https://archive.md/ZdXIS
"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.
Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable,
or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a
figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind
these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the
world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp
Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major
lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in
Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote
about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were
there.
The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel’s chief
intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. (Thiel
identifies as a “hardcore Girardian.”) On the evening of the unpublicized
lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world
filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from
the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on
Armageddon—and all the things he believed were “not enough” to prevent it.
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."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
