Peter Thiel: Keynote Address (The Conservative and Republican Student Conference, 2024)

Thank you, everyone, for coming out today. I'm here to introduce a man who needs little introduction. He was co-founder at PayPal, one of the first investors at Facebook, chairman of Palantir, and billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Great. Thank you very much. It's a tremendous privilege to be here. You know, I wanted to do a little bit of a redux on some of the debates I was involved in as an undergraduate, law student, late '80s, early '90s—sort of like this distant past, and somehow feels like it still has, you know, a great deal of resonance for some of the things going on today. I got caught up in a lot of the culture wars, the campus wars. I started a conservative student newspaper, Stanford Review. You know, still going after 35 years. And, you know, there were sort of all these, there were all these debates we got caught up in. You know, it was always hard to know, you know, was it campus hijinks? Was it just some, you know, silly clown show?

But then some of these things seem to be more cosmic, more important. There was a signature debate at Stanford in the late 1980s over the Western Culture core freshman curriculum. There were protests: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go!" It then got replaced with a new curriculum. In some ways, this was a debate about one class. But then on another level, it was a debate about... the entire Western civilization and what was at stake. And a friend and I sort of wrote one of these anti-political correctness books, The Diversity Myth, published in 1995, almost 30 years ago. And I thought I would start with a short reading from the book to sort of set the tone of, you know, in a way, how we're still in this Groundhog Day.

So one of the books that was about the new class, one of the books that replaced Shakespeare's The Tempest was a book by Aimé Césaire called A Tempest, which was sort of a revolutionary political deconstruction of The Tempest, where Prospero is the evil colonialist and Caliban, who's sort of the monster in The Tempest, becomes the revolutionary hero. And it sort of culminates in a final indignant tirade. And I will read you the tirade of Aimé Césaire's Caliban: "Understand what I say, Prospero. For years I bowed my head. For years I took it, all of it. Your insults, your ingratitude, and worst of all, more degrading than all the rest, your condescension. But now it's over. Over. Do you hear? Of course at the moment you're still stronger than I am, but I don't give a damn for your power or for your dogs or your police or your inventions."

"And do you know why? It's because I know I'll get you. You know, and you lied to me so much about the world, about yourself, that you ended up by imposing on me an image of myself—underdeveloped in your words, incompetent. That's how you made me see myself. And I loathe that image and its faults, and I know that one day my bare fist—just that—will be enough to crush your world. The old world is falling apart. And, by the way, you have a chance to get it over with. You can fuck off. You can go back to Europe, but in a pig's eye you will. I'm sure you won't leave. You make me laugh with your mission, your vocation. Your vocation is to give me shit. And that's why you'll stay, just like those guys who founded the colonies and who can't now live anywhere else."

You're just an old colonial addict. That's what you are. At any rate, we sort of went on like this for about 250 pages in this book, and sort of the pretense we had was that the way you change these debates is you somehow speak truth to power. On some level these were just debates about Stanford, but then the sort of, the wrapper we put on the book was that ideas have consequences, that what happens at these colleges will gradually translate outside of that context into all sorts of other places, and that they will seep into the broader world beyond. And of course, there's sort of a way in which I'm—I shouldn't probably—'gratify' is the wrong word, but I feel like for about maybe 20 years, I felt that I'd spent too much time writing this book.

The last decade, I feel a lot better about it. It feels incredibly prophetic. But of course, it's the sort of thing where you'd rather be wrong than prophetic in some ways. And when I go through the arguments of The Diversity Myth, it's still all the particulars, I think, that we were basically right. Very little I would change on the particulars. And so we're right, not wrong. But there are some ways in which we were not even wrong. And this is kind of the retrospective I want to give. Because if you lose a debate like this for 30 years, you should ask yourself, what were you missing? What did you get wrong? Or where were you not even wrong? Where did you sort of miss the whole boat? And I'm going to sort of go through three major areas that I think we missed.

But maybe one other way to set this up a little bit is that one—one piece of the book that I think held up quite well was the title, The Diversity Myth. And it's an ambiguous title. It can mean two different things. You can put the stress on the word diversity, which is the normal thing. And then there's sort of a conservative critique, which is you don't have diversity when you don't have diversity of ideas. It's, you know, diversity—it's not enough to have diversity to hire the extras from the space cantina scene in Star Wars or something like this. And there's sort of a whole list of things like that. But the other perhaps deeper critique is to put the stress on the word myth. That, you know, we don't actually know what diversity means.

It's generally left undefined. It's just sort of a shibboleth. It's a false god. And it somehow is very important to leave it relatively undefined. And then the way it functions is as a kind of attention narrowing: our attention gets narrowed on these particular debates, or it's like, you can think of it as a magic show, where the magician is performing these diversity tricks on stage, but you ignore the man in the orange monkey suit jumping up and down on the back of the stage, or something like this. So it's a sort of attention redirection and incredible narrowing. And so when one has a critique of this, there's sort of always this tension between saying that it's somehow very evil and very silly.

And the way I would resolve that tension is it's very silly on the level of these particular things like, you know, the sort of book I was just describing. But it's maybe very evil in that it's distracting us from various other things. There's sort of three things I want to suggest are—would have been more important things for us to focus on. One is sort of broadly economics. Second one is, let's say, science and technology. Third is even bigger questions of religion and Christianity. So let me take them one at a time. This is going to be a super fast articulation, maybe too many ideas. But on the economic question, one would say that, you know, and this would be sort of a libertarian or even a Marxist critique of cultural Marxism, diversity, is that when you divide people by, you know, race and gender, you forget about class, you forget about the economy,

And there is something very curious that, you know, in the many decades that diversity took off from the 1970s onwards, and you have to think this is like a 50-year or so process, it also correlated with the economy going sideways, inequality going up massively in all these ways, and you have to at least start to ask some of these correlation-causation questions. It doesn't mean that diversity caused the inequality, but if, if these two things happen at the same time, one should at least ask this sort of a question. And then there's sort of all these versions we could ask about, you know, the woke corporation or something like this. Is the woke corporation, is that a form of... you know, mass insanity?

