“I had to renounce knowledge in order to make room for faith”
- Kant
When I met Max Chafkin in 2015, he was writing an article for Fast Company on my startup that had just gone through Y Combinator. We then met up again in 2019 to discuss a new biographical project he was working on: a biography of Peter Thiel. Pleasantries and updates aside, that main question was at hand: “Who is Peter Thiel and what motivates him?”
I had only met Peter once peripherally at a Bible study in San Francisco. I didn't have unique knowledge or access: I couldn’t share any interesting emails or open any doors. But I’d read a lot on related themes. In my own reading, I had been reading accounts of technology from figures like Kevin Kelly and Jacques Ellul, accounts of theology from figures like NT Wright and Wolfhart Pannenberg, and accounts on mimetic strange loops from figures like Douglas Hofstadter and of course, René Girard. To me, and as I shared to Max at the time, any reading of Thiel that did not take into account the revelatory breaking-in power of the Kingdom of God through humans was missing the core thread. It was through the openness of the future, and the horizon of possibility and potential that prevented the world from descending into a war of all against all, a fighting over scraps. All in all, I remember it fondly though I think Max thought I was kinda weird.
I followed up a few days later with a freshly minted essay from David Perell titled Peter Thiel’s Religion. Though I disagree with some of the framing, I highlighted this one paragraph in a Twitter DM to Max.
*eschatology.
The book was delayed until after the brouhaha of the 2020 election, but eventually it got a title, The Contrarian, and then a release date, September 21, 2021. I pre-ordered it right away. Then came the first wave of pre-release reviews. The LA times called it ‘entertaining and disturbing’, Sarah Frier said she ‘consistently gasp[ed]’. I couldn’t help but think, “Wait, what book was this? And who wrote it?”
Amazon reviews of The Contrarian are predictable for a political book released in 2021: polarizing. About half 1 star reviews, and half 5 star reviews, and few in between. The 5 star reviews delight in the depiction of the “diabolical plotter”, and “alt-right” figure. The 1 star reviews call it “biased”, “shallow”, and a “hit piece”. Surprisingly no one used the word “cancel”. I have heard the negative reviews vex Max, he feels he has done his journalistic duty by researching and reporting the facts, facts he feels are damning. I have some sympathy with this desire to “report the facts” - after all Jesus’ epistemology is “you shall know them by their fruit”. Unfortunately or fortunately, the facts are already being problematized with first parties, those spoken about in the book, disputing the events. Who to believe? Honest mistakes do happen, for instance in Max’s short column about me, there were two factual mistakes. Of course, dishonest “mistakes” also happen.
Rather than attempt to sort out the truth, I decided to take Max's book seriously, but not literally. Said another way: if this book is a sign of the times, what does the sign say?
Many critiques have tossed the book off as unserious, or a hit piece, but I want to take the book extremely seriously, more seriously than it takes itself. Beneath the anecdotes and opining, what is the message, even if unintentional and unseen, by the author of The Contrarian?
Before we dive in, I want to say that I was genuinely confused reading the book and also knowing Max, albeit only a little bit. The Max I talked to was thoughtful in contrast to the book. Perhaps Emily Cunningham, his editor at Penguin, forced it in this direction - it would certainly help sales. Because we don’t know, I intend to levy any critique at the book, and not at Max personally.
In a fascinating way, the book embodies everything about our Western world that Peter critiques. That world is mimetic, skeptical, atheistic, obsessed with power, and hyperreal.
The Contrarian does not present a single point that a left-wing reader would disagree with. It takes a grab bag of hot button issues: the influence of social media and misinformation, January 6, general misogyny and racism, deaths from COVID, and handling of the US southern border, and not only takes the party line, but tries to link it back to Peter as the person playing the marionette. At times this is downright impressive – Alex Jones would be proud. The book then, in this way, precisely mimes the already-held opinions of its audience. However if you have listened to Peter speak, he believes the only way forward is for humans to imitate Christ.
“A good model will make our mimesis good (Christ); a bad model will make our mimesis rivalrous”
- Girard in the Epilogue of the Girard Reader
The author does not leave any space for a metanarrative that could be running in Peter’s head; this is pure skeptical postmodernity. When I first got the book, the first thing that I did was go to the very back, to the index. I wanted to see what thinkers were referenced: “I wonder how Max pulls in Strauss, Schmitt and Girard, what of Shestov?” I was underwhelmed when I found that the book had an equal number of references to Schmitt as the Squatty Potty: one. The book wields the tools of postmodernism and critical theory deftly, problematizing Thiel at every turn. But in so doing, it does not move forward and admit, as Latour has said, that: “critique has run out of steam.” Deconstruction is only capable of creating one thing: nihilism; the chapter titled “The Thiel Theory of Government” damningly contains no theory at all, for or against.
