Competition Is For Losers

The most widely read business book of its decade contains a complete theory of sacrificial violence, and never names the man whose theory it is. He taught at the same university, at the same time, and the author later paid for his conferences.

A course on the thought of Peter Thiel and René Girard.

Philosophy · Technology

What you will learn

  • State what the scapegoat mechanism claims, as Zero to One states it.
  • Explain why the absence of one name is evidence of something rather than nothing.
  • Describe the institutional politics of Stanford before Thiel arrived.
  • Distinguish what the record shows about Thiel and Girard from what is commonly claimed.
  • State the mimetic hypothesis and what follows from it.
  • Explain why the scapegoat mechanism only works when it is not understood.
  • Identify what Girard says about people who believe they desire independently.
  • Identify Girardian technical vocabulary in a text that never cites Girard.

Course outline

  1. The Count — Chapter fourteen of Zero to One contains a complete anthropological theory of sacrifice, compressed into three pages. The man who built that theory taught at Stanford while Thiel was a student there…
  2. The Campus — Stanford radicalised Thiel, but not in the direction the story usually runs. The university already had a politics of its own, and the man who connected Thiel to Girard was the dean of its chapel.
  3. What Girard Said — Mimetic theory, in Girard's own words — desire as borrowed, rivalry as structural, the scapegoat as the machine that makes peace out of murder. And the part that rarely travels: his account of the…
  4. The First Book — The Diversity Myth, 1995 — Thiel's first book, an account of the Stanford he had just left. It runs Girard's apparatus in Girard's vocabulary, quotes his co-author by name, and never names him.…
  5. The Room — July 2004 — Thiel founds Palantir and co-convenes a six-day private seminar with Girard. The volume that came out of it carries his essay naming Girard throughout, and a copyright page recording who…
  6. The Domains — A sentence written in 2007 becomes an operation in 2011. Champerty, the Gawker litigation, and the exit politics that runs on the same logic — with the argument that makes all of it follow.
  7. What the Teacher Said — Girard's own verdict on competition and autonomy, which contradicts his most famous student on both. Then the moment the theory catches its own author — and what this course thinks the twenty-year…

Built from

This course was built from 10 books.

  • Max Chafkin, The Contrarian
  • Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One
  • David Sacks and Peter Thiel, The Diversity Myth
  • Robert Hamerton-Kelly (ed.), Politics and Apocalypse
  • Jimmy Soni, The Founders
  • Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy
  • Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley
  • Cynthia Haven, Evolution of Desire — A Life of René Girard
  • James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual
  • René Girard, Violent Origins; Evolution and Conversion; Deceit, Desire and the Novel

Part of the Simposeum course library.