Our Straussian Techocracy (Hirsh Chitkara, May 2026, Liberties)
The Silicon Valley elites funding the New Right believe it is much more difficult to be cynically correct than idealistically wrong. This is central to the worldview of figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen. They believe it is their lot in life to possess superior judgement that enables them to pierce through conventional thought. […]
The tech oligarchs therefore see themselves as having undertaken a heroic but thankless task. […] All three men imagine themselves as lonely Atlasses holding a perpetually ungrateful world on their shoulders.
The fundamental divide between the Anglosphere and Europe runs along this line. The English-Speaking World, at least since Hume, happily accepts that we can never see beyond the cave. The Rationalists are gnostics, who are convinced they’ve escaped. It’s just self-flattery.