I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
Thanks for highlighting this - I won't be able to unsee how well this does in "x person is bad" clickbait headlines vs "Christ V2: A Revised Edition" which seems to be more accurate and honest. I admit I've fallen for this for trop for ages ...
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us.
When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)
My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
He definitely isn't a Catholic. "Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology." says Wikipedia. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical household. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Gave up exploring space? Are we living in the same reality? Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots. We’d never have pictures of Pluto if we were hyper-focused on manned missions.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.
In my view, oligarchs in general should be scorned. No republic should suffer private princes in my opinion, the mere fact of being someone who can influence policy outside of the democratic apparatus simply by being extremely wealthy is dangerous to the democratic apparatus. Thiel is a particularly egregious example in my view, because he makes no effort to hide the oligarchical nature of his influence on a democratic society. He even personally disdains democracy, seeing it as incompatible with liberty.
I also think he is fundamentally mistaken about the nature of liberty too. Since antiquity an enduring view of liberty has been the condition of non-domination; that is to say you are free when you are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of an external actor to go about your life, even a private actor. Even a maximally benevolent oligarch is inherently dangerous to liberty in this traditional framing of the concept. Destroying the domineering aspects of the state so he can instead dominate people in a private capacity is an ideology in the service of oppression, not liberty in my view.
He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
I also think his thesis about the antichrist is actually probably not all that wrong, although overstated. (In a nutshell, that defensive degrowth might be net worse than the prognosis of the actual diseases caused by growth. Citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as the two main figures.)
The core issue with him, in my view, are his openly anti-democratic beliefs, as well as this interesting trend one sometimes sees of the "autocratic libertarians" and sometimes even "monarchist anarchists". He's close with Curtis Yarvin, etc.
He's a giga-libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
Listening to Thiel feels like opening a complicated mechanical device while running and looking at the mechanism that makes it tick. Its so raw, its beautiful in its own way. It removes the spell on so many things, it gives you the "I understand why those people do what they do now" kick. It relieves you from emotional baggage.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
AFAIK He can't in US, at least legally. What I expect to happen is that he will eventually get his city-state with the right combination of people and structure and be the president of it. Just not sure if the ICBMs come first or after.
Some ideas of Thiel seem to be good.
Everything is fine until you harm the lives of other people.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
> Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I suspect that you may have it backward in a way. The majority of people are raised religious from childhood. There are a lot of people with various religious beliefs that may seem strange to you, but you don't hear from most of them, because they're not famous.
AFAICT "self-made" billionaires are typically narcissists who have no beliefs or principles, because becoming a billionaire requires a great deal of ruthlessness. Thus, it's likely rare for someone to become a billionaire with preexisting beliefs intact. In that respect, Thiel is the exception, not the rule.
Consider Tim Cook, who was raised in a conservative Christian area and seems to have retained those beliefs to an extent. Curiously, both Cook and Thiel are gay, which brings a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially with Thiel's support for anti-gay Republicans. I heard Cook say once that he thinks God made him gay, which I guess is what he tells himself, that it's some kind of test, or he's some kind of messenger for God. In any case, both his religion and his sexuality predated his billionaire status.
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry as a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean?
"support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
That (caring for poor people) is anti-christ to the goals of Thiel, who wants to get rid of democracy and create city states governed by autocratic rulers.
I don't think he believes in Antichrist, the same way Elon Musk doesn't believe we'll go to Mars. I think these are calculated statements to manipulate people. (The U.S. oligarchs find some of the more gullible fundamentalist evangelicans to be a useful ally.)
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Further reading, nos. 675-677 at the bottom of this page: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us.
Peter is properly, openly and deeply Protestant. Jesus Christ is his Christ
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
E.g. I think what your getting at is something akin to, "you can't be Catholic if you are for abortion".
you cant be a catholic if you are for abortion. stop being dense.
your religion is a nest of child rapists why dont you talk about that?
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
It was there all this time. I need Dan Brown's email ASAP.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...
I also think he is fundamentally mistaken about the nature of liberty too. Since antiquity an enduring view of liberty has been the condition of non-domination; that is to say you are free when you are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of an external actor to go about your life, even a private actor. Even a maximally benevolent oligarch is inherently dangerous to liberty in this traditional framing of the concept. Destroying the domineering aspects of the state so he can instead dominate people in a private capacity is an ideology in the service of oppression, not liberty in my view.
I also think his thesis about the antichrist is actually probably not all that wrong, although overstated. (In a nutshell, that defensive degrowth might be net worse than the prognosis of the actual diseases caused by growth. Citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as the two main figures.)
The core issue with him, in my view, are his openly anti-democratic beliefs, as well as this interesting trend one sometimes sees of the "autocratic libertarians" and sometimes even "monarchist anarchists". He's close with Curtis Yarvin, etc.
He's a giga-libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.
I suspect that you may have it backward in a way. The majority of people are raised religious from childhood. There are a lot of people with various religious beliefs that may seem strange to you, but you don't hear from most of them, because they're not famous.
AFAICT "self-made" billionaires are typically narcissists who have no beliefs or principles, because becoming a billionaire requires a great deal of ruthlessness. Thus, it's likely rare for someone to become a billionaire with preexisting beliefs intact. In that respect, Thiel is the exception, not the rule.
Consider Tim Cook, who was raised in a conservative Christian area and seems to have retained those beliefs to an extent. Curiously, both Cook and Thiel are gay, which brings a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially with Thiel's support for anti-gay Republicans. I heard Cook say once that he thinks God made him gay, which I guess is what he tells himself, that it's some kind of test, or he's some kind of messenger for God. In any case, both his religion and his sexuality predated his billionaire status.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.