, a mob or a racket or simply something that's, you know, a totalitarian lie? And there's sort of, you know, in the philosophy of science, sort of the, you know, one of the ways I think you can sort of frame it is that science always thinks of itself as fighting a two-front war against extreme skepticism and extreme dogmatism, sort of the way it originated in the 17th and 18th centuries. So extreme skepticism, if I say, you know, "I don't believe the audience exists, I can't trust my senses," you can't do science. Extreme dogmatism, you know, the Aristotelian notion that the Earth can't possibly move, that's probably also bad for science. In its 18th-century version, where the scientists styled themselves as deists and rationalists and freethinkers of various types, it was always the fight against dogmatism that was what dominated.

And in a very, I think, paradoxical turn, that is still the way they think of themselves, even though if you sort of say where it's gotten unbalanced and erred, it has obviously just become massively on the side of dogmatism—not enough skepticism at all. And, you know, you see this, of course, in all the genuflections to science with a capital S. "In this household, we believe in science." That's sort of evidence that you don't. Or just even this, you know, the assertion, you know, I always think that, you know, when you have to call things science, you know they aren't, like climate science or political science. We don't use physical science or chemical science because, you know, you don't.

You don't need to push it quite that hard. And the sort of, you know, extreme dogmatism, you know, has, of course—it's not even been one of a very stable variety like maybe, you know, the Catholic Church and its anti-Aristotelian notions, or its Aristotelian notions on Earth. And it didn't shift itself every month or every year on this. And we've had a dogmatic, maybe an atheist church in science, a dogmatic church that has nevertheless had crazed hairpin turns in the last year. Just on the COVID thing, there are too many to enumerate, but just the very basic ones are masks: first ineffective, then required. You know, vaccines: one year ago, Kamala Harris was still campaigning that she would never take a Trump vaccine.

Now they're mandatory. And of course, there's the strange history of the lab leak where it was first racist and taboo. Now it's probably correct, even though I'm not totally certain we're allowed to discuss that yet. But it's probably sort of allowed to discuss this. And this sort of dogmatism, these hairpin turns, this sort of epistemic closure is, I think, one of the ways that things have just gotten deranged over and over and over again. And I want to maybe just go, you know, in the COVID example, I want to go through maybe two other ones, one that was sort of a very dramatic one, where I think, which is the sort of incredible, collapse, absurdist, postmodern experiment that was called Afghanistan.

And where, you know, if we discuss it in terms of military tactics or, you know, they didn't defend the Air Force base or stuff like that, we're missing what went wrong. What went wrong were, you know, 20 years of this sort of extreme epistemic closure. You couldn't dissent. You couldn't really ask questions about what we were doing. And then you ended up in some, you know, bizarre, absurdist place. There's sort of many different, you know, we spent two trillion dollars, you know, this sort of artificial country we created propped up. There are all sorts of crazed anecdotes I sort of found in putting the speech together. You know, two of—one of my bizarre, super bizarre ones was some NGO, you can look this up on YouTube, these are not, you know, things from The Onion, as far as I can tell.

But, um, you can look it up on YouTube. It's an NGO offering art studies, and they're going through the Duchamp toilet exhibit from 100 years ago. He just puts a toilet in a museum, and they're explaining to people in Afghanistan why this was an important moment in modern art. Of course, this gets translated into Pashto, and then people are sort of not quite sure what they're doing there. And then, of course, we had the last president got his PhD from Columbia University, wrote a book called, quote, 'Fixing Failed States,' unquote. Again, this is even more of The Onion episode. And then as the Taliban was closing in on Kabul, he held urgent meetings about, quote, 'digitizing,' unquote, the Afghan economy.

But of course, you know, in general, it was just this lie that we were building, you know, a liberal democracy, that this was, you know, just history was on the side of people. And if we, again, want to sort of focus on a dissenting individual voice that articulated the alternative in very clear terms, in ways that I will also quote, it would have been President Trump. It was articulated maybe at a late date. We can debate whether it could have still been course corrected. But he said that Afghanistan was fundamentally and irreducibly a quote, 'shithole country,' unquote. And, you know, I would never say this myself. I would never, you know, there's a reason he was sort of out on a limb in saying that.

Most of us wouldn't say this. It's not a very nice thing to say. It's not clear that it's, you know, a very rigorous scientific description. But certainly in a world where that question couldn't be debated, couldn't be discussed—'Is he right? Is this an accurate description of the country? Is the two trillion dollars just sort of throwing good money after bad?'—that's the kind of world in which the whole thing ends in this crazy way. The mob—the individual's right—the mob sort of silenced the argument, and then it works until at some point it just, you get to this point of crazed total collapse. Now I think, you know, there's sort of a way in which, you know, Afghanistan is sort of this faraway country we don't know much about.

There's a way in which you could think of COVID as sort of, you know, strange questions of health policy. But maybe I will end on one where I think the epistemic closure is even bigger. It's maybe, it maybe involves, it involves our, you know, perhaps our most sacred institution, our most high-functioning, deep-state institution, you know, one that we can't ask questions about at all and therefore we should suspect functions worse than almost all the others. And it's one that I think, you know, to some extent is accessible more and more on this common-sense level. And I'm thinking of sort of the runaway, non-transitory inflation that's happening in this country and the complete bankruptcy of the Fed.

