At one point in my life, when I was subjected to a strange harassment campaign by an irate neighbor, he shouted the following words: “How do you keep slipping through my fingers?” Being shouted at isn’t fun, but I did start laughing; I had to. After all, his whole sentence, right down to the little inflections, was a dead-on imitation of Dr. Claw from the cartoon show Inspector Gadget: “I’ll get you next time, Gadget! Next time!” Later on, remembering this, I created a helpful rule of thumb: if you say something out loud, and it sounds like a quote by Darth Vader, or Saruman, or Thanos, stop what you are doing, immediately. Or, to quote the band Destroyer: don’t become the thing you hated. As moral advice goes, in fact, this isn’t the gold standard; it’s the raw, bare minimum. It’s a low bar, but also one that men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and J. D. Vance can’t reach. That’s a problem, because they’re “nerds,” even according to themselves. They love showing off how much they own, or can summon (and incorporate) ex nihilo, by paying “tribute” to their favorite authors and giving big, expensive things really dumb and corny names. Borrowing from writers like J. R. R. Tolkien isn’t just adolescent, though. It’s grounds for hope. This isn’t just one more essay about how unethical, and how annoying, certain rich male world-shakers are. It might be a secret staircase into Mordor.
Why is any of this good news? It proves the truth of a very old idea. Nobody, anywhere, can bear to consider themselves a villain in the present tense. (Regrets are another matter; plenty of people don’t like who they used to be.) But the willingness to shrug, and say, “I guess I am Sauron. How odd.” isn’t compatible with the basic capacity of a human being to function. Here’s what happens instead: the pillars of that person’s whole “ur-text”—their moral rubric for evaluating themselves and others—becomes a blatant, ugly distortion of whatever their original mythos happened to be.
A terrific example is the company Palantir, which was founded by Peter Thiel and named after a crystal ball that shows up in The Lord of the Rings. In the book, the palantir is used by the Satanic antagonist, Sauron, as a tool for surveillance and control. Moreover, it isn’t a “neutral” tool—either good, or evil, depending on who uses it. It’s evil technology. The (formerly) benevolent wizard, Saruman, who can’t help wanting the data it contains, becomes a twisted, power-hungry psychopath. The entire setup of The Lord of the Rings contravenes our conventional wisdom about the supposedly “neutral” properties of tools. There are some tools, Tolkien insists, that can’t be used for good, ever—and there are other kinds of tools, also dangerous, that aren’t what they appear to be. The palantir is one example; the One Ring is another. “I would use this Ring from a desire to do good,” Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf tells his friend, Frodo Baggins. “But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.”
Thiel’s surveillance outfit Palantir wields, compared to its namesake, less power; it’s not from Mordor, fortunately. But its business model is, overtly, profiting from invading the basic human right to privacy. If you know what a “palantir” is, then you know what’s wrong with Thiel. It’s written right across the side of his corporate building.
The most obvious conclusion to draw here is one that has grown shaggy, and pedantic, from constant overuse: lo, what a tragic failure of accurate literary interpretation confronts us here! The whole business of roasting Thiel, from that point onwards, writes itself: literature’s complex, critical thinking’s vital, Thiel’s an imbecile, etc. Let’s take a slightly different path, if only because Thiel isn’t a literary critic, doesn’t have to be right about Tolkien, and has built an empire using brand names that are incidental to its success. There’s no value in trying to discredit him with genre fiction. There’s great potential in recognizing that Thiel cares, about J. R. R. Tolkien. Here’s someone with unlimited resources, a good education, and a vibrant social network, leaning into a middle-school level misreading of Tolkien. Why? Because we’ve permitted a company like his to exist on American soil. He’s found some way to rationalize it; critical thinking isn’t a pure, incorruptible trait, which can’t be lost once it is acquired. The real question is, drawing on Oscar Wilde, what other self-portraits, slowly grown hideous, are just lying around neglected, a la “Palantir”? They might show us to ourselves, if we cared enough to look.
The parallel that comes instantly to mind, for me, is the paradoxical situation of American Christianity. The evangelical position, which conflates being Christian with being a conservative, is fictitious and untenable. A conservative candidate like Donald Trump is an absurd “Christian” choice for a voter to make; in his life, and his politics, he embodies no Christian values. Ninety percent of the time, he doesn’t even bother pretending to have them. But there’s a conversation about the true nature of Christianity that could, and should, be happening across America. It isn’t, and this isn’t Trump’s fault. It’s a problem endemic to politics as (for example) the Democratic Party understands it: politics reduced to an illusory pragmatism. I’m talking about treating the whole enterprise as a matter of fact-checking, realpolitik, data harvesting, strategic compromise…and nothing else.
