Everyone talks about Thiel but few carefully discuss his mysticism, which is not a millionaire’s eccentricity but the force that moves someone who believes himself to be a civilizing agent. After decades of technocracy and republican and globalist mantras, today the business world is looking for a new ideological-spiritual support. Thiel proposes a political theology that combines libertarian thought with the mystery and power of religious thought. He travels through corporate, communication and academic forums with his exhortation against all regulation of large companies, against all forms of collective action that seek the strength of the State, against anyone who warns about the dangers of the world that technological magnates seek.
Thus, while criticizing sacrificial logic—an ancestral way of suppressing mimetic violence according to Girard—Thiel reproduces it. Designates any opponent of unlimited corporate freedom as a antichristthe radical evil that comes to effect the end of the world. There is no possible coexistence between the divine and the demonic, this logic not only enables but theologically justifies a sadistic passion, a mark of the contemporary radicalized right and sacrificial agent par excellence. In this techno-crusade we contemplate, disoriented and exhausted, the authoritarian domination of capital, the exclusion of the unproductive – the elderly, the disabled, the poor, etc. – the imperial war and torture. Now they also claim divine legitimation.
If we have reached this point, we believe, it is because for too long we allowed a capture of our desire in possession and personal status, and in that absurd race they stripped us of almost everything. Perhaps the bet is on the inappropriate, on other forms of wealth, on other experiences in which a collective with the necessary power to confront them can germinate. It is not about replacing sacrificial logic, but about displacing it: it is about sacrificing wealth to enrich the world and life with everything that opens us up to others without a utilitarian purpose.
*By Aarón Attias Basso, doctor in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, and Tomás Ramos Mejía, doctor in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca.
by Aarón Attias Basso and Tomás Ramos Mejía
