Peter Thiel calls death "a bug in the program." He's invested millions in life extension, advocates for elite governance over democracy, and argues that human nature is dangerously mimetic: we copy each other's desires, escalate into rivalry, and descend into violence without strong structures to contain us. His political protégés now occupy the highest offices in American government.

Miguel de Unamuno, writing in 1912, argued that our awareness of death and our refusal to accept it creates "the tragic sense of life" that is the source of human dignity. The struggle with mortality, with our limitations, with the unresolvable tension between reason and faith, is not our curse but our glory.

These aren't just philosophical disagreements. They represent fundamentally different answers to the question that defines our political moment: Can humans be trusted to govern themselves?

Thiel's worldview comes from René Girard's mimetic theory. The core insight: humans don't have original desires. We copy them from others. I want what you want because you want it. This creates rivalry, which escalates into violence. Historically, societies contained this through scapegoating: uniting against a common victim to restore peace.

Modern democracy, in this view, is a mimetic crisis generator. Social media amplifies imitation at scale. Everyone sees what everyone else has. Everyone wants the same scarce goods: status, recognition, and power. Electoral competition is pure mimetic rivalry. We've dismantled traditional containment mechanisms (religion, hierarchy, ritual) without replacing them.

Thiel's conclusion: Democracy can't handle mimetic conflict. We need elite governance, clear hierarchies, and reduced participation. Not intentional tyranny, just recognition that ordinary people caught in mimetic contagion can't make good collective decisions; it’s better to concentrate power among those who actually understand the problem.

Therefore, this isn't just theory; look at the current administration: JD Vance (Thiel's former employee and funded candidate), David Sacks (PayPal colleague now shaping AI policy), Elon Musk (restructuring government), dozens of Palantir alumni throughout the executive branch. Journalists call it "Peter Thiel's party."

The operating system is simple: democracy amplifies conflict, strong executive action breaks through gridlock, hierarchies reduce rivalry, and competence matters more than consensus.

Unamuno looks at the same human weakness and reaches the opposite conclusion.

Yes, we're mortal. Yes, we're conflicted. Yes, we struggle with limitations. That's what makes us human. The person who accepts mortality but lives intensely in its shadow, who maintains the tension between faith and reason, who creates meaning from despair, that person achieves something no amount of life extension or technological transcendence can provide.

"Make yourself irreplaceable," Unamuno wrote. Not by living forever, but by living so fully that your finite existence contains something infinite.

Applied to governance: Yes, democracy is messy because humans are flawed. But the solution isn't to remove human agency. It's to recognize that the struggle with our flaws is what creates civic virtue. The solution to imperfect humans governing themselves badly isn't to stop letting them govern. It's to build better structures that channel human weakness toward productive ends.

This is faith in humanity's capacity to transcend itself through struggle, not escape itself through engineering.

There's an experiment underway that tests these competing worldviews: agoradao.eth, a blockchain-based governance organization trying to prove that decentralized power can sustain accountability through structural design.

The proposal is Madisonian: bicameral governance (forcing different constituencies to negotiate), temporal checks (cooling-off periods prevent mimetic contagion from becoming instant policy), enumerated powers (constitutional bounds on what can be governed), mandatory deliberation (proposals must include opposition analysis), and fork rights (minorities can exit if principles are violated).

This accepts Girard's diagnosis while rejecting Thiel's prescription. Yes, humans are mimetic and rivalrous. So design systems that turn rivalry into deliberation. Make the struggle productive.

The Thielian critique writes itself: "This only works because you've selected high-trust, voluntary participants with shared incentives. At the nation-state scale, with actual diversity and material conflict, mimetic violence overwhelms any structure. That's why you need elite control."

The Unamuno response: "The attempt itself, building systems worthy of human dignity while accounting for human weakness, is what makes us worthy of self-governance. Maybe it fails. Maybe we're not ready. But giving up without trying is the real passivity."

Both Thiel and Unamuno recognize human limitation. The difference is what they do with it.

Thiel: Humans are broken at the code level. Death is a bug. Democracy is a bug. Mimetic nature is a bug. Solution: replace the human element with something more reliable. Posthuman biology, AI, elite governance, and technical systems.

Unamuno: Humans are broken, and the brokenness is the point. The wound is the gift. The awareness of limitation forces us to create meaning. The struggle with our nature rather than being determined by it is what makes us human rather than merely biological.

One treats human flaws as problems to be solved through engineering. The other treats them as conditions to be lived through struggle.

One leads to technocracy, concentrated power, and posthumanism; the other leads to democracy, distributed struggle, and tragic heroism.

Thiel's diagnosis contains real insight. We are more imitative than we admit. Social media has revealed mimetic dynamics. Democratic deliberation has become dysfunctional. The question "can humans handle freedom without descending into rivalry?" deserves a serious answer, not dismissal.

But his solution terrifies me. Once you accept that ordinary people can't be trusted with power, you've justified every authoritarian move that follows. "We're not being anti-democratic. We're just recognizing that democracy creates mimetic crisis. What looks like democratic participation is actually mob behavior that needs containment."

Unamuno's faith in humanity appeals to me. The idea that meaning comes from struggle, that we can transcend our limitations through conscious wrestling with them, that democracy is messy precisely because it honors human dignity. This feels true.

But I wonder: Is this just privilege talking? Is faith in democratic struggle something only stable societies can afford? When mimetic violence actually threatens to tear things apart, is elite control genuinely necessary, at least temporarily?

Can structural design substitute for elite control in managing mimetic conflict? Or must concentrated power always be the answer when humans prove unable to govern themselves?

Can we build systems that assume human weakness while maintaining faith in human potential? Or is that wishful thinking, wanting to believe we're better than we are?

Is democracy worth preserving even when it's failing? Or is that romantic attachment to a system that no longer serves its purpose?

Are we pursuing technological immortality because we're ambitious or because we're afraid? Are we dreaming big enough, as Thiel asks, or fleeing from living deeply enough, as Unamuno suggests?

I don't know if the DAO experiment will work at scale. I don't know if Thiel's pessimism about human nature is justified or just convenient for concentrating power. I don't know if Unamuno's faith in tragic struggle can sustain actual governance or just philosophy.

What I do know: We're living through the test.

One worldview is being implemented right now through the most powerful government on earth. The other is being tested in blockchain experiments and philosophical essays.

Which one proves durable will determine whether the 21st century sees democracy's renewal or its replacement by something we're calling "competence" but might just be the oldest form of government: the strong ruling the weak.

The question isn't which worldview is more intellectually appealing. Which one generates systems where humans can actually flourish? Flawed, mortal, mimetic, and all.

I suspect the answer lies somewhere neither Thiel nor Unamuno fully captures. But the conversation between them? That might be the most important one we're not having loudly enough.

Where do you stand?

For deeper exploration: The Tragic Sense of Life on Unamuno's philosophy, and Can Decentralized Governance Redeem Democracy's Promise? on structural alternatives to elite control.

Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., author and civic designer exploring the intersection of governance, technology, and moral architecture; thought-leader and steward of agoradao.eth.