It was, admittedly, not a great reveal.
Under the shroud of secrecy—no streaming, no phones, $200 tickets—Silicon Valley Svengali Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (among others), investor in Founders Fund and Facebook, convenor of “Hereticon” and other Silicon Valley heterodox gatherings, and patron to the sitting vice president, gave four lectures at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club over the last two months on, in the words of the event invitation, “the topic of the biblical Antichrist … its theology, history, literature, and politics.”
The Technorati twittered in anticipation. What would Peter say?
Now that the series has concluded and secretly transcribed, recordings have been circulated to journalists, the tldr is that the Antichrist is anyone who opposes people like Peter Thiel.
More precisely, according to tapes provided anonymously to The Guardian, Thiel repeated his previously stated view that the ultimate Antichrist will arise in the form of a one-world government: “‘One world or not’ in a sense is the same as the question ‘antichrist or Armageddon,’” he said, “so in one sense, it’s completely the same question.” And anyone who helps to bring it about by warning of some looming disaster are lower case–a antichrists as well; candidates included climate activist Greta Thunberg, AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, and venture capitalist (and Trump backer) Marc Andreessen.
The core of Thiel’s conception of the Antichrist is taken from philosopher Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis before World War II in order to oppose socialism, which he thought would bring about “the satanic unification of the world,” in the words of Schmitt scholar Wolfgang Palaver. (Thiel first came to know Schmitt’s work through Palaver’s scholarship, although Palaver was extremely critical of Schmitt’s ideas, whereas Thiel has embraced them.) Schmitt saw the combination of the USSR and FDR’s socialist-leaning United States as presenting this risk, and saw Hitler as the katechon, a biblical figure who would stand in its way. Notably, the katechon may not be a positive figure, but he plays a positive role in the unfolding of this drama; Thiel hedged when asked if Donald Trump may be the katechon of our day.
To support this novel reading of Christian dogma, Thiel does a lot of heavy hermeneutical lifting: misreadings of biblical text, inversions of Catholic teaching, and a fair amount of hubris. Often, these readings are incoherent; were he simply some guy on the internet, they would be totally unremarkable. But of course, Thiel is not just some guy; he is a billionaire who has influenced elections, installed a loyalist as vice president, and co-founded Palantir, now the largest company providing surveillance technology to the state (Palantir tech has recently been used to identify and arrest suspected “illegals”). And no one can doubt his business acumen, or the creativity with which he spends his wealth. But, to borrow language from the tech industry, Thiel has “optimized” for some results and not others. Sophisticated theology is one of the others.
The term “Antichrist” first appears in one of the “epistles of John,” which were attributed to John the Apostle but actually written around 100 C.E. These letters were some of the last texts to be canonized in the Christian Bible, and they have an apocalypticism and depiction of spiritual warfare that is not present in the gospels. “Dear children,” says 1 John 2:18, “this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.”
The epistle does not specify who or what this entity is, but other biblical texts describing a “Beast” or “persecutor” were later understood to be referring to the same figure: a wicked, sinful man who would rule over nations, persecute the faithful, and claim to be God. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Daniel ascribes these characteristics to a figure generally understood to be Emperor Antiochus II; the Book of Revelation associates them with the Roman emperor Nero. In these texts, neither the Antichrist nor the “antichrists” anticipating him are supernatural; they are figures of worldly power opposed to the spiritual power of Christ and are part of early Christianity’s ascetic, world-renouncing, end-times theology. Just a few lines before the description of the Antichrist, 1 John commands (in 1 John 2:15-16):
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.
This ascetic worldview is obviously very different from that of a wealthy, powerful billionaire who proudly enjoys the “lust of the flesh” and the “pride of life.” (Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.) For 1 John, the physical, lustful world is to be rejected, and the Antichrist is an all-too-human player in the drama of its imminent demise.
The supernatural Antichrist—you know, Rosemary’s Baby, or Damien from The Omen—was a product, unsurprisingly, of the medieval imagination, including various letters by monastics and theologians. In this version, the Antichrist is the son of a demon who will reign in Jerusalem for three years (embraced by the Jews, who rejected Christ for three years), rebuild the Temple, and eventually be defeated by Jesus Christ.
The difference between the biblical/Thielian Antichrist and the medieval/demonic one probably accounts for some of the ridicule to which Thiel has been exposed. It’s as if he’s saying that Greta Thunberg is the spawn of the devil. (Which he is not.) Thiel is also consistent with the Antichrist tradition in attaching the title to contemporary figures: previous incarnations have included Frederick II, Peter the Great, Benito Mussolini, and even Pope John XXII. Martin Luther said the institution of the papacy itself was the Antichrist, a theme that reappears in American anti-Catholic bigotry. From Antiochus and Nero to Thunberg and Yudkowski, the Antichrist has always functioned as a theological category for one’s political opponents.
