In Defense of Palantir and the Ethics of Survival

The Course of Empire: Desolation by Thomas Cole (1833 – 1836)

In 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes. The survivors, stranded at altitude with no food and no hope of rescue, faced a decision that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. They would either eat the bodies of their dead friends, or die beside them. They chose to live. It was, by any moral standard, repugnant. And it was absolutely necessary.

Today, the West is stranded on its own mountain, this one digital, invisible, and just as lethal. We are surrounded by adversaries who hack our infrastructure, poison our discourse, and siphon off our intellectual capital, all while cloaked in the darkness of authoritarian secrecy. And we, the liberal democracies of the world, stand paralyzed, more afraid of violating our principles than of losing everything they were meant to protect.

The lesson of the Andes is not about cannibalism. It is about survival. And the moral terror that accompanies doing what must be done when every other option has run out.

Enter Palantir

Palantir is not a comfortable ally. It is not Silicon Valley chic, nor open-source utopia. It is a war machine, disguised as software. It fuses data streams, predicts patterns, empowers governments and militaries to see through the fog. It tracks terrorists, unmasks criminal networks, maps battlefield logistics in real time. It enables action when inaction means defeat.

And like the meat cut from frozen corpses in the Andes, Palantir is a thing that good people are supposed to reject. It’s controversial. Cold. Blunt. Unapologetic. Its name elicits outrage from NGOs and academic panels. It raises questions about privacy, surveillance, militarization, and control.

But here’s the truth we’re not allowed to say in polite company: we need it.

The Course of Empire: Destruction by Thomas Cole (1833 – 1836)

Because Our Enemies Aren’t Playing by the Rules

China does not debate the ethics of facial recognition. It deploys it, refines it, exports it. Russia doesn’t worry about violating norms, they weaponize that very worry. Iran doesn’t care about oversight; North Korea doesn’t bother with restraint. These regimes understand that information is power, and power wins wars, cold, hot, or digital.

The West, meanwhile, insists on dragging its feet through bureaucratic molasses. When a cyberattack hits, our instinct is not retaliation, it’s regulation. When an adversary hacks a hospital, we launch a commission. We are governed by lawyers, watched by journalists, and paralyzed by our need to be perceived as just. This is not virtue. It is strategic impotence.

Palantir is the antithesis of this paralysis. It gives us eyes in the darkness. It enables not just defense, but deterrence. And yet we treat it like a radioactive element, useful only when locked in a lead box, never to be touched without gloves and apologies.

The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire by Thomas Cole (1833 – 1836)

The Repulsiveness of Power, and Its Necessity

When the Andes survivors were rescued, they were not greeted with cheers. They were met with revulsion. Cannibals. Monsters. Their story was whitewashed, sensationalized, and finally ignored. But no one who lived through it doubted the righteousness of their choice. They chose life.

We are at the same juncture now. The use of companies like Palantir, deeply embedded in military operations, counterterrorism, border enforcement, is seen by many as the first step toward dystopia. They say it’s too powerful. Too secretive. Too effective.

Good.

Do you think the Chinese Communist Party fears tools that are “ethically designed” not to offend? Do you think the Kremlin hesitates out of concern for digital due process?

We are in a war where our ideals are being used against us. We publish our laws; they read them and exploit the gaps. We train our journalists; they flood our platforms with disinformation. We build systems to protect rights; they build systems to destroy us.

Palantir doesn’t apologize for being built to win. And it shouldn’t.

The Luxury of Ethics Is Built on the Foundation of Security
Democracy does not survive on its values alone. It survives on its ability to defend those values. And that defense often requires tools that are uncomfortable, ugly, and morally complicated. The Enlightenment did not defeat fascism with debates, it did so with bombs and spies and codes and silence. Our ancestors knew what we have forgotten: sometimes, you have to do what is necessary to preserve the space in which ideals can live.

Palantir is necessary. It is our flesh on the frozen mountain.

Yes, it raises difficult questions. Yes, it could be abused. But so can fire. So can medicine. So can every tool ever invented by humankind in the service of survival.

The greater danger is not in using Palantir. It is in refusing to use it out of fear of what it says about us. Because what it says is simply this: we are not dead yet. We are still willing to fight.

The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State by Thomas Cole (1833 – 1836)

We Must Choose: Sanctity or Survival

Empires do not fall when they lose wars. They fall when they decide they’re too civilized to win them.

If the West continues to play by rules that its adversaries are actively weaponizing, we will become a cautionary tale, a civilization that believed itself above the fray, even as the fray consumed it. We will talk ourselves to death, noble and irrelevant.

But we don’t have to. We can choose to survive.

Palantir is a symbol of that choice. Not perfect. Not pure. But powerful. A reminder that survival isn’t always pretty, and that’s exactly why it must be protected.

This is the Digital Andes. The cold has set in. The dead are piling up. And the question remains:

Do we eat? Or do we die?

The Course of Empire: The Savage State by Thomas Cole (1833 – 1836)

(The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by the English-born American painter Thomas Cole between 1833 and 1836, and now in the collection of the New York Historical. The series depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary empire. The paintings in this article are shown in reverse order.)