In a 2012 seminar at Stanford, some ideas from which ended up in his 2014 book, Zero to One, Thiel at several points came close to suggesting that the CEO of a company may fall victim to scapegoating mechanisms just like the ones that felled Jesus Christ. This particular idea didn’t make it into Zero to One, though it shows up in the class notes taken by his coauthor, Blake Masters. But one need only listen to Thiel when he believes he is defending himself against attacks—especially when justifying his Ahab-like vendetta against the now-defunct news and commentary site Gawker—to hear echoes of this worldview. In interviews from 2016, Thiel repeatedly describes Gawker as a bully and bemoans the experiences of the many, many rich and famous people it went after, calling them its victims. Unsurprisingly, ideas that allow the hyperpowerful to cast themselves as victims are popular in Silicon Valley. Girard’s may well be only the most philosophically ambitious and historically literate version.
We have encountered the idea of the rich and powerful being the true victims before. For Thiel, mimetic desire is something we can achieve mastery over in ourselves; and since others won’t be quite as good at such mastery, or sufficiently aware to achieve it, our self-knowledge puts us in a position to manipulate others. There are clear echoes of Ayn Rand in this version of Girard, but also far more pedestrian echoes of the motivational guru Tony Robbins: it reimagines as a marketing trick the human being’s status as a fallen creature. We can be saved, then turn around and monetize other people’s sinfulness.
So it isn’t just that Girard’s followers in Silicon Valley get to imagine themselves as keepers of an esoteric knowledge few others possess. They also believe this knowledge gives them the ability to become leaders of others. It should be clear why tech people and academics—two groups given to delusions of this type—might be particularly drawn to mimetic theory.
For all the features of Girard’s theory that Silicon Valley has intuitively grasped and glommed on to, there are others that seem to have conveniently disappeared over the short trip from Jane Stanford Way to the VC firms on Sand Hill Road. For one thing, Girard’s theory is relentlessly pessimistic. After all, for Girard, Christ did not die redeeming us but rather making visible the fundamental awfulness of our predicament. Girard at times sounds like he thinks our self-knowledge will, to some extent, free us from mimetic desire, but he’s not altogether sanguine on that score.
Listen to Peter Thiel talk about the same questions—and he talks about them surprisingly frequently—and you’ll hear a totally different version of Girard. It is one that is far more optimistic, and optimistic in a way that Girard’s readers in the seminaries might see as Christian, but that has likely taken a few detours from its origin. Girard seems genuinely allergic to human community. Given the violence he sees at its center, it could hardly be otherwise. He puts his hope for redemption in self-knowledge.
Thiel shares Girard’s disgust for society, for the public, for politics, but he thinks redemption can come from a well-managed, small company of like-minded individuals. It’s highly dubious that Girard would have thought that the PayPal mafia was the solution to mimetic desire. Thiel likes the PayPal mafia so much he renders it sacred.
Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires.
.6.Disruption
“Disruption” is one of those concepts that unify in an almost wondrous way the stuff of dry economics lectures and our everyday experience. Because I am not an economist, I can’t draw the requisite graphs for you. But because I am someone who recently moved houses, I can describe to you the feeling of holding an old TI-83 graphing calculator in my hands. I can describe to you how it felt to send my copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica to Goodwill: not exactly sad, but melancholy at how I didn’t feel sad. Thanks to technology, thanks in particular to the technology introduced by Silicon Valley, this is a feeling we’re becoming more and more familiar with: some objects have fallen so thoroughly out of our lives that we cannot even muster the energy to miss them.
The concept of disruption allows companies, the press, or simply individuals working in an office in Los Gatos, California, or behind the desk of a video store, to articulate questions of continuity and discontinuity. But neither those who argue for continuity nor those in favor of discontinuity are disinterested parties—everyone has a stake in these things. One ought to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims of something’s being
