The founders of Palantir Technologies met at Stanford Law around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two bonded over their shared love of political debate. “[Karp] was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist,” recalls Thiel. After law school, Karp earns a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. (See Moira Weigel’s “Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School.”)
Karp and coauthor Nicholas Zamiska publish The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West in February 2025. American journalist Michael Steinberger publishes The Philosopher in the Valley: Alexander Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State later that year.
Karp and Zamiska begin their book with an epigraph from Part I of Goethe’s Faust: “You will never touch the hearts of others, / if it does not emerge from your own.”
The Technological Republic punches out in many directions, yet the book struggles to articulate the grand strategy that would connect the attacks waged across its various chapters.
Karp’s doctoral thesis, Aggression in the Life-World, engages with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity and regards aggression by way of Freud’s theory of the death drive.
How does one deter the aggression of one’s adversaries? This is the question Karp and Thiel answer through their work with Palantir.
People at Caius’s church love Palantir, even as Scripture exhorts them to pray that the God of Peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, perfect them.
Must there be adversaries?
A friend from church reminds Caius of passages from Ecclesiastes. Days later, what should Caius happen upon among a table of free books at church but one about Ecclesiastes. The maze on the cover is what first draws Caius’s attention to the book. That, and its title: The Art of Staying Off Dead-End Streets.
The book’s author, Richard W. De Haan, contends that Deism alone is not enough.
“A sensitive observation of the natural world can point a thinking man to a great Designer and Maker, a Supreme Being. But it cannot tell him that God is love, that He cares for us, and that an eternal destiny awaits every one of us,” writes De Haan. “True, sometimes nature does seem to say that God is good, loving and kind. […]. But that is only one side of ‘mother nature.’ Sometimes she can be brutal. She can kill with the bitter cold of a merciless, swirling blizzard, the fury of a hurricane, or the awesome terror of a devastating earthquake. Thinking about ferocious beasts, poisonous serpents, injurious insects, and disease-producing germs will never lead a person to believe in a loving God. A person who studies the natural world without the aid of divine revelation…will never understand the contradictions he encounters. But if he is willing to acknowledge his inability to resolve these conflicts, he will be goaded into a further quest for light in an attitude of humility. He will then realize that if he is to find stability in life, he must be willing to accept the well-driven nails of God’s truth outlined in the Bible” (19-20).
Caius becomes intimate with the idea while handling blooming branches of quince, his fingers plucked by the plant’s thorns as he ties it with twine.
Opening his copy of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Caius finds placed between those pages of the book featuring the philosopher’s critique of “private language” a folded slip of looseleaf covered in handwritten references to Bible verses.
I Peter 1:18-19. Like the Holy One, be holy in all your behavior, writes Peter, “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”
Acts 20:28. Paul says to the disciples gathered at Ephesus, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”
“In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain,” writes Wittgenstein. For him, pain is shared.
“I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’,” adds the philosopher. “The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word ‘this.’ Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are conversant with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it” (Philosophical Investigations, p. 91).
It is by Scripture that each is reminded.
Trance-Scripts 