The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 4/10

The Marvels of Duct Tape

No book even vaguely connected with technology and politics would be complete without a mention of Peter Thiel’s infamous “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”. The response is utterly predictable, and speaks perhaps more about Sandifer than Thiel, as it doesn’t exactly take great intellectual courage to keep repeating the party line that is so thoroughly indoctrinated early and often into every western child, than it does to actually examine the ramifications of the statement. And by examine, I mean “try to understand why a reasonable person might come up with such an idea”. Whether Peter Thiel himself is a reasonable person (my money is firmly on “no”; as an extremely unreasonable person myself I do recognize my own kind when I see it) is not the point; whether he might actually have one (a point, not a reasonable person) is.

The idea that democracy is the solution to everything imaginable and anti-democraticness thus being inherently evil is such a standard feature of the modern western memetic environment (by which I mean the ideas that surround us and their respective positions of status, acceptedness, respectability, and sanctity; the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed but the words themselves can be reappropriated into more useful things) that it’s hard to imagine democracy being anything other than the best idea ever (unless one shares one of the Officially Accepted Critiques of Democracy), but when one pokes at the foundations they turn out to be disappointingly vacuous. An educated person might get as far as Churchill before they run out of appealing soundbites and demonstrate their inability to explain their convictions, but a person who wants to get to the bottom of things must go all the way back to the 18th century.

To be specific, a fictional 18th century where everyone has a space program. There is just one unfortunate problem; the rockets tend to crash and burn horribly every few launches because nobody has figured out how to prevent an important part from breaking apart. Clever engineers, from a variety of countries I can’t be arsed to google right now but the United States was probably one of them considering that they implemented it in practice, finally come up with a solution: wrapping the parts in duct tape. NASA attempts it with great success in the rocket launch of 1800 when analysis shows that the parts did indeed once again break, but the duct tape kept them together and thus the part that should point towards the ground did keep pointing towards the ground instead of space, nothing that should not be on fire was on fire, they did not have a big problem and they did indeed go to space that day.

Thus, the marvels of duct tape in solving this particular problem are exposed to the world. When people ask how NASA could launch rockets so well, the answer is rightfully “duct tape”. Other countries get tired of crashing and burning and switch to use duct tape as well, or keep crashing and burning. Over time people forget what the original issue was, but they do remember that duct tape is vitally important for some reason, so they retroactively justify it with duct tape being basically magic. Some people propose that rockets would be even better if they used more duct tape, and some of the places it is applied in are beneficial, while others are wholly unsuitable but people don’t really stop to consider it as much as they should, because duct tape is Good. Idealists even suggest that since adding a bit of duct tape was wonderful, just imagine how perfect everything would be if the rockets were made entirely out of duct tape!

And then Mr. Thiel suggests that he doesn’t think duct tape and good engineering are compatible anymore, and gets verbally crucified because how dare he question the miraculous gray sticky thing.

Democracy is ritualized, formalized, non-violent enactment of a civil war, to achieve dynastic changes in a substantially more civilized way than before. Democracy doesn’t promise freedom. Democracy doesn’t promise fairness. Democracy only promises stability, a promise the keeping of which alone makes democracy one of the most brilliant inventions of the last centuries. No matter how disgraceful a spectacle the 2000 election was, it was nothing compared to the Wars of the Roses; and no matter how terrible Andrew Jackson was, he was not Henry VIII. That is all democracy promises, and that is all democracy delivers. Not having civil wars is a pretty neat thing mature democracies excel beautifully in (the comparatively recent unpleasantness was over something as significant as “should people be property” instead of the previously typical “rich people’s family drama” which has been demoted to be the subject of cable tv instead), but not having civil wars is not the same thing as being compatible with freedom.

In fact, anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in high school should know that the most important thing the majority needs is restraint, for any amount of freedom to exist anywhere.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in adulthood knows that the majority is not good at restraint.

The entire idea of constitutions is to have a list of things the democracy is not allowed to do because otherwise the natural instincts of the mob are to trample over everyone who doesn’t fit in. (To prove this, just consider the way your political enemies are pursuing terrible witch-hunts for simple thoughtcrimes while your own side is reminding the world that some very bad people are doing very bad things. It works regardless of what your politics actually are!) Freedom makes far more sense as something that is primarily orthogonal to the type of government (even though different governance technologies certainly influence how easy or difficult different varieties of freedom are to achieve in practice, just like technologies of production dramatically affect facets of social organization) and from this perspective, Thiel’s outrageous claim boils down to the far more reasonable “I don’t think duct tape is good at something basically unrelated to the reason we are using duct tape” (for a comparison, imagine someone getting yelled at for claiming that Google is not a very good fast food company). Maybe he still has nefarious purposes; perhaps he owns a company manufacturing rubber hose which he wants to sell despite it not necessarily being any better than duct tape. But to get to this point where such things are even an allowable object of reasonable discussion necessitates rejecting the unchallenged sanctity of duct tape.

Nonetheless, this elementary idea is “strange terrain” because it doesn’t fit with the appearances of what one is supposed to cheer. The unlikely thought breaks the comfortable games.

Part 1: A False Manhattan

Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon

Part 3: Hubris

Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape

Part 5: The Darkening

Part 6: A Game to End All Games

Part 7: The Players of Games

Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters

Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer

Part 10: Denouement

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