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July 14 - July 17, 2025
Palantir itself is an attempt—imperfect, evolving, and incomplete—at constructing a collective enterprise, the creative output of which blends theory and action. The company’s deployment of its software and its work in the world constitute the action. This book attempts to offer the beginnings of an articulation of the theory.
As Jürgen Habermas has suggested, a failure by leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government. When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the
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The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.
Thomas Schelling, who taught economics at Yale and later Harvard, understood the relationship between technical advances in the development of weaponry and the ability of such weaponry to shape political outcomes. “To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear, “War is
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“To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,”
Our experiment in the West with self-government is fragile. We are not advocating for a thin and shallow patriotism—a substitute for thought and genuine reflection about the merits of our national project as well as its flaws. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. It is true that we should hold ourselves and our experiment to a higher standard than that of other nations, but it is also worth remembering how high a standard this country has
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Vannevar Bush.
many of Xi’s contemporaries who lived through the Cultural Revolution “concluded that China needed constitutionalism and rule of law, but Xi Jinping said no: You need the Leviathan.” The cultivation of hard power, including AI for the battlefield, is a necessity to survive. Xi understands this in a way that those in the West, the self-proclaimed victors of history, often forget.
Anne Applebaum rightly reminds us that a “natural liberal world order” does not exist, despite our most fervent aspirations, and that “there are no rules without someone to enforce them.” Xi and others have wielded and retained power in a way that most of our current political leaders in the West will never understand.
In 1968, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian writer, published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he articulated a logic of oppressor and oppressed that continues to structure our intellectual and moral discourse half a century later. One of his central claims was that the oppressed peoples of the world, the underclass, were essentially incapable themselves of violence, or indeed oppression itself. He neutered the dispossessed of moral agency. “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” he wrote. “It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent.”
“To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom,” he later wrote.
The problem is that those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world. “If you do not feel it, you will not get it by hunting for it,” Goethe reminds us in Faust. “You will never touch the hearts of others, if it does not emerge from your own.”
In this way, the university presidents are victims of their and our collective focus on the policing of language and by extension thought, combined with the enforcement of elaborate yet unpublished codes regarding speech and behavior—that together deprive individuals of the habit and instinct required to develop sincerely held and authentic beliefs, as well as the gall to express them.
is a belief that has no cost really a belief? The protective veil of anonymity may instead be robbing this generation of an opportunity to develop an instinct for real ownership over an idea, of the rewards of victory in the public square as well as the costs of defeat.
Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard, anticipated the contradictions that arise from our fierce commitment in the West to classical liberalism, and its elevation if not preference for individual rights at the expense of anything approaching collective purpose or identity, as well as our cultural reluctance to venture into many of the most meaningful and significant moral debates of our time.
“Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meanings finds undesirable expressions,” he wrote in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
discussion of the vast realm of questions that afflict our moral lives beyond adherence to the basics—a commitment to equality, of some sort, and certainly the rights of others—was essentially off limits.
Any inquiry into what constituted a good or virtuous life, of what allegiance, to one’s country, for example, meant in the modern era, was beyond the meadow of permissible discourse.
at school, the subtext of their education from an early age had been that an overly fervent reverence for the American project, let alone the West, should be viewed with skepticism.
Amy Gutmann, who taught at Princeton through the 1980s and 1990s, captured the logic of the era when she argued that “our primary moral allegiance is to no community,” national or otherwise, but rather “to justice” itself. The ideal at the time, and still for many today, was for a sort of disembodied morality, one unshackled from the inconvenient particularities of actual life. But this move toward the ethereal, the post-national, and the essentially academic has strained the moral capacity of our species.
cosmopolitan and technological elites in the developed world were citizens of no country; their wealth and capacity for innovatio...
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Samuel Huntington published his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?”
The deconstruction of and challenge to a monolithic and wholly coherent conception of Western civilization began in earnest in the 1960s but arguably culminated with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978.
the term “Orientalism,” nearly half a century after its popularization by Said, “has become one of those words that shuts down conversation on liberal campuses, where no one wants to be accused of being ‘Orientalist’ any more than they want to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic.”
The effect of Orientalism on the culture was so thorough and complete, so totalizing, that many today, particularly in Silicon Valley, are scarcely aware of its role in shaping and structuring contemporary discourse, as well as their own views about the world.
In his biography of Said, Places of Mind, Timothy Brennan writes that beginning in the late 1990s, “postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field,” but rather an entire worldview, with a highly particularized jargon, including “ ‘the other,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘Eurocentrism’ ”—terms that “could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film.”
As Said himself explained in an afterword to the book, written in 1994, “The construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering.” In this way, the engine and mechanism of the production of history and anthropology were the objects of Said’s study. And it was the inclination of that engine toward division, toward definition of the “us” and the “other,” that for Said was itself a consequence and perhaps necessary component of the act of observation.
