The paradox of the liberal contrarian

From Emily Chang’s Brotopia pg 52:

The beliefs of the PayPal founders—that individual merit is the most valuable metric of human potential and that creativity is deadened by groupthink—have deeply influenced the postcrash tech industry and are consistent with the ideas promoted by Thiel’s cohort at Stanford. There are many counterarguments to this thinking, but I’ll focus on one of its glaring flaws: Peter Thiel, who champions unbridled individuality, is in fact describing a groupthink of his own. From his Stanford days onward, Thiel has largely surrounded himself with Ivy League, antiestablishment contrarians whose opinions are similar to his own. The Review editors might not have been the most popular group at Stanford, but they were a group nonetheless. They took their particular brand of groupthink to PayPal and their subsequent companies, propagating it through Silicon Valley—with consequences far beyond the PayPal walls.