The problem with poking Thiel for his accidentally truthful brand name is that “the truth” picks up speed if, and only if, its pursuit is conjoined with empathy, with solidarity… in short, with all the species and instances of love. The point isn’t to break lances with Thiel about the right way to understand Tolkien. The point is to feel sorry, and a little bit responsible, for the ruthless opportunist he’s become. That’s not the person he set out to be.
Let’s take this further still. Thiel’s mixing up good and evil in order to make billions of dollars. His Tolkien slip, nonetheless, is a symptom of a larger malady. In that case… perhaps there are features of Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings, and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (which gave us the “Metaverse,” and, eventually, Mark Zuckerberg’s “Meta” brand homage) that even the most critical of thinkers haven’t considered, read, closely enough of late. Isn’t that the point of Tolkien? That the ability to overcome Sauron depends on the resolute courage of individual people who are frustrated, imperfect, and tempted to do evil? Or, if you prefer the Star Wars universe, isn’t there something disturbing, and very realistic, about the ability of the entire Jedi Council to overlook the terrible cancer, Senator Palpatine, who was operating unchecked in their very own backyard? If so, one has to ask why they ended up so blind; or why, for that matter, the American media “locked up” the 2016 Presidential election before it happened—calling it, wrongly, for Hillary Clinton.
If there’s a single dynamic that unifies these various fictions—Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and even lesser galaxies of world-building + fandom like Snow Crash—it’s the theme of those unimportant-seeming people, and marginal populations, that someone overlooks. The Ewoks are a frustrating caricature of Indigenous people, to be sure; however, as the first domino in Palpatine’s undoing, they’re unbelievably salient to the original trilogy’s plot. They’re the one thing Emperor Palpatine can’t possibly foresee mattering at all. That’s also true of hobbits; hobbits, living sequestered in “The Shire,” are so commonly overlooked that Tolkien has to begin his big fantasy epic with an expository essay “concerning” them. But they are, in every instance, the only beings capable of surviving the One Ring. There are, in Dune, the Southern population of undetected Fremen. There are, in Snow Crash, the skeptical, low-flying constellations of hackers. Or, thanks to Captain Adama, that “outdated” starship, in Battlestar Galactica, that the Cylons can’t remotely disable.
The moral lesson hiding (about an inch deep) across all these works may be clear, but nothing about it is easy, when you try living your life by it. It’s an argument that people are good, and evil, in complicated and intermingled ways; that is, not really an invitation to fire bullets of accuracy at the edifice of a buffoon like Thiel. Rather, it’s a call to examine what’s best, and worst, in one’s self—and, by extension, in one’s own township, party or nation. It’s a reminder to believe in the humanity of our enemies, and in the possibility of surviving every civil war with heroes, to quote the Chinese film Hero, “on both sides.” But most relevant, right now, is this: who do we think is too marginal to matter? Even better: who do our worst enemies laugh at, then ignore? For many, many years now, the emergent margins have been entirely on the conservative, even fundamentalist, side of things. Christian evangelists, who I mentioned before. “Red pill” conspiracy theorists (who don’t know how to correctly interpret The Matrix, despite our many patient attempts to instruct them). And perhaps now is a good time to mention, as well, the hijackers from al-Qaeda who pulled off 9/11.
It may seem oddly Quixotic, or even absurd, to insist that the revolution we need has to begin with a mixture of “why not?” outreach and ruthless self-examination. In that case, let me add one last thing to the mix. Where faith is missing, there’s never any possibility of a lasting victory. I’d argue that crucial, hapless “movements”—like the coalitions fighting climate change, or the people trying to monitor and safeguard that new, unregulated monster, “A.I.”—aren’t failures of adequate education, or casualties of effective misinformation. They’re movements without vision. They are righteous performances, based on tawdry overlapping opinions, without any unifying articles of faith. The fact that these movements are getting nowhere, right now, doesn’t prove a thing. It doesn’t mean the great struggle for the betterment of our species has been lost. But a great change is needed. It will not come along by itself. Thank goodness for those nerdy, immortal, overwritten myths, still living at the center of even the worst people’s bookshelves. At least they’re still trying, as through a glass darkly, to show us the way.