A couple of years ago I bought Rene Girard's now-famous book (thanks to Peter Thiel's dissonance) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (please don't buy this crap).
I couldn't even get through the first few pages... at least Rand's books are good reads. My head started aching and spinning... these are books that are better off used for recycling. That reminds me I have a handful of books that fall under that category of "not donate but recycle the paper".
But yet, the morons in Silicon Valley read and follow his preachings religiously!
It's none of our business what they read but unfortunately, these morons control so much of our lives and naturally it becomes our business what values and belief's these morons follow. Adrian Daub's has a great synopsis of this cognitive dissonance:
Tech leaders have long been infatuated with thinkers who reverse the commonsense picture of how power in our society is distributed and how it operates. And we have largely gone along for the ride. Examples of self-styled victimhood are dime-a-dozen in Silicon Valley.
The optic of a multibillion-dollar corporation spending millions of dollars arguing it’s been treated unfairly by being forced to play by the same rules as other companies already reveals the enormous distortion of scale involved in arguments of this type. The idea that your company is being victimized by nefarious professors and union organizers goes further, however: The kind of thinking that allows this to happen first involves a wholesale reconceptualization of power.
Thiel and Uber have to convince themselves that, if looked at the right way, power in society doesn’t flow as common sense would suggest it does. In this way of thinking, people who — to ordinary understanding — seem as though they have little or no actual power secretly have loads of it; the person who has somehow made billions and has a speaking slot at the ruling party’s national convention in truth has none of it. Tech loves its philosophical references and its profound-seeming ideas. So when it comes to this curious, but deeply useful, distortion of scale and power relations, tech unsurprisingly has expended extensive intellectual resources to convince itself of its victimhood.
Who made the powerless so powerful? While tech magnates almost never invoke him directly, the idea that in society the strong are the real victims goes back to 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his On the Genealogy of Morality. Christianity, Nietzsche argued, had managed the trick of telling the strong and powerful to aspire to the meekness and powerlessness of the people they had power over — to adopt, as he put it, a “slave morality.” Once Christianity had pulled this off, the weak and powerless were the true oppressors. The powerful were forced to understand their strength as sinful. Suddenly unsure of themselves and terrified of damnation, they had become the victims of a world-historic con.
Nietzsche proposed that exercising power wasn’t bad and that a moral system that said it was, well, that was unnatural and unhealthy. He wasn’t interested in economics; it was a question of morality for him. Ayn Rand applied this idea to places where it mattered to tech: to board rooms, to industries, to entire societies. Rand’s fiction works portray a world in which the strong are being hemmed in by “second-handers” who weaponize their own weakness, their own dependence on others, while the “makers” are forced to submit to regulation in penance for their own autonomy.
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Let’s say you like this idea of the powerful being the true victims, but you’d prefer it to be even more counterintuitive. The thought of René Girard might be for you. A philosopher who taught in Stanford’s French department for decades, he’s not as widely read as Rand. But Thiel was one of his students, and Thiel has made spreading Girard’s gospel one of his missions. Girard is most famous for his theory of the scapegoat: All desire, Girard taught, is mimetic — meaning we desire things because others desire the same things. Culture displaces the inevitable conflict that arises as a result by redirecting reciprocal violence toward one single, shared target. In this way, the tension that exists within any social group is refocused onto a single individual.
[---]In a way, it’s not surprising that an industry used to getting its way would locate philosophies that buttress its attempts to evade regulation and generate positive PR. But two things stand out about tech’s adoption of this philosophical preoccupation with the victimization of the powerful. First, there’s the fact that we listen to tech leaders as thinkers in ways that are fairly unprecedented. My yoga instructor recently chose to “close out our practice” with some sage words from Steve Jobs — it’s hard to imagine Lee Iacocca being invoked in that way after a vinyasa flow. We live in a culture that defers to these ideas with exceptional credulity. That’s what makes this preoccupation so troubling: If rich people want to adjust their categories to deal with their inevitable cognitive dissonance, then that’s one thing. But what if they adjust ours in the bargain?
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