The Oligarchs are Running the Asylum
The Oligarchs are Running the Asylum
The Billionaire Class is Ruining the World
Previously published on August 1st in Brussels Morning Newspaper.
Brussels Morning is a daily online newspaper based in Belgium. BM publishes unique and independent coverage on international and European affairs. With a Europe-wide perspective, BM covers policies and politics of the EU, significant Member State developments, and looks at the international agenda with a European perspective.
The world is shrinking due to a transnational network of male billionaire autocrats. Notably absent are any empresses or Queens. These autocrats effectively function as an international crime syndicate, though there is no conspiratorial cabal as conspiracy theorists are wont to implicate with the likes of Davos, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations. Simply, while ideologically divergent, such as Communist China and “sovereign democratic” nationalist, imperialist Russia, these heads of state autocrats have aims or objectives that are aligned, and thus, an organic synergy or an informal alliance is formed.
Authoritarianism expert Sarah Kendzior posted on X, “…We are not headed for 20th-century strongman fascism; we are headed toward more entrenched mafia state autocracy, which is what we already have.”
To illustrate the point of unprecedented coordination between ideologically divergent world powers, on his CNN show Global Public Square (GPS) from Sunday, July 28th, Fareed Zakaria noted that Russia and China flew strategic bomber jets in a joint patrol exercise near Alaska this past week.
Anne Applebaum, author of her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, has discussed that 20th-century tin pot dictators such as Benito Mussolini of Italy weren’t interested in money — only power and restoring the glory of the nation. Dictators used to be singular figures acting unilaterally. Present-day dictators are united in a loosely held coalition in their castigation of democracies and, in particular, the West as unorganized, if not chaotic, and degenerate, especially sexually.
In the pairing of Donald Trump with J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination for the 2024 U.S. election, MAGA is in bed with Big Tech. Vance is inextricably linked to Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, along with a veritable juggernaut of the who’s who in Silicon Valley (David Sacks, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen) and the New Right (Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, René Girard, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher).
Keeping MAGA weird, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of overlapping fringe ideologies such as TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism).
From the podcast Dave Troy Presents: Understanding TESCREAL with Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, Jun 14, 2023, Torres said, “…the thing that I think is dangerous about these ideologies is that they tend to produce these communities of practice that are very self-referential, and they become cultish is really what the problem is. When you have a bunch of people who are convinced that their worldview and their values override broader societal values, then they’re spinning out of control and are really not accountable to anybody. They are a cult.”
A narcissist is solipsistic or rigidly self-referential, just as any cult leader, or, for that matter, dictator, is. Prof. Sam Vaknin, an expert in narcissism, weighs in on the rigidity of the dictator, “It used to be that psychology thought there was a uniform self, but now psychology thinks rigidity is the nucleus of mental illness. There are no parts inside of the narcissist that can test the narrative that the narcissist is God; there is no opposition. Mental illness is like a dictatorship. There’s a single tyrant and there’s no dissidents and no opposition party. The tyrant/dictator is in control. It’s a dictatorship, mental illness, whereas a democracy is a healthy organism — many parts, many debates.”
The narcissist-dictator’s psychology, in some sort of fit of backward logic, mandates conformity, e.g., to Christian nationalism, whereby his subjects would be “free” from the tyranny of choice. Citizens are compelled to be uniform and cookie-cutter as a relief from options-overwhelm and the dysregulation that can come from “adulting.”
Conveniently, this conformity soothes the amalgamation of internal objects (avatars of people) that comprise the citizenry in the dictator’s distorted and reality-impaired mind. Any deviation from social mores, e.g., family values and traditional social roles, is thus minimized, if not squelched, for the dictator’s maximal ego-syntony or comfort that comes at the expense of citizens’ individuality, agency, and self-efficacy. We can see this imperative for conformity lately in J.D. Vance's prolific misogyny, where he rails against childless cat ladies and goes so far as to claim that women without children are “sociopathic,” “psychotic,” and “deranged.”
