Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures
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It'd be bad enough if he was just some random crank, but the fact he's got the level of power and influence needed to actually make his beliefs happen makes it exponentially worse.
Who should take into their hands the job to stop him, and to what lengths should they push themselves?
I also like a two-pronged approach which includes taxing the billionaires out of existence. I haven't heard any significant downside to doing that. All the more so when weighed against the possible upsides.
I think what frustrates me above all else is that we, as a society, as a people, could have it so much better.
We could all be living in such a better world but for the allowances we make for the most sociopathic and greedy among us.
When you reach an arbitrary score, like $100 million, you get presented with a cup that says ‘congratulations, you won capitalism’ and are given the choice of either playing again from the start but this time on hard mode (no emerald mine or parents that are friends with the IBM chairman this time), or keeping your winnings on the condition that you and your family fuck off somewhere and are never seen or heard of again.
Seriously though, that billionaires can exist, that so much power and wealth can be concentrated in the hands of so few while so many have nothing is utterly repugnant.
So yes: as a system, "wealth" is demonstrably extremely wasteful of capital, in wouldn't take much on both edges to improve it significantly.
In his case - I assume most of it is from Palantir these days. Therefore stop your governments from contracting with them.
Thiel is only "relevant" because he's wealthy.
In a system that allows wealth to equal political power, systematically weakening the impact of wealth on civic and political systems is an effective method. Whether that can be done in America, with the current understanding of the constitution and the current philosophy that many take towards taxation/wealth is questionable; but the idea that we can do nothing is just not true. We don't need to slide back into an era of 19th century robber barons and pseudo-aristocracy. If we do, it's because we largely gave up or allowed it to happen.
Unfortunately the political rhetoric have smeared "the globalists" and equated people that want global coordination to limit those multinationals with power, with the ones abusing it. Even the platform that was promising to drain the swamp turns out was just another swamp, so one would need to start from the scratch for that political movement.
The dixiecrats mascarading as Christian Republicans who HN treats as all American Christians don't even believe in the larger USA/Constitution/Human rights so yeah they ignore/are anti a lot of basic American beliefs. They are from a long line of loser traitors to our beliefs.
Thiel has been obviously and evil sack of shit for decades but more than half of HN viewers revere him. I fear we have no hope, and the good people asking how we can democratically solve this problem makes me feel even more hopeless. Yall don't get it.
If voting didn't work, they wouldn't poor money into it. If voting didn't work, they wouldn't be trying to force their horrible new ID poll tax laws.
Spreading fear in this way since 9/11 has dramatically changed America into something worse. I'm sad you've lost faith in Liberal thought and are preaching replacing it with reactionary nothingness.
We literally defeated the people who owned the system AND owned the workers, because we elected the right people and we fought. If we had instead burnt the system down how the heck would we win the war? This system was build for people like us. The first of it's kind. We aren't going to get a better playing field. The oligarchy WANT it burnt down. Stop doing their work and put your effort/energy into useful change, don't be a tool for them.
It's sucks we have to fight, but it's idiotic to seed the best battlefield we are going to get to fight them on to some nebulous, reactionary unknown one like you seem to want. Don't give up! And fuck the anti-American traitors!
What are you prepared to do to contain/restrain a person who is non compos mentis?
I've only got some superficial acquaintance with Thiel's ideas, but he's been objectively correct on enough contrarian stuff (Thiel fellowships) that I'd like to at least have some rough, non-distorted understanding of what the anti-christ stuff is about even if it sounds a bit crazy.
Why is Thiel, whose parents were American evangelical and whose own beliefs are described as "heterodox", trying to sell this in Catholic packaging outside the US?
I'll do you one further, as someone from a deeply catholic country: Considering the triggering of Armaggedon in daily politics is seen as batshit crazy.
No, but as a general rule, Catholics don’t and have never fretted about the end times the way all sorts of Protestant sects have, historically. Which is curious given Matthew 24:36 and all the hullabaloo Protestants make about being “scriptural”. And perhaps more importantly, because it has authority on such matters, Church teaching makes no claims about when the end of the world will occur and it never has, because it cannot.
Putting effort in triggering the end of the world is nowhere on the spectrum though. I think if you told a priest you're pushing for that he would be seriously alarmed, like calling the police alarmed if you hold power.
