All the while, he’s spent years marching along the institutional track, obeying orders and doing exactly what others told him to do, without questioning why he should listen to them in the first place. According to this vision, humanity will be cleansed, renewed and perfected. They’re dozing off in an intellectual slumber. He condemns the modern, finance-fueled affair with optionality. To illustrate the idea, let’s turn to my favorite example: The Reber Plan. “I always get stuck writing” is one of the most common frustrations I hear from readers. He explained how the school system taught him to follow rules, mimic his peers, and listen to teachers. Writing this Annual Review, I realize that I’m incredibly fortunate. The Reber Plan is my favorite example of Definite Optimism. Thiel concludes that time is linear, not cyclical. Pledge first. They are real enough to model. In the words of Thiel, “social media proved to be more important than it looked.”. Trapped in a never-ending rat race, lawyers climbed the corporate ladder by winning favor with partners at the top. Remember, you’re not trying to win arguments (“be right”), rather, you’re trying to find the best path forward (“get it right”). At the time, Americans were producing fewer than 1,000 planes per year. People perform ritual sacrifices together, and when a priest is appointed to kill a victim, he kills the victim in the name of the whole community. In his final lecture, Keller quoted Robert Nisbet, the author of The History of the Idea of Progress. Better yet, you can copy more than their writing. If there was ever a silver bullet, Thiel believes living with a long time horizon is it. Thiel’s favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca who said: “To begin you must study the end. Against this future, it is far better to save one’s immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal City of God, than it is to amass a fleeting fortune in the transient and passing City of Man.”. Looking back, these desires came from my peers. Mimetic competition is visible in every aspect of social life. Today, these bold visions would be ignored and dismissed as lunacy. People who work with Thiel are told to look for heterodox ideas and people with clear visions of the future. Creating explicit images of my future has made me healthier, happier, and much more productive. Thiel’s Christianity-inspired worldview lines up with Michael Porter’s philosophy of business strategy. The longer they spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop. Firms don’t have market power, so their prices are determined by the iron laws of supply and demand. And yet, my skepticism is balanced by my own relationship with my future self. True to the observations of Shakespeare, Freud, and Hobbes, academics are famous for institutional elbow-knocking. Definite Optimism: The future will be better and we know how. His “invisible hand” doesn’t just speak to the stability of the economic system, but also to the natural progress of wealth, labor, skill, rent, and profits. Three simple statements will lead us towards our ultimate answer about the importance of religion: The future will be different from the present. And everything, from our bodies to our souls, would be purified. Thiel’s idea of Definite Optimism is Christian theology cloaked in secular language. A lack of progress leads straight to a bleak, ravaged, and apocalyptic world. It felt as if the goal of life wasn’t to improve the world, but to win awards and build an impressive resume. Even the virtues of information consumption have changed. It’s like a search for keys. But life is not like options trading. In my recent podcast conversation with Jason Zweig, he shared his experience growing up on a farm in upstate New York. Scientists would ask proxy questions for determining a culture’s time horizon, and use it to evaluate its impact on productivity growth. I suspect this is why Thiel admires Elon Musk so much. Thiel says a bad plan is better than no plan at all. Society will push you towards competition, but you shouldn’t compete with your peers or depend on them for guidance. That’s why the Cain and Abel story is the archetypal example of Mimetic conflict, and Thiel sees Christianity as the optimal solution to apocalyptic violence. And according to Girard, this is the essence of biblical revelation. Like lobsters in a bucket, wannabe lawyers battled for law school placement and law firm employment. Through toys, Girard and Henrich show how our tendency to desire the same scarce resources as our peers leads to envy and competition. That way, they would only be shared with a small, select group of people. While imitation creates a race to the bottom, innovation promotes healthy competition and economic growth. Definite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we know how. Instead of sharing their names and hiding the truth, today’s Straussians hide their names, but share the truth. Here, Thiel encourages us to be specific about the long-term future we want to create. Forbes.com calls him one of the most powerful people in the world. All the while you “build skills” and “accumulate options,” as if the next corner will provide the happiness you’ve been seeking all along. The book predicted that America would be a post-industrial society by the year 2000. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel describes four ways of thinking about the future: definite optimism, indefinite optimism, definite pessimism, and indefinite pessimism. They were responsible for one job, one metric, and one part of the business. High profits attract competition. In 2007, for example, half of Harvard seniors took jobs in finance or consulting. I’ve also chosen an interpretation of the Bible, and especially The Book of Revelation that aligns with Thiel’s philosophy. Social events revolve around binge drinking and conversations so superficial a robot could automate them. When you compete to be unique, you innovate. Every Thursday, Tim Keller spoke about the core tenets of Christianity: faith, meaning, satisfaction, identity, morality, justice, and hope. According to Thiel, this shift has been worse than acknowledged. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. No matter what you do, the world will return to its original state. For the first three years, during the initial fundraising process, investors turned their cheeks. What does Peter Thiel think? The competition was zero-sum. His $500,000 investment was partially informed by Mimetic Theory because he saw Girard’s ideas validated by social media. When they do, they’re concealed in unpopular characters, such as devils, beggars, and buffoons. Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, was unsuccessful. He encourages human agency and believes in the power of a single individual to bend the future to their will. Each goal led to the next. Instead of looking in the light, Thiel and his employees look in the dark, where nobody else is looking. God’s purposes are central, not theirs. Succeed later. America’s imagination peaked in 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. Here, he counters the secular and Eastern philosophy. And yet, few consider its importance at the societal level. He supports people who trade the shiny mirage of short-termism for the calm, controlled grace of a long time horizon. “When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’ Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. Big dreams are now seen as childish illusions. In a letter called One Solitary Life, James Allen Francis wrote: “Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. Even if imitation is inevitable, we can reduce the negative effects of it. Earlier this year, I attended a series of Questioning Christianity lectures in New York City. These are the moments when time disappears; when years of trust are built in seconds of synchronicity. In 2018, he supposedly had $2.5 billion. We can avoid the kinds of competition that lead to violence. Is religion a superfluous add-on or the origin of everything? Cover Photo: JD Lasica | CC 2.0 License via Flickr. It will either be much worse or much better. To be sure, he doesn’t only invest in companies with little competition like Palantir and DeepMind. Beginning with the Greeks and accelerated by the Christian writers such as St. Augustine, Western philosophy is defined by the march towards heavenly perfection. In our current phase of American history we have lost belief in God and salvation, or in any shared sense of national greatness and destiny.”. Buffett’s firm has poured millions of dollars into renewable energy. We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. I was obsessed. When we whirl in its vortex, we become overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos and lose sight of our place in history. Or more explicitly, “stagnation leads straight to apocalypse.” If we don’t, we’ll suffer from limitless Mimetic violence; and if things go well, we might find our place in God’s peaceful kingdom. In the span of a single lifetime, people went from traveling by horse and buggy to walking on the moon. He says: “I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne.” Instead of relying on a cyclical re-birth, Jesus’ return will fix the material world by destroying all decay and brokenness. The Christian story begins with: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” At its root, the story is about how the world went bad and how we can fix it. Adam Grant does a masterful job showing that is not the case; we are lucky to have him as a guide.” Sheryl Sandberg: “Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. Peter Thiel: I first read "Things Hidden" when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. It’s a portal onto the present and onto the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. As the Apollo rockets pierced through the stratosphere, and navigated the pin-drop silence of outer space, they inspired people back on earth to expand their horizons. Snow, the first basemen for the San Francisco Giants. The best way to take this advice is to do exactly the opposite: live each day as if you would live forever.” — Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist the internet most loves to hate, has developed a peculiar bromance with 17th century English champion-of-science Francis Bacon. And both might complain I’ve focused too much on his relationship with Christianity. Instead, we put our faith in small tweaks and A/B tests, implying that millions of small actions are a better way of improving the world and creating a desired future. They were clear and specific. Indefinite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we don’t know how. Social media decreases the distance between people and their role models, so the pull to idolize false gods is greater than ever. What is interesting, however, is Thiel’s stated political philosophy; which claims to be libertarian, yet rejects democratic systems, and has a deep authoritarian streak. To reach the moon, America’s pioneers traveled across 240,000 miles, about fifty-eight times the distance Columbus sailed when he discovered the Western world. People are afraid to dream big or stand out. In response, as CEO of PayPal, Thiel set up the company structure to eliminate competition between employees. I re-write my 25-year vision multiple times per year. The importance of belief and momentum is evident to any shouting fan in any arena across the country. Since the Financial Crisis, tens of thousands of Americans have moved into the Indefinite Optimism and Definite Pessimism quadrants. The year would be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. Meanwhile, the costs of housing, healthcare, and education are rising faster than inflation. Thiel was raised as an Evangelical and inherited the Christianity of his parents. Since small disagreements loom large in the imagination, Girard wrote that social differences and rigid hierarchies maintain peace. Here’s how Thiel would respond to my imitative instincts: Be careful who you copy. The last, still-yet-to-come stage will consist of peace and happiness on earth. They are codependent. Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, shares a similar philosophy on productivity and management that he developed while turning PayPal into a billion-dollar company. Humans need to be ruled, and man must glorify its king. But until now, nobody has explained the roots of his singular philosophy. It begins with the Garden of Eden at the beginning of The Bible and ends with the Kingdom of Heaven. Others engaged in small acts of sabotage against their coworkers. But companies who have a monopoly can set their own prices since they offer an in-demand product that cannot be replicated. At first, it can inspire cooperation. Time and again, these skilled operators have the agency to act without Thiel’s approval, and are encouraged to pursue bold visions of the future. We’ve shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solve incremental problems, and sometimes even fake ones. When I speak with Christians, they always return to the importance of hope. Thiel recommends one book: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. In 2004, three years after 9/11, Thiel sponsored a philosophical conference called “On Politics and Apocalypse.” Thiel contributed an essay called The Straussian Moment. We shouldn’t be surprised that Japan is home to most of the oldest companies in the world. 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