Thursday, June 26, 2025

Have We Lost the Future?

From Ross Douthat's interesting interview (NY Times) with Peter Thiel:

Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. . . .

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

I think Thiel's observations about a middle class society being invested in the future are astute. So, perhaps, as I have written here before, the reason our public mood is so bad is that nobody is excited about the future. I don't think I know a single person who expects the world to be better in ten years than it is now.

Thiel of course thinks the solution is to move fast and break things, abolish regulations, cut taxes, slash the government, unleash high-tech capitalism, etc., and he regards the reluctance of voters to embrace those policies as a main driver of our "stagnation." ("We should take a lot more risk.") But even he seems unsure that this would work; when Douthat talks about Trump and Musk maybe ushering an era of bold risk-taking, Thiel says, "You’re framing it really, really optimistically here."

As an aside, I appreciated this comment from Thiel about getting involved in politics: "I am schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important, and it’s incredibly toxic. . . . It’s zero sum. It’s crazy."

And here is Thiel on AI:

One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. . . .

It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it.

To me Thiel's attitude is puzzling because I think we are doing fine. But I have to pay attention because so many of my contemporaries share his view that our society is somehow stuck or broken, and he has a compelling take on why that is: because creeping bureaucracy and political logjams keep us from doing amazing things like going to the Moon or curing dementia, and this leads to societal depression, because we need regular bulletins from the exciting future to remain optimistic.

Because I don't think things in America are bad, I oppose radically shaking them up. So far as I can tell, most of the radicalism we have seen lately, whether that means MAGA rage against immigrants, "reconsidering" childhood vaccines, rioting against "capitalism," or Queers for Palestine, has actively made life worse. I do not see radical change as a likely or even plausible solution to whatever is troubling us.

If that condemns us to "stagnation," so be it. We live in a place that has great trouble keeping out the millions trying to get here, and that ought to give us pause about rolling the dice on some kind of big change. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good thing for Peter Thiel that he made lots of money and backed a winning horse in politics. Otherwise his ideas would be lost - unheard mutterings in a cabin in the woods. The anti-christ, the shift to a global authoritarian regime, stagflation as a cause of all this. Give me a break. Throw in a couple verses of the bible and voila you have a deep thinker of the right-wing.