For Whom The Bell Thiels
In November 1623, John Donne had a near death experience. The poet, priest, partyboy and occasional pauper fell sick with a fever - possibly typhus. Ignoring instructions to rest, as he recovered he wrote what became “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes”. Not so much a poetry collection as a stream of consciousness reflection on life, death and all states in between, the best known lines come from Meditation 17.
No man is an island
For Donne, even in our pain and our extremity, we are not alone. We share with each other a common humanity and a common experience. We are connected to each other. For Donne this connection comes through the Church and God “When she [the Church] baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member”.
For Donne, this connection transcends death: “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated”
The meditation is regularly punctuated by the ringing of a church bell - until: “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
As humanity we share a common fate. Death comes to us all. We are bound in our death. Donne’s words could come across as morbid or depressing but I find them vibrant and alive. While I don’t share Donne’s beliefs in the afterlife, God, or his Church; I do share his sense that we are all connected together. I am not an island and if I try to be, I’ll sink and drown.
Seasteading is living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, has a different take. In a recent interview with Barton Gellman of The Atlantic, he describes his worldview in general and his frustrations with the current political process and his technological projects in particular. Gellman’s piece is neither hatchjob nor hagiography but Thiel does not come across as a happy camper, despite his unfathomable wealth.
Thiel is a thermian - a reader of SF who wants to make fiction a reality. He also espouses a Great Man theory of history - the fate of the world lies in the hands of few exception (male) individuals who define the future for everyone else. Unsurprisingly, Thiel is actively hostile to both liberalism (especially the forms that seek to check ambition against ambition though he’s much more comfortable with a kind of will-to-power libertarianism) and democracy (the masses have nothing to offer the Great Man). However his attempts to turn one against the other have not left him satisfied. He expected Donald Trump to remove any regulation from Silicon Valley. Instead he got a mess and both sides of American politics going after social media, crypto, and now AI.
All this is to be expected but Thiel also seems disillusioned with the state of technological progress. Instead of epoch-making discoveries, the tech sector seems to be producing slightly more expensive ways of ordering a pizza or verbally abusing strangers. Where are the Great Men, the John Galts who will transform society? Thiel himself made his fortune with PayPal - which went from a libertarian’s wet dream of freeing money from the shackles of the state to a method for eBay to charge credit cards. He is also not a technologist. Perhaps Thiel’s dark secret (that even Gawker could not uncover) is that he is not John Galt but rather Tom Buchanan. Ironically for Thiel, the last period where America was creating world-changing technologies (and also producing the science fiction that he loves), it was doing so with the funding and under the direction of the government that Thiel so loathes.
The bleakest part of the article relates Thiel’s obsession with immortality. He turns down Bill Gates’ notion that billionaires should be improving humanity and instead seeks out technologies that will let him cheat death. He has poured millions of dollars into cryogenics, diets, exercise, and medications. This all seems profoundly selfish. Thiel cannot bear the thought that his life might end like everyone else. Whereas Donne finds comfort in the commonality of death, Thiel sees only horror.
While Thiel has undoubtedly been a shrewd entrepreneur at times, I find his obsession risible. Personally, I think death is valuable. The one guarantee of social change is that we all die. Grief is natural at the deaths of those we love. The goal that all human beings should have the life they deserve is a noble one. But death frees the young from the old. It is important that I die. That you die. And that Peter Thiel dies. A world in which the rich live extended lifespans will almost certainly foreclose the kinds of invention that Thiel so craves. Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
So if death is not only inevitable but also to be celebrated then let us remember that death is something that we share. We are not alone.
I love this Meditation!
It’s as Thiel has some kind of arrested development. Thiel has the analysis of history of a 5th grader, and a 5th grader’s goals with his own individual existence. Most of these people have some kind of frozen psycho-social development displaying the complete impossibility of wisdom and the extremely minimal humility of young children. They are also lacking in curiosity, which is a trait that intelligent people almost always have. Such people continue to inquire throughout their lives.
He really is someone who would make a GREAT character for a sci fi novel but as a very limited and troublesome villain, not as a protagonist.
The Epic of Gilgamesh already covered this problem, and Gilgamesh is sort of sympathetic in his own way. But this is because he lost his love. His quest starts with loss and love. Tolstoy also had a lot of problems with accepting death, after he lost his brother. So—it happens. But to get stuck there like Thiel does is a sign of intellectual and character limitations.
One thing I find a little bit interesting about this ‘quest’ is that many of the billionaires justify their mendacity with quests that have an adolescent character, and then they pretend that they are providing humanity with something in a way that nobody else can—like Musk and Mars or Bezos and whatever the hell he’s doing with space….or whatever. So do they genuinely believe they NEED a justification for their position? If they do, I’d say this is a vulnerability in their world view because the justification they provide is wack-a-doodle and unwanted. Or is it a cynical ploy like that of Bankman Fried and ethical altruism to provide cover for a larger grift.
Or is it a kind of self-deception ploy to help them cope with their own fears?
It’s honestly unclear whether—after a hundred years (or even less) one would be the ‘same person’ in any meaningful sense. They have never even inquired what it is to have a ‘self’ such that the ‘self’ survives over time. Among a vast array of other things they have not considered. I suppose they are not more absurd than other emperors and Caesars but they are pretty damn absurd, and more sensible people should oppose them as much as possible.