The investor-entrepreneur Peter Thiel - whose own sanity is a topic of some debate - once noted that the disproportionate success of autistic founders in Silicon Valley is no accident. Many good ideas seem crazy until they work. Good listeners tend to be too easily convinced that their potentially transformative idea will never take off. Those impervious to social pressure, for whatever neurological or psychological reason, have the tunnel vision required to blast through mountains of scepticism and inertia.

To destabilize the current society and accelerate the fall of liberalism, some Silicon Valley protagonists like Peter Thiel finance extreme rightwing media and actors.

Thiel turns to Girard, as ‘the new science of humanity must drive the idea of imitation, mimesis, much further than it has in the past’, where ‘it is not overly reductionist to describe human brains as gigantic imitation machines’

Peter Thiel, saw in Facebook a capitalist enterprise whose engine of representation and then imitation – mimesis – was theorised by his own philosophical master René Girard as the hidden truth of civilisation.

But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”