Today’s rigid enforcement of ideological orthodoxy perpetuates sclerosis and stagnation.

From The Scapegoat by Geoff Shullenberger, a review of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin.  

Is Thiel right about the dangers we face? Is the tepid economic growth of recent decades a premonition of darker, more violent times to come? Chafkin evidently has no opinion. He is ­unwilling, for the most part, to treat his subject’s views as anything other than arcane heresies to be policed and denounced. In this sense, he inadvertently reveals that Thiel is right about at least one thing: The ideologically formative institutions of our society—­universities, ­journalism—have cultivated an elite barely capable of serious reflection on ideas outside of a narrow range of acceptable opinions. In Zero to One, Thiel suggests that contrarians sometimes grasp the future because their heresies reveal the truths no one acknowledges. Today’s rigid enforcement of ideological orthodoxy perpetuates sclerosis and stagnation. This is where Thiel’s two major concerns—political correctness and stalled progress—intersect.

Chafkin, like many of his fellow journalists, is concerned by the “­reactionary turn in our politics and society” symbolized, most obviously, by the election of Donald Trump, whom Thiel supported. But also like many journalists, he shows no interest in the factors that have led to declining or stagnating prospects for many Americans, as well as to social atomization, anomie, and disillusionment. Doing so might require him to apportion some blame, not just to ideological bogeymen like Thiel, but to those who run his own widely disliked industry (the ­media)—not to mention the many Silicon Valley executives who, ­unlike Thiel, share Chafkin’s ­bien-pensant antipathy to ­Trumpism.

Instead, Chafkin seeks a scapegoat. This is just what members of social groupings always do in moments of crisis, according to Girard. That Chafkin finds one in Thiel would come as no surprise to the latter. He writes in Zero to One: “Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures.” The strength of The Contrarian is its examination of the contradictions that have attended Thiel’s improbable rise. Its main weakness is that Chafkin seems more interested in joining in his tribe’s collective vituperations than in understanding the insights that, at certain points, have allowed his complex subject to anticipate the future.