At the beginning of the second millennium political violence returned. From the attacks on the twin towers, 11 September 2001, it was a crescendo, culminating, we hope, with wars in Ukraine and Middle East. In reality, violence was never gone. But we Westerners were pretending did not concern us, even when we launched bombs on Belgrade with our planes. Peace operation. Police operation. Special operation. Euphemism denounces the embarrassment in the face of the use of weapons.
At least he thinks this Peter Thiel. Short biography of Thiel for those who had distracted: Paypal’s founder and/or financier, Mithril Capital Management, Valar Ventures and Palantir Technologies. The latter is the giant that collaborates with the American defense in the key sector of big data and predictive analyzes. Thiel is very different from the type of Silicon Valley type entrepreneur and is indicated, by conspiracy theorists perhaps not too far from the truth, such as the “puparo” of the Trump administration. Exaggerated, perhaps. Also because the team Elon Musk concluded his experience with Donald between accusations and apologies. However, there is no doubt that Thiel has expressed opinions that Trump could sign. For example, Thiel made American universities to pieces, a tomb of critical thinking, well before the president. Thiel remains in the liberal field but theorizes, to exit alive from the new technological wars, an alliance between the state and private companies. He also believes that a partial transfer of private data is an acceptable sacrifice in exchange for security. An American and Christian future is imagined, as long as he remained tuned on reality and not on the Kantian dreams of eternal peace from which Europe, for example, struggles to wake up, rearrange or do not rearrange.
Peter Thiel has been a pupil of René Girard and it is not a detail as the Straussian moment (Liberibri, edited by Andrea Venanzoni, pages 124, Euro 4.99; only in digital edition). Girard is the author of classics such as violence and sacred to whom Thiel is inspired very clearly. The French anthropologist is famous for the theory of the “scapegoat”. A ritual murder, carried out by the community, bases all religions except the Christian one. The death on the cross of Jesus reveals, according to Girard, the deception of sacrifice as an antidote to violence; From Christ onwards we can no longer ignore the fact that the victim is innocent and that the killers are guilty. Violence can no longer be exorcised through the repetition of the ritualized sacrifice but only through adherence to the evangelical message, which makes free and above all responsible.
Questionable thesis, and in fact much discussed. But there is no need to retrace the debate here. We are interested in underlining the roots of Thiel’s ideas. To Girard, we can add Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The only Italian thinker mentioned: Roberto Calasso for the ruin of Kash (Adelphi). Without going into other philosophical disquisitions, we come to the heart of Thiel’s book: the Enlightenment, far from being the beginning of critical thinking, has been a sleeping pill. To overcome the incurable contradictions in the soul of man and peoples, we end up removing and ignoring them. Fundamental questions are relegated to private issues, which must not influence the public debate. Thiel: “From the Enlightenment onwards, the modern political philosophy was characterized by the abandonment of a series of questions that a previous era had instead considered central: what is a well -lived life? What does human be like? In what does the foundations of the political community and humanity consist of being? How are the culture and religion insert in all this? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature”. Addressing these themes led to the political and religious clash, therefore they were deleted for the benefit of a single dimension of life: the economic one, at most married with the desire for power. He did not work before, despite the revolutionary scope of Christianity. The Enlightenment solution did not work even. Thiel: “The progress of enlightenment took place at different rhythms in the various parts of the Earth. And in that world outside the West, the issues of religion and the deepest purpose of humanity have remained central”. As the Islamist attacks from which we started. Al Qaeda was led by a millionaire and the “martyrs” of September 11 they thought above all of life after death.
Today, concludes Thiel, “the mere self -preservation forces all of us to look at the world in a new way, to think new and strange thoughts, and therefore to awaken us from that very long and profitable period of torpor and intellectual amnesia that is called in such an misleading illuminism”.
After all, it is a reference to realism. The problem of violence cannot be circumvented, there is no security in universal disarmament, there are no franche areas where humanity is fundamentally good or not problematic (as we Europeans thought, making shield with American weapons, a little hypocritically).
It continues hardly: the right society cannot survive without intelligence and intelligence provides for the suspension of some rules of natural law, in agreement with what Leo Strauss already said and here is explained the title, we are right in front of this picture: we are in the Straussian moment.
It ends with the accusation that the Trumpian world addresses to political opponents, including those of their area, because the political borders are in the street of redefinition and in search of new synthesis: “They can be defined as liberal who knows nothing of the past and continues to support the enlightening vision of the natural goodness of man. And they can be defined as conservative who knows nothing of the future and the global world that is still destined to be, Other institutions rooted in sacred violence may contain unlimited human violence.
The present risks being a terrible synthesis of the blind points of that doctrinal thought, synthesis of violence and globalization in which all the boundaries of violence are abolished, whether they are geographical, professional (for example, non -combatting civilians) or demographic (for example, children) “.
More or less we are (back).