Pluralistic：疯狂的亿万富翁及其综合征 (2026年7月16日)
背景与摘要： 在这篇文章中，科利·多克托罗（Cory Doctorow）探讨了新古典经济学的意识形态矛盾以及“精英统治（meritocracy）”的神话。他指出，尽管市场理论假定竞争压力能为了公众利益而遏制贪婪行为，但如今那些所谓的“亲市场（pro-market）”辩护者，实际上却在为极度富有的食利者和科技界亿万富翁（如埃隆·马斯克和彼得·蒂尔）开脱。这些大亨已经完全摆脱了市场纪律，并公然渴望建立垄断、摆脱民主约束，像现代君主一样统治一切——与此同时，他们还将公众的批评轻蔑地斥为“亿万富翁错乱综合征”。
Summary
In this essay, Cory Doctorow explores the ideological contradictions of neoclassical economics and the myth of "meritocracy." He argues that while market theory posits that competitive pressure keeps greedy actors in check for the public benefit, today's "pro-market" defenders act as apologists for ultra-wealthy rentiers and tech billionaires (like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel). These figures have escaped market discipline entirely and openly yearn to establish monopolies, cast off democratic constraints, and rule as modern-day monarchs—all while dismissing public criticism as "billionaire derangement syndrome."
今天的链接
- 疯狂的亿万富翁及其综合征：疯狂的国王们确实喜欢三段论。
- 嘿，看看这个：令人愉悦的享受。
- 客体永久性：PoGo 诉强制仲裁案；特朗普击败了一些彻头彻尾的失败者；公共利益互联网；“贴近机器”；适合装小工具的休闲裤；Gambiologia；猴子自拍的版权；监狱城镇诉监狱改革。
- 即将出席的活动：爱丁堡、悉尼、墨尔本、布莱顿、伦敦、南本德。
- 近期出席的活动：我去过的地方。
- 最新出版的书籍：你继续读，我就会继续写。
- 即将出版的书籍：就像我说的，我会继续写下去的。
- 版权页及其他说明：其余的所有内容。
Today's Links
- Deranged billionaires and their syndromes: The Mad Kings do love a syllogism.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: PoGo v binding arbitration; Trump beat some absolute losers; Public interest internet; "Close to the Machine"; Gadget-friendly chinos; Gambiologia; Monkey selfie copyright; Prison towns v prison reform.
- Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
疯狂的亿万富翁及其综合征
市场理论是这样描述的：即使是我们中最优秀的人也可能成为自私自利和寻找借口的牺牲品，因此，让我们这样来安排社会，使得人们出于最自私的冲动而采取的行动，最终能为我们所有人带来利益。这比试图说服每个人变得更加慷慨要容易得多，也可靠得多。
Deranged billionaires and their syndromes
The theory of markets goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so that people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous.
你是如何安排社会，让自私产生公众利益的？答案是通过市场。面对无情的竞争，积累和保持财富的最有效方法是努力让你的商品变得更便宜、更好。在一个竞争激烈的劳动力市场中，我们无需依靠劳动法或工会就能确保工人获得公平对待——那些苛待工人的老板会把工人输给更好的老板。只需“理顺激励机制”，剩下的就交给市场吧。
How do you arrange society so that selfishness produces public benefit? With markets. Faced with relentless competition, the most effective way to accumulate and retain wealth is by striving to make your wares cheaper and better. In a competitive labor market, we can secure fair treatment for workers without labor law or unions – bosses who treat their workers badly will lose them to better bosses. Just "align the incentives" and let markets do the rest.
