Alex Karp is a maniac and maybe even a sociopath. But I think he’s right about one thing:
Interviewer:
I want to get into all of that, but I’ll tell you where I want to start. You wrote a book last year called “The Technological Republic,” and you quote Samuel Huntington in it and you argue the following: that the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” What did you mean by that? And is that what Palantir ultimately does?
Alex Karp CEO of Palantir:
Well, I think one of the most interesting things about that quote is it’s indisputably and obviously true.
Interviewer:
You genuinely believe that the U.S., this idea of ideas, values, religion, has nothing to do with it? You think it really is about organizing violence?
Alex Karp:
But one of the biggest problems we have in our elite institutions, especially our Ivy Leagues, is this indisputable truth that no one would listen to the superiority of our ideas if our ability to organize violence was inferior.
That every single person in the world believes, outside of the faculty of Harvard, and certainly all of our adversaries know to be true, is viewed as something that’s kind of worthy of great discussion and dispute.
And the primary reason they dispute it, honestly, is because at their core, they want to undermine the superiority of Western values, which are meritocracy, rule of law, accepting that inputs and outputs are not the same, that are the basis of building the superiority on the military plane.