Thiel, and the Dynamics of Our Time

1. The Power and the Danger of Standing Inside

When you enter into the dynamics that animate Thiel and his peers — capital flows, entrepreneurial drive, the restless pulse of innovation — you touch the same elemental forces that they are immersed in. These are real world-shaping forces:

• The elemental powers in technology (ahrimanic intelligence).
• The tidal surges in finance (etheric energies diverted into abstraction).
• The entrepreneurial will (the fire of the human “I” pressed into risk and transformation).

Most spiritual thinkers recoil from these forces because they feel “brute,” but precisely there lies the living becoming of the world.

To remain outside is to stay “safe” but ineffective. To enter in is to risk being swept away, but also to stand where the real shaping must occur.

2. Form as Force-Armed

It has to be re-framed exactly as it is: what’s missing in Thiel’s world is not the force — there is force in abundance — but the form that can carry force without breaking it or stifling it.

If we use Goethe’s image:

• The raw dynamics are like the sap surging upward.
• The spiritual-scientific correction, when done badly, becomes like a rigid trellis that chokes the plant.
• What’s needed is a living form — the metamorphosis of the leaf itself — that channels the same vitality into stages of development without suffocating it.

That means a corrective that doesn’t blunt the entrepreneurial fire, but reorients it just enough, with dynamic vision so it becomes human, not merely technical.

3. The Missing Faculty: Formative Consciousness

It is indeed so, and it has to be pointed out that a normal consciousness cannot spontaneously find the overall evolutionary picture so that orientation in time becomes possible. It requires something like Steiner’s initiatic consciousness — a capacity to perceive not only forces but their lawful metamorphosis.

Summed up, a spiritual-scientific approach could be described precisely like this:

• Step one: live yourself into their point of view.
• Step two: perceive the lawful form hidden inside the forces.
• Step three: shape a corrective form from within the movement itself, not imposed from without.

This way the forces are not hampered, but redeemed — allowed to show their full dynamism in human-aligned form. Their historical formative impact is not lessened or distorted, but oriented to full human development.

4. Why This Is So Hard

What makes this eventually difficult for anyone attempting it comprehensive "corrective" measure, is that to do it truthfully, one must be carried along by those very brute forces — finance, entrepreneurial will, innovation fever — and not be broken by them. Most all too good-willing people don’t dare to even go there, and most entrepreneurs can’t step out of them.

So what's required is a standing right in the in-between: fully experiencing the massive technological and digital forces from within, so as to breathe the force of the age and give it lawful form. Naturally, what "lawful form" might means, is itself subject to upgrade through a dynamized thinking that can truly experience time-shaping forces of that magnitude. That requires enormous inner strength. And it is no surprise that one can feel to “lack elements” to fully enter into such situations — while to have access to the ins and the outs and their full complexity, one would need to stand in it, on the very terrain where they exist.

5. A Next Gesture

We will next try to take one concrete project (say, Praxis or Freedom Cities) and attempt to live into and highlight it from the inside, indeed — imagine it as if we were inside their view. Then the question could be asked: what form would metamorphosis suggest here? How could the “city-state” impulse be reshaped so it carries the same dynamism but opens to the human-spiritual dimension?

That exercise might begin to strengthen the “force-armed form” that we’re needing to pointing toward.