Ideas from Peter Thiel’s Breakfast Table
Until this week it was never quite clear to a considerable body of intelligent citizens why a sufficient plurality of voters in the United States would flock to a reality television star whose casual relationship with the truth would frame a day of riot, rapine, and insurgency at the Capitol as a flower-wielding gathering for peace and love. Undoubtedly the primal cause of their affinity is the threat of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC).
Such a cause was revealed earlier this month in the salmon-tinged pages of the Financial Times. It was a fine article, even if the tastes of the FT, debauched by the pedestrian concerns of business and finance, may have underplayed the writer’s careful allusions and air of worry and triumph. War, apparently, is everywhere. It is a war between the Internet and an “ancien regime,” and the Internet has won by the measure of Americans’ distrust in the DISC – “media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.” These “pre-internet custodians of secrets” have hidden the truth from us, and it is for this sin that they are at war.
When noted entrepreneur, Peter Thiel, published his piece, the internet could be forgiven for not having risen at once and as one to say, “Finally!” No, Thiel assures us, it is only the beginning. The election of Donald Trump, as Thiel explains, will bring an apocalypse in the old sense of the word – the Greek form, apokálypsis. The apokálypsis is an unveiling, and his apokálypsis is the unveiling of truths that have been held from the people by the DISC. Only in this unveiling can we begin the process of reconciliation for the crimes perpetrated by DISC. In this way, the United States, with Trump, has reached the moment for truth and reconciliation, and through this, there will be forgiveness.
And the unveiling has only just begun. Thiel writes, “DISC has lost control of the narrative.” Some sixty-five percent of Americans have their doubts about Lee Harvey Oswald’s riflery and indulge in more elaborate explanations of the assassination of John F Kennedy, preferring the company of the mafia, Fidel Castro, and the CIA. Nearly half of Americans have unwrapped the explanation of Jeffrey Epstein’s death to find no evidence of suicide. Meanwhile, Thiel lays out questions about Covid as piles of fraud, threats and startling terms of art: wasted tax dollars, bioweapons, gain of function research – questions that only Anthony Fauci and the “National Institutes of Health apparatchiks” could answer. And how could Brazil ban X without the backing of the US?
Who shot JFK? Who killed Epstein? Covid was a US funded bioweapon program? The US secretly controls Brazil? These are the most pressing and injurious secrets of the ancien regime, according to Thiel, and the government and institutions of DISC must dedicate their resources to releasing them. They must release, stand by for further requests, and release more information – an endless process of discovery in the interest of reconciliation.
Thiel’s vision for truth and reconciliation is a grand spectacle and fitting for an entrepreneur in the old sense, which draws its meaning from the French entreprendre, meaning to undertake. It was adopted by the English language in the early 1800s as one who undertakes a musical or theatrical production. From its earliest applications, the entrepreneur is one who “gets up” entertainments. The government and the institutions of DISC are the reluctant stars in his carnival of conspiracies. The demands for reports, records, testimony, data would enlarge and spread to consume every resource in an effort to deliver the truth about who shot JFK, and who knows how far back it goes or how far it reaches. There must be more unveiling to entertain and dominate the public.
The knee-jerk description for Thiel’s unveiling –his so-called truth and reconciliation– tends towards Steve Bannon’s more colorful phrase – “the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” But this is incomplete.
Thiel’s unveiling is organized for a higher purpose – revelation, in the older, religious sense. Leo Strauss discusses it in Natural Right and History. Revelation dines opposite “philosophy or science in the original meaning of the term.” It relies on mystery, secret knowledge, and the assurance of “divine guidance” for a life of obedient faith. It is for revelation that “man yearns so much for a solution of that riddle” – the riddle of being. It is also with great care that Strauss, in no way anticipating Thiel's ambition, says, “the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted.”
And so, Peter Thiel has sent his picture Truth & Reconciliation in the grand tradition of Oliver Stone with the expectation that we will want to know what it all means. We can only expect that the entrepreneur will offer himself or his substitute with assurances of their divine guidance in the matter.
The survivors of this war between the internet and the ancien regime only hope to inspire the author with a love of something more appealing than spending time in Bannon’s pool.
