Peter Thiel’s evil, but he’s not an “evil genius”
How to criticize self-mythologizing villains.
Peter Thiel: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” It’s the far-right billionaire’s most telling phrase. Thiel wants us to think he’s an evil genius, because he wants us to think he’s a genius. So much of Thiel’s activity is devoted to self-mythologizing, like when he made us all think he was infusing the blood of teenagers in a bid to become immortal:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood
But as Ben Burgis writes for Jacobin, Thiel isn’t an evil genius, “he’s just a rich guy”:
https://jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-superrich-wealth-inequality-political-influence/
Burgis cites Max Chafkin’s 2021 Thiel biography, The Contrarian, which shines a glaring light on the distance between Thiel’s stated commitment to high-minded ideals of “liberty” and his self-serving defense of mass surveillance and human rights abuses:
If you think Thiel is an evil genius, then maybe these contradictions are the result of your puny brain lacking the subtlety to understand how, on…
