Extended description

Alt-text: Article here: But to understand why Thiel may be willing to take that risk, Palaver says you need to first understand that he’s human. “What I’ve observed are traces of deep fear,” he told me. “Fear of death, fear of terrorism.” It all comes down to a lack of trust and a craving for security, Palaver suspects. “There are so many cases where he expresses fears and concerns and a need for protection,” Palaver says. “And if your main thing is seeking protection, you play with fire.” —------- Tweet thread here: Tweets: I'd be on board with Thiel's creepy techno fantasia if he could bring René Girard back to life just so Girard could tell him (and Vance) how criminally they have misunderstood him, not to mention Christianity. Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he's spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a "machine god" & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms. He rises who realizes his immortality now. If the only priesthood in which someone truly believes is the life extension profession, a project hewn to mortality fleeing the Way itself, no wonder they sing unconscious of a desperate atheist life bounded by a terror of annihilation. This curious doctrine, which supplants the entropic reality of the body with an incorporeal simulation, shows Moravec’s fantasy to be less Christian than gnostic—and, it must be added, a mighty simpleminded gnosticism at that. As William Irwin Thompson notes in The American Replacement of Nature, “With its detestation of the imprisonment of the soul in matter, its imagery of mind as light, male, and informational, a logos spermaticos, and the flesh as dark, female, and entrapping, Gnosticism is a basin of attraction that awaits those naive technologists who step outside modern society’s conventional worldview.” Thompson's point is astute: As modern Prometheans pursue the “rational” possibilities of science and technology, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain the commonsensical perspective of the man on the street. Instead, such thinkers and tinkerers are loosed in a world of possibility whose profound metaphysical and religious dimensions they are often incapable of handling, let alone recognizing; as such, they find themselves unconsciously drawn to the soul's most adolescent fantasies of transcendence and immortality.