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

by Ryan Holiday

I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. What is more, I won’t. That was my discovery: that I didn’t have to. —Walker Percy, Lancelot

I cant stand it walker percy lancelot

Our tendency to shy away from this truth creates a profound ignorance of how things really work, and what it means to be strategic, to be powerful, and to try to shape events rather than simply be shaped by them.

Dont shy away from the truth

“The beginnings of all things are small,” Cicero reminds us.

The beginnings of all things are small

The existentialists spoke of ressentiment, or the way that resentment creates frustration which fuels more resentment.

Resentment creates frustration which fuels more resentment

Never fight a battle against someone who buys ink by the barrel. It’s easier to just let the whole thing go.

Ink by the barrel

What’s more, there is evil in not acting, too. To assume that a bad situation will resolve itself or that someone else will resolve it for you.

There is evil in not acting

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what other people have. They covet.

Mimetic desire is to covet

José Raúl Capablanca, and remind himself of the man’s famous dictum: To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.

Capablanca dont be irst to act be last standing chess

That’s where you just become that which you hate.”

Dont become that which you hate. Retributive justice

“There

Be legal as a constraint

That was one of the benefits of his patience: he wasn’t angry anymore, he didn’t need people rallying to his side.

Patience means he wasnt angry anymore

Ethics don’t win the war, but they do help keep the peace.

Ethics dont win the war but they do help keep the peace

B. H. Liddell Hart would say that all great victories come along “the line of least resistance and the line of least expectation.”

Line of least resistance and expectation

To view Atlanta, this city that lay before him and his plans, as the sum total of its people would be to make the whole affair personal, not professional, and thus impossible. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” he told them as he rejected their pleas to be spared. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” When someone categorizes something evil, as Sherman did, as Peter and Mr. A repeatedly did, he implicitly gives himself permission to do what needs to be done to destroy it. It cannot have been easy for Sherman to demand the evacuation of that city.

When you categorize something as evil sherman march

choose your enemies wisely, he had been told, because you become just like them—but

Choose your enemies wisely because you become just like them

“The problem with the Silicon Valley,” as Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “is that we tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.”

Jim barksdale a clear view with a short distance

There is a story that Herodotus tells in The Histories about a war between Sparta and Tegea. In it, the Spartans were “so confident of reducing the men of Tegea to slavery” that they literally brought chains with them. But they lost, having dreadfully underestimated their enemy, and with poetic justice the prisoners were “forced to wear on their own legs the chains they had brought.” Gawker’s depositions would prove not dissimilar. Both A.J. and Denton would one day be marched into court chained to the words they had spoken in the depositions they had so confidently conducted. “I

Herodotus Sparta Tagea chains of confidence

“Psychologically, there is this weird thing where you want to brag about these things that you’re not supposed to,” Thiel would say to me. Freud explained this phenomenon a hundred years ago: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” This is how Peter justified the few friends he told and how he suspects he was eventually discovered. Just as rules are meant to be broken, it seems, secrets are meant to be shared.

Freud and secrets eyes to see ears to hear

“The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others” is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim.

Truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing

maskirovka—

Maskirovka

Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est—cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.

Cut anything into small enough pieces and its mass confusion

Being feared, Machiavelli says, is an important protection against a conspiracy. The ultimate protection, he says, however, is to be well liked.

Being feared is importantg protection econd only to being well liked

“At some point the word ‘strategy’ becomes a euphemism for procrastination.

Strategy is a euphemism for procrastination

Churchill once compared an offensive force to throwing a bucket of water over the floor: “It rushes forward, then soaks forward, and finally stops altogether until another bucket can be brought.”

Churchill buckets on the floor water and offensive force

“Lick ’em tomorrow”

Grant battle thrown in disarray redouble and lick em tomorrow

Napoleon: “Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.”

Napoleon never interrupt an enemy making a mistake

There was a cultivated and deliberate sense around Lyndon Johnson, an aide once said of the pragmatic, ruthless man. “There was a feeling—if you did everything, you would win.” Whatever it took. Whatever was necessary. Even if it wasn’t necessary but it might help. That’s what you did and that’s how you would stay on top. This is very different from the sense that Hillary Clinton had that she should win. Or the sense around Al Gore that he probably did win. What matters is who does what needs to be done to finish.

LBJ do hatever it akes everything and you will win

The great sin for a leader, Frederick the Great once observed, was not in being defeated but in being surprised.

Frederick the great the great sin for a leader is to be surprised not to be defeated

He had proven that “nothing you can do about it” is just what people who don’t want to do anything about it like to say to make themselves feel better about their inaction.

Nothing you can do about it...

Machiavelli would say that when overconfidence enters men’s hearts, “it causes them to go beyond their mark . . . to lose the opportunity of possessing a certain good by hoping to obtain a better one that is uncertain.”

A certain good to obtain a good that is uncertain so is overconfidence

David fells Goliath with his well-placed stone, that’s not the end of it. Then began the gruesome work of hacking off the giant’s head with the man’s own sword. The point is: you can’t leave them even an inch to come back at you.

David goliath severing goliaths ead crushing enemies totally

E. P. Thompson said that history never happens as the actors suspect, that history is instead the “record of unintended consequences.”

History is the record of unintended consequences

In Maui, where Thiel has a home and spends a good deal of his time, officials once introduced a species of mongoose to kill rats. Only after introducing them did it occur to anyone that rats are nocturnal and mongooses are diurnal. A bad problem became worse, a rat problem became a mongoose problem.

Maui rats mongoose

amor fati—loving, embracing the good in what has happened.

Amor fati