In 2020, Peter Thiel wrote an email that resurfaced last week, right after the election of democratic socialist Zoran Mamdani as mayor of New York.
“If one has no stake in the capitalist system, one may well turn against it.”
Thiel wasn't defending socialism, oh no! But he was already describing a structural disconnection.
A generation excluded from ownership, burdened by debt, and priced out of housing will eventually stop believing in the system that rejects it.
And five years later, it's playing out as predicted...
Thiel understood that when you can't enter the system, you don't try to fix it, you move into another logic of reality.
He saw that the capitalist architecture was losing its integrating power.
And once a system stops absorbing its youth, it gets outflanked by emergent ones that promise coherence through new currencies: meaning, protection, community, clarity.
Thiel saw the crack.
What he didn't articulate is how the system reconfigures into new architectures of power, each with its own promise of stability and its own blind spots.
Four world-forming logics
When I started mapping our geopolitical and societal complexity, I had to destroy every binary frame I had been taught.