Competition Is for Losers

Peter Thiel's ideas, in his own words and at their strongest, from the contrarian question to the apocalypse. At their centre is René Girard, the French thinker whose theory of copied desire and the scapegoat Thiel learned at Stanford and turned into a way of seeing business, politics and history.

A course on the thought of Peter Thiel.

Philosophy · Technology

What you will learn

State Thiel's contrarian question and say what a good answer to it looks like
Explain why Thiel says simply reversing the crowd is not the same as thinking for yourself
Define a secret in Thiel's sense and name the four trends he says have killed belief in secrets
Explain Girard's triangle of subject, model and object using Don Quixote and Amadis of Gaul
Distinguish external from internal mediation and say why only the second produces rivalry
Describe how rivals forget the object and become doubles, using Oedipus and Tiresias
Explain how, in Girard's account, a war of all against all turns into a war of all against one.
Describe the double transfer by which a community makes its victim first guilty and then sacred.

Course outline

The Question — Peter Thiel's thinking starts from one interview question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? The question only makes sense if hard truths are still waiting to be found, so it…
The Borrowed Want — The lesson follows René Girard from Avignon to Indiana to the moment in 1959 when two novels written centuries apart showed him the same plot, and it teaches his first theory: we copy the desires of…
The Victim Who Makes Peace — This lesson follows René Girard from novels to Greek tragedy and anthropology, and shows how he explained the sacred as the work of a crowd that unites against one victim and then worships him for…
The Unmasking — Girard's claim is that the Bible, and above all the Gospels, tells the scapegoat story from the side of the innocent victim. Once that truth is known it cannot be taken back, so the old sacrificial…
Escape the Race — Thiel's case against competition is traced back to the teacher he studied with at Stanford, René Girard, whose theory of imitation, rivalry and the scapegoat Thiel summarised in his own essay. The…
The Stalled Future — Thiel sorts attitudes to the future into four kinds and argues that the West moved from building by definite plan to hoping without one, around 1970. He offers flat wages since 1973 as evidence that…
The Straussian Moment — After 9/11 Thiel asked why modern politics had no account of human violence, and he tested three answers against it: Locke's silence about human nature, Schmitt's politics of enemies, and Strauss's…

Works read in this course

Faust — Goethe's play, from which Thiel quotes the lines Faust speaks to Wagner, that mankind has always crucified and burned those who revealed what they knew to the crowd, and uses them to argue that a secret should be shared only with fellow conspirators.
The Lord of the Rings — Tolkien's tale, from which Thiel takes the verse about a new road or a secret gate as an emblem of hidden paths still waiting to be found.
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel — Girard's first book argues, through the great novelists, that desire is copied from a model rather than born in the self; Thiel takes from it the idea of mimetic desire on which his later thinking rests.
Violence and the Sacred — Girard's 1972 book arguing that sacrifice exists to channel a community's internal violence onto a substitute victim, and that myths like Oedipus hide a collective scapegoating; Thiel takes from it the scapegoat mechanism, in which the war of all against all ends as a war of all against one.
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World — A long conversation with two psychiatrists in which Girard sets out the founding murder and reads the Gospels as its revelation; Thiel takes from it the claim that the hidden violence behind culture has been exposed.
I See Satan Fall like Lightning — Girard's late book reading the stoning at Ephesus and the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery as two opposite answers to the first stone, and arguing that peoples deify their victims; Thiel takes from it the account of how the single-victim mechanism generates gods.
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning — Girard argues that the Bible, and the Gospels above all, take the side of the innocent victim and break the unanimity that myth depends on; Thiel takes from it the account of how the scapegoat lost its power and how the modern concern for victims can become a weapon.
Battling to the End — Girard's last book reads Clausewitz's escalation to extremes as what follows once scapegoats no longer work; Thiel takes from it the claim that the truth about the scapegoat comes out slowly and cannot be reversed, which gives the modern world an apocalyptic dimension.
Anna Karenina — Tolstoy's novel opens with the line that all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; Thiel reverses it to argue that happy companies are all different because each has escaped competition.
Romeo and Juliet — Shakespeare's tragedy of two households "both alike in dignity" whose feud destroys their children; Thiel takes it as the model of rivals who fight because they are alike and forget why they started.
A Theory of Justice — Rawls's book holds that fair political reasoning must set aside knowledge of the world as it concretely exists; Thiel takes it as the leading example of indefinite optimism, a philosophy of fair process with no concrete picture of the future.
Zero to One — Thiel's 2014 book on startups, written with Blake Masters, whose chapter on luck and planning sets out the four attitudes to the future.

Built from

This course was built from 7 books.

Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One (2014)
Peter Thiel, "The Straussian Moment", in Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly (2007)
Peter Thiel, "The Optimistic Thought Experiment" (2008), "The Education of a Libertarian" (2009), "The End of the Future" (2011)
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; Violence and the Sacred; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World; I See Satan Fall Like Lightning; Battling to the End; Evolution and Conversion
Cynthia Haven, Evolution of Desire, A Life of René Girard (2018)
Max Chafkin, The Contrarian (2021)
Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley (2025)

Terms introduced

mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, monopoly, definite optimism, the Straussian moment

Part of the Simposeum course library.