The Political Power of Eschatological Thinking: This Is Why Peter Thiel Is Talking About the Antichrist

Trying to make sense of Thiel's obsession with the Antichrist and Armageddon? This article has the answers. Parts 1 and 2 lay the foundations, and parts 3 and 4 offer an explanation. (4,100 words.)

NEW!! If you’d prefer to listen to this article, you can do so on YouTube here.

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My friend Gil Duran writes:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder, Peter Thiel has announced plans to deliver a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. These unusual events will take place at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on four days in September and October.

Duran just released the first of three videos on the topic, which you can view here:

Here are my initial thoughts on Thiel’s foray into end-times theology. Parts 1 and 2 lay the foundations, and parts 3 and 4 offer some answers. (A TL;DR summary can be found at the end of this section.) I hope you find this useful.

1. An Intoxicating Seduction

Eschatological thinking has a seductive, intoxicating, spellbinding appeal. (“Eschatology” literally means “the study of last things,” but can also refer to the end of the world more generally.) Here’s one way to understand this appeal:

Begin with a pessimistic outlook according to which the world is a pretty horrible place overall. This outlook underlies many religious systems, including some versions of Christianity, and one finds it embedded within many utopian ideologies.¹ It goes something like this: our fellow humans are, in general, quite selfish, callous, narcissistic, cruel, and power-hungry. Most are indifferent to the pain and misfortunes of others. As the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer put it: “For the world is hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

Zooming out, much of civilization’s 6,000-year history is little more than a long list of catastrophic wars, exterminations, genocides, and terror. People have been tortured in oubliettes, executed for their political beliefs, and imprisoned indefinitely without charges (some fates are worse than death). Many parents have watched their children die, and children have witnessed their parents slaughtered. Untold numbers have endured slavery, homelessness, and loneliness, while hundreds of millions struggle with chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and insomnia. About 1.5 times more people perish from suicide each year than from homicides, and half a million die of homicides annually — a staggering number that transcends our abilities of comprehension.

There is, furthermore, no justice in this world. Good people finish last while evil-doers are rewarded for their bad behavior. Hitler may have died by his own hand, but he was never punished for orchestrating the industrial mass murder of 6 million Jews. In contrast, a dear friend of mine roughly my age died last August from a rare form of cancer, a terrible fate she (obviously) did nothing to “deserve.” The world is a patently unfair, unjust, and unhappy place, all things considered.

But what if I were to tell you that everything will be made right in the end? What if all of the agony and anguish, suffering and sorrow, terrors and torments will have been worth it? What lies ahead is a refuge of endless ecstasy, where death has been eternally vanquished and the evil-doers banished to the torture chambers of perdition. A place where you reunite with your love ones, surrounded by verdant meadows, sacred streams, and everlasting abundance. Your task right now, while on this Earth, is to push through the interminable miseries because this earthly curse — the dull ache of existence — is but a temporary test implemented by the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, to ensure that only the righteous pass through the gates of heaven.

This is the seductive power of eschatology. Indeed, some theologians characterize eschatology as providing the “ultimate theodicy,” where “theodicy” refers to an account of why God allows suffering and evil in the world. The grand promise of eschatology is that with the closing of this chapter of worldly history, the scales of cosmic justice will finally be balanced: good folks will receive the ultimate reward, while those who trafficked in evil will receive the unrelenting punishments they deserve. There may be no justice in this life, but there will be in the afterlife — and that’s what “excuses” the presence of suffering and evil right now.

The psychological benefit of this mode of thinking is an extraordinary kind of eschatological hope. Such hope is profoundly comforting, and offers a deep sense of meaning and purpose in a weary world marked by gratuitous hardships. It provides a potent antidote to the endless awfulness of postlapsarian life.

2. Eschatological Thinking Throughout History

Eschatological thinking takes many forms: millennialism, millenarianism, utopianism, and apocalypticism, to name a few. Within the Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — end-times narratives are linear rather than cyclical (as with many Eastern religions), culminating in the establishment of paradise or utopia. However, the only road to utopia takes humanity through the apocalypse — a term I’m using in the colloquial sense to mean “the complete final destruction of the world.” To establish heaven on Earth, the current world order must be violently torn down and permanently eradicated. Hence, in the religious context, apocalyptic anxieties are often inextricably bound up with utopian expectations. To realize the latter, we must first endure the former.