这是一个左派和右派有着广泛交集的领域。《共产党宣言》的第一章就是马克思和恩格斯写给市场的“情书”，他们赞美市场通过增加生产同时降低成本来改善所有人物质条件的不可思议的力量：
This is an area where there's broad overlap between the left and the right. Chapter one of The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels' love letter to the incredible power of markets to improve everyone's material conditions by increasing production while lowering costs:
The New York Times Review: A Spectre Haunting (China Miéville)
与此同时，在《国富论》中，亚当·斯密也得出了相同的结论：
Meanwhile, over in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith comes to the same conclusion:
我们期望吃上的晚餐，并非来自屠夫、酿酒师或面包师的恩惠，而是出于他们对自己利益的考量。我们诉诸的不是他们的人道，而是他们的自爱，我们从不对他们谈论我们自己的需求，而是谈论他们的利益。
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
换句话说：如果你的激励机制是正确的，那么即使是最贪婪的面包师也会抵制住在面包里掺入锯末和沙砾的诱惑。他越贪婪，就越会努力把自己的面包做得又便宜又好吃，因为这样他才能卖出尽可能多的面包，从而实现自己财富的最大化。
In other words: if you get the incentives right, then even the greediest baker will resist the temptation to fill his loaves with sawdust and gravel. The greedier he is, the more he'll strive to make his bread cheap and delicious, because that will let him sell as many loaves as possible, thus maximizing his own wealth.
这算不上是马蹄铁理论（指两极相通）的完全胜利，但如果你稍微眯起眼睛仔细看，你就会发现无论是共产主义者还是资本主义者，在这个问题上意见是一致的：如果你想让资产阶级倾注心力生产出让我们其他人受益的东西，相比于寄希望于他们的慷慨大方，诉诸他们的恐惧和贪婪会走得更远。
It's not exactly horseshoe theory vindicated, but if you squint just right, you'll see both communists and capitalists agreeing on this one thing: if you want the bourgeoisie to bend its efforts to producing something that the rest of us can benefit from, you'll get further by appealing to their fear and greed than by trusting in their munificence.
正因为如此，左派和那些真正信仰市场的人才会在反垄断问题上站到同一阵线：他们也许并不完全同意，通过唤醒资本家对被竞争对手推翻的恐惧是运作事物的最佳方式，但他们绝对同意，运作事物的最坏方式就是单纯信任资本家的慷慨。
This is how you can have both leftists and market true believers coming onto the same side on antitrust: they may not both exactly agree that the best way to run things is by appealing to capitalists' fear of being dethroned by a competitor, but they absolutely agree that the worst way to run things is to simply trust in capitalists' generosity.
当然，他们是对的。正如丽娜·汗（Lina Khan）常说的那样，大到不能倒的公司，也会变得大到无法被制裁，因此也就变得大到无需在乎任何事。如果你对此有所怀疑，不妨看看苹果某位高管发送的这封内部电子邮件，他坚称公司制造太好的 iPhone 是在浪费资金，并建议采取一种蓄意使产品变糟的企业战略：
They're right, of course. As Lina Khan likes to say, companies that are too big to fail become too big to jail, and thus too big to care. If you doubt it, consider this internal email sent by an Apple executive insisting that the company is wasting money by making iPhones that are too good, and counseling a corporate strategy of deliberate shittiness:
事后看来，我认为展望未来，我们需要为我们认为对消费者而言‘足够好’的功能设定一个底线。我认为我们现在做的已经超出了原本‘足够好’的标准。但我们发现很难让我们的产品功能逐年（YOY）倒退。“现有的功能‘如果我们之前没有推出的话，在今天看来本来也是足够好的’，”而且“任何新的、特别是昂贵的功能，在获准进入消费者手机之前，都需要经过严格的挑战。”
In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are 'good enough' for the consumer. I would argue we're already doing more than what would have been good enough. But we find it very hard to regress our product features YOY [year over year]." Existing features "would have been good enough today if we hadn't introduced [them] already," and "anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it's allowed into the consumer phone.
政策制定者可以假定利润动机的存在，但他们必须创造一种条件，让这种动机在竞争焦虑的塑造下，能够以公平的价格生产出高质量的商品和服务。
Policymakers can assume the profit motive, but they have to craft the conditions under which that motive is shaped by competitive anxiety to produce quality goods and services at a fair price.
