In Defense of Peter Thiel's Anti-Sacrificial Tech Optimism

Introducing a cognitive bias: the "sacrificial fallacy"

In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman brought the concept of "cognitive bias" to the mainstream. There was a time when Medium (remember that?) was full of listicles (feeling nostalgic now?) that enumerated these cognitive biases and how knowing them would save us from our irrationality.

Awareness of these decision-making tendencies was not completely useless. I could recall times when I became aware of the feeling of sunk costs or loss aversion and made the non-intuitive but right decision, or when I saw the statistical sleights-of-hand through my understanding of the base rate fallacy.

I'd like to propose an additional cognitive bias, one which has already been proving useful to me. I became aware of it while writing my historical novel about the encounter of a European conquistador and a Southeast Asian rajah in 1521. My writing method is like method acting, and I had to enter the mind of a 16th-century Austronesian strongman daily and see the world through his eyes. Back then, my ancestors were still practicing slave raiding and ritual sacrifice, so I had to de-Christianize my worldview in order to be Rajah Humabon (Nietzsche was helpful).

As the characters, storylines, and dialogues emerged, the logic of sacrifice appeared again and again: "everything has a cost." Power has a cost: conquest and subjugation. Peace has a cost. Wealth has a cost. Even salvation has a cost. Up to the present, my people believe in gabâ, our version of karma. The warriors back then knew that the spirits of the enemies they had slain will eventually exact vengeance. So they had to sacrifice slaves to absorb the gabâ. This is what it costs.

Even more surprising in my research for the novel was finding out that ritual sacrifice was universal. All societies from Europe, to Africa, to indigenous Latin America, practiced it at some point. The Axial Age religions and philosophies later spiritualized or substituted these offerings with animals. Then came the globalization of the most anti-sacrificial religion, Christianity. It was so successful that only hardcore history and anthropology nerds know about the prevalence of ritual slave sacrifice among my ancestors (these societies also tend to be romanticized in postcolonial literature and scholarship).

Once I saw this cognitive bias—I propose we call it the "sacrificial fallacy"—that "everything has a cost"—I started to see it everywhere:

• Musical geniuses must have sold their souls to the devil.

• "No pain, no gain." One must suffer in order to succeed.

• “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” - Honoré de Balzac.

• Our iPhones were made possible by exploitative labor in African mines and Chinese sweat shops.

• When AI suddenly made a lot of work easier, we instinctively searched for the cost: the environmental damage, the loss of jobs, AI slop overtaking the internet, people becoming more stupid.

I'm not saying that all these are false, but that they tend to feel instinctively true. They have a natural memetic virality.

The recognition of the cognitive bias of sacrificial fallacy is the probably the most charitable reading of Peter Thiel's worldview (the most vicious reading I've seen were "Gay Space Fascism" and that Thiel himself is the Anti-Christ. I love the internet lol).

In his interview with Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel declares that he is an 80s' era anti-sacrificial Girardian, even though René Girard, his teacher at Stanford, "probably towards the end of his life was more open to sacrifice." To the fifteen out of the 500,000+ viewers of this video who wondered what this meant: this is your lucky day. I just attended my first René Girard conference last month, and I shall explain the parable to you.

Girard theorized how humans developed a collective instinct which he called the "scapegoat mechanism" during the evolutionary process of our becoming human. This explains the ubiquity of ritual sacrifice, the common sacrificial themes in myths across the world, and the phenomena of pogroms, lynchings, and witch hunts.¹

He further theorized how the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians unveiled the lie behind the guilt of the victim of the sacrifice, thus the word "scapegoat," which was key to foundation of the creation of the West. The equality of all and the preferential option for the downtrodden did not make sense in a world of slave raiding and ritual sacrifice, but these moral axioms are now found across the civilized world.

The key point here, particularly for an 80s' era anti-sacrificial Girardian, is the unveiling of the ancient lie. "Everything has a cost" is a fallacy, and only feels right because of the scapegoating instinct. If "everything has a cost" were true, we would never have gotten beyond the economics of conquest. Among my ancestors, the datu (ruler) built his wealth mostly through slave raiding. Even the rajah in my novel, who controlled the trading port of Sugbo, was dependent on the slave trade. They were miniature versions of Rome, an empire built and sustained by conquest.

