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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27019 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?

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 :(

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