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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.

From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.

It’s because 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.

I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.

He continues more coherently:

Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:

I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.

First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.

Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?

From the article:

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon.

They quote him:

I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"

My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.

Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.

In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky].

It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.

That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.

Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.

Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.

One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.

Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.

Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)

Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.

The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.

As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?

As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.

When Moldbug calls you weird, that is saying something,

Being far from Moldbug doesn't imply being far from a normal person.

You know this has lead me to an important realization. If it came down to it, I would choose to be ruled by the wokest HR lady on Earth before this guy. As much as wokeness disgusts me it doesn’t really scare me, it doesn’t strike me as outright evil or insane. I’m switching teams as of now.

I kind of like Thiel, but you have a point. If it came out in five years that Peter Thiel had been abducting wayward teenage boys and keeping them in a lovingly accurate recreation of a 13th-century Burgundian dungeon under his mansion, I’d be mildly surprised but not shocked.

Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.

You're clearly grappling with the way his (uninhibited by resource scarcity) gayness makes you feel. I don't disagree, but if that's how it is we should probably be more willing to generalize.

I was riffing off the blood boys thing primarily!

The "blood boys thing" was just him investing in longevity research companies looking into the thing where mice given blood transfusions from younger mice are seemingly rejuvenated. That got media outlets that hated him running sensationalist titles about him being a vampire and the TV show Silicon Valley taking inspiration from them. I think investing in medical research is good and not an indication of being a serial killer, especially longevity research which seems badly neglected.

Incidentally last I heard there was some research on the subject indicating it also works with saline + 5% albumin instead of young blood, but that's from 2020 and I don't know what the current state of the research is. A quick search finds this 2025 study claiming it's about "diluting age-elevated proteins as the way to re-calibrate systemic proteome to its younger state" but I don't know if that's the mainstream view. I don't know whether any of this is close to applications in humans.

I'm aware. I still don't think it's all that unfair to have fun with "blood boys" imagery when we're talking about the guy who sounds like a Metal Gear Solid villain.

Again, I say this as someone who kind of likes him! I'd actually like to have thought of half of the cyberpunk things he's invested in, or had my shit together enough to apply to be a Thiel fellow.

Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.

Yeah, her dungeon would be extremely inauthentic.

Yes, I'd like to be plowed by billionaire cock in the much more authentic BDSM dungeon.

Wokeness isn’t insane? Do you want examples?

Not the OP, but it's insane to me in a way that I can understand, unlike The Reptile, whom I don't understand.

It's just a question of higher familiarity then.

If you think there isn't weird satanic shit over on the woke side, you don't know Marina Abramaovic.

Marina Abramaovic

She's mostly pre-woke, isn't she?

Sure, she's still alive, but her heyday and peak relevancy are long behind her. Now she's just one of those old ladies that gets trotted out whenever there is a slow news week and people need to be reminded of what a Legendary and Influential Artistᵀᴹ she is.

She's been around forever, but was still having major exhibitions last year. Her connection to woke/leftism is mostly through her association with Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

Welcome to the Good Side. I've been feeling like effing von Papen these past 9 months...

  • -10

Papen in which year?

Like 1934 maybe, not the later years when he decided to willingly collaborate with the Nazis anyways despite his reservations.

I'm always surprised he survived the Night of the Long Knives. Von Schleicher didn't, so Hitler wasn't afraid of killing off Hindenberg's buddies.

I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

Quite the opposite, really. Churchill of course wanted those involved in the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes tried and executed, but he was very hostile to any sort of indiscriminate mass revenge against senior German officers and officials.

In fact there was an episode during the Tehran Conference in November 1943 where Stalin made a "joke" about how they could just kill 50-100,000 of the most senior German leaders to prevent another war, and FDR responded (in a more humourous tone) that maybe 49,000 would be enough. Churchill, knowing of the Katyn massacre and much more cynical towards Stalin than the somewhat naïve FDR, stormed out and had to be convinced to come back and resume the conference.

I’ll just pick on the first “rebuttal.” Thiel is making a Type I v Type II error point. Yes WW3 would be unjust. But so too will be the efforts by those saying “be afraid of WW3–give us these powers to prevent it.”

He then points to Thessalonians. In it, Paul is not saying he is proclaiming “peace.” Instead, Paul is quite literally saying TPTB will be saying “peace.” That is, it’s a prophecy. Thiel is saying the Antichrist will use the yearning for peace to usher in a fate worse than war.

fate worse than war.

Someone who starts Palantir (amazing how people tell you who they are) seems to be projecting when talking about antichrists and coming evils in peacetime.

…Thiel is telling you he is Feanor?

This is a very mottizen reading in that I can't tell if it's bad-faith hostile or just so overly literalist it misses point by point and becomes fisking with a mis-sighted gun. A couple points:

Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?

Armageddon is not the total destruction of human civilization, that's a casual use of the word. Armageddon is a gathering of the world's temporal forces for battle at a central point (Megiddo), at which point things will be Revealed.

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

The Nazis would never stop with 50,000 top people, they went root and branch into the population. That's the point of Churchill's approach - you take powerful, symbolic, deadly vengeance against the most responsible, and from then the stain is cleansed and you don't create a machine of eternal revenge that locks up nonagenarians to this day. It's a Girardian end-the-cycle-of-violence thing.

