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

by Ryan Holiday

To borrow a line from Zero to One, to believe in conspiracies is an effective truth. To dismiss anything as impossible is as well. I said in the introduction that we might live in a world of too few conspiracies, not too many. We have plenty of opinions—plenty of histrionic complaints about how terrible and awful and stuck we are—but not enough people with the patience, coordination, and ambition to do anything about it. We used to throw bombs, now we throw tantrums—or worse, tweets. In ancient times it was the foolish sophists who believed that every problem could be talked through, that the logical, obvious, and right thing would simply come about if explained well enough. It’s the realists who know that this isn’t how things actually work, who know that realpolitik is how things actually get done.