PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel described American opposition to technology and progress as a cultural challenge during an interview Tuesday.
“Our culture dislikes technology in all its forms,” Thiel said Tuesday at an event organized by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Look at just the science fiction films. They basically portray technology that does not work. It’s dystopian. It kills people. It’s ‘The Matrix,’ ‘The Terminator,’ ‘Avatar,’ ‘Elysium.’ I watched the ‘Gravity’ movie the other day; you would not want to go into space, you’d want to be back on this muddy island here. That is sort of the dominant trope in our society. It is a society that does not want change. It does not believe in progress.”
Thiel used the 2008 Obama presidential campaign as an example showing Americans don’t value change or technology.
“The 2008 Obama presidential campaign, the initial slogan was ‘hope and change’. The slogan at the end was, ‘the change we need.’ So the slogan changed from the maximal, ‘hope and change,’ to the absolutely minimal, ‘the change we need,’ because the word ‘change’ poll-tested very badly. Because if you’re a politician, and if you speak in front of people and say, ‘Everything is going to change. Your biology is going to change, your genes are going to change, you need to stop building cars and [start] working with computers.’ … People do not want change in our society. That’s the big cultural challenge we have.”
Thiel was answering a question about gene editing, and whether Americans would get involved. He said China, Israel, and India were more interested in genetic improvement technologies and predicted Americans would oppose it.
Thiel also challenged the notion that Americans are living in a democratic system. “It’s not at all clear that we’re living in anything resembling a democracy. We’re living in sort of a representative republic, but then that’s modified through a judicial system, and … that’s been largely superseded by these very unelected agencies of one sort or another, which really drive most of the decision making. … Calling our society a democracy, whatever may be good or bad about democracy, is very, very deeply misleading. We’re not a republic, not a constitutional republic, we’re actually sort of a state that’s dominated by these very unelected, technocratic agencies.” Thiel went on to call government agencies “sclerotic” and “deeply nonfunctioning,” but that some political alternatives were even worse. For example, Thiel disagrees with much of what the Federal Reserve does, but said congressional attempts to dictate Federal Reserve policy seem even worse.
Although Thiel was founder of an online payment system, he seemed to downplay damage done by the Federal Reserve to the economy. “We have all these debates about Fed policy. … Money and the nature of money is somehow much less important than all the micro-regulations that make up the economy. If you gave me a choice of getting rid of the vast bulk of government regulations and keeping the Fed, I’d much rather do that than keeping all the other zoning laws and crazy rules we have and going with … any sort of alternate currency one could come up with.”
Thiel also criticized the U.S. education system. “Even this idea that the university system is somewhat screwed up, somewhat broken … this not even very controversial anymore.” Thiel said he once gave an interview where the writer expected Thiel’s opinion on education to offend many people, but 70 percent of the comments on the article agreed with Thiel. “This idea that the educational system is badly broken is not even controversial.”
Thiel co-founded Paypal in 1998 and provided some seed funding for Facebook.
Thiel’s remarks were delivered during a public interview with Tyler Cowen, the chairman of the board at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an influential economist.
