I was scrolling through X this week and a ten-second video stopped me. Peter Thiel, speaking somewhere — a conference, an interview, I am not sure which — saying this: "If you're evil, you're at least competent. Maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done."
The strange thing is that the day before, I had been sitting with a friend and we had been talking about exactly this. Not Thiel. Not the quote. But the thing the quote is pointing at. How the world actually works versus how we were told it would work. The video felt less like a coincidence and more like a confirmation that the question had weight.
For those who do not know Thiel: he co-founded PayPal, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and built Palantir — a company that sells surveillance and data technology to governments and intelligence agencies. He is not a villain in a movie. He is a serious man who built real things and has a habit of saying uncomfortable things out loud. That is part of why the quote lands. It is not coming from nowhere.
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The Romans had a word: virtus. We translate it as virtue, but that is not quite what they meant. Roman virtus was closer to excellence, to effectiveness, to the capacity to impose your will on circumstances. A virtuous Roman was not gentle. He was competent, decisive, willing to act, and willing to bear the consequences of acting. You did not become consul of Rome by being kind to people who stood in your way.
Then slowly the definition shifted. Virtue became restraint. Patience. Mercy. The meek were supposed to inherit the earth. This was a profound civilisational change — and not entirely wrong. But something else happened at the same time, something less discussed: the institutions that trained people began to change what they were training people for.
The Church did not simply shift the definition of virtue. It inverted the entire value system — deliberately. Humility became sacred. Obedience became holy. Suffering became a sign of closeness to God rather than a failure to avoid it. This was not accidental theology. A population that believes meekness is a virtue is considerably easier to govern than one that believes in virtus. The inversion had an audience, and that audience had an interest in the inversion holding.
Nietzsche called this ressentiment — the psychology of the weak who, unable to defeat the strong, reframe their own weakness as moral superiority. "We are good because we are humble." The strong are not just different — they are evil. Not because they are actually evil, but because calling them evil is the only weapon available. It is a brilliant move. You lose the contest and win the moral narrative. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche described it as the slave revolt in ethics: the transformation of powerlessness into virtue by renaming it.
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"The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'; it knows that it is only itself which confers honour on things." — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) |
Machiavelli watched good men lose and effective men win, and decided to describe the reality rather than the ideal. Five hundred years later his book is still in print. The discomfort it creates has not aged — because the gap he was describing has not closed.
Now look at what school actually trains children to do. Sit still. Follow instructions. Do not question the teacher. Produce the correct answer on demand. The system selects for compliance and calls it merit. It rewards people who are good at the performance of learning, not necessarily at thinking. And then it releases them into a world that operates by entirely different rules — where the premium is on judgment, on risk tolerance, on the willingness to act without permission.
This gap is not an accident. It is what the system was built to produce. The question is what it does to the people inside it.
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Look at who gets held up as successful today. In tech, in finance, in media. Many of them bent rules. Many of them treated people as instruments. Many of them won — visibly, publicly, with the numbers to prove it. The culture celebrates the outcome and quietly forgives the method. This is not new. But the visibility is new. The follower counts are new. The aspiration machine has never been more efficient.
So if the people we display as successful are, by some definitions, operating with questionable ethics — and they are succeeding — then what does that make the person who has the same capacity, the same intelligence, the same ability to read a room and exploit an advantage, but chooses not to? Are they the virtuous one? Or are they, in a different way, also making a bad choice — playing safe with a hand that could do more, choosing comfort over full engagement, hiding behind good values as an excuse not to fully compete?
That is the uncomfortable version of the question. And I think it is the honest one.
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There is a third option. It does not have a clean name in English, so I will describe it.
This person is not harmless. They understand game theory, competitive dynamics, where the power sits, how the system can be gamed, and how ruthless the ruthless really are. They know when and how to show their teeth. If someone tries to walk over them, there is a cost — and the cost is real. They are not lambs.
But they are trustworthy. Not because they cannot play dirty — because they choose not to. Their word means something. They do not sell their partners. They do not exploit an information advantage to take what they could take. Large capital, serious talent, and quality people gravitate toward this type — because everyone in the room knows that this person plays by the rules of the game they agreed to play, even when breaking them would be easy and profitable.
Dangerous but trustworthy. Not harmless. Not ruthless. Something harder to be than either.
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"The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves." — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532) |
I have met very few people like this in twenty-five years. Fewer than I expected. But the ones I have met are the ones whose careers compounded in a way that the purely ruthless rarely do — because trust, unlike most things, actually builds over time rather than depreciating. The ruthless person wins rounds. The dangerous-but-trustworthy person wins the longer game.
I have a six-year-old daughter. I do not know exactly what I will tell her about all of this when she is old enough to ask. But I know what I will not tell her. I will not tell her the world is fair. I will not tell her that being good guarantees anything. And I will not tell her to be harmless — because harmless is not the same as good, and in a world that contains real predators, harmlessness is not a virtue. It is a vulnerability.
What I want to give her is something harder to build and harder to take away: the capacity to be fully in the game, with full knowledge of how the game works — and the clarity to decide, from the inside of that knowledge, what kind of player she wants to be.
That is not what school will teach her. It is also not what Thiel is selling. It is the third thing. The one that does not have a ten-second video.
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This week's insight There are not two options — ruthless and effective, or good and powerless. There is a third: dangerous but trustworthy. Not harmless. Fully capable of playing the hard game. Choosing not to exploit — not because they cannot, but because their word means something. This is harder to build than either of the other two. It is also the only one that compounds. Trust is the one asset that does not depreciate. |
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