Analysis of Society

Peter Thiel’s conservative, libertarian reflections on Western social progress are worth looking at. Peter bemoans the fact that science at one time, after the defeat of the WWII Axis powers, seemed to be promising us flying cars, seemed to promise mind-bending progress in the world of atoms, very important to all of us, but then stagnated.

String theorists, Peter says, are the smartest people in physics, but string theory has made no progress in the past 40 years. As a result, the string theorists themselves have become effective as jealous guardians of their specialty, distracting the world at large from their lack of substance.

A similar pattern can be seen in cancer research and also, we suspect, more generally, in an enthusiastic attitude toward urban infrastructure and social planning, in medicine’s approach to diets, personal metabolism and food labeling, in mental illness and conspicuous homelessness and in general toward the experimental, behavioral approach to consciousness and subjectivity.

We want to see consciousness and subjectivity made subject to experimental behaviorism.

The University and its administration, where scientific research of all sorts gets spearheaded, functions as Peter’s center of social gravity, and here during the past 50 years, an all-pervading distraction problem has emerged. Identity politics and diversity administration, according to Peter, have substantially hampered the University’s ancient, overarching mission toward social progress. The humanities in this respect have long been moribund. Experimental behaviorism since Skinner is vastly diminished. Academic freedom is a mere echo from its storied past. Ideological, survival-based conformity of a reduced and totalitarian type rules all.

Concurrently, the economies of the West, of America and Great Britain in particular, have fallen victim to unbalanced GDP growth. Here there has been a pattern of land use and rent-seeking that was strongly signaled and warned in the late 19th century by the American economist Henry George, a few years prior to the enormous wartime and social adjustments of the 20th century, where government spending and debt financing were used to keep Western societies in equilibrium. But distractedness from the fundamental economics of land use and rent-seeking is a peculiar thing.

Now in the early 21st century, Western institutions find themselves confronted, as a result of a century of headline-grabbing Great Power momentum, in dangerous new ways by discontent both overseas and among their own populations. Attempts were made in the 1980s by conservatism, as Reagan and Thatcher did, and in the 90s and 00s by Friedman-style neoliberalism to effect a reprise of its glorious, fundamentalist momentum, but these were econometric shadows of the promise of real science and real technology.

By way of digital media, a form of pseudo-science, the distraction was amplified, the shadows started to seem real and cadres with no legitimate claim to make the rules of a genuinely progressing society started further to dominate the discourse. Peter accordingly identifies a third axis of Western social dysfunction, the loss of inteliigible contact with Christianity, the preeminent religion of substance. Further, by way of substitution, he imagines the infestation of people’s minds by a new and crazy ideology, by an ultra-Christianity, an ideology of identity and victimhood, namely by Wokeness.

God, like science or economics, is a strange thing to be distracted from because the idea of the Christian God, as do the ideas of political economy and positive science, suggests a plethora of legitimate ways to reframe serious discourse. But the idea of the Christian God, as the early Fathers understood, contains a dual seed of antithesis. The original Progressive was the Christian God. There is progress in history, but without understanding its limits, Christian progress readily ends in anti-Christic parody, in Communism or Wokeness. Alternatively, Christian progress may be deemed suitable for disposal by a right-wing, fascistic, Nietzschean appeal to raw nature and naturalism.

Between fascism and communism, both with their foot on the political accelerator, stands the innocence of Christian democracy, Catholicism in particular, and even Russian Orthodoxy, due to its practices and its prestige.

We propose to dissolve the Diversity Myth by a rediscovery of behavioral engineering, proposing to inspect the idea of conversation. The idea of freedom is really very versatile. Quite outside the storied confines of our merely social institutions, we think it will soon become possible to introduce behavioral engineering and reinforcement learning not just into our new, digital Deep Minds, but into human beings themselves, whose origins and whose destinies, if intelligently constructed, lie far behind the terrestrial sphere, in the rigid, parallel, cosmic photosphere.

For an analysis of this and the preceding Post, click here.