Michael Porter, the Godfather of modern business strategy, believes that strong businesses should aim to be unique, not the best. Something Peter Thiel also believes: Trying to outcompete rivals leads to mediocre performance, so companies should avoid competition and seek to crea...

According to Peter Thiel, monopoly is the end state of every successful business. If you want to create and capture lasting economic value, don’t compete. The more unique companies are, the more the business world can flourish.

Consider the airline industry...

In most religious traditions time is like a circle: it closes where it opened. In Hinduism, for example, the world spins along an endless cycle: creation, rise, decline, destruction, and rebirth. This conception is very much fatalistic in nature.

Christians, however, see time as linear. It ...

When a scapegoat is sacrificed, peace is restored in the community. Then, the culture lives peacefully for a short time. But eventually, tensions flare and violence returns to the community. To restore the peace, a new scapegoat must be named and sacrificed, which re-starts the sacrificial loop.

Peter Thiel is an investor who founded PayPal, a believer in Libertarian ideals, a philosopher who found faith in Jesus, a gay Republican & best-selling author.

• He is deeply influenced by Rene Girard, a French historian who postulated that we tend to carry our lives by...

When humans engage in a Mimetic conflict, violence can only be fixed by murdering the scapegoat. This process of killing the victim, again & again, is the main peace pill in an archaic society. People perform ritual sacrifices together, and when a priest is appoi...

Mimetic Theory rests on the assumption that all our cultural behaviors, beginning with the acquisition of language by children, are imitative. Girard observed that all desires come from other people. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning but ... when tw...