Apocalypticism, then, is the belief that the world’s end is imminent. One version of apocalypticism, which I refer to as “active eschatology” below, claims that one is divinely mandated to actively bring about the end in accordance with God’s grand plan for the universe. In other words, one plays a special role in catalyzing the apocalypse. Since what lies on the other side of the apocalypse is paradise, the sooner the apocalypse happens, the sooner utopia will arrive.

The power of this thinking is evident in many of the most significant events of human history, including world-altering wars, conflicts, movements, and acts of terrorism. Given the seduction of eschatological promises of a better world to come, a true dedication to and belief in eschatological narratives can mobilize people like no other ideology or worldview can, while “justifying” virtually any act to protect, preserve, and accelerate the arrival of paradise — including extreme measures, violence, and even genocide.

Almost 10 years ago, I published an article that delineates a thesis I called the “clash of eschatologies.” This contends that a useful way of understanding the course of history is in terms of conflicting eschatological visions of the future. I adduced a number of historical examples to substantiate this claim. To understand why Thiel is obsessing over the Antichrist and Armageddon, it’s worth reproducing a short excerpt of this article — this excerpt covers only a small fraction of the examples presented, but I hope it gives you a sense of the surprising ubiquity of eschatological thinking across cultural space and time:

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Throughout human history, a staggering number of social, political, and religious movements have been motivated by ideologies of applied eschatology [again, the idea that one plays an active role in bringing about the end times]. For example, most New Testament scholars in the U.S. and Europe today believe that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected the world to end in his lifetime (for example see Matthew 24:34). When this failed to occur, he voluntarily sacrificed himself “to force the hand of God,” as Scot McKnight puts it. Following Jesus, a long list of Christian leaders have found themselves under the spell of apocalyptic thinking, including the Apostle Paul, Martin of Tours, Pope Sylvester II, Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson, Harold Camping, and the Christian Zionist John Hagee. Further, many significant events in Christian history have been driven by applied eschatological convictions, such as the First Crusade, during which 100,000 Christian fighters believed they were hastening the End of Days.

The situation is similar within the Islamic tradition. As Allen Fromherz writes, “some scholars have suggested that Islam was, from the first revelations of Muhammad, almost entirely an apocalyptic movement. … Some have even supposed that Muhammad deliberately failed to designate a successor because he predicted that the final judgment would occur after his death.” After Muhammad’s death in 632CE, many bloody battles were waged in the name of the Mahdi, a messianic figure prophesied by hadith (traditional sayings and deeds of Muhammad apart from the Koran) to usher in the final events before the Last Hour. The very first Mahdi was identified as Muhammad’s grandson, but he was certainly not the last. Indeed, Islamic history is cluttered with Mahdi claimants, including one who, along with several hundred insurgents, seized Mecca’s Grand Mosque for two weeks in 1979, with some 100,000 hostages trapped inside. As of 2013, approximately 3,000 Mahdi claimants were locked away in Iranian prisons.

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Even more, numerous historical movements with applied eschatology motives have been, strictly speaking, secular in nature. To quote Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley at length:

It was not an accident that Hitler promised a Thousand Year Reich, a millennium of perfection, similar to the thousand-year reign of goodness promised in Revelation before the return of evil, the great battle between good and evil, and the final triumph of God over Satan. The entire imagery of his Nazi Party and regime was deeply mystical, suffused with religious, often Christian, liturgical symbolism, and it appealed to a higher law, to a mission decreed by fate and entrusted to the prophet Hitler.

Thus, the Second World War was driven, in part, by an apocalyptic vision borrowed from Christian eschatology and repurposed for the particular nationalist, racist aims of the Nazi Party.

Similarly, Karl Marx appears to have plagiarized aspects of Christianity’s grand narrative in his “teleological” (or goal-directed) theory of societal evolution. As Chirot and McCauley note, “Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine.” … It goes without saying that Marxism has been one of the most influential ideologies of the past two centuries. This ideology of cosmic struggle has driven revolts and revolutions, as well as global conflicts both hot and cold. At its core is an eschatological doctrine that many believers have interpreted as a practical guide for accelerating history’s inexorable march toward the telos of pure communism — a post-historical stage that constitutes the final epoch of social evolution. Once again, applied eschatology is hidden in plain sight.