Over the years, Fascists such as Donald Trump offer up what one wants to hear; there’s a little something for most everyone in his gibberish. He’s done a clever job of deflecting and skirting the issue on the overturning of Roe vs. Wade — that it’s the state’s choice, that legal scholars never agreed with Roe while alternately, depending on the audience, taking credit for its overturn.
The fatal flaw of fascism is that it tries to be something for everyone, replete with contradictory doctrines. Fascism tries to accommodate every known ideology and every known ideal and fuse them together uneasily.
Fascism was constantly in the making, an eternally half-baked and on-the-fly ideology subject to violent permutations, mutations, and transformations.
Fascist movements suffer from identity confusion/diffusion/disturbance. They are process-oriented and thus impermanent revolutions since fascism is based on the negation of other social forces in permanent civil war.
It was a utopian movement, fascism — in search of a utopia.
During a conservative Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit on Friday, July 26th, Trump urged Christians to vote, imploring, “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Some have interpreted Trump's remarks about not having to vote again in four years to reflect his ongoing accusations of rigged elections, historical voter suppression, a plan to let the courts decide who wins, or signaling violence against opponents to make them too fearful to run.
No matter what nonsense or veiled threats are spewed by Trump, e.g., not having to vote in four years, his acolytes will do mental gymnastics to yield confirmation of their preconceived notions (confirmation bias) and that which gratifies their desired longings. Some of MAGA believe that he will be a traditional president who will leave office in four years; others don’t mind or even prefer that he become America’s first dictator. Some delusionally believe that he would be an oxymoronic and contradiction-in-terms “benevolent dictator.”
While abundantly straightforward, Trump's signaling for dictatorial rule during this speech is denied and contorted to fit predetermined scripts by his adherents in a desperate attempt to normalize the abnormal or, as Democrats are now characterizing Trump, that he is “weird.” By picking J.D. Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump made a dangerous alliance with weird Silicon Valley.
In the hodgepodge or array of competing ideologies that fascism presents — inchoate, inconsistent, and contradictory though they may be — conservatives want to preserve the West with an American First ethos while simultaneously blowing it up: voting for Trump would be the nuclear option.
Broligarchs want to create their own corporate dictatorships called “network states,” i.e., private zones where tech billionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments. Burning Man appears to be a prototype.
Public intellectual and anti-woke crusader James Lindsay has critiqued public-private partnerships as a fascistic merger of state-owned and privately held and/or publicly traded corporations. He has written that, “…our present plight, the so-called “public-private partnership,”…synthesizes Communism and Fascism into one new terror to be managed technocratically, in mockery of the science it will invoke to establish yet another unnecessary tyranny upon the world and its generally innocent people.”
Just as most Americans don't want a Christofascist merger of Christianity and the state in Christian nationalism/dominionism, most Americans don’t want to have tech overlords (any more than we already do). A fantasy-based public-private merger, i.e., technocracy with no checks and balances from an independent government, would disrupt society to the breaking point. Absent any constraints, fascism always rushes in to fill the vacuum.
A lesson from our age of narcissism is that merger/fusion of self and other or in this case public (government) and private (corporate) interests hampers the independence of mind and ingenuity conducive to innovation. Further, this paradigm invites, in the worst-case scenario, totalitarianism, which is antithetical to social developments or what is colloquially termed “progress.”
“Regulatory capture” or the private sector’s control of the regulatory process, while seemingly expeditious and fortuitous, could herald disaster. Short-term profits can come at the expense of long-term gains when the sugar high of immediate gratification of deregulation stalls out long-term growth. Our planet is an exhaustible resource; cryptocurrency and AI are energy-hungry beasts.
Government regulations are Silicon Valley’s broccoli;
it’s good for you even if you don’t want it.
Silicon Valley resents the imposition of the Biden Administration’s regulations throttling the crypto industry, AI, and mergers and acquisitions, which are typically lucrative paths for startup founders to cash in.
Government regulations and taxes inspired Libertarian Peter Thiel to write in his 2009 manifesto, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Analogously, Thiel’s protégé J.D. Vance has identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right.”