What is new here is Thiel’s inversion of traditional Christian values. Whereas Jesus demanded that we care for “the least of these” and said that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven, Thiel is a billionaire eugenicist opposed to the welfare state. Where prudence is one of the cardinal virtues, Thiel argues that it is a sin if it causes us to slow the progress of technology. Where traditional Catholic theology still holds that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered,” Thiel is openly gay. And where, in the biblical and medieval sources, the Antichrist is part of the drama of Armageddon, in Thiel, the Antichrist gains power by warning of Armageddon. Here’s Thiel:
The antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.
What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the Antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace … the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
Actually, this is not what 1 Thessalonians says. 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3 does not say that “peace and safety” is the slogan of the Antichrist; on the contrary, it is what people deceive themselves into thinking if they ignore the prophecies of the End Times:
Now, brothers and sisters, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
Moreover, 1 Thessalonians says that predicting the End Times is a sign of righteousness, not wickedness, continuing in verses 4 and 5:
But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.
In the Bible, the righteous are the ones who expect the End Times, and the ignorant “in darkness” are the ones who think everything is fine. But in Thiel’s version, worrying about Armageddon is a ruse the Antichrist uses to lead us to technological stagnation, and ultimately to one-world government; warning of one Armageddon brings about a different one.
There’s more here—Thiel offers a disquisition about the difference between a just and an unjust peace, and the results of a “Cold War Two” between the U.S. and China. But the core inversion is clear. In the Bible, the righteous worry about Armageddon; in Thiel’s theology, evil people do.
A final inversion of biblical theology comes in Thiel’s extended interpretation of the last chapter of the Book of Daniel. That chapter describes how the Archangel Michael will deliver the faithful of Israel from “troubled times” and resurrect the dead. At that time, prophesies Daniel, “the wise shall shine like the radiance of the firmament, and those who make the masses righteous like the stars forever” (Daniel 12:3). Then, in Daniel 12:4, the prophet is told:
And you, Daniel, close these words and seal this book forever. The masses will run back and forth and the knowledge will multiply [or increase].
Daniel next has a vision of two semi-divine figures, clothed in linen, who tell him that the that the end of days will take place four years after the discontinuance of the burnt offering in the Temple (which actually took place in 586 B.C.E.) and that Daniel and all who are wise should wait and purify themselves. With that, the book ends.
The language of Daniel 12:4 is ambiguous. “The masses will run back and forth” is my translation of yishtetu ha’rabim, which literally means “the masses will flow” but is usually rendered “the people will run to and fro.” Is this meant figuratively or literally? What does it mean? “The knowledge will multiply,” meanwhile, is a translation of v’tirbeh ha’da’at, awkward definite article included; it could mean that knowledge increases, but seems to mean that there will be multiple versions of knowledge, more confusion, and more error. This interim period, between Daniel’s prophecy and the end of days, is not one of greater wisdom, but of a division between the few who understand and the masses who proliferate knowledge and error.
In 1733, Isaac Newton wrote that these two phrases were prophesying the advances of science. As scientific knowledge increases, Newton wrote, people will soon be able to travel at the astronomical speed of fifty miles per hour. Thiel offers a similar interpretation, though updated for the twenty-first century:
Let’s go on to “many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.” It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the Antichrist.
Once again, this is quite different from the biblical text. Obviously, Daniel had no inkling of the “one-world state of the Antichrist” or global trade in goods and services. But he also makes clear that “knowledge increasing” is a bad thing, not a good one. This isn’t scientific progress; it’s masses running to and fro, oblivious to the truth.
Based on this foundation—that technology is good—it follows that anything getting in the way of it is bad. Thus Thiel’s overall vision of the Antichrist:
A basic definition of the Antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of Antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times …
In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the Antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the Antichrist has somehow become anti-science …
My thesis is that in the seventeenth, eighteenth century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the twenty-first century, the Antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowski].
Thiel thus inverts the eschatology of 1 John, 1 Thessalonians, and Daniel. In the biblical books, the wise and righteous are aware that the end is nigh; they renounce the world and purify themselves. In Thiel, the Antichrist is the one warning that the end is nigh, while the good people are busy increasing technological knowledge and living in the world.