Or is it a clever plot to, you know, pay the workers less and the shareholders more? Or, you know, is it some combination of a racket and useful idiots or something like this? Or this would be, you know, if you had, I don't know, a Marxist like Rosa Luxemburg here, and we asked her to talk about diversity. What she would tell you is there can be no class that's more revolutionary than the proletariat. Anyone who's not a worker is a part of the reactionary class. And so a diversity officer at Harvard University is in the same class as a bank robber or a prostitute. They're part of a corrupt capitalist racket. They're actually retarding the sort of necessary economic analysis that we need to do.

The economic dimension that I always think is very underrated, sort of halfway between libertarianism and Marxism, is the Georgist theory. Henry George was this late 19th-century economist. He was considered to be sort of quasi-socialist in the late 19th century, sort of semi-libertarian today, which I don't think reflects any ways that he changed, but more a reflection of how our society changed. Uh, and the basic Georgist analysis, we have to always look at, uh, real estate as an incredibly important dimension of the, the economy and what's going on. Real estate, if you're not careful, uh, you end up with sort of runaway real estate prices in which, uh, all the value, all the growth gets captured by the landlords at the expense of everybody else.

And there's sort of, there are ways we can think of the last 50, 60 years as a kind of Georgist catastrophe in, you know, the US, sort of much of the, probably all the Anglosphere countries, many adjacent countries. And you can sort of go through the math in different ways where, you know, it's something like, you know, a place like London or San Francisco or New York, where maybe the inelasticity of real estate is something like minus two, which means that if you increase the supply by 1%, the average price goes down 2%, and that means that the more housing you build, the less that it's collectively worth. And when you get effects like that, very weird things start to happen. You get sort of crazy NIMBYism, crazy restrictions on growth, but basically a massive, massive wealth transfer from the people who rent to...

to the urban slumlords. And something like this is what has happened at scale. And then the question is, why is this not analyzed? Probably by some measures that I've seen, you can explain 100% of the increase in inequality in the last five decades to real estate alone. And it's just, do you own, do you rent? Didn't matter in 1970. It matters a great deal today. And that basically is sort of a way to think of this entire arrangement. And it's sort of a curious thing that we can't talk about it. And then you have these questions in how does this relate to these diversity debates? Where are the distractions from this, or something like this? If we were to anchor on a place like New York or San Francisco, if we were sitting there in 2007 at the peak of the ridiculous housing bubble of the Bush years, and you had told me, you know, in 17 years,

The rents will be double in Manhattan or San Francisco what they are today, I would have said, 'This is just completely impossible. I would say people would move. They'd go somewhere else.' And you said, 'Well, it happened.' Just tell me, what's sort of the Occam's razor thing that would have had to happen for the rents to double in these places, for people not to do the common-sense thing and just move? And it would be something like, 'Well, I don't know, they must have been really brainwashed in some crazy, crazy ideology. And there must have been some kind of a Stockholm syndrome in which you couldn't imagine doing something else.' There sort of are all these variations of the story I can tell.

So if you're a gay person, you were told that you couldn't move out of Manhattan. If you move to Hoboken, New Jersey, as soon as you move there, you get beaten up, so you have to stay in Manhattan. Or you're a woman living in a rat-infested apartment in San Francisco, and you have these fantasies about moving to a nice suburban house in Reno, Nevada, and you are told, 'No, as soon as you do that, you'll be chained to your bed and forced to carry a baby to term.' And so you have to stay in your rat-infested apartment. And again, I want to be very careful not to make this too conspiratorial. So correlation does not prove causation. But when you have trillions of dollars of value that gets transferred, isn't it odd that we cannot even ask this question?

And that we can't even ask, you know, was it a conspiracy or an as-if conspiracy of the urban slumlords, or were there people who sort of went on this diversity racket as part of the transfer? And then, of course, there's a university dimension to this whole crisis, where if you look at a place like Harvard in Cambridge or something like this, there is sort of a question about how to analyze this in terms of the faculty, the people who are part of these communities. I did a version of this. I always think the UK is an even more pure, more extreme version. But there was a news item at Oxford where I did a version of these remarks a few months ago. And it was basically that you could buy J.R.R.

Tolkien's old house for 4 and 1 half million pounds. And what I submitted to the audience was that if a faculty member at Oxford moved into Tolkien's house, he or she should be investigated, right? It's not possible. And so when we ask these questions, why are the faculty being radicalized in all these places and sort of proletarianized or turned into subproletariat or whatever you want to call it, is it just simply this as an explanation and then something like this is going on, needs to be thought of. And to the extent we've been distracted from asking these very basic questions, this is surely both a silly and very wicked thing. And then, of course, there is sort of a second category of distractions that are perhaps in some ways even bigger, that I've in some ways been talking about

close to two decades at this point. And it is sort of this question about—and again, *The Diversity Myth*, when we wrote this, was sort of centered on the humanities. It was sort of transparently obvious this stuff was silly. And the thing we didn't talk about was the sciences, which was—or, you know, which was, of course—the way the university would describe itself to the donors. You know, the university—Harvard, Stanford—they don't talk about, you know, they don't talk about all the diversity nonsense when they talk to billionaire donors to give them money. They say, you know, 'Our medical school is making all this progress,' or, 'We are really serious in physics and science, and this is, you know, we're at the cutting edge of these things.'

And I started to wonder, well, what is actually the truth of this sort of accelerating tech, accelerating science story? How much is actually going on? How can we even measure it? Are we still progressing in tech and science? How fast are we progressing? And I'm always willing to concede that there's been a narrow cone of progress in the world of bits: computers, internet, mobile internet, maybe now AI. But that in the world of atoms, things have been pretty much stuck since the 1970s. And this is reflected in—even when I was an undergraduate, late '80s, you were not supposed to major, and any sort of engineering major turned out to be bad: chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, aero-astro.

