The popular pass-around-the-block piece this past week in my circles has been “The Rise of the Thielists.” Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in the New Yorker about the growing, or increasingly apparent, role Peter Thiel the billionaire plays in American politics. Thiel is a man of the right, a technologist skeptical of technological progress, and a student of political theory. It’s a decent little writeup and I see why people are reading it: Thiel is very interesting, the idea of a Thielism is interesting, and as Wallace-Wells points out, “Most of us, these days, operate downstream from one billionaire or another.” We want to know where we stand. 

That’s the most interesting line in the piece, actually. As Wallace-Wells explains later, a major tenet of Thielism is “founder” theory. This is Great Man history for the 21st century. He writes:

The deepest quality of Thiel and Masters’s book is its outsized vision of what a heroic individual—a founder—can do. In a late chapter, they argue that successful founders tend to have the opposite qualities of those seen in the general population—that they are, in some basic ways, different—and compare them to kings and figures of ancient mythology.

From Thiel and Blake Masters’s book, Zero to One, as quoted in the piece: 

This hints at the strange way in which the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more “modern.” A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.

There’s a billionaire latter-day Carlyle floating about; it had to make it into the New Yorker eventually. And the New Yorker had to, in a carefully casual little line, admit that individuals, persons, founders, are setting many of the stages the rest of us recite our lines on.

The rest of us should be keeping that in mind. The temptation of our moment is to let technology, the economy, systems, structures, abstracted power, obscure persons and personal responsibility. But we must indeed pay attention to the men and women behind curtains, for some we may choose to follow, and others are our foes. The New Yorker tagged this Thiel piece “Annals of Populism,” but we should add it to the archives of personalism, instead. Perhaps, with enough demystification of progress and remystification of the human spirit, we can draw out authority again from behind her veil.