I would venture that it is less than half of Christians who believe in this idea at all. It does seem to be the domain of wild eyed TV evangelists though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
Russia bit of the prophecies:
> [...] If my requests are [not] heeded, Russia [...] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.
I'm not sure it is fair to call it propaganda when it is bang on the money. Even the Holy Father bit checks out, seeing how John Paul II narrowly survived a KGB-sponsored assassination attempt.
> The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.
Rings a bell. Errors are spreading but “Russian” they are not.
> The date of the attempted assassination, 13 May 1981, was the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the children at Fátima.
Do I have to spell it out.
Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents.[13][14] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[14] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund
His parents moved to the US when it became clear that with the opening the uranium mine the influx of black people was unavoidable.
His current ramblings are only the latest change in his views. There's a very good history of Peter Thiel video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAeTKyY3LB4
To answer your question: I think his lectures being held in the backyard of the Vatican is a deliberate provocation. He is a philosophy student, after all and forcing the Angelicum and others to publicly deny involvement may be his goal.
But Catholicism has its own government, which prevents individual catholic countries to veer off too much.
In lack of a better word, that sounds more like anti-Cristian
See also: bean soup / "what about me?*
> The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
"Wormwood", a type of bitter plant, translates to Russian as "Chernobyl", and Ukrainian "Chornobyl": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl > Etymology
So do the Evangelicals believe that Chernobyl disaster triggered the apocalypse, and that it has been happening ever since? I don't think so.
This was a bit of ad lib, the US branch of Christianity follows it's own logic and sadly I cannot answer the serious question.
I'm pretty sure there were some bits in the Bible about loving thy enemy and turning the other cheek. But maybe I misremember.
It is also common among these folks to believe that the end times don't just happen and that instead it is our responsibility to create the circumstances that enable the end times. This can either mean creating a state of instability and violence or creating a worldwide christian theocracy that lasts for 1000 years. Both involve massive upheavals of global systems.
So, you (not you, a generic you) believe that Armageddon is happening in your lifetime, and the event is the literal moment when God will pour his Holy Wrath against unrepentant sinners in a final judgement as the world wraps up... And you, deeply religious as you are, will obviously go to Heaven, while all the annoying people you rightly hate will go to Hell, to be punished for eternity.
Considering this, is it not obvious that this hypothetical person would wish for Armageddon already? I mean, for you it is the final prize.
I believe these people don't want a future. They want the end.
Some of his offshot do believe in a necessary war though. Leninism and Stalinism are the most famous one. Some of them take the US revolution as an example to follow.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter...
A Google search turns up the usual stuff (e.g. his Wikipedia page) and then a Youtube video accusing him of destroying democracy, so if that is what he is trying its not working: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=peter%20thiel&sei=tfWzadnD...
Unfortunately, he also knows everything about you and everybody else in the so called free world.
But why though? If that's what you believe and there's nothing more, we know the sun is going to explode and destroy everything and an asteroid impact is likely to happen that destroys even sooner than that, so why does that matter?
Call me cynical, but I haven't seen any improvement in human nature in 50 years.
We today have laws and moral separated from religion and institutions that both teaches it to the young citizen and uphold it. But that wasn't the case for vast majority of the history.
How would you convince a tribal person that can't perceive something beyond "good for me & my family/tribe is all justifications required" to act collaboratively beyond that view? Especially if that attitude is also causing suboptimal behavior around him.
Introduce the concept of "good behavior" but there's no guarantee he will follow. Even if you introduced law & punishment you really have no efficient way to enforce it, back in the days.
So you introduce the idea that "if you behave bad,(or your children does) you'll suffer beyond your death".
Just so happen this simple yet powerful idea don't really scale with a complex world
I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.
But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing.
People are wired to follow their leaders.
Organized religion is pretty much about manipulating our innate spiritual side with nice stories to keep us bought in to the "nice story" that serve the top the most.
I'm just pointing out that the utility of the idea is just that: organization and control. It is quite redundant today because there are more advanced way of doing the same thing.
Or are you just pointing out that things have to be argued in a cynical way for it to be true?
It is hardly a naive world view. It is instead grounded in reality and the evolutionary luggage of humans and its various consequences on our cultures. We all probably agree, but there seems to be a misunderstanding of the grand parent's comment. Namely, you stated that "Religion became a tool ...", but what GP is referring to is "before it became such tool, what was it ?"
> "I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story." I think both GP and I will agree. It is not "for the good of the tribal man", at the same time it does not imply the other alternative that you seem to suggest: "for the benefit of the ruler class".
