The Precious Golden Fluid: American staple export commodity or complete piss take? I linked this video in my previous article but here I’m going embed it and I demand of my readers that you watch it, because it is going to form the basis of this article. Blood in capitalism has a market price, CoVid, whether it was created by people in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ or originated from a dead bat in a food stall, it has no price. ‘The Precious Golden Fluid’, as Russel terms it, does have a price, and from that price we can extrapolate other prices with the help of economists and business people and experts and whatnot.
And with respect to Peter Thiel and Straussian Moments, let’s all take on board this Straussian Moment with respect to the Bitcoin Industry as it exists today and Peter Thiel’s penchant for large volumes of ‘The Golden Fluid’ injected intravenously directly into his own veins, so to speak.
Peter Thiel plays a dangerous game, balancing the Palantir, and a proven capability to predict the future enough to eliminate the competition, with ‘The Golden Juice’ in order to ‘Secure the Bag’ or ‘Secure the Future’ in a ‘Competitive Environment’ of ‘Zero to One’, so to speak.
Politically, what I respect about Peter Thiel is his brazenness with respect to his beliefs and that he lives his beliefs in his life and in his business. The price of blood is a very central theme to Rene Girard’s theories of violence, peace, spirituality, human progress and measurement of cultural time; and also to Thiel’s own views on the costs of growing social media platforms like Facebook and mass surveillance and logistics platforms like Palantir. There is something authentically medieval about Thiel, something that puts inherent value upon proto-capitalistic things, that I like and prefer to general neoliberal orthodoxy. In this way I believe that Peter Thiel knows something about the price of blood that most people don’t, and that this is a further key to unlock the secrets of his book ‘Zero to One’.
Firstly: blood as a commodity can be very easily modeled in terms of the Nitzan and Bichler Capital as Power framework, much more easily and viscerally than crude oil, financial derivatives or signatures on engineering or quality assurance documentation.
Youth is a source of libidinal vigor, the blood of the young is prized over the blood of the old. The blood of the healthy is prized over the blood of the unhealthy.
Having more blood of greater quality gives greater stamina, greater libido, greater strength, faster healing et cetera in general.
Having less blood of lower quality leads to faintness, dizziness, anemia, decreased attention span et cetera in general.
Therefore vampiricism is the most crude and basic mode of operation of any Power Capital structure:
The flow rate of blood of a commodified quality towards a buyer, or just the potential or option to have access to that flow at any given time, represents capitalized power.
The basic biological instinct to survive under Capitalist Realist precarity represents systemic fear.
The flow of blood away from the seller represents the ‘acceptable level’ of ‘strategic’ self-sabotage (exchange of one vital energy for another). Thus cementing capitalized power to the power capitalist.
This calls for what’s called a ‘Safety Moment’ in the civil infrastructure industry, because the dangers of vampiricism should be clear and represent a slippery slope towards many further possible unintended consequences. Absent in depth information about the source of funds of the buyer and the true costs of drained libido of the seller: their competence, their tacit knowledge, the true potential long term value of their life, vampircism can easily become both metastatic (feeding negative old behaviors with the libidinal energy of new potentially much better ones) and what Thiel himself terms ‘Gerontocratic’. Capitalism is currently not creating the markets and the prices to justify this in any way whatsoever, in my view. Further to this blood is the very stuff of violence, war and all the worst aspects of mankind and uncontrolled mimetic desires. When neoliberal markets are pricing and commodifying the blood of the youth, are pricing brain stem hacking of the youth, are dumping debt on the youth whilst also not giving employment and career opportunities to the youth, not giving the youth the ability to own a home and start a family, while gender relations amongst the youth have never been more uncivilized: this represents a deep sickness in Western society today and an enormous threat to future security. The libidinal plasticity of our time is a possible powder keg if we don’t get a grip on this, and we start getting a grip by taking safety culture seriously.
Bloodlust: uncontrollable desire to kill or maim others.
Bloodshed: the taking of life
- Merriam Webster Dictionary
Peter Thiel can build systems to expressly define in data science terms his own distinction differences in taste between ‘desire for blood’, his perceived optimal levels of ‘blood donation’ from ‘bloodlust’ and ‘bloodshed’. The problem with this sort of thing at scale is that most people can’t, and that’s what the Catholic sacrament is about: renunciation of these desires altogether to Jesus Christ whose father sent his only begotten son to be the eternal victim of all our sins and all our temptations and thus save us from them.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
- Matthew 18:6
There are currently three main ways that Power Capital prices blood:
Via the Military Industrial Complex and NATO: with an aim to either kill or be killed in order to maintain a ‘Balance of Terror’ on a strategic level while fighting a ‘War on Terror’ on a tactical level.
Via the healthcare system as a balance of concerns of saving lives and improving health.
Via the neoliberal system of global trade as a physical economic commodity to be graded and traded no differently to soy beans or pork bellies.
