This is a linkpost for https://www.nihilismisnotenough.com/
This is Peter Thiel building on the ideas of one of his teachers at Stanford, the Catholic philosopher René Girard. Girard had this slightly weird theory of human nature according to which all desire is imitative, this leads to people wanting the same things, and this leads to community competition for scarce resources. In pre-Christian cultures the competition is resolved by finding someone to blame, a scapegoat, who the community then unites to persecute. But Christian culture has neutralized this mechanism by siding with the underdog against the community, and so society now has all these competitive and violent urges hanging around unresolved. Girard lived in the 20th century and he tried to interpret the risks of fascism, communism, and nuclear war in terms of this framework, specifically in terms of a struggle to fend off the apocalyptic unleashing of violence. Thiel's contribution to Girardian theory is to interpret the 21st century so far as a low-testosterone period in which no one cares enough to really do anything apocalyptic; but this can't go on forever.
I haven't actually read Girard, so I don't know any of the nuances. But I can interpret this partly through the lens of one of my gurus, Celia Green, who depicts society as a kind of conspiracy to suppress ambition, on the principle that misery loves company. This idea horrified me as a young transhumanist, both because it paints an ugly picture of human nature as spiteful and vengeful, and because it implies there is no will to serious liberation (I wanted to end work and death), in fact it predicts that such attempts will be resisted. I always had trouble believing this theory, and I would now say there's a lot more to human nature (and to why transhumanism hasn't prospered) than just "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down". But it's definitely a factor in human life.
Celia Green was herself an extremely ambitious person who didn't get to act on her ambitions, which explains why she ended up developing such a theory of human nature. My guess is that Thiel has a similar story, except that he got his analysis from Girard, and he did succeed in a lot of his ambitions. Basically, anyone setting out to become a rich and powerful capitalist, as Thiel did, has to worry about becoming a focus of negative attention, especially when there are political movements that attack wealth and/or privilege; and Girard's theories may have explained what Thiel saw as a student (intersectional leftism on campus) as well as preparing him for his entrepreneurial career.
So in both Green and Girard, we are dealing with theories of social psychology according to which people have a tendency to persecute individuals and minorities in the name of the collective, and in which this persecution (or its sublimation) is central to how society works. They even both utilize Christianity in developing their theories, but for Girard (and Thiel), Christianity supplies an overall metaphorical structure including eschatology, whereas Green focuses on Gnostic Christianity as symbolizing how the individual psyche can escape the existential pitfalls that await it.
So I'd say this essay by Thiel is a work of Girardian eschatology, similar to apocalyptic Christian writings which try to interpret the contemporary world in terms of the end times, only Girard's apocalypse is the violent collapse of civilization. Girard's whole historiography, remember, revolves around the premise that pre-Christian societies had this psychology in which scapegoats are sacrificed to the collective, then Christ was supposed to nullify this impulse by being the ultimate sacrifice. But he really needs to return in order to seal the deal, and meanwhile we've had 2000 years of Christian and post-Christian societies wrestling with the need to sublimate the sacrificial impulse, seeking substitutes for the Christian formula, succumbing to apocalypse in the form of war or revolution, or teetering back from the brink, and so on. Thiel is adding a new chapter to the Girardian narrative, in which the 21st century has avoided collapse due to a generally lowered vitality, but he prophesies that the end must still come in some form.
depicts society as a kind of conspiracy to suppress ambition, on the principle that misery loves company
ugly picture of human nature as spiteful and vengeful, and because it implies there is no will to serious liberation (I wanted to end work and death), in fact it predicts that such attempts will be resisted
anyone setting out to become a rich and powerful capitalist, as Thiel did, has to worry about becoming a focus of negative attention, especially when there are political movements that attack wealth and/or privilege
I agree that there definitely is a general human instinct to suppress the successful ones. I am much less certain about the exact details of what triggers it, and how could it possibly be overcome.
Notice that there is also an opposite instinct to worship the successful ones: many people practically worship their leaders, sportsmen, actors... What decides which reaction activates when they see success?
(Also, how do you distinguish between "people do X because they see others do X" and "there is a reason why multiple people independently decide to do X"? For example, my first reaction to the previous question was "people are likely to hate those who are hated by others, and worship those who are worshiped by others", which seems like something Girard might say, but that also seems like a lazy answer; maybe people arrive at the same conclusions because they see the same triggers.)
A possible explanation is that people try to suppress others when the distance between them is small, and worship them when the distance is large. If you are a peasant, a more successful peasant is probably a witch and needs to be burned... but a king is practically a different species. A person similar to you evokes the feeling of "it should have been me instead", which leads to resentment.
Familiarity breeds contempt / “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” / “An expert is an ordinary fellow from another town.” = people are much less likely to admire someone whom they already knew before that person became famous.
So, to trigger the worship instinct, people should know as little as possible about your past; you should appear in front of them as a fully developed success. To a more credulous audience, you could perhaps give a story about how you were already awesome as a baby (it helps if someone else says that).
...this is not an optimistic perspective either: it offers you a recipe to individually overcome the talent suppression instinct (every time you level up, move to a different city, and get rid of everyone who knows you; use pseudonyms online, and burn them when you level up), but it does not suggest a way out for the society as a whole.