I mean, people already knew nuclear engineering was a really bad idea. And the entire world of atoms was regulated, stopped. Nothing was going to happen. It had notably slowed down. And then it's always, of course, a much more difficult thing to figure out what's going on in these fields. They're sort of harder to get a handle on. And you have sort of these ever-narrower groups of guardians guarding themselves. The string theorists tell us how great they are. The cancer researchers are always going to cure cancer in the next five years. And it's much harder to evaluate than to do something like what we did with The Diversity Myth. One of my colleagues was in the physics PhD program at Stanford.

His advisor, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998, or late '90s. And he suffered from the extreme delusion that once he got his Nobel Prize, he had academic freedom and that he could do whatever he wanted once he had a Nobel Prize. And he was going to investigate. And he decided he was going to investigate not things that were as controversial as, let's say, Darwinism or stem cell research or climate change, which, of course—but something way more dangerous than that. And he was convinced that most of the scientists were basically stealing money from the government. They were engaged in more or less fraudulent research. He started by investigating the biology department at Stanford.

It started with a public hearing. They didn't even bother publishing anything, were denouncing everybody in the biology department for stealing money from the U.S. government. And you can sort of imagine how this movie ended. The students had to find a different advisor. And you couldn't do this. Of course, in the last 20 years, there is this thing called the replicability crisis, where all these results can't be replicated. But the people who talk about it are very careful to be politically correct and not name all the people who do it. And if you started doing that, it would unravel things quite a bit more. And I think there was this very striking illustration of this ability to focus on the humanities and not to focus on the sciences in the sort of tale of two universities, of Harvard and Stanford in the last year, where both university presidents were fired.

And it's very understandable why Claudine Gay got fired. It was all the fake diversity nonsense that she plagiarized. The plagiarism was a little bit hard to tell, because she was just repeating what thousands of other people had already said. So there's nothing original. But everybody else wasn't original either. I mean, if she had said there was discrimination against Martians or something like that, we would have caught her much more quickly, because there was probably only one person that she would have plagiarized that idea from. But then Marc Tessier-Lavigne at Stanford, it was basically this neuroscience research fraud. It's still unraveling as a story. He got fired last year. A month ago, he had to retract his most important paper on dementia.

And as far as I can tell, the entire career was a fraud. It probably—I may be exaggerating, but only slightly when I say probably hundreds of millions of dollars were misdirected as a result of this. And somehow, the two frauds of Claudine Gay and Marc Tessier-Lavigne, they're somehow complementary, and we somehow need to find a way to understand them as deeply connected and related to one another. And probably at the margins, I think the science fraud is the more important and the bigger one to understand. If you want a governmental analogy, it's sort of like the esotericism of the sciences should be cause for suspicion. And so if we take, let's say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office, and the NSA, and I ask you, what's the most corrupt, dysfunctional part of the government?

My placeholder answer would be, it's the NSA, because nobody knows what's going on there. Post office, DMV, they're transparently corrupt. Nobody does their work. And that's roughly—the humanities are like the post office. The sciences are like the NSA, and somehow we need to find a critique of both, or the debate version of this. I always think there are basically two debate techniques you can have when you go after an enemy. You can go after your enemy at the enemy's weakest point, which is the way you are most likely to score at least a tactical win, and this was sort of what we tried to do in The Diversity Myth, all these tactical wins. But if you go against your enemy at your enemy's strongest point, and if you're able to win, it is game, set, match.

And sort of my fantasy version of this, it's something like, I don't know what the pinnacle of science is. Maybe it's still string theory. And if we can show that the string theorists, who are the smartest of the physicists, who are the smartest of the scientists—if we can show that the string theorists have been doing nothing for 40 years, then by some principle of transitivity, we can show that all of them are more or less corrupt, and that is sort of the game, set, match, victory that we need to try to achieve. Let me do a quick digression. There's always this question when I talk about the tech-science stagnation, and I think it's sort of been going on since the early 1970s, is always this question, why did it take us so long to figure this stuff out?

It's sort of seeping a little bit more into the consciousness of the last decade, but why could people not figure it out? And I think there were sort of two big... The basic thing that you're supposed to do is figure out a way to get back to science, get back to innovation that's broad-based, not just narrowly in the world of bits. That's sort of broadly what you should do. But there were two one-time moves people were able to make. There was a center-right and a center-left move that sort of papered over the tech stagnation in different ways. The center-right move was the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. It was a one-time move to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, sort of get rid of a bunch of antitrust laws.

And I think it was the right thing for that time. If you have marginal tax rates at 70%, you lower them to 28%, and you go in a more capitalist direction, it is going to improve the economy dramatically. It is not a timeless and eternal thing. It worked for about seven years, '82 to '89. And then by the late '80s, early '90s, when we wrote The Diversity Myth, it had run out of steam. These culture wars sort of reemerged as a symptom of this. But then there was a second one-time move, which was the center-left Clinton-Blair move, which was globalization, that you could sort of do this one-time, incredible sort of global arb. And... and it probably came with more negative externalities than the center-right move.

And we're sort of downstream of a lot of the things that went haywire with this. But it got you sort of a 1995 to 2007 long globalization boom. I think it was sort of, in a weird way, a much harsher thing than the Reagan-Thatcher thing. It had to be dressed up in the center-left way because it—that Clinton is the president where inequality went up the most. The Gini coefficient went up the most under Clinton of all the presidents since, I don't know, Truman. And so there was some kind of very severe cost to it. I don't know if one should undo either globalization or capitalism. But there is a sense in which more of them is not where we will find the solution. And we're now sort of in a place where these things need to be rethought a lot more.

