In one sentence
The Enlightenment’s economic and liberal picture of humanity is incomplete: people are driven not only by comfort and self-preservation but also by religion, honor, imitation, sacrifice, and violence. After 9/11, this forgotten dimension becomes politically decisive. Yet openly reviving older, more violent forms of politics is impossible in a nuclear age. The responsible response is a Straussian middle path: recover difficult truths about human nature without turning them into apocalyptic or tyr
Overview
Thiel presents the essay as an intellectual reexamination prompted by September 11, 2001. He begins with the apparent failure of economic development and rational-choice assumptions to explain religious terrorism, then traces the Western retreat from questions about virtue, religion, and human nature. He contrasts Locke’s liberal compromise with Carl Schmitt’s insistence that politics necessarily involves friend–enemy conflict. Leo Strauss appears as the mediator: philosophy should recover deeper truths, but communicate them cautiously because societies may be unable to bear them directly. René Girard then supplies a theory of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating, suggesting that civilization itself rests on concealed violence. The essay ends with a Christian-inflected recommendation: no return to archaic violence, no faith in automatic liberal progress, and no retreat from political responsibility; when uncertain, statesmen should generally choose peace.
Core ideas
9/11 exposes the limits of economic explanations
Thiel argues that the perpetrators of September 11 were not simply impoverished or economically excluded. Their wealth, education, and ideological commitment challenge theories that treat prosperity and incentives as sufficient to contain violence. Material development may reduce some conflicts, but it cannot dissolve religious conviction, sacrificial commitment, or the desire for glory.
Modern liberalism rests on strategic ignorance
The Enlightenment avoided disputes over human nature, virtue, and the true religion because earlier attempts to settle them produced religious and civil war. Locke’s liberalism replaces substantive agreement with uncertainty: because no one can authoritatively know the human ‘X,’ individuals receive wide latitude in religion, speech, property, and commerce. This compromise creates peace, but also leaves liberal societies poorly prepared for people who regard those questions as ultimate.
Locke’s capitalism depends on a hopeful account of history
Locke treats labor and property rights as the basis of growing prosperity and encourages attention to future production rather than the often-violent origins of wealth. Thiel highlights oil wealth and the history of authoritarian extraction as counterexamples. Liberal capitalism may eventually outcompete violent or religious movements, but its long-run advantages do not protect society from short-run catastrophe.
Schmitt: politics cannot abolish enemies
Carl Schmitt argues that human beings remain divided by fundamental questions and must eventually distinguish friends from enemies. Attempts to declare conflict obsolete—through universal law, pacifism, or global administration—can become forms of self-deception. For Thiel, Schmitt correctly identifies the persistence of the political, but his hard-line remedies are unacceptable after nuclear weapons make unlimited conflict potentially terminal.
Technological administration can become a substitute religion
Schmitt’s warning about a ‘religion of technicity’ anticipates a world promising total security, comfort, and mastery over nature. Thiel treats this as a dangerous fantasy: systems that appear to administer everything can conceal unresolved moral and political decisions. Efficiency and safety do not eliminate the need to decide what human beings are for.
Strauss: truth exists, but must be approached indirectly
Leo Strauss argues that classical and religious writers often used esoteric writing: an outward teaching suitable for public order alongside deeper implications available to careful readers. Thiel applies this idea to political philosophy. The point is not simply secrecy for its own sake, but recognition that some truths can destabilize a city when detached from judgment, context, or moral formation.
Strauss’s middle path rejects both absolutism and relativism
Strauss preserves the possibility of truth about human nature without offering a universal rule for every political situation. Thiel summarizes the position as a hierarchy of ends without universally valid rules of action. Statesmanship therefore requires judgment about particular circumstances—especially war, founding, emergency, and the survival of a political community.
Girard: imitation creates rivalry and scapegoats
René Girard’s central model is mimetic desire: people learn not only actions but also what to want from others. When several people desire the same object or status, imitation produces escalating rivalry. Communities historically stabilized this crisis by uniting against a scapegoat, whose expulsion or killing generated temporary peace. Religious myths and institutions then concealed the founding violence by portraying the victim as guilty.
Practical takeaways
- When analyzing conflict, do not ask only what incentives or material grievances are present. Also ask what identities, sacred commitments, rival models, humiliations, and desires for recognition are operating.
- Treat claims that politics, ideology, or history has ended as hypotheses requiring scrutiny. Apparent neutrality may conceal an unexamined moral or political commitment.
- Separate recognition of danger from endorsement of extremism. Schmitt’s diagnosis of conflict can be useful even when his more drastic political conclusions are rejected.
- Look for mimetic escalation: people may want something more intensely because others want it, including prestige, weapons, influence, or martyrdom.
- Examine founding stories and institutional myths. They may legitimize a community while concealing coercion, exclusion, or violence in its origins.
- In high-stakes decisions, avoid both automatic pacifism and automatic force. Thiel’s concluding rule is contextual judgment, with a presumption toward peace in genuinely close cases.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The essay is interpretive and polemical, not an even-handed history of Locke, Schmitt, Strauss, or Girard. Thiel often compresses complex thinkers into roles within his argument.
- Its account of September 11 strongly emphasizes ideology and human nature while giving relatively little attention to U.S. foreign policy, organizational dynamics, regional politics, or other explanations of terrorism.
- The discussion risks treating ‘the Enlightenment,’ ‘the West,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘the modern world’ as more unified than they historically were.
- Thiel’s use of Schmitt is especially delicate because Schmitt was associated with authoritarian and Nazi legal theory. The essay recognizes the danger of Schmittian extremism but still draws heavily on his categories.
- Girard’s account of scapegoating is presented as a grand theory of cultural origins. Its explanatory power is suggestive, but the essay does not establish it empirically or compare it systematically with rival anthropological theories.
- The closing recommendation to favor peace in close cases is morally significant but operationally under-specified: the essay offers no general test for identifying a genuinely close case or balancing peace against deterrence and protection of victims.
Questions worth revisiting
- Does Thiel show that liberal economic models are intrinsically inadequate, or only that they are inadequate when used as complete theories of motivation?
- Can a society safely preserve esoteric or elite knowledge without creating paternalism, manipulation, or an unaccountable ruling class?
- If public myths help stabilize institutions, what should replace them once their violent or exclusionary origins become widely known?
- Is mimetic rivalry mainly a source of violence, or can institutions redirect it into achievement, competition, and cooperation?
- How should a statesman distinguish prudent restraint from dangerous indecision when the consequences of force and inaction are both uncertain?
- Does Thiel’s Christian conclusion follow from the preceding political philosophy, or does it introduce a theological commitment that the earlier analysis does not establish?
Return to this when…
Return to this essay when thinking about terrorism, political theology, ideological conflict, elite versus mass knowledge, the limits of rational-choice explanations, mimetic competition, or the tension between maintaining social order and revealing unsettling truths.