If you think one thing is the most central and the most important to Peter’s thought, certainly that has to be his faith in Jesus Christ and Christianity more broadly. And yet the book spends no time on it. It doesn’t even seem that it was in the draft and later edited out - instead it’s almost as if the idea that someone can truly have a deep faith in a supreme being just does not compute and, as a result, could simply not be relevant to understanding Thiel’s actions and motivations. In that way, it is implicitly atheist.
The book views Peter as someone absolutely hell bent on gaining power, seizing it if he has to. This Nietzschean ubermensch, as the book would have us view Peter, views himself as always at war, a war of all against all. However if we believe that Girard is as important to Peter as he says he is, then Peter is concerned with minimizing violence, maximizing peace, and turning back global hegemony. Strangely, on this point the book often disagrees with itself, for instance saying this about a young Peter on page 10: "He never tried to settle scores, never confronted his old tormentors."
Lastly the book is hyperreal or post-truth. Jean Baudrillard, the French postmodernist, famously defined hyperreal in his book Simulacra and Simulation:
“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials… Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself… A hyperreal [is] sheltered from any distinction between the real and the imaginary”
One specific example of this is how the author views the political process. The generous reading is that the book is naive: it still believes that politics reflects the idealized 6th grade American politics classes where everyone comes to the table and has a nice conversation about what is to be done. However, consider Bill Clinton’s contrasting comments to Kevin Spacey about House of Cards: “Kevin, 99 percent of what you do on that show is real. The 1 percent you get wrong is you could never get an education bill passed that fast,” The other reading is that the book is intentionally gaslighting you with a mix of the real and the imaginary.
The Contrarian then is a collage of our postmodern milieu: mimetic, skeptical, atheistic, obsessed with power, and hyperreal. It is then not surprising that it simply can not process or understand someone who is fundamentally against all of those things. It is a book of the times, written about a man who is decidedly not.
Instead of being a useful critique of Peter, the book becomes contortionally and psychologically self-reflective. A sadistic obsession with globalizing power, throwing off the moral and ethical standards of the past (my paraphrasing), does not describe Peter, so much as the society that Peter has rejected, the society that, I assume, is the core audience for this book.
This book does not take the issues of late modernity seriously, and that is the scariest self-reflective revealing quality of all. While Thiel is trying to understand the sorry state we find ourselves in the West, this book is completely blind to it. These issues are not simply right-wing concerns: Marxists like Žižek take them seriously as well. The questions of post-liberalism, post-enlightenment, and post-dialectic are ones we all bear.
“There's always a question where does reason end and where does revelation begin”
- Peter Thiel, Lincoln Network Interview
The Contrarian is Athens vs Jerusalem played out again in 2021, in late modernity. Athens vs Jerusalem refers to the tension between reason vs revelation as discussed at length by Tertullian, Strauss, Shestov, Pope Benedict, Habermas, and others. This struggle, is perhaps the great question of our era and is played out here between the author(s) of The Contrarian and Peter. Girard in Battling to the End discusses Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address on this tension: “The pope is alerting us to the fact that Greek reason [Athens] is disappearing, and that its disappearance will leave the way open to rampant irrationality... Rationalism’s disdain of religion not only turns reason into a religion, but makes for a corrupted religion.”
Gillian Rose, the 20th century British philosopher, discusses Athens and Jerusalem in her book, Mourning Becomes the Law, as reflected in Poussin’s painting, Gathering the Ashes of Phocion. Phocion was a noble Athenian statesman in the 3rd century BC. Serving 45 terms in office, he often rose against the consensus of the Athenian senate stating “I am the one who disagrees.” Naturally, Phocion was convicted of treason (unanimously of course) and like Socrates, drank his hemlock. Denied an honorable burial, his body was burned and the ashes left on the pyre outside the city gates. In the painting, you see Phocion’s widowed wife, gathering his ashes, as an act of love, while the Athenian grandeur stands beyond.
Gillian Rose says, “the gesture of the wife bending down to scoop up the ashes as an act of perfect love — as Jerusalem. She contrasted this gesture of love with the unjust nature of the city of Athens… The bearing of the servant displays the political risk; her visible apprehension protects the complete vulnerability of her mourning mistress as she devotes her whole body to retrieving the ashes. This act is not therefore solely one of infinite love: it is a finite act of political justice.” Not long after Phocion’s death, the city returned to its senses, reburied his ashes, and erected a statue in his honor.
People who are extreme insiders/extreme outsiders have a long history of being scapegoated and executed. Peter, of all people, knows this and even calls himself such. Scapegoating may still buy peace, but it is at-best tenuous and temporary. There is a better way.
Gillian Rose again:
“Athens, the city of rational politics has been abandoned: she is said to have proven that enlightenment is domination [Auschwitz]. Her former inhabitants have set off on a pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem, where they seek to dedicate themselves to difference, to otherness, to love - to a new ethics, which overcomes the fusion of knowledge and power in the old Athens.”
We can say one thing - Peter has not been drawn into the Girardian conflict, he has not escalated the violence; but has chosen peace; and maybe, just maybe, even forgiveness. In this world we live in, that would be the most contrarian thing of all.
well done Jeff. Very insightful.