The Dr Strangelove thing is an odd choice, but if you're familiar with the literature of the time, it seems to me that Thiel is referring (with an esoteric joke?) to the Faust myth and similar stories, which begins with the Protestant Reformation and culminates at the end of the 18th Century with Goethe. Goethe made Faust the paradigmatic literary figure of modernity in his time for a reason.

That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice.

This is just reading comprehension. Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.

Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.

Speaking of which, why is Marc Andreseen in the running to be the Antichrist again? I feel like I missed something. If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...

If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...

Larry Ellison is at least 4 of the top 10, right?

Yes.

Yeah, as I said in my comment below the OP here is doing a sort of maximally uncharitable reading. From subsequent responses, he clearly has contempt for Christianity and Thiel so, not shocking.

Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are ...the Christian right who oppose stem cell research"

Embryonic stem cell research yes, adult stem cell no.

"and CRISPRing fetuses."

Oooh, ooooh! That are me? Me am Antichrist? Yay! Fame at last!

still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible ...Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe."

I would like to see more development of this point. I think he's referring to The Enlightenment when open atheism did become a thing, that's when we get a lot of writings by revolutionaries and radicals (see Shelley, though that's early 19th century, and of course Voltaire with his "is he/isn't he" flirting at least with atheism). So I would be interested for his reasons as to why he thinks science and atheism are not compatible.

Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it"

Would you care to expand on that? Seeing as I'm in the running for Antichrist due to my retrograde religious views, I need moral guidance from those of superior virtue (that is only half-sarcastic; an outside view is always useful and I would like to see if your notion of the theistic vices line up with what I think you would say are the theistic vices).

First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.

Throwaway for limited OPSEC

You're right here, though maybe with a few interesting caveats that others might find interesting from the (very niche) field.

Classic nuclear winter (everyone dies on snowball earth) was fairly quickly ruled out, and the worst case scenarios of present day teams most concerned on the issue seem unlikely. For example, the 150 Tg (a Tg being a million tonnes of soot in the stratosphere, where it persists) requires 4,400 unique (non overlapping) detonations over the most dense cities in the list, all of which make a firestorm. That's more than the total strategic arsenals available, some of which will be destroyed, fired at targets not in cities or held back, targeting is heavily duplicated in nuclear planning to ensure kills and not every urban detonation will cause a firestorm.

However, nuclear winter is unfortunately still possible, or at least the National Academy of Sciences is concerned enough not to rule it out at all and more research is being funded: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27515/potential-environmental-effects-of-nuclear-war. Models which exclude the possibility of stratospheric injection don't include latent heating (a huge deal) - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022JD036667 and you only need ~400 firestorms injecting soot to take out something like 30-50% of global crop yields via 47 Tg, depending on how well you adapt agriculture https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395439565_Strategic_crop_relocation_could_substantially_mitigate_nuclear_winter_yield_losses .

Add in losing agricultural inputs, access to mechanization in fields and mass logistics should the war also seriously disrupt global industry and civilizational complexity, and you have the conditions for a lot of mortality (that's actually true even without the winter, it just makes it much worse). This isn't certain, but it's really risky, and deaths in non target countries could be in the billions.

Like you say, it's hard to go from that to human extinction, and I don't personally think it's too plausible myself, but we have never run the experiment of putting our society in a situation where 80% are likely to die (absolute worst case following big rearmament, I would guess). Catastrophes can spiral, people could take risky actions as a result that contain x risks, maybe we cannot recover, it's full of unknown unknowns to quote the man who actually did the most for disarmament arguably in living memory.

I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful. I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

The katechon, the restrainer of the antichrist, must be both really powerful to prevent the antichrist, but that means there is also the danger that it IS the antichrist. I have a soft spot for theology and think it is fun to think about such mindbenders and finding real world examples. I guess Thiel was nerd sniped here.

The general point seems to be that Thiel would like to avoid anything which is too powerful, which is a globalist one-world-government. Which makes sense in a not-all-eggs-in-one-basket way.

I laughed about the juxtaposition of Francis Bacon and juvenile japanese Manga:

In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece.

I laughed out loud about this:

Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope. “The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time.

I don’t know how wooey Vance is, he comes off as relatively grounded, but Thiel giving the unsolicited advice to not get too close to the pope must have been an absurd scene (and suspiciously what I would have expected the antichrist to say).

I going to say, 99.9% joking, that Thiel may be WELS-Lutheran. My wife was raised in the WELS, and the latter believe that — not the individual — but the seat of the Pope is the Antichrist.

(The WELS are also exceedingly unecumenical, and are instructed not to pray with anyone outside their synod.)

Yeah, ELCA is the most liberal, LCMS is more conservative than that, and WELS is the most conservative, right?

If he's German-American I could see some variety of Lutheran background and of course even a liberal Lutheran probably isn't all that fond of the papacy. Still makes me laugh that he's warning Vance off; seems like the new Pope should be warned off Vance ("Careful, your Holiness, your predecessor died the day after meeting him!") 🤣

Wikipedia isn't very helpful, German Evangelicalism is probably different from the American version:

"Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology. He grew up in an evangelical household but, as of 2011, described his religious beliefs as "somewhat heterodox".

This could be his parents' background:

The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. It calls itself the Protestant Church in Germany in English. In 2024, the EKD had a membership of 17,979,849 members, or 21.5% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans."