You know, one way to recapitulate sort of my argument thus far is that you can think of us as we're sort of in a pit in the back of a cave. And it's a pit that is, you know, there's all this artificial rainbow-colored multicultural lighting in this sort of virtual discotheque or whatever you want to call it. And something like economics, even in the Marxist or libertarian form, is desirable. Maybe it's necessary to at least get back to the natural cave. And then it's probably not sufficient to get out of that cave. And then if we want to move out of the cave, we have to think about some other things like the science-tech questions, and then maybe even some broader questions about religion and Christianity.

Let me end on this third theme. Coming back to diversity as a distraction, we're sort of not able to pay attention to things. If we think of sort of something like Anselm's ontological argument, there's nothing you can conceive that's greater than God. If we can distract you from thinking about God, the biggest thing in the world, wow, that's a pretty powerful distraction machine. And it's pretty extraordinary to the extent it's been pulled off. And yet I keep thinking that... there's surely some kind of a Christian or... analysis of this that if we sort of look into the microscope or the telescope from the other side, from what I would say is the right side, maybe it would be a very illuminating analysis.

There's a lot that one can say about this, but one kind of a framing is that there's obviously sort of a very odd way that something like Christianity connects with this woke religion. And Christianity, the Bible, is the one religion that takes the side of the victims. And somehow this focus on victims is—it has its origins in Judaism, Christianity. It's sort of already in the beginning of the book of Genesis. We have the story of Cain and Abel. It's a contrast. It's similar to the myth of the founding of Rome, Romulus and Remus, but the Roman myth takes the point of view of the city. And Romulus is right, Remus deserves to be killed. The Bible—Cain founds the first city, Romulus founds the greatest city in the ancient world.

The story of Cain and Abel, the Bible takes the side of Abel. And then, you know, there's sort of a way in which, you know, the normal story of Egypt and the Jews would be from the Egyptians: "We sort of got rid of the troublemakers and sent them away." And it gets told from the other side. And then, of course, there is a version where the story of Christ is the story, in part, of Christ as a victim. And so there is sort of, there are these complicated ways where the woke religion, if we call it a religion, it's not... it's not like this super weird new thing. It is maybe just one toggle switch away from Christianity or something like this. There is probably a lot one could say about Judaism, Islam, Christianity.

If we were sitting here 100 years ago in 1924, I think it would have been clear that Christianity was sort of the odd one out. It was not strictly monotheistic. It was Trinitarian. It basically took... It basically, in Islam or Judaism, it was inconceivable that someone could murder God. So there was certainly a claim about how bad people were, where Christianity was more extreme, and then there was also something about it where there was a greater need for forgiveness or something like this. And if we had to simplify these sort of culture debates massively, I keep thinking you could say, you know, there's a sort of very complicated Christian balance you're supposed to strike about history, where history was terrible, and the Left is right that history was terrible.

And it's sort of this tale of violence and injustice, et cetera, et cetera. But you need to find a way to forgive people and move on. And you have to somehow, you know, "hate the sin and love the sinner." And then there's some sort of version of this on the debates on history. And then the two alternatives to that are broadly something like—something like, let's say, the non-Christian alt-right, where it's, you know, we just shouldn't feel so guilty about the history. And I find it very tempting, personally. This is where, you know, it's like Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, all these people. It's like, "I am so sick of feeling guilty about stuff, and I would just like... I would just like to move on."

And there is sort of just a question: Is this actually feasible? Is this sort of narrative sustainable? And certainly when you go into the particulars, it probably does break down in all sorts of ways. You're probably not supposed to say that all the slaves were happy slaves or things like that. That doesn't sound like a winning sort of argument. But then the woke religion is sort of more on the other side, where it is, yes, there's a lot of sin, but there is no forgiveness. There's no redemption. There is nothing like that. And this is perhaps why I always think that we have to characterize it as not particularly liberal. It's not particularly... big-hearted or anything like this. It's closer to something fundamentalist, Puritan, something like this.

And, you know, this is sort of... I don't know, there's sort of different riffs one can do on this, but, you know, if we think of... Elizabeth Warren. Harvard is still a Puritan divinity school like it was in the 17th century, and Warren is a Puritan minister from the less pleasant half of the 17th century. She is a worse fire-and-brimstone preacher than—I mean, than the most retrograde Catholic or fundamentalist Protestant or anything like that. And this is kind of the balance that we need to somehow reset. It doesn't lead to sort of a great political formula, but that's where things always feel off to me. In a brief conclusion, there is, of course, a way where these three themes—the theme of economics, science and tech, and religion—I think are surely better than just the diversity topics themselves.

But if we have to—if we have to have a debate about diversity and political correctness, maybe we can at least just go back to what these things originally meant. And I always think the etymology of political correctness is somewhat instructive, where, by the 1980s, political correctness was a term the conservatives, libertarians used to critique the intolerant parts of the Left. In the 1970s, it was still something liberals described themselves as if they were really doctrinaire liberals. But if we go back to the 1950s, the original meaning of political correctness was you were simply a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and you were following orders directly from Moscow. And I sort of wonder if one should always think that this original meaning is still somehow very present.

That we should stress the totalitarianism, not the relativism. We should stress the nastiness, not the fake niceness. And the ways in which it can only culminate in madness and murder. And this is a simplification. I think we should be thinking about other things than DEI. But if you have to think about DEI, every time you hear DEI, you should just think CCP. Thank you very much.

Okay, why don't we get started with our fireside chat session, and I want to start by thanking Peter for this wonderfully rich talk. I heard more interesting ideas, I think, in those 35 minutes than I've heard in many a Harvard lecture, so thank you for that. And I want to start with maybe one thought for you and one question, and then your reactions can spur the further conversation. The thought for you is about wokeness as a distraction. I think there are undeniably cases where we can prove that to be true. So the journalist Lee Fang has done this very interesting work on how corporations quite self-consciously have used wokeness to defeat unionization drives by pitting employees against each other on dimensions of race and gender and ideology and so forth. It's quite a deliberate tactic.