And within these pricing structures for blood, the most interesting one from an engineering perspective at this time, is the price that is not currently measured at all: the price of ill health and suicide from the use of social media and it pernicious Siren Server business model. Thiel makes an important point about how Silicon Valley has become more totalitarian and violent since the creation of Siren Server modes of operation. Silicon Valley culture today is vastly different from the ‘Homebrew Computer Club’ of the 1970s and less open to heterodox ideas, embracing uniformity itself as an ideal. The problem with this is that innovation comes from heterodox people: people with the courage to think differently and who still believe that there are new truths and new ways to be to be uncovered. Between 99% conformity in a society and 100% conformity societies change from being ‘liberal’, whereby the Cre-Order of capital can be questioned, explored, criticized and even overcome via disruptive innovation, to being ‘like North Korea’ whereby dissent itself is censored, censured and violently repressed. From my own perspective as a process safety engineer this gives rise to what essentially amounts to bad Safety Culture, which is inherently dangerous to both people and the environment in a vast number of ways. I explain this in the ninth and final lecture in my YouTube lecture series:
One way to value Peter Thiel as a ‘thought leader’ is to think of Palantir and Facebook as means of arbitrage to price libidinal energy in places where it is not valued appropriately: teenage mental health, minimum wage precarious Gig Work, the value of creative work cratering to the bare minimum, environments of poor health and safety regulation, developing nation political instability et cetera, and up-sell this ‘libidinal energy’, created as an externality of capital deterritorialisation into the libidinal sphere, as a package, via mechanisms of engineering and insurance as a software tool to the Military Industrial Complex and Fortune 500. Via his 10x Zero to One business philosophy Peter Thiel is very good at creating not just demand for the products he sells, but need for them: PayPal, Facebook, Bitcoin™ and Palantir all create powerful and indispensable modes of differential advantage for users and customers: whether purely social or in business.
What results from this, which is the current problem with American Christianity, in my view, is a form of religion as Operant Conditioning: whereby what’s wrong or right is merely a function of what American Power Capital can convince enough of the public to believe is wrong or right, unfounded in Biblical principles in the result. This is not Peter Thiel’s fault, Peter Thiel is as much a result of his circumstances as we are in my view, but his successes result from a very ugly and pernicious side to our Western culture that Christianity, as a moral basis of mutual understanding between us, exists to make us face up to: how our culture abuses and preys upon the youth, how our culture mistreats experts, how our culture abuses science for profit, how our culture no longer builds and maintains infrastructure, how our culture no longer believes in innovation, how our culture normalizes financial fraud, how militarization and systemic fear are symptoms of cowardice and weakness and a loss of hope, not strength and leadership vision.
From Project Paperclip to Operation Mockingbird to the MK Ultra experiments; from the the adulteration of the food chain, to the loss of biodiversity and the responses to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Deep Water Horizon incidents and then CoVid-19, from the Saving and Loans crisis, to the Dot Com Bubble to the 2008 mortgage crisis to the crisis now, what Catherine Austin Fitts calls ‘Mr Global’ or Alex Jones calls the ‘Deep State’ clearly just view faith, religion and spirituality not as something tacit and personal between us and our church, but as a Operating System in order to condition people to accept more Power Capital stagflationary accumulation, past the point of naked vampiricism, past the point of empirically verifiable brain damage in young people.
The fact is that from a safety, risk management and even a national security perspective it makes absolutely no sense for people at scale to be dependent upon networks that play upon these sorts of Operant Conditioning Metcalfe Effects at scale. People need human scale safe predictable networks that value them inherently, as what they are as sacred and beautiful unique human beings, not as a set of cybernetic concerns decided by people far away who often don’t even value their users as customers but rather as programmable agents to be mined for their resources. Any sane and reasonable the response to CoVid-19 would and should have recognised this, but again the crisis was seized upon in order to further agendas of global power brokers, further cementing unsustainable and unsafe conditions, further devaluing life itself.
Western society has devolved into facile cults of personality: from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Craig Wright to Vitalik Buterin and ‘influencer culture’ in general: there is an inability to separate the concerns of machines and industry from the people who represent them, and therefore a breakdown in critical and discerning thought: a breakdown in logic. Engineering is engineering, medicine is medicine: these professions exist to do what is correct, not to do media politics, not to do silly dances on Tik Tok for ‘clout’.
This is my main criticism of Peter Thiel, while I believe that he is refreshingly self aware, and that he has founded some great companies, his value proposition for BTC Bitcoin™ belies an arrogance and a form of American Exceptionalism that haunts his own crafted cult of personality. He talks about the ‘great industrialists’ but Thiel is not an industrialist, he’s not a civil engineer, he, in fact, derides the engineering profession as itself a throwback to the 20th century: a ‘quaint’ thing, an ‘impractical’ thing to be. Thiel plays with very powerful and potentially very dangerous political, technocratic and libidinal forces largely divorced from how these forces translate into the proto-capital and capital that maintain society: education, families that live in their own houses with stable middle class jobs, roads, bridges, trains, power plants, farms et cetera. And while he is to be commended for challenging orthodoxy, combating the most pernicious and toxic forms of organised hate, such as Gawker, most of this represents a putting out of the fires that he helped to create as opposed to a genuine upholding of his own stated values, in my view.
If CoVid-19 didn’t teach us, as human beings, to be more courageous in upholding our stated values, to be more truthful, to be more disciplined and professional and more accepting of subjective measures of risk from a greater breadth and depth of real experts, then there will be no ‘Build Back Better’, there will only be more lurching from one crisis and one political theater to another and another.
“If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.”
― Chögyam Trungpa