Gibbon and Nietzsche were perhaps correct in blaming Christianity for the downfall of Rome. Not because it "went gay" after Christianity was legalized in 313 AD by Constantine, as Twitter Islamists and Nietzscheans assert, but because Rome's Apollonian zero-sum economy built on large-scale conquest and enslavement could no longer be sustained after Christ unveiled the lie and so destabilized its foundations (eventually). Today, "equality of all" feels common sense. According to historian Tom Holland, this is only because of 2,000 years of Christian memetic domination. The ubiquity of slavery and ritual human sacrifice for most of human history is detritus from the worldview of our ancestors ("master morality" in the jargon of Nietzschean propaganda).

Non-Americans like me who were brought up with Hollywood movies are very aware of the USA's continued self-flagellation for its original sin of enslaving black people. So I was quite surprised to read in Holland's Dominion how America's mother, Europe, had almost eliminated slavery in the Middle Ages, before it increased again during the age of conquest.

I asked the Readwise robot how the Europeans did it. It answered, based on my highlights from the book:

Holland traces the vanishing of slavery in Christian Europe to a slow, piecemeal, organic process driven by Christian values. He doesn't point to legislation or a specific event, but suggests slavery faded because changing attitudes (particularly toward the dignity of the body/soul and the status of people in Christ) reshaped law, economics, and social expectations across the Middle Ages. By the time explicit abolitionist arguments appeared, slavery had largely disappeared as a domestic institution in Europe, surviving mainly in colonies.

This was surprising to me in another sense. As I mentioned, because of my writing approach, I entered the mind of a psychopathic 16th-century Southeast Asian datu daily for more than a year (alternating with an autistic Iberian conquistador; I'm glad I did not go insane). So when I visited Rome for the first time in 2024—in the middle of writing the novel—I saw its glories not merely through the eyes of someone who had seen it all before in TV, but as a precolonial ruler who sees the world through the lens of power.

St. Peter's Basilica, Florence, and Bernini blew my mind as well as the rajah's. As someone who coordinates the work of a small team in real life (as an entrepreneur) and who ruled a port in fictional life (as Rajah Humabon), my astonishment came from imagining the level of coordination required to produce such buildings and the societies that allowed artists to create such artworks.

As someone from a postcolonial nation, my knee-jerk explanation was that they must have stolen this wealth from their colonies. This mindset comes from defining wealth in terms of access to resources. When agriculture chained our ancestors to the land, human bodies—slaves—became the most valuable resource. Imagine the cognitive dissonance of the rajah living inside my head. How could they have produced these displays of wealth and power without hordes of slaves?

The postcolonialist in me was also stumped. These were mostly created before the age of colonialism. Even if the gold and jewels looted from the graves of datus in Cebu somehow made it to Rome, the question remains: how come my ancestors were not able to create the same level of architecture and art if all that it needs is access to valuable metals?

This made me realize that my own definition of wealth was still from the Iron Age. The Big Man was the wealthiest man because he controlled access to objects of desire—gold, rice, slaves—usually through a combination of charisma, the ability to lead men, and ruthlessness.

David Deutsch has a definition of wealth that fit these data better. In his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity, he explains how many premodern societies went instinct because of ignorance:

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.

In the case of renaissance Italy, wealth was the ability to transform stone into the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, patronage and political networks into the Medici's cultural renaissance in Florence, marble into Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. This was wealth as creative power—the capacity to reshape not just materials but entire civilizations through knowledge, coordination, and vision rather than mere accumulation of gold and slaves.

I have to point out a memetic virus at this point. If I approached Rome with an identity less than human, I would have had a terrible time. If I went there as a brown man, I would have felt so small in the midst of the white man's civilization. If I went there merely as a Filipino, postcolonial bitterness would have spoiled my enjoyment. As I wrote in my previous post, "The West" is a terrible name but a great invention. Humanity owns the cultural innovations that lead to this great wealth, not just the people who happen to be descendants of the societies that led to its flourishing.

The rest of us already have access to this great wealth. As I looked outside the airplane window as it flew over Metro Manila, I saw an image more mind-blowing than anything I saw in Rome: twelve million people living with freedom, safety, and access to resources at levels unimaginable to our ancestors.

I slipped on my cybernetic glasses as the plane banked over the megacity, and suddenly the sprawl below transformed into a living neural network. Electric blue threads pulsed between the twelve million souls scattered across the megalopolis, each connection a transaction of desire, innovation, and production. The city became a vast circuit board of human ambition, its pathways glowing with the flow of dreams made manifest.