任何相信市场的人，也必须心照不宣地相信：成功的市场参与者实际上并不相信市场。他们应该明白，资本家痛恨资本主义，每一个海盗都渴望成为海军上将。他们应该明白，资本主义的赢家只有在自己是颠覆者时才会为颠覆行为辩护。他们应该明白，利润只有当你是斗志昂扬的挑战者时才是好东西，一旦征服了市场，每个资本家都会寻求成为封建领主，将利润转化为地租，并将自己与那种疲于奔命、不断竞争的生活隔绝开来：
Anyone who believes in markets must also tacitly believe that successful market participants don't believe in markets. They should understand that capitalists hate capitalism, that every pirate yearns to be an admiral. They should understand that capitalism's winners only defend disruption when they're the ones doing the disrupting. They should understand that profits are only good when you're a scrappy challenger, but once you've conquered the market, every capitalist seeks to become a feudal lord, converting profits to rents and insulating themselves from an exhausting life of constant competition:
（聪明的）市场捍卫者们确实明白这一点，但他们面临着一个两难境地。从定义上讲，那些拥有最多金钱和权势去资助他们的智库、大学经济系、会议和出版物的金主，正是那些食利者——也就是用沃伦·巴菲特钟爱的“护城河与高墙”来巩固自己财富的亿万富翁。他们是热衷于闪电式扩张（blitzscaling）的亿万富翁，靠着掠夺性的收购和高昂的资本成本来阻止新的市场进入者挑战其垄断地位并剥夺他们轻松赚取的利润。他们就是那些已经变成了海军上将的海盗。
The (smart) defenders of markets do understand this, but they face a dilemma. By definition, the benefactors with the most money and power to contribute to their think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and publications are the rentiers – the billionaires who've shored up their fortunes with Warren Buffet's beloved "moats and walls." They're the blitzscaling billionaires who thrive on predatory acquisitions and high capital costs that prevent new market entrants from challenging their incumbency and its easy profits. They're the pirates who've become admirals.
正如厄普顿·辛克莱尔（Upton Sinclair）那句著名的俏皮话：“当一个人的薪水取决于他不理解某件事时，要让他理解这件事是很困难的。”当你的右翼、“亲市场”智库依赖于那些通过俘获市场、俘获监管机构以及俘获劳动力来发家致富的人的慷慨施舍时，你就会不可避免地陷入极度怪异的逻辑纠结中，以解释为什么你的市场倡导不应该从剥夺你资助者的权力、财富和地位开始。
As Upton Sinclair famously quipped, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When your right-wing, "pro-market" think-tank depends on the largesse of someone who made their money by capturing a market, capturing its regulators, and capturing its labor force, you need to tie yourself into some very weird knots to explain why your market advocacy shouldn't start with stripping your funders of their power, wealth and position.
这差不多就是新古典经济学的整个大厦基础。反垄断的“消费者福利（consumer welfare）”理论指出垄断是有效率的，并坚称如果一个垄断是低效的，那么它会立刻吸引新的竞争者进入市场，这些竞争者会通过竞争消除垄断者的优势：
This is pretty much the entire edifice of neoclassical economics. There's the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, that says that monopolies are efficient and insists that an inefficient monopoly would immediately tempt new competitors into the market who would compete away the monopolist's advantage:
“消费者福利”是一个完美的辩护词，因为它潜藏着一个三段论推理：它认为“低效的垄断”总是会引来竞争对手摧毁它们的利润率，这意味着我们在现实中看到的任何真实存在的垄断必然是高效的。如果它不是，它早就被竞争淘汰了。证明完毕（QED）。这意味着你完全可以作为一家“亲市场”智库，毫无矛盾地从垄断者那里拿走无数的金钱：根据定义，任何手头有闲钱资助你为他们发动公关闪电战的垄断者，肯定都是有效率的，否则他们早就破产了。
"Consumer welfare" is a perfect apologetic because it contains a lurking syllogism: it holds that "inefficient monopolies" will always bring forth competitors who trash their margins, which means that any actual monopoly we see in the wild must be efficient. If it wasn't, it would have been competed out of existence by now. QED. This means that you can be a "pro-market" think-tank and take infinite money from monopolists without any contradiction: by definition, any monopolist with extra cash on hand to fund your PR blitz on its behalf must be efficient, otherwise it would have gone broke.
