r/AskLibertarians

When news broke of Peter Thiel comparing AI safety figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky to the "Antichrist," most commentary dismissed it as clickbate hyperbole. Having broken down night 1 of his lecture in detail, treating it purely as a cheap insult misses the actual Western intellectual canon he is deploying on stage.

Thiel's lecture rests on a very specific lineage: Vladimir Solovyov's Short Tale of the Antichrist (where the Antichrist presents as a hyper-moral, safety-obsessed philanthropist,) Rene Girard's mimetic theory (where safety becomes a scapegoating mechanism), and Carl Schmitt's political theology. He uses these texts to argue that the real civilizational threat isn't just apocalyptic risk, but a global safety regime that enforces total technological stagnation to manage that risk.

What makes the lecture interesting isn't just the texts he cited (Bacon, Solovyov, Girard, the Bible), but the critical structural canon he intentionally left out, specifically how safety apparatuses function under Ivan Illich, Ulrich Beck's Risk Society, and Habermas.

I wrote a full essay mapping out the complete canon behind Night 1, directing what Thiel said on stage versus what his framework omits. Curious to hear how people here evaluate his use of Solovyov and Girard. Does his framing of safetyism as stagnation hold up intellectually or is he misapplying the source material?

Specifically in the US, have Libertarian groups and/or Libertarian communities made any large, significant inroads in the past 100 years?

I think of John Stuart Mill's quote, "The freedom of the individual is limited thus: He must not make himself a nuisance to other people."

(I sincerely apologize if I've already been a nuisance here.)

As I think of that quote, I think, "Holy smokes! If I only had a nickel for all the times that I've perceived that ideal of Mill's to have been infringed upon or absolutely disregarded!"

As I write this, I also think of two individuals: Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura. But did they really significantly advance the libertarian philosophy?

would you rsther live in progressive dictatorship where your life is stable or a freedom country where your life is on stable but on constant pressure to be better

disclaimer this is just a would you rather not mentioning any country