Accounting for the tech industry’s newfound cozy relationship with Trump is an aversion to liberal democracy which from a Libertarian perspective, precludes minority interests and expressions with a sledgehammer of a majority-rule vote at the expense of freedom for all to act independently of consensus — what many would consider selfish and narcissistic behavior.
Right-leaning City Journal reports, “For all its populist fulminations, the Right is still seen as the stronger ally of business…In deciding between the party of conformity and pessimism and the party of verve and achievement, many in tech see an easy choice…Trump and the rise of the “New Right” have made it possible to rethink old ideas, propose crazy new ones, and offer bold, ambitious plans for revitalizing America. These plans, coalescing around an America First pursuit of the national interest, align well with an industry full of entrepreneurs and builders eager to accomplish something unprecedented, if only to prove that it’s possible.”
Tech bros, in collusion with Trump, want to disrupt, i.e., burn down “the system,” clear the path, and have nothing to replace anything with other than more tech. If society falls apart due to a lack of oversight and governance, then at least they’ll have that much more wealth to run off to their compounds in New Zealand (or Mars).
Collectively, we have misplaced divine trust in these magical thinkers who have already pushed the bounds of what’s technologically possible. But there is a limiting principle whereby only so much expansion can continue before contraction sets in; even the stock market suffers corrections. It’s possible to push social, political and technological limitations to a breaking point where we, mere mortals, are collateral damage.
MAGA and Silicon Valley share a nihilistic fever dream of disruption and dismantling the pillars of civilization. Thiel, Musk, Russia, and other right-wing media have been planting seeds of doubt in the dollar, setting the stage for a worldwide crypto revolution where, ostensibly and ideologically, the individual is empowered against the state.
From a Libertarian perspective, the state is the ultimate corporation. Instead of transitioning to a multipolar world with the United States hegemony in the rearview mirror, as is often argued today, we would be transitioning to a unipolar world with narcissistic U.S. tech bros at the helm. This transition is not unlike the European Union adopting the Euro over individual countries’ currencies—but on steroids.
Squaring with narcissism’s transactionality, Silicon Valley reifies the pay-for-play nature of bought-and-paid-for government. Trump flip-flopped on banning Chinese-owned ByteDance’s TikTok to get donations for his 2024 campaign from Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire with a 15% interest in TikTok. Trump also promised to roll back environmental regulations once back in office for a $1 billion campaign contribution from 20 oil companies. And all the while Elon Musk offered to donate $45 million a month to Trump's campaign. The brazen kleptocracy is on full display.
Shamelessness marks this age of narcissism. Dictators used to worry how they were perceived on the world stage, if they were perceived as corrupt, punitive and murderous, but they no longer care.
Case Study: Broligarch, Peter Thiel
Tech Bro billionaire and Trump’s V.P. pick, J.D. Vance’s backer, Peter Thiel established Palantir Technologies Inc. (Palantir), a software company that develops data fusion platforms that facilitate machine-assisted and human-driven data analysis, based on data collected by a wide range of spy agencies to help prevent terrorist attacks on the United States.
The company’s track record has been uneven; Palantir, at one point, sued their customer, the United States Army, accusing it of improperly excluding the company from being in the running for a renewed contract — an atypical business move. After securing business again from this lawsuit, they ended up losing their contract years later.
Palantir effectively subsumed the government’s proprietary kludgy system by replacing it with its system’s slick, user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI).
Palantir has worked with the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command and is capable of accessing mountains of data. Its powerful functionality poses a menacing threat to women who would seek abortion across state lines or who are of menstruating age, as Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance’s good friend and a benefactor, has just the system that could aid and abet such a scheme. Pro-choice bro-choice is no choice.
Thiel has effectively positioned Palantir as a pro-military arm of Silicon Valley, a culture dominated by tech gurus who view their work as paving the way for a global utopia with all the bells and whistles concomitant to A New World Order of Techno-Anarchy-Libertarian-Fascism, euphemistically called the “New Right.”