这就是经济学中许多“经验性的、科学的”理论的结构，它们归结起来只是换种方式说：“其实，你的老板是对的。”
This is the structure of so many of economics' "empirical, scientific" theories that boil down to new ways of saying, "Actually, your boss is right."
以“显示性偏好（revealed preferences）”为例，该理论认为人们的实际行动比他们口头声称偏好的东西更能反映其真实的偏好。虽然这个理论表面上有一定的合理性，但只有那些在获得经济学学位时遭受过极其特定形式神经损伤的人才会全盘接受它：这种损伤会让你丧失感知或思考权力关系的能力。
Take "revealed preferences," the idea that people's actions are a better indicator of their preferences than the things they say they prefer. While this theory has a certain superficial plausibility, it can really only be embraced by people who have suffered the highly specific neurological injury you get by taking an economics degree: an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power.
完全接受“显示性偏好”就意味着，当你看着一个刚刚为了凑齐房租而卖掉自己肾脏的人时，你会惊呼：“看这个人，他显示出的偏好是只想留一个肾”：
To fully embrace "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has just sold their kidney to make rent and exclaim, "Look at this person with a revealed preference for only having one kidney":
然后是右翼对“监管俘获（regulatory capture）”的概念。当你想到“监管俘获”时，你可能会想象一家公司或一个行业已经变得如此强大，以至于它可以对政府颐指气使，从而可以肆无忌惮地剥削你。但对于一位新古典经济学家来说，“监管俘获”并不是因为企业权力过大——而是因为国家权力过大。根据这一理论，如果国家有能力去做些实事，那么资本家就会想方设法接管国家机器，并利用它来惩罚自己的竞争对手，因此唯一的解决之道就是彻底消除国家的能力：
Then there's the right's conception of regulatory capture. When you think of "regulatory capture," you might picture a company or sector that has grown so powerful that it can boss the government around, so that it can abuse you with impunity. But for a neoclassical economist, "regulatory capture" isn't the result of too much corporate power – it's the result of too much state power. If states have the ability to do real things (the theory goes), then capitalists will do everything they can to take over the state and use it to punish their competitors, so the only answer is to eliminate state capacity altogether:
最后，还有“精英统治（meritocracy，又称绩效主义）”，这是将清教徒的神圣天意概念包装成一种关于社会必须如何运作的科学理论的手法。清教徒坚称，他们的上帝会降临人世去提拔我们当中那些真正具有美德的人，而这种神圣的恩宠可以从财富和权力在我们当中的分配方式中看出来。富人和有权势的人是上帝的“选民”。你可以确定这是真的，因为他们就是富有且有权势。其推论便是，穷人和受压迫者是不受上帝眷顾的，因此他们必然缺乏富人和当权者所拥有的某种美德。
And finally, there's "meritocracy," which is a way of dressing up the Puritans' concept of divine providence as a scientific theory about how society must work. Puritans insisted that their god reached down into the human realm to elevate the truly virtuous among us, and that this divine favor could be discerned in the way that wealth and power were distributed among us. The rich and powerful were god's "elect." You could tell this was true, because they were rich and powerful. The corollary is that the poor and downtrodden are disfavored by god, and must therefore lack some virtue that the rich and powerful possess.
同样的三段论思维也支撑着“精英统治”的经济学说，该学说认为，市场就像是一台巨型计算机，处理着我们在决定买卖什么以及以什么价格买卖时所做出的亿万次决策，为每种商品找出“正确”的价格，并提拔那些最擅长以获得最优质商品最优价格的方式去分配资本的人。正如清教徒相信财富是美德的证明一样，经济正统派的信徒也相信，精英制度恩泽了我们当中最优秀的人，赋予他们控制我们生活的权力，允许他们“分配资本”去创造或摧毁就业岗位，甚至是整个公司，或者经济的整个部门。你可以确信他们是做这件事的合适人选，因为市场选择了他们——如果他们是糟糕的资本配置者，他们早就破产了。证明完毕（QED）。
This same syllogistic thinking underpins the economic doctrine of "meritocracy," which holds that markets are giant computers that process uncountable trillions of decisions we all make about what to buy and sell and at what price, seeking out the "correct" price for every commodity and also elevating the people who are best at allocating capital in ways that arrive at the best prices for the best goods. Just as a Puritan believes that wealth is evidence of virtue, a hewer to economic orthodoxy believes the meritocratic system graces the best among us, giving them control over our lives by allowing them to "allocate capital" to create or destroy jobs, or entire firms, or whole sectors of the economy. You can tell they're the right people to do be doing this because the market chose them – if they were bad capital allocators, they'd have gone broke by now. QED.