Or they could be Evangelical in the American sense:

Despite their many similarities, evangelicals are not a homogenous group. In the German-speaking world, they can be roughly divided into three main denominations:

  • Confessing Evangelicals, who value the authority of traditional church confessions , are found in conservative circles within regional churches, for example, in the No Other Gospel confessional movement and the Conference of Confessing Communities .
  • The charismatic evangelicals, mainly in charismatic circles of the regional churches and in the congregations of the Pentecostal movement .
  • The Evangelicals in the Pietistic tradition, mainly in the Pietism of the regional churches, in traditional free churches and in the Mennonite Brethren congregations , which were often founded by Russian-German emigrants .

He was born in Hesse, so his family could be these:

Open Evangelicals or Neo-Evangelicals: This movement takes a distanced stance towards biblical criticism but is willing to accept certain of its findings. It is found particularly among evangelicals in the regional churches. This largely includes regional church Pietism with its regional focuses in Baden-Württemberg , Hesse and Saxony and the Protestant Community Movement and its educational institutions such as the Albrecht Bengel House , the Evangelical Tabor University in Marburg, the Liebenzell International University in Bad Liebenzell , the Johanneum or the Paulinum . In the free churches they are particularly represented among the Old Lutherans such as the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church , among the Mennonites and Methodists , although there are also "non-evangelical" Christians among these, and in the more liberal wings of other free churches.

Since we don't know, it's difficult to speculate about his childhood religious influences. Possibly Pietist-influenced Lutherans?

It's been described to me by a lutheran friend like this: ELCA are just autistic Episcopalians(with the variance, and age, that you'd expect), LCMS are conventionally conservative, WELS are so fundamentalist they rival tradcaths and quiverfulls.

That seems, broadly speaking, accurate.

I was raised ELCA. My best friend from high school is now an LCMS pastor, and my wife was raised WELS.

I don’t think the ELCA is quite what’s described above. The Lutherans, even the ELCA, at least started from a comparably-confident theology. The ELCA still includes the Book of Concord as one of its guiding texts and creeds. And the ELCA still holds the most stereotypical Lutheran theological belief: real presence (say it with me: “IS MEANS IS!”).

My wife and I are church shopping and are having a heck of a time. We both feel too conservative for liberal churches and too liberal for conservative churches.

One really sad thing is that there are cultural trends not inherently and inseparably wed to any theological difference that shape liberal and conservative Protestant denominations.

Namely, the median conservative Protestant (and not just Lutheran) church uses contemporary worship music that, for us, turns a Sunday into an aesthetic ordeal.

And particularly so having been raised Lutheran. Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn were all devout. Some of Bach’s works are deliberately Protestant in composition, designed to allow his congregation to sing simple lines that combine to create complex harmonies. Per capita, Lutherans are the undisputed champions of worship music.

Which is why the number of acoustic guitars and tambourines found in LCMS churches hurts.

The WELS are one of the rare exceptions, anywhere in American Protestantism, of very conservative churches who still insist upon traditional worship music. It remains as a part of their insularity. Also as they’re not on trend as a conservative Protestant church, their numbers are declining.

Conversely, and even aside from theological disagreements, the depth of theology found in the sermons of ELCA (and other liberal mainline churches) sermons, in the aggregate, is wanting. I agree it is wonderful God sent Christ to die for our sins, and that I should be kind to others. Hearing not too much more than that in almost every sermon doesn’t really help me, as a layman, grow in my faith.

My wife is a hard no on returning to the WELS, as the church she grew up in dealt… less than honestly… with one of her elderly relatives in convincing the latter to make a sizable bequest. She also attended a private WELS school which didn’t prohibit non-WELS children from attending, as this is a big source of revenue for the WELS. A high school classmate and friend of hers who wasn’t WELS died, suddenly, of a heart problem. And her school pulled all its students together to remind them they were not to pray at the subsequent funeral.

The LCMS (and even the smaller LCMC which sits ideologically in between the LCMS and ELCA) churches in our area all make use of drum sets, guitars and keyboards. Plus we both disagree with the LCMS on young-earth creationism.

And our local ELCA churches have followed the national organization’s postmodern, progressive tendencies, and offer shallow, redundant services.

We’ve branched out and are currently, desperately searching for a church among other Protestant denominations, even if it is an outlier in relation to the views of its national organization, that has traditional music and theological depth in its sermons.

We were very impressed by the pastor at a PCA church we visited, but infinitely less-so by the cajón behind him. And, there were no bibles in the pews at this church — some things even if we leave for another denomination, having been both raised Lutheran, we just can’t accept.

The search goes on…

Going off on a tangent, I saw that Katie Porter, running for governor of California and currently blowing up in the news for blowing up her campaign, is (according to Wikipedia) an Episcopalian.

And I had to laugh, because that's just so perfect. Of course she would be. Though I don't know if the Episcopalians want to be linked to someone trending right now for being an absolute bitch to her staff, amongst other things. Allegedly she fired a staff member for giving her Covid, because said staff member didn't mask while in her house, even though the staff member explained that was because she was upset about learning a friend had been murdered (and also supposedly Porter had been vaccinated previously). So yeah, charming lady, totally who you would want governing you.

Evidence in favor of Thiel being sane: He can't resist getting in a dig in on Andreesen.

