Thiel also thinks it’s culture: We’ve stopped believing in the future. We’ve become either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the future, either way it means there’s nothing we can do: if you're optimistic, the future will take care of itself. If you're pessimistic, we're headed to the apocalypse. When really it's up to us. Extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are both equally wrong. We should always come back to the question of individual agency and not these large historic forces. There's always room for history, for new ideas, and these things are never definitively decided either way.