Member-only story

The Scapegoating of Peter Thiel

Pay attention to the mimetic process, not the person. It’s bad for the person—it’s even worse for our society.

Luke Burgis
8 min readNov 15, 2021

A version of this essay was originally published in Unherd in September.

If you want to be known as a legendary start-up founder, you need a good origin story. That you sprung forth from the head of Steve Jobs, maybe — or, if that’s too spectacular in 2021, maybe that you were an awkward orphan that got into, and then dropped out of, Harvard.

If you’re the kind of person who writes for a living and you wish to paint a legendary start-up founder in the most nefarious light possible, you also need a good origin story. You might weaponise pop psychology mixed with school-age gossip, served neat, to suggest something like the following: because a person was bullied or shy as a kid, he must necessarily have psychological defence mechanisms that explain all of the reasons you don’t like him or his politics. It’s a relatively vile flavour of historicism.

And it’s been applied, by journalist Max Chafkin, to Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, legendary Silicon Valley investor and, more recently, backer of Republican U.S. Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. Last week, New York Magazine published an extract from Chafkin’s new biography, The Contrarian, under the headline: “Peter Thiel’s Origin Story: His ideology shaped Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.” The piece begins with a fantastical story about Thiel as a 20-year-old college student talking himself out of a speeding ticket by saying that he thinks the relevant laws are unconstitutional.

When I talked to Thiel last week, I told him I found this story far-fetched. It’s hard to believe he told a cop that he doesn’t believe in speeding laws — and even harder to believe that the cop would’ve accepted this argument. Yeah, it’s pretty weird, Thiel tells me. “Yes, I drove a Rabbit to a chess tournament back in 1988,” he says.

“Yes, I probably drove pretty fast. And yes, I probably got pulled over by the police and I probably talked myself out of a ticket. But the key part of the story could not possibly have happened: there is no way that I

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Luke Burgis
Luke Burgis

Written by Luke Burgis

Author of “WANTING: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.” Find more at read.lukeburgis.com

No responses yet

Write a response