Conjuring up shades of Silicon Valley’s biotechnology entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent blood-testing company, Theranos, military and intelligence officials expressed apprehensions about the firm’s integrity, including concerns over Palantir stretching the truth that its software was instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden.
In 2009, Peter Thiel published a controversial essay on Cato Unbound, a Libertarian website, on the limits of politics:
…I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for Libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guide so-called “social democracy”…
…The critical question then becomes one of means of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode of escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country, and for this reason, I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers: (1) Cyberspace (2) Outer space (3) Seasteading — settling the oceans.
Cyberspace: As an entrepreneur and investor, I have focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed.”
Peter Thiel believes that politics is mostly futile, a conclusion he reached after years of activism. In particular, he thinks that democratic politics is unlikely to bring about Libertarian outcomes.
However, it’s not clear that Trump would bring about Libertarian outcomes either; in May, Trump was booed at the Libertarian conference. If Libertarians ostensibly embrace freedom, Trump's authoritarianism is at odds with their party’s platform.
Conclusion
What Thiel is missing is most everything is intrinsically political. Who, if not some form of government, would harmoniously manage the sea-stead residences once established? The same goes for whatever is built up in outer space. Are we supposed to outsource our agency entirely to robots and merge with machines?
For now at least, interpersonal dynamics and sociopolitics cannot be waved away with a magic wand. This rejection of life lends itself to the fantasy release valve of narcissism. As it is, Elon Musk believes that we are living in a simulation, and therein lies the parallel with narcissism’s paracosm or fantastic space, critical for a shared fantasy between victim and abuser.
Instead of emotionally maturing, these socially inept, reality-impaired Tech-Titan Broligarchs want to dispense with relationships altogether in a nihilistic gutting of what it means to be human. If they have their way, we will not grow up but instead grow out beyond cyberspace to the final frontier.
Reporting from San Francisco,
-GC
Resources/Dig Deeper:
Former attorney and “fixer” for Trump, Michael Cohen, on his podcast Mea Culpa, in an epic rant about how the billionaire class in Silicon Valley is pro-Trump because he will deregulate cryptocurrency and blockchain even though it's not in their long-term best economic interest. Cohen argues that Trump is their ally up until he has power and then he will take their money from them in an effort to become the first trillionaire.
The elite thought they could contain Hitler in Nazi Germany, and it didn't work out so well for them. The German industrialists who financed Adolf Hitler in the 1930s were eventually forced to reap what they sowed; they couldn’t foresee what was coming. Oligarchs in Russia regularly “fall” out of windows when they don't comply with Putin.
The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class by Thom Hartmann
The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview by Ian Ward
The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism: Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is. by Adrienne LaFrance
The Wide Angle: Peter Thiel and the American Apocalypse by Dave Troy
The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn by Dave Troy
Understanding TESCREAL podcast with Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres
“TESCREAL is a convergent Venn diagram of overlapping ideologies (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) that, because they often attract contrarian young men, tend to co-occur with other male-dominated reactionary and misogynistic movements. The Men’s Rights movement (Manosphere), the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way), and PUA (Pick Up Artist) communities are near-adjacent to the TESCREAL milieu.”
"The Real Risk is Totalitarian World Government" - Tech billionaire, Peter Thiel
It’s highly ironic that Peter Thiel, in his halting speech pattern, is warning against Totalitarian world government, when it is Big Tech who is Orwellianly advocating Tech overlords aka what I’ll call “freedom merchants” to supplant government.
Autocracy Inc. With Guest Anne Applebaum | Rick Wilson's The Enemies List
“America is at a crossroads, starring potential autocracy dead in the face. As the election inches closer, we are forced to consider the implications of autocrats and their impact on society. In today's episode Rick is joined by acclaimed author Anne Applebaum to discuss her new book, Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Anne shares insights into the modern autocratic landscape, detailing how today's dictators prioritize power and wealth over ideology and support each other to maintain control. The conversation covers the troubling rise of authoritarianism globally and its implications for the United States, the role of technology in repression and manipulation, and the potential consequences of a second Trump administration on international democracy and alliances.”