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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.
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:
For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:
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:
They quote him:
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?"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
As others have pointed out here, your interpretation is wrong. He did not actually mean what you think he meant.
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.
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 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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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