His central thesis provides the basis for much of what passes as foundational in the humanities today, that the identity of a speaker is as important if not more important than what he or she has said.
It was the overextension of his principal claim that set in motion and empowered a deconstructionist movement that would, in the decades to come, successfully elevate the importance of the identity of the speaker over that which is said.[*3]
McNeill wrote in an essay published in 1997 that attempts to construct world history courses had themselves “often been contaminated” by what he regarded “as patently false assertions of the equality of all cultural traditions.”
Niall Ferguson has observed, the principal Western empires that began their ascent in the sixteenth century came to control 74 percent of global economic production by the 1910s. Figure 8 Western Empires: Share of Territory and Global Economic Output The mere recitation of such a fact has become provocative in a way that suggests our current culture’s fundamental unease with truth, as well as perhaps its loss of an ability to disentangle descriptive claims from normative ones. To point out, as an empirical matter, that a certain subset of nations has come to dominate global affairs is not
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The canon wars as they would come to be known on university campuses in the 1960s and later, as well as the challenge in academia to the West itself that would follow, represented a struggle not merely over the content of American identity but over whether there should be any content at all.
Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who was born in Colorado Springs in 1902, has argued that the majority of adult men are “condemned to what, especially if they are oversensitive, they must feel to be an unsatisfactory experience,” deprived of their rightful inheritance. Parsons was the last of a generation of theoretical sociologists whose work was unencumbered, or as critics would charge, uninformed, by empirical research.[*]
In an essay on human aggression published in 1947, Parsons observed that many men “will inevitably feel they have been unjustly treated, because there is in fact much injustice, much of which is very deeply rooted in the nature of the society, and because many are disposed to be paranoid and see more injustice than actually exists.” And he went further. The feeling of being “unjustly treated,” Parsons noted, is “not only a balm to one’s sense of resentment, it is an alibi for failure.”
1970s by Keith Johnstone,
In Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,
As Henry Kissinger put it, in the case of Lee’s leadership, “the ancient argument whether circumstance or personality shapes events” was “settled in favour of the latter.” That ancient argument had stretched back to at least the nineteenth century, when Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish historian, wrote in 1840 of “the Great Man” who had “been the indispensable saviour of his epoch;—the
The loss of interest in this way of thinking, narrow and flawed as it was, coincided with the culture’s broader abandonment of much interest in character or virtue—seemingly ineffable concepts that could not be reduced to the psychological and moral materialism of the modern age. Our mistake, however, was to throw everything out, instead of simply the bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
1882, Ernest Renan, a French philosopher who was the descendant of fishermen, delivered a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris that was titled “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What Is a Nation?”).
the “graver mistake” occurs when “race is confused with nation.”
He described the nation as “a vast solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices one has made and of those one is yet prepared to make.” A national project, for Renan, “presupposes a past,” but is “summarized in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.” It is that “common life” with which we are at risk of losing touch. Renan famously described the nation as “an everyday plebiscite.” And it must now be renewed.
The necessary task of building the nation, of constructing a collective identity and shared mythology, is at risk of being lost because we grew too fearful of alienating anyone, of depriving anyone of the ability to participate in the common project. It is this disinterest in mythology, in shared narratives, that we have as a culture taken too far. Palantir takes its name from The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, and some have suggested that Tolkien references are favorites of the “far right.” The critique is representative of the left’s broader error, both substantive and strategic. An
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Martin Walser,
he suggested that the yoke of an enforced remembrance should be thrown off and abandoned—that the imposition of shame on a contemporary German public had ceased to serve any productive purpose. Walser said, “Everyone knows the burden of our history, our everlasting disgrace.” He did not, however, stop there. The daily reminders of Germany’s past, for Walser, were more of a self-serving attempt by the country’s elite to relieve “their own guilt” than anything else.
The moment was deeply cathartic for nearly everyone listening, who, according to several accounts, stood up at the end of Walser’s speech to give the author sustained applause. He had articulated the forbidden desires and feelings of a nation, and in doing so relieved an immense amount of internal dissonance for his audience, most of whom had been immersed in a culture in which speech had been tightly patrolled and monitored for even the slightest signs of deviation from the received wisdom, the national consensus.
A lone figure in the audience that day declined to stand and applaud. Ignatz Bubis, the chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a towering figure of moral authority in the country, believed that Walser’s remarks, while strenuously couched in language aimed at providing cover against charges of antisemitism, were essentially divisive, threatening to take the country back, not forward. The day after the speech, Bubis issued a statement to the German press accusing Walser of “spiritual arson,” or geistige Brandstiftung. The two, Walser and Bubis, engaged in a lengthy public debate
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* See, for example, an essay by Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan Williams, “Master of His Universe: The Warnings in JRR Tolkien’s Novels,” New Statesman, August 8, 2018.
