As The Guardian has reported, Peter Thiel has been lecturing in San Francisco about the Antichrist, Armageddon and a one-world order. What his Antichrist fixation tells us is a great deal about his views on power, but nothing on prophecy.
Thiel is one of the so-called and influential 'Tech Bros', and is a founder and major owner of Palantir, which now controls a great deal of NHS (and so your) data and which now has a billion-plus-pound agreement with the Ministry of Defence. He argues that the great evils of our time are global cooperation, international law, and any restraint on the wealthy or on technology. He hints that the Antichrist could be Greta Thunberg. He toys with the idea that it could be the United States. He worries that regulation and climate action will end freedom and stop invention. “Peace and safety” is the slogan of the Antichrist, he suggests. Restraint is the road to ruin.
It would appear that he hates tax havens as he wants places where money can be hidden, and suggests that moves against them have been very bad for society. Maybe I am on his outlier list to be the Antichrist in that case, given how much work I did on that issue.
But let's be candid. These lectures were not theology in the sense that any theologian might recognise. Nor, as far as I can see, are they about Christianity as such, although he claims to be one. One of the labels discussed here yesterday might well apply in that case. Instead, Thiel's lectures represent the catechism of a class that has lost the habit of accountability.
Thiel speaks as if democratic guardrails are satanic because they limit what the very rich may do, and he treats global standards on finance, the rule of law, and basic environmental responsibility as existential threats not just to humanity, but to the unconstrained reach of private capital.
This, in my opinion, is the thinking of a mind deranged by money and power. And he has power over us. He bankrolls political candidates in the US. He funds campaigns to roll back regulation. His firms win security and data contracts from governments. He wants the privileges of empire without the duties of citizenship, and the spoils of technology without the obligations that come with it.
What he does is recast public oversight for the common good - one of the essential tasks of any state - as cosmic persecution. The Antichrist then becomes, in his thinking, a metaphor for any force that might tax, regulate or simply ask billionaires to answer to the public. In that story, climate policy is tyranny, the International Criminal Court is heresy (he is a friend of Netanyahu), and the UN is a portal to hell. It is convenient nonsense. It is also dangerous because it gives political cover to attack the institutions that protect the rest of us.
There is also another way to read this if the mumbo jumbo, faux theology and fake philosophy are removed from consideration. What if the menace here is not a mythical tyrant waiting in the wings, as Thiel claims, but is instead the billionaire who preaches that shared rules are evil and that only private power should decide the future? What if the Antichrist Thiel fears is actually his mirrored image staring back at him, and the creed that says markets must rule, wealth must concentrate, and democracy must stand down?
I am not interested in Thiels' absurd take on apocalypse. What I am interested in is the material project underneath it, which is to remove the last checks on corporate power. If you can brand cooperation as satanic, as Thiel does, then you can make greed look like virtue, and if you can call regulation the path to Armageddon, you can turn profiteering into a sacrament.
In that case, let me address what must be said, which is that free speech is not the freedom of billionaires to buy politics. In addition, innovation is not the right to experiment on society without its consent, and security is not the outsourcing of the state to surveillance vendors paid from public funds. A civilised economy sets rules first and then lets enterprise flourish within them.
What then follows is not complicated. We need:
- Transparency over public contracts with data and defence firms
- Full beneficial ownership disclosure to end secrecy
- Hard limits on money in politics
- An end to tax havens
- Regualtion of cryoto-currencies
- Antitrust law to control social media platforms, other media and other monopolies, and
- Democratic oversight of high-risk technologies before they are unleashed.
In other words, we need the ordinary work of accountable government.
In his lectures, Thiel offers a choice between the Antichrist and Armageddon. I offer a better one, between oligarchy and democracy. If you want to see the real end of days, just look for the moment we decide that the richest man in the room gets to define what is good and evil, and you will know it has arrived.
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If there is an antichrist, I think it is Thiel, the Koch Brothers, etc., who stand for virtually everything that is the antithesis of what Christian values are supposed to be.
Separately, I noted the other day that one of the stated great advantages of AI is that it will eliminate over 25% of graduate white collar starting roles. How does enriching a few tech bros benefit society? The underlying consequences of these stated claims about eliminating graduate starting roles are mind-boggling as well as being illogical. How does the foregoing square with Thiel’s pathetic drivel about the antichrist, Armageddon, etc? QED – he is a prime candidate for the antichrist.
In some ways what we need is not freedom of speech but equality of speech.
Freedom of speech implies letting each shout as loudly as they can, which gives billionaires massive influence while the majority are entirely unheard. Demagogues also have a disproportionate voice.
Democracy aims to give people a more equal voice. Those voices may sometimes be ill informed, but an equal vote system reduces the opportunity for one person to completely upend things.
I am full of admiration for your ability to reduce Thiel’s incoherent ramblings to a semi-coherent narrative in order to critique it. Well done. I gave up reading the Guardian article with a mixture of horror, disgust and despair that this man, with this kind of thinking has so much money and therefore so much power. I also reflected that perhaps Trump’s rambling speeches, which appear so extraordinary in comparison to those of normal politicians, are actually just a product of the company he keeps. If this really is how they think and talk to each other we really are in trouble.
I read it.
I did a TL;DR using AI.`
Then I did that again to get another version, deliberately setting it a slightly different task.
Then I wrote.
That is using AI as a tool but very definitely staying in charge.
I will address this in the guide to AI that I am working on.
I generally feel sick in my stomach reading this.
Thiel and Larry Ellison – what a future they have planned for us all.
If there is any hope – and I am struggling to feel any – is that there is a chain of consequence in all livings, everything connects and we either work together or dont and perish.
We have to have a vision for a better world. It currently feels like Bons villians have took over the world.
Oligarchs tussling for power. Very unsavoury. I’m thinking grimly of Tom Payton’s song, When Princes Meet. This looks like another kind of feudalism in the making.
It seems obvious to me that Thiel is a fascist?
All he is doing is getting his word in first for as you seem to suggest, he is actually the threat he is describing. He is get the refutation in first, pretending to be concerned, pretending to be a potential victim, hoping that he has thrown people off the scent.
We have to remember what people like Thiel have done. These are people who have deliberately made social media addictive and intrusive. They knew what they were doing and they did it anyway as Soshana Zubhoff has explained and so many others (watch ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix or ‘The Great Hack’ also on Netflix if still available. Read Jaron Lanier for gods sake, watch – ‘Screened Out’ on Amazon.
This is Thiel’s empire and he is the emperor – a fascist one. It is almost like Star Wars – Thiel has gone over to the dark side because in the face of the known damage social media has done to young people in particular, he needs to side with or take over government in order not to be curbed. It is the same with Netanyahu keeping out of prison siding with Zionist extremists and why Trump had to become president to keep out of prison too. This is how powerful keep away from accountability. They double down and are prepared to be used and make a pact with the Devil himself.
Thiel’s favourite book is Lord of the Rings, but it appears he comprehended none of it. Perhaps he thought Sauron was the victim? He seems to have understood the text as well as Kemi Badenoch understood Terry Pratchett’s discworld novels.
Agreed
How about Christos or Christo bros for the Christians like Thiel who are diametrically opposed to anything Jesus actually stood for?
Thiel, Musk and a handful of others demonstrate the complete takeover of Western government by corporate interests.
The way back to sanity from where we are today may be long and painful.
The alternative, where they do run the world unrestrained, doesn’t bear thinking about.
Someone should refer Thiel to Christ’s words reported in Luke 18:22-25
“Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. … How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Indeed….