Peter Thiel on political theology

It sounds like he's been reading my blog, he mentions the Cain/Abel Romulus/Remus parallel I talked about in the context of what I called the Shamanic Revival. Then they move on to "history was bad." People tend to forget, history looks much worse than it really was, because for the most part, only the bad stuff got written down. Looking at history this way is kind of like reading the obituaries and disaster reports, and thinking it constitutes a full picture of life. No historian sat down and wrote, "Today was more or less satisfactory, let me tell you all the reasons why." One of the reasons I love visiting art museums is because it's a different version of history, you get a picture of life in the past, not just death. I think it was Balzac, in one of his moods, who said knowing what takes place in a small city on a single day would break the strongest man. Maybe, but you would have to weigh it against the good and the merely satisfactory. You tend to remember the catastrophes; the merely mundane, not so much.

Then they move on to the Antichrist and a one-world government. I'm not a tech person, I'm kind of a luddite, but isn't this the Palantir guy? Wouldn't you say putting the whole world on house arrest constitutes world government? The Antichrist's brief reign is coming to a close.

Then they get on to Shakespeare and politics. I'm telling you, the book here is Anti-Machiavel. All these stories from Shakespeare are in there, everything from the English history stuff to Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. All this stuff is in Anti-Machiavel, and they have completely buried it. Just to take the history of science, well, the main revolution in the Scientific Revolution was not heliocentrism, it was the change from deductive to inductive reasoning. They've completely overlooked this passage, which gives Anti-Machiavel a place in the history of science, decades before the Novum Organum.

Bacon, Novum Organum:  

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all.

Anti-Machiavel: 
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Aristotle and other philosophers teach us, and experience confirms, that there are two ways to come unto the knowledge of things. The one, when from the causes and maxims, men come to knowledge of the effects and consequences. The other, when contrary, by the effects and consequences we come to know the causes and maxims… The first of these ways is proper and peculiar unto the mathematicians, who teach the truth of their theorems and problems by their demonstrations drawn from maxims, which are common sentences allowed of themselves for true by the common sense and judgment of all men. The second way belongs to other sciences, as to natural philosophy, moral philosophy, physic, law, policy, and other sciences.