So I think it undoubtedly occurs in your other examples as well. But I wanted to also suggest a different, not necessarily inconsistent framework for thinking about wokeness, which is not that it's a distraction the way a magician distracts you from what's happening in the foreground, but a medical analogy that wokeness is a symptom. So wokeness on this view would be a symptom of some underlying condition. So it's not the main thing that needs to be addressed or cured, but symptoms are important. They're important in themselves. They have diagnostic value. And if the symptom is left unaddressed, it can independently inflict harms on the patient. So if we have some underlying condition that creates a dangerous fever, the fever is a problem in itself apart from the condition.

So while we're treating the condition with medicine or surgery, we might also very much want to address the symptom and we need literal or metaphorical aspirin for the body politic. So I would see the activism of people like Christopher Rufo as a kind of aspirin for the body politic and say that it's not that they've been caught up in a distraction, it's that they are doing perhaps not the main task, but an invaluable task that needs doing. So that was one thought about a slightly different frame for thinking about wokeness. The question for you I would put is something like this. It seems to me that decadence is close to the core of your thinking, that in some way the sense that the stagnation of our economic and political order is very much at the core of what you care about.

There have always been two, I think, very different critiques of decadence in our tradition, however, well before you get to Ross Douthat. I think of the Republican critique of decadence running from Sallust to Montesquieu, which says that the problem is opulence and luxury and the enervation that comes with opulence and luxury. And then there's another critique of decadence that I associate with people like Frank Knight and Joseph Schumpeter, which says that the problem with decadence is a kind of bureaucratization of the spirit. That is, that we lose the entrepreneurial spirit that created our very high civilization in the first place in some way. And what's interesting to me about your thinking, Peter, is I see strands of both of these critiques in different ways in what you say.

They seem to have somewhat different implications for capitalism, or at least for unbridled capitalism. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of that.

Well, to the extent that it's economic—not all economics, I try to make clear, but to the extent it's economic—I'm still in the anti-socialist, free-market direction. I'm still much more in the second camp. And so, yeah, there's this moralistic argument that the young people, the Gen Z people, have it too easy, and that's why they're not working hard enough. And my intuition is that, no, it's actually too hard. And that's the thing that's demotivating. And it's not about present circumstances. It's always about your view of the future. And if you think that hard work and effort is going to translate into a much better future, that's highly motivational. And if you think that's not, it's demotivational.

And maybe you should be working harder if you're in a tougher circumstance. I don't think that's how it works empirically. If you think of it in terms of tax law, tax policy. The question is, do income effects or substitution effects dominate? Income effect is you're making $150,000 a year. You pay a third in taxes. You got $100,000 after-tax income. We make the tax rate 50%. You work harder to get to the same after-tax income. And this was sort of the Obama administration theory that the more you tax the rich people, the harder they will work. And that's income effects dominate. And so, in theory, if people were rational actors, those would dominate. What empirically happens is substitution effects dominate, and when things get tougher, people actually substitute leisure for work.

As far as the economics go, I would come down pretty squarely on the capitalist side. And the problem is that things are too bureaucratized. People are too much caught in this iron cage of sorts. And it's too hard to move out of it. But if I had to offer a critique of both of our positions in some way, and of Curtis Yarvin and all these other sort of characters that have been produced in the last decade as the system is rattling to an end, is I think we are very powerful in our critiques. And I think the critiques are basically correct, that we are at the end of liberalism. We're at the end of some sort of end of capitalism, end of science. I always have this apocalyptic undercurrent where I wonder if this is the end of history.

It's not a Hegel-Kojève entropic twilight, but it's literally the end of the world. And then where we are weak is, you know, as philosophers of the future of, you know, what will the post-liberal world look like and what will future governance look like? And, yeah, surely it will be different from the present. And, uh, this is where I'm, you know, um, at least sympathetic to your position. At least it's going to be so far outside the Overton Window from what we currently have. And, you know, uh, and anything, you know, if you're still—I don't know if you're still, um, having this sort of Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton debate, you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or something like that. Lifeboat's not that charismatic, but surely you should be making your way for the lifeboat or something like this.

And then there's always this question of what does this future governance look like? And then I think we always should be steelmanning our opposition a little bit more. We should be trying to figure out what are their strongest arguments. And what I kind of wonder is whether the liberals know all of this too, and they know that liberalism's days are numbered, and they know that there is no succession after this that's possible. And so my placeholder for what's going on is that liberalism, it's sort of... devolved into a gerontocracy. And we have this, and it's sort of devolved into this funeral. And this is sort of the—you sort of think of the Biden administration as this living funeral or something like this.

And then when you ask the question, 'What happens after this funeral?' it looks really bad. And so what we end up with is an endless funeral. And it's just we need more ceremony. We need to elongate the funeral. We need to keep the funeral going as long as possible. And because the liberals actually deeply agree with you and think that the system is bankrupt, it's finished, they also don't really know what happens next, and their placeholder is an endless funeral. And I think that seems kind of lame and uncharismatic, but maybe it's better than thermonuclear war or the totalitarian state of the Antichrist or something. So those would be different, but maybe an endless funeral is still preferable.

That's great. That's super interesting. What you point out is that it feels as though we're in a strange in-between time where we have new futures that we can imagine, hitherto unimaginable futures, and yet we also feel quite stuck in a kind of gerontocratic Boomer liberalism regime that seems to go on indefinitely with no hope of being destabilized. Let me just try out for you two possible ways in which it could be destabilized. One is, I'm a believer in the sheer power of nature—that is, perhaps Boomer liberalism can turn itself into a kind of immortal vampirism, but I'm not so convinced yet, I think. Maybe nature will catch up with it, although it's taking a shockingly long time.