Evidence against: Everything else

Yeah, dude's losing it.

I think Scott raised a very valid point on Antichrist ID 101: They're supposed to have "Antichrist" literally spelled out on their forehead. Do we really know why Yudkowsky always wears his fedora? On the other hand, Andreesen and Greta have fiveheads, but in 2025, cosmetic surgery or makeup can do wonders.

I think Scott raised a very valid point on Antichrist ID 101: They're supposed to have "Antichrist" literally spelled out on their forehead.

Where was this?

It was either his Twitter or a Substack note. I'd look it up if it wasn't 3 am on a Monday :(

I'm very confused about this speech and Peter Thiel's religious beliefs. Because as far as I can tell he doesn't practice Christianity in his daily life the only Christian denominations that would accept him being a homosexual are very liberal and don't care about Armageddon. And I can't see him being an Episcopalian. It just doesn't fit my mental model of him at all and I don't understand how a gay German techlord is giving talks like an Evangelical preacher?

Unless it's some kind of Jordan Peterson metaphor thing? But it doesn't appear to be. Can anyone explain where this came from?

I wondered if he might have swerved towards some branch of Orthodoxy, given his use of Greek theological terms, but as you say the gay thing does rule against it. Plus the warning about Caesaropapism, given that the prime example of that was the Byzantine church and the Eastern Churches in general don't think that Councils can be called without the authority of the Emperor (who is no more, unless we all accept Trump as the new Emperor?)

Warning Vance against the pope is very funny and possibly tongue-in-cheek, given the memes about pope Francis' death very soon after meeting Vance.

My personal theory is that it got to Thiel how often people accuse him of being the Antichrist and he wanted to deflect.

I saw a tweet that read,

Beyoncé released a song called "Bodyguard" to hide the Google search results about her yearlong affair with her bodyguard. Same thing is happening here with "Peter Thiel antichrist"

It doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Writers on this show suck ass now dude, can't even keep character motives straight. No respect for the source material.

Is it not clear that everything he’s saying is a metaphor and it’s being quoted/framed in the most uncharitable possible way by a hostile source?

Thiel may not be a believer, but he clearly regards organized Christianity positively. It’s not a surprise that when he’s trying to make a point thats where he’s reaching, although he doesn’t hit the trad Catholic end times prophecies well, so he’s at least not just cribbing those.

Sure, the source is hostile.

But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.

If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.

If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.

Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.

  1. Since he said it in private, it's inherently not going to include caveats and explanations that let you understand it, so you should grant a lot more charity to interpret it than you would anything said in public, like 99% of the cases of "punch a Nazi". This is doubly so if it was selected specifically because it sounds bad (and it was), because that ruins your priors.

  2. People won't give a pass for punching Nazis because punching Nazis is an act which can be done by a vigilante or a mob. Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.

  3. As others have pointed out here, your interpretation is wrong. He did not actually mean what you think he meant.

Since he said it in private

He gave a bloody lecture in front of a couple of hundreds of people. This is very different from having a private dinner with a couple of friends which was bugged by the guardian.

Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.

There is a reason that western culture has evolved an allergic reaction to Christians accusing others of either being in league with the devil or the antichrist. The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.

If Thiel was giving lectures about the Eucharist and the guardian tried to spin this into "well obviously he is advocating for cannibalism", nobody would buy it, because while Christian beliefs about transubstantiation are definitely weird, Christianity also has an excellent track record as far as avoiding actual cannibalism goes.

From a stochastical terrorism perspective (which I personally do not like much), saying "X is the/an antichrist" is the right-wing version of saying "X is literally Hitler". Either has a mild priming effect on people who have a psychotic break and decide to murder someone, I would guess.

Suppose that instead of the antichrist, he gave a lecture on jihad. Would you go well, there is no way that a Western Muslim in 2025 would actually advocate for violence. Actually, what he really means is jihad in the sense of an inner struggle which brings you closer to god.

The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.

The word "historically" is doing a lot of work here. If it happened ten years ago, you might have a point. But Christian violence against accused antichrists has been pretty much nonexistent for 80 years. (This is not so for violent jihads, of course.)

one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist

This is so insane

Explains so much about contemporary western society though

Replace "antichrist" with "literally Hitler" (meaning: "not literally Hitler but morally Hitler-equivalent") and see what numbers that gives you.

Which is also... incredibly stupid

The median Westen voter is a moron, the older I get the worse it's revealed to be.

To be fair, this was just a Fermi estimate on my part, I simply assumed that the number of people who believe in The Omen are roughly the 14% who believe that the second coming of Christ is near.

Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist. But in the big tent you don't have the luxury of enforcing ideological conformity.

It doesn't matter if Thiel believes in the Antichrist the same way I do, or as strongly as I do or as literally as I do, what matters is that I know what he means and those who don't can easily find out. This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'

This works well as a cultural touchstone for red tribe for several reasons - a) historical precedence - Christianity has long been at home in the red tribe. At the same time, Thiel is a student of Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order. I assume Thiel is using the term with that intellectual framework in mind, making it both a populist shibboleth and a high-concept philosophical argument, meaning it b) both uses and reinforces the current resurgence of Christianity in the red tribe by embracing a low status red tribe marker (distinguishing Thiel from the typical conception of the billionaire) and legitimising it amongst tech bro types (who have always been susceptible to esoteric and fantastical mythologies aesthetically) and also c) it upsets people who don't get the shibboleths, who, because they don't get the shibboleths, are forced to interpret it through their typical understanding of the world where it just sounds insane.

Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist.

My experience is that people who talk about the devil and the antichrist a lot are very likely to be fundamentalists.

I was raised Catholic-lite, I went to Church twice a year and attended one or two hours a week of Catholic education in German public school, before I opted out in favor of a non-religious ethics class (which was more interesting in the topics it covered) at age 14. This forms the baseline of my model of liberal (but not necessarily insincere!) Christianity. I think the devil only appeared as tempting Jesus in the desert, and even there was interpreted more like an inner drive than as an external, rational agent. We did not cover Revelations at all. There was no preaching of fire and brimstone, sex was not a topic. There was certainly no mixing of religion and politics, the god of my childhood did not endorse any candidates.

Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order.

You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?" I certainly had a (Catholic) history teacher who expressed such an opinion. Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people who thought that changing the organization of society might alleviate suffering (and were correct in the case of social democrats and terribly wrong in the case of communists).

I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?

It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).

This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'

I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.

Frankly, if Thiel wants to make the point that Greta or Eliezer exemplify what is wrong with our world, I would probably give him two paragraphs of moderate length to convince me that he is making an interesting argument. I am much less inclined to spend the resources to try decipher a deliberately obfuscated argument on the off chance that it holds some insight instead of him being a MAGA weirdo who has found a new favorite thing to call his political enemies.

You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?"

Critiques like that of Marxism are a subset of the anthropological phenomenon Girard is describing. Girard's point isn't limited to a single political ideology. It's a critique of the entire modern mindset, and the desire to 'build a better world' on the back of a designated enemy. He saw this pattern repeating everywhere, from the French Revolution to modern social justice movements. The Antichrist is the principle that weaponizes compassion for victims to create an engine of perpetual conflict. It's a critique of secular humanism and its endless quest for new victims and new oppressors, a quest which leads to a permanent state of social conflict - the 'chaos marketed as order' I mentioned.

Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people

Then you don't understand religion. A religious institution without a belief in its moral standing is a social club. A religious institution derives its morality from divine authority. You are judging it on criteria it doesn't care about, you can't then be flummoxed that it doesn't care about your judgement.

I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?

Thunberg is a shibboleth. She is just a good representative of the secular doomsday cult, she's a child prophet.

Regarding Stewardship you are missing the point entirely, deliberately it seems? Or was that Marxist line literally all the thought you put into understanding Girard's thesis? The idea doesn't become unsound, it becomes dangerous. We don't understand all the ways certain sociological concepts interact, which ones affect which. Compassion is good, but decoupled from religion, from a framework of original sin, grace, transcendence, and forgiveness, it turns suicidal. It gets coopted by grifters, narcissists, psychopaths. Perhaps that is what Thiel is doing! If it is, it would have been a lot harder to figure out without Girard's Antichrist.

It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).

Do you similarly believe Christianity has no ip rights on the development of everything you just mentioned? Because I see a pretty direct (straightforwardly direct in the case of social justice) through line from Christianity to them. They aren't just virtuous, they are virtuous according to the tenets of Christianity and built on a bedrock of assumptions that most other cultures in history found bizarre.

I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.

What are you arguing now? That Thiel sees different problems to you? Actually most of those things, I'm pretty sure, Thiel would argue are symptoms of... You guessed it, the Antichrist. In the Girard sense. Dismissing his position as 'deliberately obfuscated' would carry more weight if you hadn't already admitted you have no idea what Girard said or any interest in finding out.

The entire point is that the quasi-religious framework he's using explains the rise of things like the 'demolition of truth' and the 'anti liberal patterns' you mentioned. And that by tying the religious and secular conceptions of the Antichrist together Thiel provides a way two disparate groups he belongs to - Christians who believe the bible is true if not necessarily 100% accurate and tech bros - can share culture.

Thiel has stated that he is a "small o orthodox" Christian.

Sure, but his speculations on the antichrist don't correspond well to actual Christian apocalyptic prophecy. I can see the guy being methodist or episcopalian or something where you believe Jesus Christ was God, died for our sins, and was resurrected, but not necessarily a whole lot else. On the other hand he's pretty clearly not a Catholic or Orthodox, and the kind of protestants who take this stuff literally won't have him.

Okay, who is his bishop?

Non-proper noun, that’s a claim of adherence to basic, fundamental Christian beliefs; not membership in a proper-noun Orthodox church.

I guess if you wanted to grill him, you could ask whether or not he believes in the Apostles’ Creed, and whether or not he believes the filioque clause belongs in the Nicene Creed.

It doesn't nessesarily imply big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but it does imply adherence to small-o Nicene orthodoxy, which nessesitates an organized church under a valid bishop.

The term usually includes mainline and most disorganized protestants, who may or may not have bishops.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Thiel's religious beliefs must be idiosyncratic to contain his lifestyle, but he does consider himself a believer, contra hydro's saying this is all just a metaphor.