Today, the most conspicuous manifestation of the clash of eschatologies is found in the current epicenter of global violence: the Middle East. Let’s begin with the roots of this conflict. In the late 19th century, the Zionist movement emerged in response to the growing specter of anti-Semitism in Europe. While this movement was largely secular, the prophetic idea of the “Promised Land” played an important role in rationalizing the occupation of Palestinian territories. As Saleh Abdel Jawad writes, the claim that Palestine was given to the Jewish people by God enabled “Zionists [to allege] that the Palestinians were usurpers in the Promised Land, and therefore their expulsion and death was justified.” From the Christian — and in particular dispensationalist — perspective, some leading figures saw the immigration of Jews to Palestine in the late 19th century as evidence that Biblical prophecy was coming true. The American evangelist William E. Blackstone, for example, interpreted this demographic shift as a clear “sign of the times,” and argued that “the United States [has] a special role and mission in God’s plans for humanity: that of a modern Cyrus to help restore the Jews to Zion.” (Cyrus the Great, to whom Blackstone refers, founded the Achaemenid Empire, and after conquering the Babylonian empire freed the Jews from captivity, allowing them to resettle in Jerusalem.)

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The importance of a Jewish state for [Christian evangelical] dispensationalists relates to the specific end-times narrative of this scriptural interpretation — one that was more or less invented by John Nelson Darby, a friend of William Blackstone, in the early 1800s. … The crucial point for dispensationalists is that everything about God’s future plans for humanity depends on the creation and continuation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is why many Christian Zionists support Israel with dogmatic intransigence, and see its establishment three years after Hitler put a pistol to his head as the most significant eschatological event since the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 AD, thereby supposedly fulfilling the prophecy of Mark 13:1-2. The eschatological fact, according to dispensationalism, is that the Tribulation cannot commence unless there’s a Jewish state in the Palestinian territories, and eternal peace will forever elude God’s children until the Tribulation occurs. The sociologist and pastor Tony Campolo summarizes this link between religion and politics as follows: “Without understanding dispensationalism, however, it is almost impossible to understand how Christian Zionism has come to dominate American Evangelicalism and been so influential on the course of U.S. Middle East policy.”

[End excerpt.]

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The crucial point for our purposes is that competing eschatological convictions have played an integral role in many events of world-historical importance: the founding of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Second World War, Marxist revolutions, contemporary US support for Israel, as well as terrorist attacks perpetrated by groups like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Aum Shinrikyo.² The clash of eschatologies is historically omnipresent.

Here’s yet another example: the current race to build AGI. This is also motivated by eschatological visions of utopia and the apocalypse — that is, a secular apocalyptic scenario that believers call an “existential catastrophe.” With Dr. Timnit Gebru, I’ve argued that the AGI race directly emerged out of the TESCREAL ideologies, at the heart of which is a utopian belief that if we build a “value-aligned” superintelligence, we can task it with radically reengineering humanity, creating a new “posthuman” species, spreading beyond Earth, colonizing our future light cone, and building literally “planet-sized” computers on which to run trillions and trillions of “digital people.”

On the flip side, if superintelligence is “value-misaligned” (Musk would call this a “demon”), then it will obliterate humanity and, along with us, this “vast and glorious” future that we could have otherwise created, to quote the quasi-religious words of Toby Ord. In fact, the “backbone” of the TESCREAL bundle is transhumanism, which was explicitly developed in the 20th century as a secular replacement for traditional religion. This is why Julian Huxley titled his 1927 book on transhumanist themes Religion Without Revelation.

Once you start snooping around the world, and world history, for examples of eschatology in action, you find them literally everywhere you look. Eschatology, in many ways, is what makes the world go ‘round.

3. The Extraordinary Power of Eschatology as a Political Tool

If you can convince people that the end is nigh, that one is fighting the Antichrist, and that Armageddon — an ultimate battle between Good and Evil — is at hand, you can persuade them to do just about anything. After all, what hangs in the balance is eternal life, perfect happiness, perpetual peace, and cosmic justice. With the stakes that high, what exactly is off the table? What act is morally impermissible?

Indeed, eschatological thinking reinforces what my friend Frances Flannery, a noted biblical scholar, calls “cosmic dualism” — a powerful “us-versus-them” mentality. You’re either on the side of Good or you’re against it, and is there anything more evil than someone who opposes capital-g Good? Who impedes the realization of utopia? Who rejects perfection? The degenerate Others are the embodiment of all that is wicked in this world, and hence ought to be eliminated with neither mercy nor compunction. My guess is that Peter Thiel understands this dynamic, at least to some extent, and that’s partly why he keeps talking about the Antichrist. There’s an extraordinary coercive power to eschatological thinking, especially when weaponized as a political tool to influence and manipulate the faithful.

