I've long considered the connexion of Law and Morality to be weak and tenuous.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/31/why-so-serious/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

After listening to this survival-cannibalism-on-the-high-seas story by Judge Coleridge in 1870 and the attendant murder convictions, my opinion gets categorically worse. Pictures at 11.

#philosophy #psychology #law #morality #morals #jurisprudence #consistancy #trials #blog #hiatus #video #society #justice #humancondition #AskMeWhy #politics #girard #serious #history

Had a chat with a film critic who claimed Peter #Thiel completely misread Rene #Girard. And he's right, although 'misread' is much too generous. Thiel didn't misinterpret Girard, more like reverse engineered him.

Girard explained that human desire is imitative, contagious as well as violent. We scapegoat to keep the mob from tearing itself apart. Thiel read that & thought, "great! a growth strategy!" Instead of engaging Girard like a philosopher, he harvested him like intellectual IP.

"Mobilizing Rousseau against Thiel, we may be more optimistic about human nature and believe in the possibility of democracy. We should reject Thiel’s false dilemma between state totalitarianism and libertarianism: there are more options in between, even in the U.S. And even global governance could be organized in a (more) democratic way.

Yet it remains a challenge to deal with the problem of violence in a way that does not lead to totalitarianism. This is not only an issue in the post-9/11 context in which Thiel’s thoughts developed, but also and perhaps especially in today’s divided and polarized political world.

This divisive context is not unrelated to tech. Current digital social media, including the Facebook Thiel invested in, have monetized mimetic desire. Girard’s theory has become a business model. The result is there for all to see, and it’s rather ugly. Social media have become the main theatres of mimetic rivalry. Artificial intelligence, in turn, doesn’t seem to make things better, undermining democracy and creating the soil for new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

That takes us back to the tech world. In practice, Thiel’s way of dealing with the Girardian problem is Palantir. Monopoly as a means to avoid mimetic competition, a classic recipe of Big Tech (as Palaver reminded his audience in his recent lecture at the University of Vienna). But also surveillance and control of the population to deal with the problem of violence. Rejecting the state, Thiel has raised a new Leviathan. Like other libertarian Tech bros, he criticises surveillance and control when it comes from the nation state, but meanwhile he has installed his own “Antichrist” anchored in the private sector (which in turn services Trump’s surveillance state and foreign states)."

https://coeckelbergh.medium.com/enemies-scapegoats-and-the-antichrist-2569ed834fdc

#SiliconValley #Thiel #BigTech #Libertarianism #Surveillance #Democracy #Scapegoating #Philosophy #Girard