(I am not the one to whom you are responding but)

The point being made here is, what exactly does Thiel mean by “small-o orthodox”? Presumably he doesn’t mean Eastern Orthodox, else he wouldn’t have qualified with “small-o”. But then he must have in mind some other notion of “correct belief” (literally, ortho + doxia), and given his, shall we say, (in)famously libertine lifestyle, it’s not at all obvious what that “correct belief” is, nor how it accords with any conventional benchmarks of correct Christian belief, such as the aforementioned Nicene Creed.

Or maybe Thiel was just making a nerdy joke about how his Christianity is growing much faster than Orthodox Christianity.

I agree with you that's a really interesting and important question, especially for Christians who want to welcome the gay moneychanger as a fellow traveler.

It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.

God damn.

This seems to be a very bad misreading of Thiel from my perspective, it seems obvious you just don't like him, or don't understand the religious themes he's pointing at, or both. I should say that I don't necessarily love Thiel, I disagree with him on many things, but I'm familiar with his overall line of argumentation.

Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.

The overall argument he makes is that while WW3 would indeed be horrible, the destruction may lead to a renewal down the road whereas the antichrist would lead to a permanent stagnation and total surveillance state, which could perpetuate unfathomably long amounts of time or perhaps eternally. In his view the latter is a far worse outcome, and I tend to agree.

As for the Dr. Strangelove piece, it's obvious he's just referencing Dr. Strangelove as a sort of archetype of the crazy scientist as well. This is an incredibly minor nitpick.

With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.

I think overall the problem here, and with the Guardian article in general, is that you aren't very familiar with Thiel's overall thought and so do not understand the points he is making in their broader context. Perhaps part of why he tried to ban recording of his talks...

Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.

I mean, the criticism that ASI believers are just reinventing either god or the devil is not exactly new. In a way, it is pure Bulverism, "Eliezer has simply translated the ancient myth of the apocalypse for the technological age". It does not engage with his arguments at all.

I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.

Yes, I have just the quotes without the broader context, for all I know, Thiel's lectures could not be on theology any more than Jesus' parable of the sower is about agriculture. Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics. For example, he points out that the antichrist does not necessarily have to be a Jew -- which would be silly if there already was a common understanding with his audience that it is all just a metaphor, and no real person can be the antichrist.

Basically, if I read a version of the parable of the sower where Jesus goes into detail about soil acidity, bound nitrogen, rainfall and temperature patterns, and fertilizers, at some point I give up on trying to understand what the equivalent of the soil pH in the heart of man might be and conclude that he is talking about agriculture, after all.

With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.

I think that compared to the 1970s, technological progress has slowed down a lot. But the cause is mostly diminishing returns. Moore's law only kinda keeps holding because the market exploded between the 8086 and today, so you can recoup your R&D costs from more customers. The discovery of the Higgs boson was immensely more expensive than that of the W and Z bosons. AI companies are burning through huge stacks of investor money to get moderate increases in model performance.

Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).

Greta is not about stopping the research of new technologies, but about building more instances of very mature tech which work by burning fossil fuels. Eliezer is against frontier AI capability research until we make progress with alignment, which might take a few decades. However, in all the worlds where the current LLM paradigm will plateau soon, the costs are rather small, because current LLMs will not overcome the diminishing returns of most research fields. Without alignment, any AI which would be smart enough to overcome the general trend of stagnation would also be a potential x-risk for humans.

I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.

Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.

Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics.

Thiel is positing potential ways in which the antichrist could manifest into our world, not giving actual specifics he's more exploring the problem. Again, I'm not a Thiel-stan I don't agree with his theology, but given the follow up to this sentence, you're very much pattern matching a snarky atheist here lol. I'm not surprised you're not engaging with his metaphor, because from my perspective you're basically reading "antichrist" and going "oh this guy is just another religious idiot, anything he says must be bunk."

For instance, Jesus does indeed go into many specifics in his parables, calling out specific groups like the Pharisees, Samaritans, etc etc. For the parable of the mustard seed, He even goes into specifics of soil quality! Metaphors often employ specifics that are relevant to the audience.

Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).

The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.

I'm not particularly convinced by it, but there is a logic there.

Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.

I agree that I was a bit uncharitable. That being said, I am unconvinced that I am entirely wrong. For example, calling Catholicism a doomsday cult would be silly. From my very laymen understanding, Early Christianity did have a bit of an apocalyptic streak (e.g. Book of Revelations, ca. 95 CE).

The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.

I guess his fears make more sense from the perspective of a billionaire. The current Gini index is only stable in periods of exponential growth. As long as every generation has a life substantially better than their parents, few care too much if the billionaires are owning more and more. One the cake stops growing, they will likely have strong opinions on its current distribution ratio, which might easily end the billionaire class and thus, civilization, from their point of view. ('Humans might survive, but without private helicopters and space tourism, as mere animals nesting in suburban homes' or something along the lines.)

I will grant you that the reading "perpetual technological growth is the only way to keep the present society stable, so anyone who threatens that (i.e. Greta, Eliezer) are agents of chaos, i.e. the antichrist." would be a self-consistent philosophical position.

Of course, the god of perpetual exponential growth is likely not Jesus Christ (who did not die on the cross to maximize shareholder value). For most of Christianity, technological progress was glacial slow. On the other hand, calling Greta the antimammon does not really have the same ring to it.

Good points, thanks for coming back around to this.

