Simon Gros

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At a bicentenary event of the Oxford Union—an institution that frames its mission around debate, scrutiny of entrenched assumptions, and protection of free expression—Peter Thiel delivered an address that positioned the contemporary university, and “classical liberalism” more broadly, as systems under sustained stress. Thiel, a U.S. technology entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early investments in major internet firms, presented himself less as a celebrant of institutional continuity than as an ambivalent defender: he described his stance as “anti-anti-anti-anti classical liberalism,” arguing that a chain of negations could still amount to a guarded affirmation of liberal norms, even while conceding that many criticisms of universities and the modern West are not frivolous.

Thiel opened with a wordplay that set the tone for a lecture mixing provocation with diagnosis: he said a single-word antonym for “diversity” is “university,” implying a tension between a modern institutional emphasis on pluralism and the older idea of a unified, truth-oriented intellectual community. He treated that tension as long-running rather than novel, suggesting that for two centuries the Oxford Union’s debates have repeatedly returned to variations of the same meta-crisis: the crisis of the university, the crisis of the West, and the crisis of classical liberalism. In his telling, what changes is not the existence of these disputes but their surface content and their rhetorical intensity—an oscillation between enduring arguments and what he called a kind of kaleidoscopic novelty.

To illustrate how academic conflict can become a proxy for civilizational conflict, Thiel recounted his experience as a student at Stanford in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. universities were embroiled in high-profile disputes over curriculum, identity, and the status of the Western canon. He recalled the controversy around a mandatory freshman sequence—debates that outwardly concerned reading lists but, as he interpreted them, functioned as a referendum on “Western civilization” itself. Thiel described participating in the student media ecosystem that arose around these battles, including efforts to publicize and criticize curricular changes he saw as ideologically driven. He used one emblematic episode, centered on the prominence of particular texts and authors in revised syllabi, to make a broader point about how symbolic academic disputes can become politically amplified and socially consequential—sometimes in ways that participants do not anticipate.

In an anecdote meant to show how moral narratives can feed on conflict, Thiel described writing critically about a memoir associated with a Guatemalan activist who presented herself as the victim of multiple intersecting forms of oppression. He said that, at the time, he believed he was engaged in a stark confrontation between right and wrong, but later concluded he had unwittingly played a supporting role in a larger political script whose outcome was not controlled by any single actor. When the activist subsequently received the Nobel Peace Prize, Thiel interpreted the sequence as an example of how media attention, controversy, and symbolic “victimization” can interact to elevate particular figures and stories. He framed this not as a narrow campus anecdote, but as a window into how intense cultural disputes can obscure the deeper question of what is truly at stake.

From there, Thiel shifted from humanities-centered “culture war” controversies to a critique of the technocratic self-justification of modern universities. He argued that, historically, institutions under fire in the humanities have often replied with a familiar defense: even if the humanities are chaotic and politicized, universities are ultimately engines of scientific and technological progress, and that progress is what matters most. In this account, disputes over Shakespeare, canonical curricula, or ideological fashions are treated as side-shows; the “real” work is elsewhere, in laboratories and technical departments producing breakthroughs that advance human welfare.

Thiel’s counterargument was that this technocratic defense no longer reliably matches reality. He suggested that the sciences and technology fields—precisely because they are highly specialized and difficult for outsiders to evaluate—may be at least as prone to institutional dysfunction as the humanities, and perhaps more so. He described a structural problem: when only small circles of specialists can assess claims in a field, the field may become less accountable, more self-referential, and more vulnerable to inflated promises. He cited the example of Bob Laughlin, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at Stanford, whom he portrayed as believing that substantial portions of academic science had drifted toward borderline fraudulent behavior—extracting public money without delivering commensurate results—and that trying to challenge this attracted severe professional penalties. Thiel used that story to argue for what he called a “hermeneutic suspicion”: taboo topics are not automatically true, but extreme taboo is, in his view, a signal that scrutiny is warranted.