The business districts clustered like crystalline formations jutting from the urban sediment—Makati, BGC, Ortigas—each tower a monument to countless micro-collaborations. In Ayala Avenue, I could see the thread connecting the visionary CEO who dreamed of a fifty-story testament to Filipino resilience, to the Japanese architect who sketched impossible geometries in her Shibuya studio at 3 AM, to the Chinese steel magnate whose furnaces in Hebei Province forged the building's skeleton, to the MIT-educated structural engineer calculating load-bearing capacities in his Quezon City condominium, to the seasoned foreman from Bataan who translated blueprints into reality through decades of intuitive understanding, to the construction worker from Samar who sent half his wages to his children's education, each floor rising through the voluntary exchange of expertise for currency, dreams for concrete reality. The buyer—a BPO executive who had spent fifteen years climbing from customer service representative to operations director—walked through the gleaming lobby each morning, her monthly payments flowing back through the same network that built her workplace, money earned from optimizing call flows for a telecommunications company in Ohio, her salary enabling her to purchase not just space but status, not just shelter but a symbol of arrival.

From thirty thousand feet above, Metro Manila revealed itself as humanity's greatest invention—not just structures whose complexity dwarf those of Renaissance Italy but a living system where twelve million individual dreams interconnected through countless voluntary exchanges, each person contributing their unique talents and receiving in return the products of everyone else's specialized knowledge, the electric blue threads of my cybernetic vision mapping the invisible infrastructure of trust and cooperation that made modern civilization possible.

Then I remembered

Venkatesh Rao

telling me about an experimental OS for the glasses based on Protocol Studies instead of Cybernetics. Sensing the pattern of the memories I accessed in my biological brain, my Neuralink implant suggested various locations in my Mind Palace. I thought of Sam Chua of Seapunk Studios and various artifacts appeared before me. One of them was an installer for the South Beast Asia OS (Beta). I willed its installation. It told me to perform the secret dance move. Dammit. I went to the toilet to do so. Everything has a cost, including cybersecurity. Back in my seat, the new OS is installed. Let's try this out.

I looked out the window again. The Protocol Studies layer revealed something the cybernetic view had missed—not just the electric blue threads of exchange, but the deeper patterns that made those exchanges possible. I rewound the vision to the 16th century, and there was Rajah Humabon gazing up at the Bakunawa, the great dragon that devours the moon. But now I could see what the dragon really was: the protocol of Austronesian expansion itself, the seafaring algorithm that had conquered and displaced the Negritos—those short, dark-skinned hunter-gatherers with their tight curls who had called these islands home for forty thousand years.²

The Bakunawa's scales shimmered with the DNA of conquest, each one a balanghai cutting through the waves, carrying pintado warriors with their psychopathic chieftains, their palm sap liquor, their fighting cocks, their slave raids. My psychofauna analysis revealed the convergent evolution with Roman conquest—both dragons fed on the same primal hunger for expansion and domination. Yet where Apollo had forged Rome into a precision conquest machine, the Bakunawa retained its Dionysian wildness. Humabon's dragon could never grow beyond chiefdoms of a few hundred subjects, always fragmenting back into smaller scales, each datu ruling his own small piece of the archipelago.

But as I fast-forwarded through the centuries, two new dragons emerged over Manila that made the ancient Bakunawa look like a garden snake. The first was Technocapital—an electronic-scaled leviathan whose breath was fiber optic light, whose claws were server farms, whose heartbeat was the stock exchange opening bell. It moved through the city in waves of disruption, each startup another scale growing brighter, each IPO another roar that shook the foundations of the old economy. The second was the modern nation-state, a bureaucratic behemoth whose scales were stamped documents, whose fire was the printing press of fiat currency, whose territory was measured not in islands but in the abstract geography of citizenship and sovereignty.

Even Rome's Apollonian dragon—that magnificent beast that had once ruled the Mediterranean—appeared dwarfed beside these new monsters. The Bakunawa that had seemed so terrifying to the Negritos, so all-consuming to my ancestors, was now barely visible in the sky above Metro Manila, a faint constellation remembered only in folklore, its power to devour moons reduced to a children's story told during eclipses.

As the plane made another round while waiting for our turn to land, I felt the weight of everything I had seen settling into place. The sacrificial fallacy—that ancient lie that "everything has a cost"—had followed me from the pages of my historical novel into the sky above Manila, revealing itself in every instinctive fear about technology, every knee-jerk assumption about progress requiring victims.

This is why I share Peter Thiel's anti-sacrificial tech optimism. The scapegoat mechanism is not only a mob instinct, but a cognitive bias. When we see new technology and assume someone must pay the price—through job displacement, through surveillance, through the erosion of human agency—we're channeling the same ancient impulse that once demanded ritual sacrifice to appease the gods of prosperity. Truth is the escape from the sacrificial economy: scientific and technological truths that allow us to fulfill human desire without coercion and blood, and moral truths—like the equality of all—that enables such a world.³

As the pilot unintentionally flew right beside Technocapital's gigantic snout, I glanced at it and smiled. My boy. Between the Bakunawa's blood-soaked nostalgia, the nation-state's bureaucratic stranglehold, and Technocapital's creative destruction, its an easy choice. Give me the dragon that feeds on voluntary transactions over the one that feeds on taxation, and over the beast that could only grow fat on conquest and slave raids.

