Billionaire Peter Thiel Funding Libertarian Islands to Build New Societies
A new profile in Details magazine features a story on the billionaire visionary, entrepreneur, and investor Peter Thiel and discusses a new investment that Thiel has made to build a new global society, literally.
Thiel is one of the masterminds behind Pay Pal and was one of the foremost investors in Facebook when it was merely a college-networking site at Harvard University.
Thiel’s newest $1.25 million investment is a bit more out of the realm of technology and is focusing more on social and political organization in the form of creating inhabitable ocean colonies.
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The colonies that Thiel is investing in would start from scratch and would be ruled by the libertarian ideology that Thiel himself believes in. The ocean communities would be free of regulations, laws, and moral conventions including regulations on things like wages or harboring weapons.
However outlandish the new ocean colonies may sound, Thiel is not alone in his ideological pathway into a new world. His investment is going into a scientific research institute that is working on developing micro-nations that are also being pushed by another famous entrepreneur, Patri Friedman.
Patri Friedman is the grandson of Milton Friedman and is one if the brainchildren behind the building of these new sovereign nations that would be situated upon oil-rig type platforms in international waters.
The Seasteading Institute is carrying out the plan and design for these new nations and the first one is expected to be launched in seven years. Believers hope that the new mini-nation states will be inhabited by tens of millions by 2050.
The institute’s mission statement argues that the research institute aims to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems.”
The business mogul’s inspiration for the investment comes from Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” that advocates reason, individualism, and free market economy as the foundational social structures of progressive society. The book further emphasizes that government coercion has had a negative impact on human achievement.
Thiel told Details magazine of the reasoning behind his investment, “We’re at this pretty important point in society where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we’re going to be forced to change in a way that’s really tough.”
The chess whiz, Harvard graduate, and self-made billionaire is not worried about the wide array of criticism that the project is gathering from skeptics.
He told Details, "There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."