The central thesis Thiel developed was that the modern West is living through a multi-decade problem of stagnation: a slowing of transformative scientific and technological progress outside a narrow band of advances in information technology. He argued that, despite continuing rhetoric about acceleration and imminent breakthroughs, many domains that once represented material progress—energy, transportation, large-scale engineering, and certain hard-science frontiers—have not advanced in ways that reshape everyday life as dramatically as earlier eras did. In his framing, information technology produced a “world of bits” revolution—computers, the internet, mobile computing—but this has not been sufficient to generate the kind of broad-based economic growth and rising living standards that older narratives of modernity promised. He pointed to a social indicator often cited in public debate: younger generations in advanced economies, he claimed, increasingly expect less economic improvement than their parents experienced, a pattern he treated as inconsistent with popular stories of unstoppable technological uplift.

Thiel offered several possible explanations commonly given for stagnation—regulatory burdens, institutional incentives, educational structure, and the difficulty of evaluating specialized research—but he emphasized what he characterized as a dominant cultural explanation emerging within elite institutions: that science and technology are simply too dangerous to pursue aggressively. In that view, what looks like a “bug” (slowed progress) is reframed as a “feature” (prudent restraint). Thiel argued that this attitude appears in contemporary discourse about existential risks across multiple domains: nuclear weapons, advanced biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and climate change. He suggested that risk narratives frequently converge on similar policy instincts—slowing or restricting development rather than pursuing new technical solutions—and he treated this as an intellectual and political posture increasingly aligned with what he described as establishment sensibilities in universities and governance.

In discussing “dual-use” technology, Thiel emphasized that many celebrated innovations sit uncomfortably close to destructive capability: rocketry overlaps with ballistic missiles; biological techniques that enable medical breakthroughs can also enable weapons; and computing tools can be used for surveillance and coercion. He argued that this proximity shapes cultural ambivalence about celebrating scientific achievements, and he offered as an illustration the relative lack of public, ritualized celebration for specific scientific contributors to recent biomedical innovations. In his telling, societies hesitate to celebrate because breakthroughs evoke anxieties about adjacent misuse, including controversies about high-risk biological research. Throughout, he used heightened rhetoric to dramatize what he viewed as a broader psychological shift: from technological optimism to an expectation that progress carries catastrophic tail risks.

Artificial intelligence served as a focal example of this shift. Thiel described earlier futurist communities that treated AI as a largely positive, even utopian, horizon—dangerous but manageable through alignment and careful design. He said that, over time, that posture flipped into a more pessimistic or precautionary stance, including discourse that treats the alignment problem as potentially unsolvable and therefore grounds for slowing development. He referenced prominent figures and institutional arguments within AI safety debates to illustrate what he saw as a move from accelerationism toward restraint, and he presented this as symptomatic of a wider elite fear of transformative technology.

At the culmination of the lecture, Thiel introduced what he portrayed as a paradox: if societies elevate existential-risk thinking to the center of policy, the “solution set” often drifts toward stronger surveillance, preventive policing, and global governance mechanisms that, taken together, resemble a form of technocratic authoritarianism. He cited academic arguments that propose restricting technological development and tightening social control to prevent catastrophic misuse, and he warned that such a trajectory risks producing a “one-world” coercive state. Thiel’s concluding claim was that this political end-state should itself be treated as an existential risk, not merely as a price worth paying to mitigate other dangers. In other words, he argued that the menu of existential threats must include the possibility that fear-driven governance could eradicate liberal freedoms under the banner of safety. He closed by urging that classical liberal commitments—open debate, contestation of power, and resistance to authoritarian consolidation—remain salient precisely because risk politics can be used to rationalize sweeping control.

In the subsequent discussion with Oxford Union interlocutors and audience members, Thiel expanded and qualified several points. Asked whether the greater threat comes from large technology companies rather than states, he argued that state power remains the primary concern, and that major technology platforms can function as highly efficient instruments through which states project authority. He returned repeatedly to stagnation as the underlying pathology: in his view, the moral and political conflicts around technology are intensified by a sense that societies are no longer delivering broad progress, leaving publics and institutions fighting over distribution, recognition, and control within what feels like a constrained, zero-sum environment.

