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.

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…