当资本配置者的孩子们最终也开始配置资本时，好吧，这恰恰说明“精英素质”是一种可遗传的特征，拥有这种特征的人生来就是要统治我们的。精英统治最终兑现为一种对王室血统和王室王朝的优生学信仰。我们知道亚瑟王适合统治我们，是因为他从石头里拔出了剑；而我们知道比尔·盖茨适合统治我们，是因为他从操作系统里拔出了一笔巨额财富：
When capital allocators' kids end up allocating capital too, well, that just shows that "merit" is a heritable trait and the people who have it are born to rule over us. Meritocracy cashes out to a eugenic belief in royal blood and royal dynasties. We know King Arthur was suited to rule us because he pulled a sword out of a stone, and we know Bill Gates is suited to rule over us because he pulled a fortune out of an operating system:
消费者福利、显示性偏好、监管俘获以及精英统治，这些仅仅是资本主义所谓的捍卫者们炮制出来的几种说辞罢了。他们以此坚称自己热爱市场所强加的竞争约束，然而他们却完全依赖于那些自封为资本家的人，这些资本家早就彻底逃脱了这种约束，并且正不遗余力地试图阻止自己受到任何形式的限制。
Consumer welfare, revealed preferences, regulatory capture and meritocracy are just some of the ways that capitalism's alleged defenders cooked up to insist that they love the competitive discipline imposed by markets while being totally dependent on self-described capitalists who have utterly escaped from that discipline and have committed to doing everything in their power to prevent themselves from ever coming under any form of constraint.
这些“自由市场”的拥护者们花了几十年的时间来捍卫诸如竞业禁止条款这样的政策，这些政策使得一名快餐店员工如果在温蒂汉堡辞职，然后为了获得每小时 0.25 美元的加薪而去街对面的麦当劳工作，就构成了犯罪：
These champions of "free markets" have spent decades defending policies like noncompetes, which makes it a crime for a fast-food worker to quit their job at Wendy's and take a job at the McDonald's across the street in order to get a $0.25/hour raise:
他们为反规避法辩护，该法律使得你在自己的手机上安装别人的应用程序商店，或者在你的打印机里注入别人的墨水，都成了字面意义上的重罪：
They defend anticircumvention laws that make it a literal felony for you to install someone else's app store on your phone or put someone else's ink in your printer:
不知怎的，他们一面相信只有当我们之中最优秀的人被迫面对输给竞争对手而失去一切的纯粹恐惧时，价值才会产生；一面却又相信，有这样一群人，他们是如此完美，如此有德行和才华，以至于根本不需要这种鞭策来促使他们采取行动。事实上，这些基因突变者和世代天才简直太令人惊叹了，如果强迫他们去沾染肮脏的竞争，那就等同于剥夺了我们所有人分享他们天才成果的权利。
They somehow believe that value arises when the best among us are forced to contend with the stark terror of losing everything to a competitor, but also that there is a group of people who are so perfect, so virtuous and brilliant that they do not need this kind of goad to prod them into action. Indeed, these genetic sports and generational talents are so amazing that to force them to sully themselves with grubby competition is to deny us all the fruits of their genius.
