Is Peter Thiel’s “stagnation thesis” partially caused by increase in Genius-phobia?

In this article I want to dissect a thought that Peter Thiel often presents and I want to discuss it from the perspective of Genius-phobia.

Thiel often presents the case for technological stagnation outside of the realm of bits (in atoms, biotech, etc) and usually attributes it to a general rise in conformity thinking.

He says that 100 years ago if one slept and woke up 20 years later one would be in a completely different world. But nowadays if that happened, one will wake up into a world where aside from the screens not much has changed.

Over the last few decades geniuses who had some impact on technological progress were Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.

But overall the progress has slowed down and the number of geniuses seems to have decreased.

My thesis is that since the 2nd industrial revolution there has been a significant decline in the number of geniuses or more specifically the genius rate (geniuses per capita).

This is primarily because the additional technological connectivity has created many more sources of harm towards geniuses and since many people are envious of geniuses this can have significant effect on the lives of geniuses.

One negative side effect of the French Revolution was that it took away significant protection of geniuses, who in the past were fully protected by monarchs.

To be continued