JD Vance met Peter Thiel in 2011, when Thiel gave a speech at Yale Law School. Vance had moved up from Ohio State to Yale, rocketing through the American elite. Thiel was a former lawyer turned venture capitalist turned Silicon Valley mogul. At the time, as Vance puts it, Thiel was “hardly a household name,” but he already had a notable career. Thiel was the founder of PayPal, and the “don” of what Fortune journalist Jeffrey M. O’Brien called “the PayPal Mafia,” the network of PayPal employees who would go on to become major players in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Thiel was of the world of Silicon Valley, but in some ways not a part of it. Since his days as an undergraduate at Stanford, where he founded the conservative newspaper The Stanford Review, Thiel had been an entrepreneur of the heterodox and the contrarian. After a short stint as a securities lawyer, he had gone into finance and then Big Tech, building or investing in some of the most notable companies in the Valley—including Facebook—but also keeping his distance from what he took to be the Valley’s conformist brand of liberalism.
Thiel’s 2011 talk argued that elites at places like Yale Law School were far too focused on competing with their peers, mindlessly moving up the ladder of prestige. Graduates did not focus enough on creating anything of real or lasting value. And, as Vance wrote in a 2020 blog post on The Lamp, Thiel connected the problem of “elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs” with a broader technological and economic stagnation, born of an inability or unwillingness to use technology to make life better. Thiel counselled avoiding competition and focusing instead on creating (and capturing) real value where others were not thinking to compete.
Vance writes that he had an “obsession with achievement” that was born, in part, out of a profound conformity of thought. He wanted to rise through the ranks at elite institutions not to achieve anything meaningful but rather to win an empty “social competition.” Thiel’s argument thus struck a chord with Vance, launching him on a journey that, among other stops, included an embrace of Catholicism in place of his natal Protestantism.
It is clear why there would be a resonance between Vance and Thiel. Thiel too tells his story as a story of being failed by established meritocratic structures. His message to Vance’s law school class might well have been advice to his younger hypercompetitive self: don’t buy into the values of your peers and the wider world around you. They want you to be a senior partner at a law firm, but you’ll never go from Zero to One (in the words of Thiel’s 2014 business book) if you follow the herd.
Vance and Thiel became friends. Thiel blurbed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance spent two years working for Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital. With Thiel’s backing, Vance would co-found Narya Capital. Narya focused on supporting companies in the Rust Belt communities Vance wrote about in his memoir, but also more generally opposing what it saw as the political limitations and biases of the Valley’s “Big Tech oligarchy.” Among other companies, Narya has invested in Rumble, the conservative video-sharing platform, which Thiel also invested in. Additionally, Thiel contributed generously to Vance’s political career. In 2022, Vance ran for Senate in Ohio, renouncing his prior criticisms of Trump and the MAGA movement. Thiel contributed $15 million to a super PAC supporting Vance’s run.
One might momentarily mistake Thiel’s critique of meritocracy as a critique from the left, but it is rather a critique of neoliberalism from the far right. Thiel has come to be skeptical of democracy, and he has been heavily involved in promoting the career and the ideas of the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, who argues that monarchy is superior to democracy. Vance too has expressed admiration for Yarvin and his attacks on what Yarvin calls the “Cathedral”—or, as it is called elsewhere, the Deep State—that is, the permanent bureaucracy that comprises the federal government, and its liberal enablers in academia and journalism. In this way, both Thiel and Vance are part of what has been called the post-liberal right. Like Yarvin, they advocate for “RAGE”—Retire All Government Employees—as part of what Yarvin calls a “hard reset” or “reboot” of American society.
Much has already been written about Thiel and Vance’s connections to neo-reactionary thought—and these are alarming indeed—but the most important intellectual bond between Vance and Thiel is not directly political, although it also may have alarming political consequences. In addition to helping him transition into the world of post-liberal neo-reaction, Thiel crucially introduced Vance to the work of the philosopher and literary critic René Girard. It is in Girard’s thought—his account of what he called mimetic theory and his description of the “scapegoating” mechanism—that we arguably see Thiel’s deepest influence on Vance. To understand Vance, who could soon be vice president to the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, we must understand Girard.
René Girard (1923-2015) was a French philosopher and literary critic, most famous for developing what he called “mimetic theory” and for his writing on sacred violence. Building a universal anthropology, albeit one with strongly Christian undertones, Girard argued that human desire was fundamentally mimetic. People desire what they see other people desire. And as they compete for the same scarce resources, violence spreads through the community. Violence becomes generalized and escalates in intensity and force. In order to quell this violence, a symbolic culprit must be found and eliminated from the community. This is how the scapegoat mechanism is born. The scapegoat mechanism allows a community to resolve its raging conflicts by channeling its violence onto a symbolic sacrifice and temporarily wiping the slate clean, according to Girard.
The original scapegoat appears in Leviticus 16 as part of the Yom Kippur ritual. One goat is sacrificed; the other is allowed to live and to carry away the sins of the Israelites from the tabernacle. But Girard thinks of the scapegoat mechanism as universal. All religious societies channel rivalry and violence, born of mimetic desire, into the sacrifice of this or that scapegoat. Of course, sacrificing the scapegoat doesn’t quell violence for long, and the cycle must begin anew. Yet Christianity represents something new for Girard in the history of the scapegoat, in that the Christian telling of the scapegoat myth recognizes that Christ is innocent, and not only innocent but all-powerful. The community sacrifices Christ, but the Christian comes to see that the scapegoat mechanism is fundamentally unjust.
Rather than construct a person who bears all the sins of the community, according to Girard, Christianity tells the story of someone who is both all-powerful and completely and perfectly innocent, and who is therefore the victim of his community. The scapegoat in Christianity is, it turns out, the wronged party, a holy victim. Moreover, the superior being, in the form of Christ, allows himself to be unjustly martyred, and in so doing reveals the injustice of the scapegoat process.
The death of Christ becomes an occasion for Christians to reorient their mimetic desire. Rather than mimicking other humans who are competing for the same resources, Christians strive now to mimic Christ and through Christ God. Thus, at least in theory, is the cycle of mimetic violence ended.
To understand Vance, who could soon be vice president to the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, we must understand Girard.
But the Christian story also had the paradoxical effect of desacralizing the scapegoat. Pre-Christian societies depended on myth as a means of covering up the violent excesses of mimetic desire. The community could tell itself that it had quelled the source of communal strife. But for Enlightenment thinkers, the scapegoat myth no longer had force. In this way, Christianity laid the foundations for aspects of the Enlightenment. But by rejecting God along with the scapegoat myth, the Enlightenment did nothing to quell or redirect mimetic desire. Instead, the old mechanisms of mimetic rivalry and envy persisted. Only now there was no way to satisfy the community. The war of all against one (the scapegoat) threatened again to become a (postmodern) Hobbesian war of all against all. This, anyway, is what Girard means when he writes that “atheism is a Christian invention.”
