Antichrist

Bislang ist Peter Thiel als (vor allem im Vergleich zu einem gewissen Südafrikaner) eher rationaler Unhold aufgefallen, der sich mit naheliegenden Fragen wie der Realisierung einer dystopischen Gesellschaft gemäß libertären Grundsätzen und der Verlängerung des eigenen Lebens befasst hat, aber in letzter Zeit scheinen sich auch bei ihm einige Schrauben gelockert zu haben:

Peter Thiel’s Armageddon speaking tour has—like the world—not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for that which withholds the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco.

By Thiel’s telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our listless and zombie age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web. But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon—the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI—modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist.

According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. How might such an Antichrist rise to power? Thiel asked. By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist’s slogan: peace and safety. In other words: It would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse.

By way of illustration, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist might appear in the form of someone like the philosopher Nick Bostrom—an AI doomer who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing to erect an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology. But it wasn’t just Bostrom. Thiel saw potential Antichrists in a whole zeitgeist of people and institutions focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.

So humanity is doubly screwed: It has to avoid both technological calamity and the reign of the Antichrist. But the latter was far more terrifying for the billionaire at the podium. For reasons grounded in Girardian theory, Thiel believed that such a regime could only—after decades of sickly, pent-up energy—set off an all-out explosion of vicious, civilization-ending violence. And he wasn’t sure whether any katechons could hold it off.