I am listening to a podcast with Peter Thiel and it is clear that he enjoys writing and sharing narratives about humanity. He constructs stories about history.

This story is a system with inputs (material conditions of man) and outputs (the path that society follows). The system is judged based on how well it would have predicted history. He then projects this system onto the present moment to predict the future.

As someone who is trusted with having good intuitions about the future (Thiel runs a VC firm), this skill is critical.

He is also extremely well read and can speak across a broad set of disciplines. This is useful because it makes his narratives multi-dimensional, which are more powerful than narratives that live in a single domain. Good theories should talk to politics, philosophy, science, technology, theology, art, etc. Good theories will explain a lot.

What is also striking about Thiel is a rare ability to disagree. To go against consensus. He is good at questioning the basic assumptions. This non-conformism is a signal to others that Thiel is an independent thinker.

As someone who is trusted with generating alpha (Thiel is an alternative asset manager), this skill is critical.

Non-conformity, however, is not a substitute for independent thinking (you can just regurgitate old unpopular ideas). I get stuck in this trap a lot. My non-conformism is somewhat backwards.

I admire independent thinkers enough to listen to them, but not enough to think for myself. I have always found that I gravitate towards gurus (some spiritual, most intellectual). The problem with gurus is I find myself just copying their ideas? It is hard to disagree with your gurus. I am looking for a Theory of Every-thing; not a Theory of Some-things. If there are a lot of disagreements with a guru I just switch to a different guru. But if there are just a few, I will stay where I am.¹

Consensus thinking is vital to groups. Groups need coherence. This means the systems of truth-finding within groups are good at agreement but not much else. Individuals, though, are better suited to find truth.

To build your own mental systems you need the raw data; you need the primary source. With enough exposure and a healthy skepticism of the dominant ideas, your own ideas will follow naturally. Your mind has a certain configuration which can be expressed along a few dimensions: intelligence, formalization, non-conformism, divergence (creativity). Do not let your ideas stay only in the mind. One must formalize ideas, share them with others, and allow them to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Or they remain a blur.

The role of education is related to constructing grand narratives of society. I recently heard Bach state that education is something like “catching people up on the human project”. What is the human project? The last few thousand years of human society: the religious, political, philosophical, and scientific ideas that have governed human history. A good education introduces a member of a group to the traditions that precede him.

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I find myself in a society in which I am likely quite irrelevant. How many people do you remember from the last 4000 years? Maybe a few hundred. Everyone else is forgotten. The probability you are not forgotten within two generations is basically zero. This is a tough pill to swallow. I do not think the correct response is to find a way to feel important (coping), but to instead wholly accept your total unimportance.

This understanding leads us to lose faith in personal identity. Our egos are futile. We can find a more honest sense of importance in identifying with that which is greater than our small, mortal self; we can identify with the entire species. This means committing to the human project.

The first step to contribute is to complete our educations. Education is not something to get a job—education is how you can achieve some semblance of immortality. My 14 years of schooling could have done a better job. I am now tasked with supplementing it with my own approach. There are a lot of parts of history I am unfamiliar with. There are a lot of branches of knowledge I have yet to tackle.

Footnotes

1. This probably means I believe what gurus say because they say it and not because it is logical. This means I am judging ideas based on where they come from, which makes it hard to see my own ideas as good (I have no authority yet). So either I give myself authority or I stop equating authority to truthiness. ↩