Pope Leo vs. Palantir

In Silicon Valley, “meritocracy” is the gospel of efficiency, the creation myth of the self-made. But one of its own temples of worship, Palantir Technologies, has rewritten the liturgy. Its CEO, Alex Karp, and its president, Peter Thiel, have unveiled the Meritocracy Fellowship—an experiment inviting twenty-two high-school seniors to skip college altogether. “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir degree,” the slogan declares. No student loans, no professors, no campus life—just four weeks of seminars on Western civilization, from Plato to Tocqueville, followed by an internship amid Palantir’s algorithms.