Should-Read: Manu Saadia: Why Peter Thiel Fears “Star Trek”

Should-Read: Manu Saadia: Why Peter Thiel Fears “Star Trek”: “Asked… whether he was a bigger fan of ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Star Trek’…

…Thiel replied that, as a capitalist, he preferred the former. “‘Star Trek’ is the communist one,” he said…. In “Star Wars,” criminal potentates hire bounty hunters to recover debts from roguish smugglers. Robots are menial servants and sycophants rather than colleagues, and human slavery persists. Unelected tyrants and religious zealots make policy by fiat…. Fate and the lottery of birth reign supreme. It is a libertarian’s fever dream….

This, rather than the liberal-democratic setting of the U.S.S. Enterprise, is the political environment in which Thiel seems to feel most comfortable. In his Cato essay, he places “confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” in opposition to “authentic human freedom.” Only the strong and lucky, like Han Solo, should survive…