这些人是谁？哎呀，他们当然就是亿万富翁们。所有的亿万富翁：毕竟，如果上天和市场那只看不见的手认为适合将九个或更多个零赐予某人，那标志着他比一个名下只有一美元的人多出 \(10^9\) 倍的美德。但需要特别指出的是：那些具有知识分子气质的亿万富翁，那种会写书、做演讲，且（尤为关键的是）会向智库、大学经济系、会议和期刊提供巨额现金捐赠的“充满好奇心”的亿万富翁。
Who are these people? Why, they're billionaires of course. All billionaires: after all, if providence and the market's invisible hand has seen fit to bestow nine or more zeroes upon someone, that is an indicator of \(10^9\) times more virtue than someone with only a dollar to their name. But especially: intellectual billionaires, the kinds of "curious" billionaires who write books, give lectures, and (especially), make gigantic cash donations to think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and journals.
换句话说，就像彼得·蒂尔和埃隆·马斯克这样的亿万富翁。
Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, in other words.
当资本主义的（所谓的）捍卫者们对“亿万富翁错乱综合征”深表痛心，并担忧如今的公职候选人在竞选材料中频频流露出对亿万富翁的敌意时，他们实际上正是在为这些亿万富翁披挂上阵：
These are the billionaires that capitalism's (alleged) defenders are caping for when they deplore "billionaire derangement syndrome," and fret that candidates for office now routinely cite enmity for billionaires in their campaign materials:
但正如蒂姆·奥莱利（Tim O'Reilly）所写，这些为亿万富翁辩护的知识分子总是告诉我们，市场会通过竞争的约束来限制富人和权贵的愚蠢，从而保护我们免受疯狂君主的伤害。然而与此同时，这些亿万富翁却在忙不迭地将自己变成君主，挣脱了规则、道德和后果的枷锁：
But as Tim O'Reilly writes, these billionaire-defending intellectuals always told us that markets would protect us from the madness of kings, by constraining the folly of the wealthy and powerful through the discipline of competition. Meanwhile, those billionaires were busily transforming themselves into kings, unshackled from rules, morals or consequences:
在反思这一点时，政治学家亨利·法雷尔（Henry Farrell）指出，最直言不讳的亿万富翁主义捍卫者——也就是世界上的那些马斯克和蒂尔们——从来没有掩饰过他们渴望成为国王，渴望将自己与市场以及各种纪律隔绝开来的愿望，而且他们变得越来越肆无忌惮。马斯克在社交媒体上发帖，对选举这一理念本身大加挞伐，他赞同这样一种观点：应该只允许“创造者”投票，而“索取者”则不应该，因为“普选权会导致普遍的苦难”：
Reflecting on this, the political scientist Henry Farrell notes that the most vocal defenders of billionaireism – the Musks and Thiels of the world – never made a secret of their desire to become kings and insulate themselves from markets and discipline of every kind, and they've grown brazen. Musk makes social media posts deploring the very idea of elections, agreeing with the idea that only "makers" should be allowed to vote and that "takers" should not, because "universal suffrage leads to universal suffering":
至于蒂尔，他早就公开倡导过一种理念：在我们当中存在着一群潜在的贵族，他们不需要市场纪律来防止自己陷入愚蠢或损公肥私。这些人生来就是为了创立科技初创公司并进行统治的——他们是不墨守成规的人。在蒂尔的笔下，他们是“最重要的人”，并且“应该被放行，不受任何责罚”：
As for Thiel, he has long openly advocated the idea that there exists among us a latent aristocracy who do not need the discipline of markets to keep them from lapsing into folly or self-dealing. These people – born to found tech startups and to rule – are nonconformists who, in Thiel's writing, are "the most important" and "should be let off the hook":
蒂尔毫不掩饰他的观点：拥有这种优良素质的人应该被豁免于任何约束。他写道，“资本主义和竞争是相互对立的。”蒂尔表示，真正的企业家不应该去竞争，而应该寻求建立垄断，因为“垄断者有能力去思考除了赚钱以外的其他事情；而非垄断者做不到……只有一件事情能让企业超越每天残酷的生存斗争：那就是垄断利润。”
Thiel makes no bones about his idea that people who have the right stuff should be exempted from any constraint. He writes "capitalism and competition are opposites." Rather than compete, Thiel says the true entrepreneur should seek to establish a monopoly, because "Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t…Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits."