This is Adrian, right, saying at lunch that we're both way too young to be part of this conversation—to say nothing of the people in this room. We have a system where it's like, you know, if you're not 80 years old, we can't trust you. You're too high energy, and you might push the nuclear button or something. Yeah, right, right. And then they're hoping that by the time you're 80, you'll be sort of co-opted into vampire liberalism. That's right. You won't have the energy of an Ayatollah or something. Exactly.

But the other way, I think, that there—and we were talking about this at lunch as well—the other way I think that there might be a destabilization of this kind of late liberal regime is the faltering character of American empire. That is, some of the foreign policy stuff and the stuff around the debt and de-dollarization seems to be shaking the late liberal regime in fundamental ways that we haven't seen before. And you see strange symptoms of it, like the radical over-commitment, in my view, to Ukraine, the loss of control of, literally, of the Red Sea and Suez Canal, replicating the British debacle of the 1950s. And these sort of things seem, I think, threatening to liberalism in a way that we haven't seen yet.

So, thoughts on that?

It seems plausible. There's a way in which I always worry that this is still somehow too optimistic. Certainly, the Suez Crisis, 1956: if British naval power did not extend to the far reaches of the Mediterranean, then, you know, the Empire was doomed, and you get Ghana's independence, 1957, and by 1968, basically, the Empire unravels within a decade, so it turns out to be a signature moment. And I have the same question about the—which seems to me sort of a slightly misdirected Ukraine war, or very misdirected one—where if it turns out that American power cannot defend the periphery of Europe, then obviously Israel's in real trouble, and Taiwan is just simply doomed, and we shouldn't even be pretending that we're able to defend them or something like that.

But then, you know, I don't know. It's somewhat different from the British analogy because the U.S. was a successor to Britain. And so there was some kind of very, very rough handoff that happened. And this time, it is, again, it's the end of the empire. You know, it's not like the end of the British Empire. Is it actually... is it like the end of the Roman Empire, where in a sense it is pretty close to the end of the world? And there is no real succession. And then we get into all, probably one way to concretize this is always to ask this question of China versus the U.S., just to reduce it to that dipole. And I think there are ways in which the U.S. empire thinking has tended to be too complacent about China.

It always says China will collapse under its own weight and we don't need to worry about it. But then I also think that a lot of the people who are hoping for an accelerated end to the American Empire are too hopeful about China as an alternative. They have a lot of problems, too. They seem to be incapable of reproducing. There are all these ways that something has gone very wrong with Xi, and the growth has probably stopped. There are all these ways that... And then, of course, we don't really know what's going on in China. It's very, very opaque. And so then we end up with just these ideological debates. But I think the non-accelerationist version would be that China is in as much trouble as the U.S., albeit in somewhat different ways.

And it's not really going to be a successor to the American Empire, and therefore it is, it's going to be maybe a more elongated process.

Good. Well, the sense of the end of the world seems a good time to start thinking about political theology. And one of the things I love about your thinking, Peter, is that, on the economic side, you have some libertarian instincts, as you've said, but when it comes to discourse in the public sphere, you are interested in openly entertaining arguments from political theology and Christianity, as you discussed in your speech, as ways we could think about our public life together. So I wanted to pursue that line a bit and ask you a bit about heresy and liberalism as a heresy. So I guess my reactions, as from a Christian standpoint and specifically in my case a Catholic standpoint, to your thoughts

was that, yes, wokeness could be seen as in some way an offshoot of Judeo-Christianity, but all heresies are in some ways offshoots of Judeo-Christianity, and I think that the standard Catholic way, at least, to think about wokeness in this framework is that it's a species of Pelagianism, that it's the idea that by our collective efforts as humankind, we can make a new Eden here on Earth, and that history is progressing towards that culmination. And so if it's just another version, if it's the latest version of an old heresy, my sense is that Christians can cheerfully agree with you and say, 'Okay, what's the problem? We have understood that since the condemnation of Pelagius.' The other bit I wanted to react to your very interesting discussion there was to say that

I wonder if Puritanism is the right model for Liz Warren, my former colleague Liz Warren. I have a slightly different model, which is there's a very distinctive strand of liberal Protestant, liberal Protestant theology that one sees in Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that becomes immanentized and secularized into, I think, what is very much an ancestor of wokeness. So E. E. Cummings has a wonderful poem about the Cambridge ladies knitting scarves for the liberation of Poland or whatever it is. They don't really know. They're caught up in whatever the current thing is, but it very much has this sense of the immanentized eschaton that we're devoting all our energies to, this perpetual project of liberation.

So if that's right and if wokeness is really a descendant of liberal Protestantism and not Frankfurt School Marxism or not even Christianity generally, then maybe that's the problem.

There are all these different threads one could focus on. I would think of it as more Calvinist, and it's in some ways harsher and more pessimistic as well. I put more on the predestination thing, that we can't change things, versus too much free will, too much agency. There's obviously a way that Puritanism became Unitarian in Massachusetts; they were somehow linked. But I don't know, the Puritan thing still strikes me as a somewhat useful prism. You had all these subsects in the 17th-century Puritans. You had the Levellers, who wanted to level everything, and the Ranters, who were ranting at people who were too much in the hierarchy. And so I think there are these subsects that I think have persisted more than we would think.

And then I think the dimension I would come back to is it's always this question of victimhood, injustice, overcoming injustice, and I think somehow Christianity is right to say that there was some dimension of that. And then maybe where things get heretical is when we say that—it's always a question, can you be too Christian? And I think in theory the answer is no, in practice certainly yes. And in practice, that was the Marcionite heresy where, you know, you know, you had to sort of—you had to be more Christian than Paul, or more Christian than Christ. And then Marx is like this too, where Christianity will do things for the poor, but we need to accelerate it, and we need to have the communist revolution.

