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Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazi's to justify Germany's slip from democracy to dictatorship. Those theories have been a roadmap for the billionaire ever since.

Also, some terms we gotta break down before we carry on: Mimetic Rivalry: Violence that results from humans’ fundamental tendency to imitate each other—specifically to mimic each other’s desires. A key concept for Rene Girard, Thiel’s biggest intellectual influence.

Scapegoat Mechanism: The process by which humans find unity—and relief from mimetic rivalry—in ganging up on one target who gets blamed for all the community’s problems. According to Girard, scapegoating has provided less and less cohesion since the time of Christ. Now, let's carry on with Thiel:

“The high points of politics,” Thiel quotes Schmitt as saying, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” In Thiel’s mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics. The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not.