Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

To recoil at this thought is natural. While Machiavelli never said—as some might claim—that we must lose that part of ourselves altogether in the pursuit of power, he did say that for the prince who wishes to remake the world to his liking, the natural impulse to be kind, forgiving, and empathetic must temporarily be suppressed. This is not an easy thing to do, even in the face of overwhelming necessity. By 1939, Franz Halder, a German general, had taken to carrying a pistol so that when he was in the room with Hitler, he might assassinate him. But he could never pull the trigger. He could not reconcile how he could take up as “human being and a Christian to shoot down an unarmed man.” In fact, many German generals knew that someone should do it, they wanted it to have been done, but they could not do it themselves . . . because it was unethical. Hans Oster, himself a dogged German conspirator against Hitler, would despair, “We have no one who will throw the bomb in order to liberate our generals from their scruples.” Every conspiracy is the story of man sketching out a plan on paper, committing to something in a secret meeting room, and then there is the and then. The man believes he has considered any and all reservations, but only when it looks and feels like it will actually happen—when he stands in the same room with the enemy, forced to really do the deed that had been only