And so I think of Marxism and wokeness as very adjacent, but they were both this sort of hyper-Christianity: we needed to kill a lot of people and bring about a heaven in this world. And it was sort of accelerationist, but in terms of these values that were deeply shaped by Christianity. It was not in a retro pagan way, classical way—that was always weaker. This is always why something like communism—it's always what I think is the big difference between communism and fascism is they were all, in some ways they're doubles, they're similar, they just killed millions of people, but fascism was always retro, and so the historical victims really were guilty, and then communism is, 'We're going to go after the victimized, we're going to go after the bourgeoisie, the aristocrats,'

You know, all these people, and we're gonna victimize the victimizers. And that was sort of the hyper-Christian, more-Christian-than-Christ move. And so the nuanced thing I would say on this is always, I don't think we should say there were no victims, but maybe what we can say as Christians is that it's always a mistake when you say that you were a greater victim than Christ. And if people could always relativize their victimhood to that of Christ, we're still healthy. And when you absolutize it in some way, that's the dimension where this has gone very haywire.

That's super interesting. Can I pursue it for one second? There's always been this deliberate paradox in Christian theology, and specifically Christology, which is about so-called *Christus Victor*—that is, that Christ's suffering and condemnation and death is actually a form of victory. And it's how Christ becomes King over the whole universe. And so I wonder how that part of it plays into our thinking about it. That is, I don't think Christianity is just about weakness and suffering and victimhood. And it's also about liberation from oppression, yes, but it's also about the restoration of a new order that brings with it a right relationship between authority, humanity, and God. And that part seems to have been lost.

Yeah, or maybe there's, again, some way that the heresy or the hyper-Christianity, whatever you want to call it, has focused too much on one sort of dimension. So yeah, the line I always have on this is, I have a preference for the Christianity of Constantine to that of Mother Teresa. And then there's all these ways you can say, Constantine was sort of a problematic figure, killed a lot of people and stuff. But maybe Mother Teresa, maybe Christopher Hitchens was kind of right. She was a little bit too much of a hypocrite or was too high a standard. And you need to find some kind of a balance. But I don't know. I think there is—the paradoxical thing is that somehow, you know, it is by being a victim that somehow the empire of Satan gets deconstructed and gets exposed and starts to unravel.

It's always Christ as a king. The René Girard observation anthropologically is if every god in archaic cultures, if every king was a sort of living god, can't we ask the opposite question, say that every god is a dead or murdered king? And so if we have a return of the king, it's in some ways you have to come to terms with that history. And somehow it'll involve both of those dimensions, I think.

Wonderful. So good. So that leads me to another thread I wanted to get Peter's thoughts about. So the mention of Constantinianism and the return of the king, I think, turns our minds to a question that's much on the minds of the conservative movement now, which is relationship to authority and state power. And we heard this in the panels before lunch: conservatives rethinking our views about the state as an enemy or threat, and rethinking that into the state as a possible place for the restoration of right order, somehow defined. Do you have general thoughts about the relationship of conservatism, libertarianism to the state, and in particular the thought that the state could be seen as an opportunity rather than as an enemy?

Well, it surely is a hybrid of those two. I probably still have a lot of learned helplessness. I'm not a completely unreconstructed libertarian, but a decade ago I always said I called myself a libertarian for a good reason and a bad reason. The good reason was that I believed in a lot of the classical liberal ideas of limited government, government, individual rights, and things of that sort. And then the bad reason was that when I said I was a libertarian, I was signaling to people that I was going to be a loser and that I was never actually going to get power. And then it was always, and that's why being a libertarian is sort of a politically correct way to be a Republican. Like Republicans might actually win an election.

We can debate whether or not that matters, but libertarians aren't even going to win an election. And so it's sort of a way to try to be left alone a little bit more. But I don't know. It's probably, in some ways, it goes back to this question of, what is the nature of the empire? And if we go back to the—and this was sort of a really original Christian debate in the days of the Roman Empire—is it sort of like G.K. Chesterton, where, um, the empire is something providentially ordained by God and the Roman Empire was a good way to spread the gospel or, or something like this? And then there is, um, you know, there is, there is the, uh, the other version of it where, uh, you know, Christ's temptation in the desert, he sees, uh, Satan tempts him with all the kingdoms of the world.

And so, in some sense, the temptation only works if the kingdoms of the world, and especially the empire, is fundamentally not really divinely ordained, is more on the satanic side. And this is sort of Nero as a sort of proto-Antichrist figure. And I'm probably... you know, I'm probably still cut a little bit more on the problematic nature of the empire, that it is—it's always like, you know, a little bit more corrupt than evil. It's like the Lord's Prayer, first line, you know, or, you know, "Thy kingdom..." "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is a daily reminder that God's will is always done in heaven and rarely on earth. It's sort of a limitation on the goal of empire. Or when Christ says that he is the Son of God, in some sense we can go into Trinitarian metaphysics, but the political theology claim is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, is not the Son of God.

And the Roman Empire's not divinely ordained, and the government's not simply divine. And this is where—it's sort of a complicated term, but René Girard liked to say that Christ was, in some sense, the first political atheist. And maybe a certain amount of political atheism is still a healthy corrective to the woke madness.

Good. As Peter indicated, I just want to make sure people understand there's a whole other tradition in the Church Fathers of seeing both the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as precisely the katechon that holds back the end times and Antichrist. So there's very much a...

Uh, another side to that story, but I, I take—I take your point. Do, do you then also... But, you know, you're, you're, you're never supposed to, you know, if you—you talked about, you know, we shouldn't immanentize the eschaton, but then I think there's also we shouldn't immanentize the katechon either. Okay? It's a very slippery concept, and it's always changing, and then there's always a way where, you know, the Antichrist, you know, comes by pretending to be the katechon. So it's Nero is... Claudius is the katechon, Nero is the, um, the bad emperor. Or, you know, there's some way that maybe Charlemagne is a good katechon, but then by the time you get to Napoleon, it's somehow—it's somehow a parallel to Charlemagne, but the opposite.

