PETER THIEL VS CURT DOOLITTLE ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT FAILURES
Same Argument, Slightly Different Narratives
Thiel, a fellow libertarian, in a September interview at the Hoover Institution, discusses his take on the failure of the enlightenment to produce a theory of man, and attendant social science, and the consequences thereof.
Peter’s (correct) take is that the enlightenments were a reaction to a period of bloody warfare over religion. And after a bloody war over religion we were reluctant to have another war over the nature of man – and gave up.
That take attributes greater agency to man than I do. That does not mean it’s false. It means that he’s describing the human reaction as they would understand it, and i’m describing the human incentives regardless of whether they understood them
My take is only marginally different, stating that each civilization other than the british resisted the anglo empirical revolution, and that each group happily extracted the church from politics in reaction to the wars of religion, but that they preserved their group strategy, group strategic nature of man, and group grammar in preservation of their strategy including the nature of man.
And that we went through conflicts anyway: the french revolution, the german imperial restoration, the russian revolution, the chinese revolution, the american jewish counter-revolution, and the muslim counter-revolution.
And, because we failed to solve the problem we left open these counter revolutions, including the current female,progressive, jewish, and muslim counter revolutions.
But again, we had solved the nature of man by the 1920’s and correctly started the nature of man – which, honestly, smith and hume largely got right, missing only darwin(biology), spencer (sociology), and nietzsche (religion).
And of course, my take is that P SOLVED THE PROBLEM of metaphysics, psychology, social science, economics, politics, and the nature of man.
But that we are going to need to complete the conflict over the nature of man that was not settled in the postwar, prewar- darwinian, or enlightenment eras.
So yes, we will need a civil, civilizational, and cross civilizational war to save mankind from our failure to save mankind in the greeco-roman, and anglo-american eras.