For example, the selfish gene theory offers a compelling explanation that will not only fit both perspective ("good for tribal man / tribe", "good for ruler"), but also provide insight to similar cultural aspects such as religion, patriotism, to only cite a few. Namely, genes influence their containers, i.e. "survival machines" (SV) in their environment, and natural selection favors genes that induce behaviors leading to increasing the number of copies of said genes in the population. Compared to other animals, humans evolved a complex social dimension as part of their behavior.
Among the various "humans" populations (probably even more distant ancestors), the genes that led to the heuristic behavior of "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" happen to grant a differential survival advantage to its carriers: indeed, the elder is an "elder" in virtue of having living long, and more generally, a "leader" is such in virtue of having lived long enough and gathered large social and "financial" capital. So "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" is a useful rule for you to survive. Over time, the gene becomes spread through the general population.
Due to the inability of our ancestors to properly establish causal relationship, while passing "useful rules for survival of the group" , they also happened to pass a lot of superstition and irrational principles, namely because they failed at establishing causal relationship ("is the crop yield bad because I looked wrong at the sun god statue ?" and so on). Those rules are "simple", easy to follow for the tribal man, and to make matters worse, his genes have likely conditioned him to follow those rules (mostly) unquestioned anyway. Whether we like it or not, the rule of "behave well now for a better life after death" was useful at the time, at a surface level for both the "tribal man" but also his "powerful people / leader", and at a deeper level for their shared genes.
Like many other "heuristics" for decision-making that humanity has carried over, it is not immune from exploitation from "more selfish", "mutant" actor: snake oils salesman, politicians promising easy solution to what are actually difficult problems. Religion might have at some point been useful for the good of the tribal man, and incidentally his tribe leaders, which only reinforced the pattern, but the evolutionary blueprints these religion rides on now get exploited by what we nowadays call "powerful people", as you say: > But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing. > People are wired to follow their leaders. But it is not just a matter of indoctrination and blunt force, it is unfortunately a matter of predisposition of the human mind. But the leaders have not "wired" them, they are just plugging into already existing circuits, and channeling their current to enact their desired outcomes (however perverted they may be).
To leave on a optimistic note, by a chain of serendipitous events, despite religions dominating not so long ago, secularism has somehow emerged and helped us separate the wheat from the chaff in many aspects of our lives. As humans, we already have come a long way in untangling our messy evolutionary baggage and the various side effect of natural selection of genes and their extended behaviors (religion, culture, etc...) Just as how we have to upset the genes' goals through methods such as contraception, there is no reason why we couldn't free ourselves from their other machinations.
> I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.
I think this statement suggest a confusion / mix-match of philosophical, moral and ethical questions that are still grounded in the material world, and "spiritual" that are by most common definitions pertaining to super natural assumption (intangible human soul never measured so far). If anything, deeper examination suggests that religion hardly helps much when it comes to those grand questions either. Most people probably have the capacity to question the "why" and other such questions, but not all necessarily them have the luxury of exercising it.
Journalists have a real knack for warping banal things into sensational, ominous nonsense. The implication here is that universities are monolithic coordinated machines with a single voice where all things are organized top-down. Some club here is hosting this event. That’s it. We had clubs at university that did the same thing. The quoted passages read like factual answers to questions posed by journalists to the Angelicum’s and CUA’s communications offices, not some frantic “distancing” or gotchas. They probably don’t care one way or another.
“the Catholic magazine First Things”
Not officially Catholic. Ecumenical is perhaps a better term. Even that word is not accurate, as there are plenty of contributions from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, etc writers.
“an ancient Christian concept of the order of love, received a famous slapdown from Pope Francis […] Prevost shared an article […] with the headline, ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’”
Charitably, Francis and then-Prevost were critical of what they privately perceived as a misapplication or misunderstanding of this principle, not the principle itself. Prevost’s own Augustinian order draws heavily from St. Augustine who expounded the concept of ordo amoris/ordo caritatis. The concept isn’t an endorsement of national chauvinism, but merely that our love must be prioritized and ordered. It is a moral obligation and is simply part of and entailed by the natural law.
In any case, I don’t see any relevance to the article. It’s like some mish-mash of disconnected propositions held together by dubious or meaningless associations to imply something significant has taken place. It would have sufficed to say “Peter Thiel lecturing on the Antichrist in Rome”.