Or the more recent version of the Holy Roman Empire was Christian democracy in Western Europe, where it was katechontic—we're stopping communism. It was also parallel to the Roman Empire. It's a new and improved Holy Roman Empire. It's Christian, not just holy, and it's a democracy, not just an empire. And it was katechontic for a long time, and at this point, it's probably, I don't know, the sort of bad AI that makes all the decisions in Brussels doesn't quite... It seems like a katechon that's sort of passed its sell-by date.

Good. This is very interesting, and this brings me to another topic. Do you see Brussels, do you see wokeness as a... distortion of post-World War II liberalism or as a fulfillment of it? So you—I thought in your talk you seemed to see it as a distortion. And I wanted to hear more about that. What is the distortion and how does it work?

Oh, surely it's both. Yeah. Look, I'm very sympathetic to all your arguments that you have to go back a long ways and there are these mistakes that have built up over— I want to hear what you think. —a long time. I don't know, there's always, you know, there is always a... Look, there's always a version—my simple version of this is always that, you know, when I was in college, we still had, you know, genuinely Marxist professors at Stanford, and they were people, you know, who said that true Marxism has never been tried. And the people who are—there are all these people today who say that true liberalism has never been tried, and I think they're roughly in the—they're somehow making that same kind of a category mistake, that it's been tried many times and it leads to something like wokeness, and it's not an accident.

And then there may be ways it could have been different, but there's a certain tendency that this is seemingly what happens and these things need to be fundamentally rethought. And then at the same time, it's obviously like there is some decay. It's a very degenerate form of it. And it has to turn into something somewhat different. I don't know. Maybe this is probably not quite accurate, but my impression is there was some point in the past when the people who called themselves liberals were still interested in debate and still in the exchange of ideas. And there's some point where... where that changed, and that seems like a very big change from liberalism, and then obviously maybe that was just a natural thing to happen when your ideas were wrong and you didn't want to change them.

Right. I mean, ironically, I don't know if you followed this episode at Stanford Law School with the federal judge who came to speak and was effectively shouted down, and what I found ironic about that episode is the students who did the shouting down were themselves appealing to the idea of free speech in a certain way. They were saying that the hegemonic power over discourse of this imaginary conservative establishment that they take themselves to be battling is the oppressor. And this is... This is what I find very striking about wokeness is it seems to me to just take to an extreme the idea of liberation from human bondage that is in some way liberation from oppression, liberation from overwhelming power, that is in some way at the core of historical liberalism.

It's at the core of John Stuart Mill and his successors. And if that's right, then the intellectual genealogy would impeach liberalism too and not be a distortion.

Yeah, but again, I would just think we can get at this much more basically. I would still always make a little bit more of an economic argument. It's just like the rents are too high. I don't know, if you're a member of the Harvard faculty, can you afford to buy a single-family house in Cambridge, and then are there...

I'm looking over at my wife over here.

Are there all these... Are there all these... If you can, we should be investigating you, maybe, or something like this. Right, right. And then it's just very... And then, you know, so I know it's very... It's part racket, it's part... it's part, you have a lot of useful idiots, and you have some true believers, and it's this weird mishmash coalition of all these things, but I come back to, it's surprising how bad the racket has worked, how badly the racket has worked, even for, you know, I have, you're sort of a weird exception to this, but I have, you know, I always thought that academia discriminated against conservatives, and I think the class they really discriminated against were conservatives who got their PhDs in the '70s, couldn't get tenure in the 1980s.

By our generation, most of the conservatives knew that there would be no jobs for them in academia, and the people who went into it were liberals. They thought they would get a cushy, tenured job if they just toed the party line. And in some sense, the effect of discrimination was more against the liberals who wasted their lives trying to get into this impossible system than the conservatives. It's all somewhat complicated how it works. Good, good.

Okay, so let's bring it down to maybe some more concrete stuff just before we have to wrap up. Policy questions surrounding economics and real estate. Do you think that the system is now too ossified, or are there policy solutions you would favor if we could magic away the political constraints? So you get three pieces of legislation that get to pass Congress. Is there anything we can do about it?

You know, it seems very ossified. It also seems like there should be ways around it that are not simply political. The Georgist real estate stuff got traction in the late 19th century because there was a way in which the frontier was closing. You used to be able to get 140 acres of land. The land ran out. And then basically, people had to stay in the big cities on the East Coast, the cities were these nexuses of inequality, and then you got the progressive politics. The Georgist analysis, you get progressive politics as a result of the closing of the frontier. And then the 20th century, there was a one-time relief valve, and it was in the form of the automobile, the highway system, and you built out the suburbs, and that sort of relieved the pressure.

And then by the 1970s, 1980s, the highways are sort of a completed form. You can't move further and further out into the suburbs. And we somehow have this return of the cities in the last 40 years and the return of these very intensely felt forms of inequality. So one question is, the question I would have is, is there a way to blow up the cities? Metaphorically, economically. Sort of. Yeah, economically. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

I don't know if we're bugged in here, so I don't want to...

But it was... And I think the jury's out. Maybe it doesn't look quite as good as it did two years ago. But the technological way this might happen is through remote work and the internet. Because the U.S. is still a vast country. It is not insanely overpopulated. And there are a lot of places people could move. And I sort of wonder if, you know, if they can just do that. And we don't need to figure out ways to change the zoning laws in Cambridge. We need to just deprogram people from the Stockholm Syndrome they're suffering in, where they can't imagine living anywhere else or something like that. So framing it as a legislation thing seems like a high bar. We don't always need to do that. Sometimes we just need to get people to think for themselves, which might be easier or harder.

Wonderful, Peter. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.