I agree that early Christianity was apocalyptic! Obviously not as apocalyptic as the insane cults we've seen throughout history, since they survived and spread incredibly well, but there was a strong bent towards it for sure.

the hoi polloi

Not to be all snooty and everything but following the original it's "hoi polloi", not "the hoi polloi". The phrase is a direct transliteration from ancient Greek of "οἱ πολλοί". In Greek οἱ is the nominative masculine plural definite article meaning "the" and πολλοί means "many". Saying "the hoi polloi" is like saying "the the masses", the first word is redundant.

It's a very minor thing and you can argue that English as a language has evolved and developed to the point where "the hoi polloi" is now grammatically correct (I'd even agree) but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

Thank you for clarifying! The Greeks at my church would be aghast at my ignorance of the language. Alas, I am part of hoi polloi after all.

Ancient Greek as a language is very different from modern Greek (more so than Chaucer is distinct from modern English), I don't know the first thing about modern Greek so please do your own research on how modern Greeks speak.

Hah well we do the Liturgy and such in ancient Greek so, they'd still be disappointed.

but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

It is a good way to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi after all.

Indeed, finally all those Classics lessons paying off. I knew one day they'd come in useful. Perhaps in a different life I'd have read Greats at Balliol, but in this one at least I still get to use the bits and bobs I've picked up from here and there.

Yeah it's very true... not sure what Thiel's endgame is. He's quite obviously very Straussian so, he could just have layers of obfuscation around his "real" plan, who knows.

Yep that's the West today, two different cultures that hate each other and don't understand each other's mythology (not implying symmetrical ignorance, because one side understands the other a lot better than the other way around, but broadly speaking) laughing at how stupid each other is.

Which side understands the other better, do you think? I'm guessing the right understands the left better heh.

But yeah, it is a very common thing. I'm not trying to laugh at OP though, just pointing out that his tone of confused smug questioning is coming from an uninformed place.

Yeah the right understands the left better than the other way around. That might change in the near future though, because the right understand the left better out of necessity - it is more important to understand your opponent's theory of mind when you are weaker than them than when you are stronger than them.

If Thiel is worried about a one-world state, I find it rather strange that he has worked closely with the US national security / intelligence apparatus, which out of all currently existing political entities is probably the one that is most likely to bring about a one-world state and indeed is constantly working to extend Washington DC's domination to every corner of a planet. Not that I think that the US national security / intelligence apparatus has any serious chance of bringing about a one-world state, but it's more likely to do it than any other political entity I can think of. Does Thiel think that he can get on this giant tiger's back and steer its direction?

As for science and atheism being incompatible, it really depends on what Thiel means by atheism. Science is certainly not incompatible with rejection of organized religions like Christianity and Islam. But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I wish I could see a full transcript, it's hard to come to any conclusions without one.

But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.

In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

And the theologians will go "Hi, glad to see you, and it only took you eight centuries to catch up with us!" 😁

Depends on whether souls, angels and demons end up coming from an existing theological practice.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics.

There is even less reason to think that "souls" or a non-material substrate is in reach of our physics. Also, even if we could find a definitive physical cause for consciousness, that still would not mean materialism is true! As David Bentley Hart says...

One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.

Paging @FCfromSSC if he wants to go more deeply into the arguments against materialism. Here is an example of him arguing about free will, for instance.

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Excuse my ignorance of the subject, but why should perception or thinking be impossible for a material creature?

For a purely material creature. Because perception and thinking are non-material things.

Are they? Why? What makes them so? Base matter seems sufficient for perception and thinking. I'm not saying there is no non-material aspect to life, but the "things" you named...seem doable by material means.

Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain how an entity can react to the environment and think, but it is not clear that they can explain subjective experience.

Imagination works fundamentally unconstrained from physical reality, for a start. We can 'imagine' and see things like numbers, that have basically no real physical basis, and change the world from them. The list goes on and on.

If you're genuinely curious about this, I recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist.

I think there's a symmetry here. One side just declares a problem to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me" and the other declares it not to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me". (I'm with the eliminativists, btw.)

Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?

It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.

Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.

Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.

Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.

I don’t know, I think the risks of global totalitarian government are way, way higher if China becomes the premier global power.

I’ll just go ahead and stake out the position which is that the US actually does respect the rights of its citizens more than basically any country in the world (maybe Switzerland or the Nordics are better?) and certainly more than china or any of their allies. In addition to that the us really does try and encourage its allies to democratize. Places like South Korea, are imperfect, but far better than what they were earlier in my lifetime. The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way, but imo that should be viewed as more of an exception than a rule.

I also believe that the us national security / intelligence apparatus is mostly well intentioned / a good thing. Are they perfect, no, but it seems like they are pretty good at answering the elected president’s political appointees.

Most germanic european countries are very conformist societies where state force is used against those who buck the trend. They're just not enforcing the values that people who complain about 'conformity' tend to dislike, they're enforcing a different set.

If there's a country where the average person has more freedom than the US, it's probably some Latin American country where the government has to pick and choose what it uses its state capacity on.

The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way

Even Iraq is probably better off than it was under Saddam. Certainly better off than it would have been under his sons. Afghanistan not so much.

How so? Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

It's hard to find an equivalent country to look at path of development, Syria is obvious but Syria wouldn't look like it does today absent the Iraq war. Probably Iran is the downside estimate assuming poor governance and continued isolation, and Iran is about as well off as Iraq without the atrocities.

Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

Why not? Are we supposed to assume that the Americans were the predominant factor of the Arab Spring, and that no such equivalent could or would have happened absent the US invasion of Iraq?

The reason Iraq had less Iranian influence circa 2000 under Saddam was because Iran under Saddam was a roughly 1/3rd Sunni religious minority suppression state artificially holding down the 2/3rd Shia majority. That 1/3rd is a larger fraction than the Syrian state, which was roughly 3/4th Sunni and 1/4th everything else, but it was still a distinct religious minority with deep, deep sectarian grievances that were not only perpetuated, but grown, by the dictatorship's sectarian tendencies and subversion of civil society dynamics that might have created a bond. We know what was liable to happen when the suppression apparatus faltered, which is to say sectarian revenge, and we know this was liable to happen both if the state was compromised by an external invasion (US invasion of Iraq), or by a popular uprising supported by neighbors (Syrian civil war).

Saddam's Iraq was a country surrounded by neighbors who would happily have fueled a Syrian-scale-plus civil war if Saddam faced an Arab Spring-esque Shia uprising. This includes many of the the real-history states who supported the civil war that followed the American invasion, including- or especially- Iran. As much as Americans like to think they dominate other people's considerations, Iran's proxy-and-WMD pursuit up to 2003 were always first and foremost for use against Iraq, and the Iranian Revolutionaries long saw themselves as the eventual liberators / protectors of the regional Shia. Nor would many of Iraq's neighbors- who saw Iraq as a main security threat- have hesitated to drag it down a peg and build their own influence.

Unless you posit that Iran and Iraq, two arch-enemies who not only aimed but used WMD programs against eachother, were on the outbreak of a kumbiyah moment had the US not invaded Iraq, Iraq was a tender box primed for a half million (or far more) casualties if / when the Saddam regime hit a popular uprising. Iran had been preparing to support Shia groups for decades, and would not have stood by quietly.

Yeah you'd think he'd defect to the Russians or something then. The worry about the UN creating a one world government seems incredibly naive for someone as plugged in as him. The idea of the UN being more than a discussion forum and aid distribution force of the great powers is fanciful.

...Unless he knows something we don't.

Of course going off priors we'll discover some drug habits instead.

If Thiel is worried about a one-world state,

Naw dog, all states are one-world states, at least so far. He's worried about a one-state world.

Not true; Singapore is a Star Alliance state

I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

I'm surprised that Thiel claims to have just found this out. It was practically an open secret that bill gates was an excitable genius with a short temper.

But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money

From all anecdotes that I hear, he became a lot less 'nonstop' post-microsoft. He was an angry/passionate dude in the 90s and early 2000s. Calmed down after.

If Peter Thiel is doing theology, I hope he does one on homosexuality?

I can't believe I used to like Thiel. Thinly insinuating that you yourself are the antichrist here to cleanse the world and bring about literal heaven hell on earth isn't going to win you any friends at all, or at least it shouldn't in a sane world, which who knows about anymore...

This really looks like the old movie trope about how the evil genius spends a lot of time explaining in detail exactly how evil and clever he is which then turns out to be his undoing as he's too caught up with his own evilness and cleverness to notice the foil making its entrance. You'd expect the quasi evil geniuses of our world would have learned to keep their maw shut but again, who knows with this world...

I personally suspect he seems himself as more of a Leto II character, from Dune.

The Thiel quotes in OP are giving me professor Weston from the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy, specifically in Perelandra where Weston mixes his previous scientism with "spiritualism" in obfuscatory vaguely religious monologues trying to appeal to Christians (and turns out to have been possessed by a demon).

A conversation leaked by someone who doesn't like Thiel won't be a representative sample of what he says. It'll be disproportionately likely to sound bad and accordingly, the fact that it reminds you of a speech by a demon should lead you to update much less than if his speeches typically sound like they are made by demons.

Also, beware fictional evidence.

Indeed, but the quotes in OP are not that far off from what he sounds like in this hour long interview with Ross Douthat. My pattern matching him to the demon possessed Weston from Lewis' novel is more of a rough vibe based thing, rather than a precise analogue, so the claim of similarity should not be taken too seriously. I am just rereading the novels in question and noticing similarities with somebody like Thiel who merges some sort of scientism and techno-optimism with religious or spiritual language. Lewis himself was of course a bit of a luddite (as am I, I must confess), so it should be no surprise that the syncretism between transhumanism and spirituality is evaluated rather negatively.

If the quotes are not very far from what he said in public, the leaks should be a non-story because they would amount to "Thiel says a slightly different version of the same thing he's said a dozen times in public already".

They can't be both shocking revelations and just more of the same old thing.

I agree. Having listened to the Ross Douthat interview, I don't understand why these leaks are presented as a shocking revelation. It is well known that Thiel has these sorts of ideas. I remember listening years ago to some sort of discussion between Thiel and N.T. Wright (a prominent Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar) where he already had some weird idiosyncratic takes mixing Christianity and transhumanism.

The one I can't get over is Sam Altman going "Yeah, this is probably going to destroy the world, but in the meantime there's going to be some great companies!"

Bro, this is Captain Planet villain rhetoric.

Better death at the hands of an American God than life at the feet of a Chinese one. Onward to ruin.

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