And, you know, it's sort of—it's, again, we have the sort of epistemic closure in the form of, you know, everybody jumping onto MMT theories or, you know, theories that you can print as much money as you want to, there will never be inflation—at, of course, precisely the moment when they're wrong, precisely the moment when no dissent is allowed. You know, I think one of my sort of incredibly big misses of the last decade—I did some, but not as much as I should have—was not buying enough Bitcoin, not buying enough crypto. And, you know, at $60,000 a Bitcoin, I'm still not sure that one should aggressively buy it. But surely what it is telling us is that we are at a crisis moment for the Fed.

It is a canary in the coal mine. The crypto market is the pure money market, and it is telling us that the epistemically closed bubble around fiat money in the US is heading towards some crisis point. You know, the Wizard of Oz is always this metaphor on the Fed, on central banking, and I, I've sort of thought that maybe we're close to a Toto moment in the Fed where the little dog is pulling the curtain aside from, you know, the Holy of Holies and you realize that there's nobody there, nothing's really going on. And we've had sort of these preliminary questions about the nature of the stock trading and things like this. You know, without going into the details of that, it's when you start asking these questions, you know the institution is in trouble, that it is so over its skis, so out on a limb, and so much at a point where something is going to break.

And again, the problem, whether it's the Fed, Afghanistan, COVID, is that we have this sort of, these machines for generating consensus, uniformity, you know, and not asking dissident questions, even though they're super urgent. And as far as I can tell, the hour is late for all of these institutions, and it's more urgent than ever that we find a way to have some of these dissident voices get heard in all these different contexts. And so, you know, there's sort of a, you know, you can frame the skepticism or dogmatism, or the, you know, wisdom of crowds versus madness of crowds. We're on the side of the madness of crowds. We're on the side of excess dogmatism. You know, there's sort of centralization, decentralization.

Is it too much decentralization? No, it's way too much centralization. You know, is it too much misinformation? Are there too many crazy dissidents? No, it's too much the Ministry of Truth. And so, yes, maybe there's some theoretical debate, but in practice, it is, you know, if there's, you know, if there's a misinformation problem, it's a centralized misinformation problem, and it's the misinformation coming from the Ministry of Truth, whether that ministry was telling us things about COVID or about Afghanistan or that there's no inflation at all, even, you know, even to the—even going against what everyone says. Now, relating this a little bit to the theme of this conference, on the question of nationalism,

It strikes me that one of the ways the question of nationalism always gets misperceived is that it is seen as not so much on the side of individuals or classical liberalism or even conservatism. And yet this seems to me very wrong because the place where we have the worst mobs, the most homogenized forms of thinking possible are in the context of globalization. And if we think of nationalism as a corrective to the sort of, you know, homogenizing, you know, brain-dead, one-world state that's totalitarian and where no dissent, no individualism is allowed, it is the sort of all-important corrective at this point. And I keep thinking that the worst forms of this sort of fake consensus

Fake, dangerous centralization, Ministry of Truth, are all the globalist versions. You know, to make this even more self-referential to the attendees here, I was sort of reflecting on, you know, the World Economic Forum, the Davos Conference, where, you know, I last went in 2013, and the sort of insight I had there was sort of interesting, where you have all these different people, but they represent, you know, companies, or maybe they represent, maybe they are, the heads of state, they represent a government, a country. They might represent, you know, in various contexts, they represent, of course, lots of NGOs. But there are no individuals. And there's virtually nobody who's simply representing themselves and thinking for themselves and saying, 'This is what I believe, nobody agrees with me on this, but I've just been looking at the facts and the data and thinking about it myself, and this is what I've concluded.'

And it's sort of a picture of a globalist future in which individuals will not exist, and it will just be some kind of a brain-dead Borg. And I think the character of this conference will be the exact opposite of that. We have all sorts of individuals here. I hope they will not agree with one another. I hope that we will have incredibly, incredibly vigorous debates and that this is the sort of thing that is needed if we're going to, if we're gonna course-correct in this country. And I don't know what metaphor you wanna use, but it's sort of the Biden administration is sort of like the Titanic in which we have the zombie retreads from the Clinton and Obama administrations. I mean, people like Larry, even Larry Summers is probably too heterodox to be allowed.

And we sort of have the zombie retreads that are just busy rearranging the deck chairs, you know, maybe mopping the floors on the deck or something like that. You know, Captain's reading from the teleprompter, just always north, due north, steady as she goes. And, you know, we need some, you know, we need some dissident voices more than ever. Let me maybe, I will just end with a, with sort of a fantasy of mine of what victory would look like. And I don't think this will happen. And it's a long ways off. But if, you know, I would like us to go back to a country in which we have ticker-tape parades for single individuals. We haven't had such a ticker-tape parade in the 21st century. And individuals, not just sports stars, not just individuals who might even be American, who might even be doing things that are changing society, asking dangerous questions, inventing things.

And my candidate for the first such person we should do a ticker-tape parade for. He or she may well not show up, but we should still do it. My candidate is Satoshi Nakamoto. Thank you very much.