"At the extremes, even the distinction between violence inflicted on oneself and violence inflicted on other people is in the process of evaporating, in the disturbing new phenomenon of suicide-murderers. The word that best describes this unbounded, apocalyptic violence is “terrorism.”'

"One may define a “liberal” as someone who knows nothing of the past and of this history of violence, and still holds to the Enlightenment view of the natural goodness of humanity. And one may define a “conservative” as someone who knows nothing of the future and of the global world that is destined to be, and therefore still believes that the nation-state or other institutions rooted in sacred violence can contain unlimited human violence."

"In Girard’s alternative account of these matters, the war of all against all culminates not in a social contract but in a war of all against one, as the same mimetic forces gradually drive the combatants to gang up on one particular person. The war continues to escalate and there is no rational stopping point, at least not until this person becomes the scapegoat whose death helps to unite the community and bring about a limited peace for the survivors." - Peter Thiel

"As with Schmitt and Strauss, Girard also believes that there exists a disturbing truth about the city and humanity, and that the whole issue of human violence has been whitewashed away by the Enlightenment."

Thought experiment via LEO Strauss: "consider the position of a “historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party.”

...this historian comes “to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion.”

On an exoteric level, this historian will make a passionate defense of the state-sponsored view,’ but esoterically, between the lines, “he would write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think.”

It would be enough for the attentive reader, but not enough for the invariably less intelligent government censors. Alternately, our writer might even state “certain truths quite openly by using as mouthpiece some disreputable character. .. . There would then be good reason for our finding in the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans, and buffoons.”

"Politics is the field of battle in which that division takes place, in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies. “The high points of politics,” declares Carl Schmitt, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” The enemy is the one whose very presence forces us to confront the foundational questions about human nature anew; “the enemy is our own question as a figure.” Because of the permanence of these always contentious questions, one cannot unilaterally escape from all politics; those who attempt to do so are suffering from moments of supreme self-delusion; these include the signatories of the Kellogg Pact of 1928, which outlawed all war."

"Of course, in the long run, it may well be that power and prosperity go to those who follow Locke’s capitalist rules, so that in the long run, the religious fanatics who have so violently and suddenly interposed themselves will eventually lack the wealth and the technology needed to threaten the nonreligious world the Enlightenment has built in the West; but none of this will matter if we are all dead in the short run.

Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly
called the Enlightenment." - Peter Thiel

"And so, a religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars. Even President Bush, who styles himself a religious conservative, cannot bring himself to believe that it is religion that really matters: “[T]his great nation of many religions understands our war is not against Islam or against the faith practiced by the Muslim people.”

Where Bush downplays the differences, bin Laden emphasizes them, contrasting the world of pure Islam and the world of the decadent West in the most extreme way imaginable: “[Tlhe love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world . . . die in the right cause and go to the other world.”

"Since September 11, our peace has been broken. For there remains another very important boundary whose existence the American people had forgotten. They had forgotten about the rest of the world and its deep division from the West." - Peter Thiel

"Those who acquired their property through violence will not be capable of growing their fortunes, and in time will possess only a small and uninfluential fraction of the world’s wealth. Locke would dismiss out of hand Balzac’s sweeping and subversive notion that “behind every great fortune there lies a crime.” We need not heed Brecht’s call for more inspectors and inquisitors. Nothing should stop us from enjoying the prosperous tranquility of the capitalist paradise we have built for ourselves."

"In a capitalist world, violent debates about truth—whether they concern questions of religion and virtue or questions about the nature of humanity— interfere with the productive conduct of commerce. It is therefore best for such questions to be eliminated or obscured."

"Over time, the country founded by Locke would do away with Christian religiosity even as it maintained many outward appearances of it. The United States eventually would become more secular and materialist, though most of its citizens would continue to call themselves “Christians.”'> There would be no catastrophic war against religion of the sort one had in France or Russia, but there would be no counterrevolution either. Only occasionally would conservative moralists express their perplexity at how a nation ostensibly founded on Christian principles ever could have drifted so far from its original conception; never would it cross their minds to think that this process of gradual drift had been a part of that original conception." - Peter Thiel