On algorithmic bias and the future social imprint of AI, Thiel distinguished between speculative “superintelligence” scenarios and what he described as the more immediate risk: the use of computational systems to build pervasive surveillance states. He pointed to authoritarian governance models—particularly China—as cases where the most consequential “AI” is less about autonomous cognition than about scalable monitoring, prediction, and enforcement. In that context, he suggested that the political structure behind the tools matters at least as much as the tools themselves, while also arguing that certain technologies have structural tendencies that align more easily with centralized control than with decentralization.

Questioned about research claiming that subjective well-being has not risen proportionally with decades of technological and economic change, Thiel implied skepticism toward simple stories of continuous progress, emphasizing instead that measured economic output and lived expectations in advanced economies do not match triumphalist narratives. He argued that embracing technological restraint is not a stable equilibrium: in a strategic environment, he suggested, societies that renounce development risk military and geopolitical vulnerability. Even if cautionary arguments have merit, he maintained that a posture of deliberate stagnation can become self-defeating.

When the conversation moved to cryptocurrency, Thiel described the late-1990s “cypherpunk” hope that computing would decentralize power by strengthening individuals and small organizations. He acknowledged that much of the last two decades has instead produced centralizing outcomes—large platforms and large governments—but presented cryptocurrencies as one possible mechanism by which decentralizing dynamics could reassert themselves. He framed this as a contingent possibility rather than a certainty, characterizing the present as an extreme point of centralization that might, but need not, provoke a reversal.

Pressed about his support for Donald Trump in 2016 and the analogy he drew to Brexit, Thiel described his motivation as an attempt to disrupt what he saw as institutional inertia and societal “lockdown.” He said he remained uncertain whether those political shocks accelerated a necessary debate about stagnation or, paradoxically, delayed it by absorbing attention into symbolism and conflict without generating durable structural change. He resisted offering a definitive retrospective verdict, emphasizing instead the difficulty of translating political rhetoric into institutional transformation.

On political donations and campaign finance, Thiel presented a conflicted view. He described high political saturation as unhealthy, yet argued that politics remains pervasive and therefore difficult to avoid. He suggested that money does not automatically convert into persuasion or solutions, describing the “translation function” between resources and social change as weaker than commonly assumed. In his framing, many bottlenecks are regulatory, institutional, and cultural rather than purely financial, and large expenditures cannot simply purchase breakthroughs in complex systems.

Audience questions also drew him into cultural territory. Asked why the political right does not generate more “great art,” he suggested that ideological explanations can become a pretext for overlooking the basic difficulty of producing high-quality cultural work; he implied that blaming gatekeeping does not substitute for meeting demanding artistic standards. On climate change, he resisted input-focused arguments about the scale of public spending and said he would prioritize output measures—cost, reliability, and cleanliness of energy systems—while contending that much climate activism remains oriented toward restraint and lifestyle discipline rather than toward aggressive pursuit of breakthrough energy technologies. He presented this as an empirical claim about dominant cultural emphases rather than as a denial of the climate problem.

In a question about the UK’s National Health Service and the prospect of data-driven modernization, Thiel framed large state institutions as prone to self-protective narratives and public “Stockholm syndrome,” arguing that reform requires first acknowledging dysfunction rather than mythologizing performance. He spoke in general terms about introducing market mechanisms and reducing regulatory burdens, while also acknowledging a recurring tension between theoretical overhauls and the practical need to maintain backward compatibility in systems that cannot be rebuilt overnight.

The evening ended with a form of institutional ritual: the Union asked its customary final question, soliciting advice for students. Thiel’s response reinforced a theme that ran beneath both the lecture and the discussion. He treated debate as necessary and even “sacred,” but insufficient on its own. Intellectual contestation, he argued, must ultimately be paired with action—an attempt to move from diagnosis to institutional and technological deeds. In that closing gesture, he aligned himself, at least rhetorically, with the Union’s self-image: a forum where speech is protected not as an end in itself, but as a precondition for decisions that shape the material and political future.