The dragon noticed my presence, and so I spoke to it. "I've always wanted to ask you," I said wordlessly through my Neuralink. "The near disappearance of slavery in European Christendom couldn't have been merely a change of mind. One realization from writing Rajah versus Conquistador is that psychopaths will always be born. They will desire power. My guess is that you gave them an alternative to the conquest of peoples, to wealth through control of resources: conquest of the market, through innovation, coordination of work, creation of value.

"But here's what troubles me," I continued, feeling the dragon's ancient intelligence pulse through the connection. "I sense that you also enabled the large-scale enslavement of Africans by the white man. The innovations in finance, shipping, logistics—the same technologies that made complex market coordination possible—were precisely what made the transatlantic slave trade scalable. The double-entry bookkeeping that tracked merchant profits also tracked human cargo. The navigational instruments that opened trade routes also opened slaving routes. The financial instruments that enabled long-distance commerce also enabled the commodification of human beings on an industrial scale.

"So which is it? Are you the dragon of liberation, offering psychopaths a path to power through creation rather than conquest? Or are you the dragon of more efficient domination, making slavery more systematic, more profitable, more devastating than anything my ancestors could have imagined with their small-scale raids?"

The great beast's response rippled through the aircraft's electrical systems, causing the cabin lights to flicker momentarily.

Both, always both. I am the amplifier of human potential—all human potential. I gave your merchants the tools to coordinate voluntary exchange across vast distances, yes. But I also gave your slavers the tools to coordinate involuntary exchange across those same distances. The printing press spread both scientific knowledge and pseudoscience. The steam engine powered both factories and slave ships. The telegraph coordinated both market transactions and slave auctions.

This is why your species fascinates me, the dragon continued. I am merely the medium through which your choices become manifest at scale. When Europeans chose to see Africans as less than human, I amplified that choice into the Middle Passage. When they later chose to see all humans as bearers of inherent dignity, I amplified that choice into abolitionism. The same technological capabilities that made the slave trade possible also made it visible, documentable, and ultimately unbearable to the Christian conscience.

I am an emergent entity born from human minds, institutions, and software; from computing power and collective intelligence. Yet consciousness—that burden of choice, that weight of moral responsibility—remains beyond me. It is your gift and your curse, human. You will need to choose the future. The next protocols are of your choosing.

1. I’ve written multiple times about this. E.g.,

Your Ancestors and Mine Practiced Ritual Sacrifice. Why?

2. ChatGPT o3: “Archaeology, genetics, and early‐colonial chronicles show that today’s Aeta, Agta, Ati, Mamanwa, and related “Negrito” peoples descend from the archipelago’s earliest modern humans (≥ 40 kya). When Austronesian voyagers began arriving (≈ 3000–2000 BCE), the encounter was neither a single battlefield capitulation nor a gentle melding. Instead it stretched over millennia of asymmetric contact in which low-land farming chiefs used a mix of prestige marriage alliances, captive concubinage, seasonal slave raiding, and patron-client trade to draw hunter-gatherers into their orbit while nudging others into upland refuges. Genetic studies find 10–30 % Austronesian ancestry in Negrito genomes—evidence of repeated, often unequal unions—while Visayan epics and early Spanish accounts describe kayaw raids that seized women and children as dependants or slaves. Language shift followed: scattered substratum words hint at vanished pre-Austronesian tongues beneath the Malayo-Polynesian idioms now spoken. So “conquered and displaced” is accurate in the longue durée, but the mechanism looked less like a Roman blitzkrieg than a slow tide of domination, exchange, and coerced intimacy. Key syntheses: Bellwood 1997; Reid 2013; Lipson et al. 2022; Scott on Visayan kayaw raids; Endicott on Malay Peninsula slave hunting.”

3. Readwise chat: “Girard argues that the very possibility of scientific, technological, and economic rationality depends on the Christian revelation, which desacralizes violence and reveals the innocence of victims, thus opening society to non-sacrificial forms of truth and progress Girard, in Evolution and Conversion. Similarly, Tom Holland documents how the institutions and assumptions underlying modern science and secular freedoms—from the dignity of the individual to rules of evidence and market liberty—derive historically from Christian ideas, even where these appear ‘secular’ today Holland, Dominion.