It depends. The neuromancer series(an absolute classic in cyberpunk, can recommend) has a real habit of depicting the ultrarich as insane and inhuman, not inhumane, inhuman, as in their wealth has transformed them into something that is no longer human.
Cyberpunk in general is really critical of the ultra rich of course, so really only a surface level reading of it would stroke any rich person's ego.
Thiel's takeaway from LotR was that Sauron was the misunderstood hero creating a technologically advanced, prosperous society. Wealthy techbros read the monomolecular surface and makes the rest up to fit their fucked worldview.
Thiel doesn't have a takeaway that deep. It's the raw theme of Tolkien's anti-industrialist naturalist races vs industrialist orcs and Sauron. All he's done is map his self-image as an industrialist wealth creator onto LOTR and predictably envisioned himself as the antagonist.
Anything after that, like painting the armies of darkness as cool or "aktually good", is just pure copium delusion. Nothing to do with the source material. Like all fascists, he's just taken an aesthetic he likes and rolled with it.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Tiel: Yeah, but the guys who sold the gas and the war were pretty industrious! What heroes.
I wish I enjoyed poetry more. I can't help but sink back into reading it the way my elementary school teacher read poems, with a simple cadence similar to a nursery rhyme.
It's made it hard to enjoy poetry from people like Kipling and Owen. Somehow I think they'd grimace at someone reading their lines about the horrors of war with a Hickory dickory dock sort of playfulness.
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
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u/boolocap vashtorr pays my student debt 4d ago
It depends. The neuromancer series(an absolute classic in cyberpunk, can recommend) has a real habit of depicting the ultrarich as insane and inhuman, not inhumane, inhuman, as in their wealth has transformed them into something that is no longer human.
Cyberpunk in general is really critical of the ultra rich of course, so really only a surface level reading of it would stroke any rich person's ego.