Thiel has an enormous amount of money. This makes him and his ideas have power, regardless of whether his ideas are crap. It further convinces people that his ideas aren't garbage even when these ideas are in different domains than his business.
The Antichrist only makes sense within the framework of Christian eschatology. Invoking the archetype but reframing it as a secular political and cultural force that opposes AI and technological progress seems like meaningless sophistry meant to grant some greater profound scope to what is in essence just basic anti-leftist, pro accelerationist rhetoric, but which only works with a facile understanding of what the Antichrist is supposed to represent, which is opposition to Christ.
And in that sense, Peter Thiel and Donald Trump fit the criteria far more than, say, Greta Thunberg.
By the way, "Jesus" also has the same issue. That name is used at times to support positions that are explicitly contrary to what Jesus taught.
And even if it was in context to Christianity it has no veracity as the entire argument stands on faith which is fallible.
I think it's built into our selves that we think this way, or it's a common fallacy or thinking error or perhaps conscious decision to state that the present is the most important time ever and so that position brings a sense of urgency and force to ones argument. We see it on every political side left, right and centre and I think it's more easily seen in environmentalism which uses it as a central point. It doesn't mean that the arguments are necessarily wrong, more like it's a (potentially manipulative) way to spur action.
Looking at history and considering the past might be an antidote to manipulation. I'm still trying to find what the term is properly, Presentism and Chronocentrism seems to be on the right track?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysi... Chronocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronocentrism
Anyhow these lectures feel to me to be ultimately based on this - to motivate change according to some desired end. To think of the end of the world happening soon, so you better get motivated.
Like the Bene Gesserit in the Dune novels, long running institutions like the Church, I believe at its best understand humanity and measure time and weigh the present on a more universal scale.
If you've gotten this far and are still puzzled, consider this thought experiment: "Today is the closest we are to nuclear Armageddon, we must do something!" Many would agree with this statement. Now, think of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 - its likely that was actually the closest we got to it, and so the statement about today is false and so the urgency to do something now is weakened. One can understand therefore that to counter this inherent bias or fallacy is not something that we generally want to do.
1) These are actual good faith views that are inspired by his own piety
2) This is some chess game he thinks he's playing in which he erects the world government/ totalitarian state as signals of the antichrist, with Thunberg and other "woke" leaders as candidates, because they pose a risk to his business interests. "Peace and safety" is a guise and a front, but conveniently, are just bad for Palantir.
3) He is too disconnected for too long and has disappeared up his own ass
For anyone considering investigating, I wouldn't advise it. He's given huge liberties by interviewers to give vague non-answers and is never (rarely) pressed about reconciling his actions as an investor with his alleged concern for humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
It's suitably insane rambling nonsense. It actually seems to dovetail pretty well with Andreesen's manifesto in that evil is portrayed as anyone who opposed relentless technological progress at any cost. If you worry about the economic or human effects of tech oligarchs (Grete Thunberg is named as a candidate) then you are preparing your evil army for the final battle. Seeking to regulate AI also makes you a candidate.
Maybe people should put some pressure on these outlets to do so.
It’s a natural point of interest. Very interesting they didn’t pick it up.
What sort of mental gymnastics would be required to not only convince yourself the end of days is here, but that it's not directly being caused by the guy who is indiscriminately bombing foreign countries and spends each morning have a group of evangelical zealots call him the chosen one while praying on him.
Maybe that we all need to surrender all our data to an intransparent global surveillance tool, that gets more and more connected to automatic killer drones?
Oh and also despise democracy of course. Jesus Christ was on the side if the poor, so the antichrist would be on the side of the rich.
Any ideas who the new antichrist might be?
That being said, I don’t care much for Christian prophecies. Better to talk why than who.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, his views are deeply, deeply heretical. He’s so far out of pocket he’s in a completely different pair of trousers.
generally holds true soros marc rich bill gates musk thiel nassim taleb epstein etc
On Twitter, in my experience. The 'manosphere' is practically all philosopher-wannabe-billionaires.
archetype is people who sell their success as a model for you to follow while having none themselves, wrapped up as some kind of philosophical position, so they can make money
lots of self help authors, failed vc funds, podcasts
> I'm the problem, it's me
- Taylor Swift, 2022
My point is that it's not crazy, it's survival. It's a feature not a bug.
In other words this looks dangerous, but it's really just every day normality for all of us.