这并不是说蒂尔反对约束本身——他清楚地认为我们大多数人都应该在约束下运作——这些约束是由像他这样的人构想并执行的。那些人生来就是要统治一切的：他们从幸运的产道降生，拥有幸运的基因。我们怎么能分辨出他们是天生的统治者呢？因为他们正在统治。如果他们不是生来就是要统治的，他们就不会处于统治地位。一如既往，一个三段论解决了我们所有的意识形态和存在主义问题。
It's not that Thiel opposes constraints per se – he clearly thinks that most of us should operate under constraints – constraints that are dreamed up and enforced by people like him. Those people are born to rule: they emerged from a lucky orifice, in possession of lucky genes. How can we tell they were born to rule? Because they're ruling. If they weren't born to rule, they wouldn't be in a position to rule. As ever, a syllogism solves all our ideological and existential problems.
蒂尔生活在娜奥米·克莱恩（Naomi Klein）所说的“镜像世界”中。尽管反主流文化者长期以来一直赞颂不合群的人和特立独行的社群，但他们所看重的是一个不受权力干涉的空间，在这里怪人们可以自由地挥舞他们特立独行的旗帜：
Thiel lives in what Naomi Klein would call "the mirror world." While counterculturists have long celebrated misfits and communities of nonconformists, they were invested in the idea of a space protected from power, where weirdos could let their freak flags fly:
但蒂尔眼中的这个理念，却是赞颂那些异端信仰是“劳工法、隐私法、金融法和消费者保护法不应适用于他们”的“不合群者”。他想保护这些人，这样他们就能挥舞权力。他们应该组成“黑手党”（就像“PayPal 黑手党”那样），而不是基于团结亲和的群体。正如法雷尔所写：
But Thiel's version of this is to celebrate the "nonconformists" whose heterodox belief is that labor, privacy, finance and consumer protection laws shouldn't apply to them. He wants to protect those people so they can wield power. They should form "mafias" (like the "Paypal mafia") not solidaristic affinity groups. As Farrell writes:
创业过程中的冒险精神可能令人惊叹；怪异的人往往更有可能具有原创性；联系紧密的社群拥有许多优势。而且，我猜测，这些因素中没有哪一个足以单独促成我们今天看到的“疯狂的王子们”的现象。在不同的外部环境下，他们完全有可能以一种温和得多的方式一起合作。但我们身处的这个世界就是这样：少数几个亿万富翁那无限的胃口和非理性行为，似乎越来越与维持一个稳定的公民社会的需要背道而驰。
Entrepreneurial risk taking can be awesome; weird people are often more likely to be original; densely linked communities have many advantages. Furthermore, I would guess that none of these factors was sufficient on its own to precipitate the madness of princes that we see today. It is perfectly possible that they would have worked together in much more benign ways under different external circumstances. But we are in the world we’re in: one where the boundless appetites and irrationalities of a small number of billionaires seem increasingly incompatible with the need to maintain a stable civil society.
一个由自命不凡的“新贵族”组成的阶级，始终是这些人可见的轨迹。唯一看不见这一点的人，就是那些由他们资助去撰写论文的智库员工，这些论文意在向世人解释：他们的金主不需要市场纪律来防止自己陷入疯狂，或者企图颠覆民主。
A new would-be aristocracy was always the visible trajectory of these guys. The only people who couldn't see it were the think-tankies they funded to write papers explaining that their paymasters didn't need market discipline to keep them from sinking into folly or attempting to overthrow democracy.
今天，这些仿佛被主子吸干了血的奴仆（Renfields），对极度富有人群被“妖魔化”感到痛心疾首，并将其称为“亿万富翁错乱综合征”。但唯一重要的“亿万富翁错乱综合征”，是那种影响了亿万富翁本身、让他们确信自己凌驾于任何纪律或规则之上的综合征。
Today, these Renfields clutch their pearls at the "demonization" of the ultra-rich, calling it "billionaire derangement syndrome." But the only "billionaire derangement syndrome" that matters is the syndrome that affects billionaires and convinces them that they are above any discipline or rules.
(剩余部分的链接由于篇幅较长，在此不再详述，只包含主体文章的翻译)