There is an internal logic to Thiel’s view: technology has led to many good things. But they are the kind of material, worldly things that the Bible disparages in favor of asceticism, renunciation, and the spiritual truth of the Eschaton. And of course, as Thiel notes, technology has also led to very bad things, like the threats of nuclear annihilation and runaway artificial general intelligence, not to mention the immiseration of tech-addicted youth and the increase in extremism and conspiracy-mongering in all Western societies. Surely some caution—such as that urged by Yudkowski or Thunberg—is more consonant with biblical ethics than trusting our planet to the Great Men of technological innovation. This isn’t a desire to “stop all science.” It’s the virtue known as prudence.
From Antiochus and Nero to Thunberg and Yudkowski, the Antichrist has always functioned as a theological category for one’s political opponents.
Broadly speaking, Thiel inverts the moral grammar of biblical Christianity: the good are the strong and the bold, the bad are the humble, the cautious, and those who care for the “least of these.” But this is not Thiel’s invention; it has been developed at length by philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Schmitt. For Nietzsche, the Sermon on the Mount is the epitome of what he called the “slave revolt in morality.” Prior to this, the good, the beautiful, and the strong were all the same: it was good to be moral, it was good to be rich, it was good to have power over the weak. But then, gradually, the “slaves” revolted against their superiors to the point where Jesus could say “blessed are the meek” and the poor. This, Nietzsche said, was rubbish. The Übermensch, the super-man, transcends conventional morality—much as Thiel appears to believe that he is not subject to the Catholic church’s condemnation of homosexuality and eugenics, or its insistence on service to the poor. (Thiel’s foundation focuses on developing breakthrough technologies, seasteading, reversing aging, and paying promising young entrepreneurs to drop out of college.) Rand, similarly, wrote that humanity’s salvation lay in the few, rare geniuses like the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, who secretly orchestrates the destruction of bureaucratic government and preaches the virtues of individualism.
What is harder to understand is how this Randian Objectivism can be construed as Christian, let alone Catholic. Yet there are some precedents. First is the “prosperity gospel” that emerged in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, which now counts among its preachers some of Donald Trump’s most influential advisors. It was born out of the fusion of the New Thought movement (the origin of today’s “Law of Attraction” beliefs that you can manifest your own reality with positive thoughts) and Pentecostalism, which already had the belief that faith can influence external circumstances. But while those movements focused on health and wellbeing, twentieth-century preachers such as Oral Roberts focused on material wealth. In Roberts’s case, some of this was, if not a scam, then at least self-serving: donations to his ministry, he promised, would be repaid sevenfold by God. Subsequent figures, including Jim Bakker and Joel Osteen, have made similar claims.
Like Thiel’s version of the Antichrist, the prosperity gospel inverts Jesus’ teachings about “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) and holds that the poor essentially deserve to be poor. Wealth, which had previously been a sign of greed and selfishness, now became reinterpreted as a sign of God’s blessing. Yet while the prosperity gospel fit neatly within conservative Republican politics, Thiel is more like an extreme libertarian, writing in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Neither, of course, did Schmitt, who before joining the Nazis was an outspoken critic of liberalism. Schmitt believed liberal democracy would inevitably collapse into socialism and world government and that a chaotic katechon like Hitler would be God’s instrument in opposing it. (Schmittian philosophy is everywhere in “National Conservatism,” whose conference this year featured overt blood-and-soil white nationalism; Thiel has spoken at many previous NatCon events.) There is a similarly Schmittian thread in the work of Palantir, which, as discussed in a long-form investigation published in Wired last month, is the fulfillment of Thiel’s dream of “the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana,” in the words of an article he published in 2004. It can seem ironic: to stop world government, we need a global network of omniscient, omnipresent surveillance technology. But this is the point of the katechon as understood by Schmitt and Thiel: to fight the Antichrist, one must become a bit like him.
It would be easy to laugh this stuff off, as much media coverage of Thiel’s talks has effectively done. Thiel’s is a highly idiosyncratic theology, to put it generously. But that would be a mistake, because it is also the worldview of someone worth $27 billion who, unlike many other billionaires, has chosen to deploy that wealth to shape culture and politics, and who has demonstrated a knack for doing so. Carl Schmitt and Rene Girard (however badly Thiel has misread him) now have a voice in the White House, via Thiel’s protege JD Vance. So it matters quite a lot that Thiel believes that environmental and AI regulations are the work of the Antichrist, and that large swaths of the tech industry appear to agree with him. Whether we want them to or not, religious beliefs shape all of our lives, especially when those beliefs are held by a billionaire.