As far as I can tell, the particular interpretation of biblical prophecy that Thiel is peddling goes like this: we face two foes — the Antichrist and Armageddon. The former is a world government with — I kid you not — high taxes, an idea that’s “curiously consistent with other apocalypticists who’ve claimed that the Antichrist will gain power through supranational organizations like the European Union or United Nations.” Thiel sees Greta Thunberg as an agent of the Antichrist precisely because she advocates for global regulations targeting carbon emissions. If implemented, this would take us one more misstep down the slippery slope of regulatory regimes that interfere with other areas of industry, some of which Thiel has a vested interest in.

Here’s the strategy of Antichristic agents, according to Thiel: they use the threat of Armageddon — a global-scale catastrophe, or an existential disaster — as a pretext for establishing a world government. If you want to avoid annihilation or collapse, they say, we must sacrifice the “freedom” of corporations to continue polluting, exploiting, extracting, and doing whatever they see as necessary to maximize their profits. Thiel responds that aligning with the Antichrist to avoid Armageddon is no solution at all. Rather, our eschatological task in these perilous times is to walk the narrow path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: to avoid an actual catastrophe while resisting the urge to accomplish this through global governance.

This is a highly idiosyncratic, quite bizarre reading of Christian eschatological themes. Many traditional believers will likely reject it. Nonetheless, by tapping into a rich reservoir of powerful images embedded within our collective imagination, images that have played a crucial role in some of the most consequential events of human history, Thiel may hope to mobilize people to join his pro-libertarian fight against the unholy forces of “big government.” If he convinces such people to switch from a “normal mode of mentation” to a totalizing “apocalyptic mindset,” then suddenly the fight becomes far more urgent and important. It takes on an apocalyptic dimension framed within the “Otherizing” outlook of cosmic dualism: us versus them, Good versus Evil.

If Thunberg is just an annoying climate activist, she can be safely ignored. But if she’s an agent of the Antichrist, then she must be stopped immediately and at all costs. If those advocating for AI regulation are engaged in the work of the Devil, then they, too, must be dealt with in a manner proportionate to the awesome stakes of the fight. This is an apocalyptic showdown to protect, preserve, and bring about paradise, which Thiel imagines happening through the unregulated development of advanced technologies.

4. The US Is an Apocalyptic Nation

As Frances Flannery writes, “the US is an apocalyptic nation.” (My clash of eschatologies thesis would further claim that much of the world has been and still is enthralled by apocalyptic expectations.³) She adds that “the Book of Revelation has arguably been responsible for more genocide and killing in history than any other,” and that “it is arguably the bloodiest book in history” because of the atrocities it’s inspired. This is just to say, once again, that eschatological thinking is intoxicating, seductive, and extremely powerful.

With respect to the US being apocalyptic, consider that one poll from 2010 found that 41% of US Christians expect Jesus to return before 2050. Another reports that roughly 25% of Americans believed that Obama was the Antichrist during his presidency. A more recent Pew survey finds that, “in the United States, 39% of adults say they believe ‘we are living in the end times,’” including 63% of evangelicals and 27% of Catholics.

Hence, there’s a very sizable demographic of people primed to believe the sorts of apocalyptic proclamations that Thiel is now spouting. As I’ve argued elsewhere, eschatological narratives are simultaneously rigid and elastic: there are fixed events that must occur and the outcome is of course predetermined, but the exact nature of these events, the individuals involved, the particular ways in which they unfold, etc. are left open to interpretation. Eschatological narratives are like a fluid that can fill whatever container they’re poured into, by which I mean they can accommodate a wide range of surprising political, geopolitical, cultural, technological, etc. developments. Things that might have once seemed to challenge or undermine eschatological narratives are often reinterpreted, after or during the fact, as reinforcing those very same narratives.

Consider that in the midst of the Cold War, many Christian evangelicals quickly integrated the development of thermonuclear weapons into their prior eschatological worldviews. As Ronald Reagan said during a 1971 dinner, while he was governor of California:

for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. … It can’t be long now. Ezekiel [38:22] says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now, and they never did in the past.

The elasticity of otherwise rigid narratives thus offers an opportunity for charlatans like Thiel to fill in the blanks, by mapping those narratives onto contemporary events and arguing that such events are exactly what ancient prophecy was talking about all along — though we perhaps couldn’t have seen that until now.

There is no upper limit to the amount of wealth and power that sociopaths like Thiel want to acquire. Although Thiel is, philosophically, a rather simplistic thinker, my guess is that he has an intuitive understanding of — once again — the power of eschatology as a political tool. Without having seen his lecture series (I may modify my credence levels if a recording is leaked), this is the main reason I suspect he’s talking about the Antichrist and Armageddon right now and insisting that people like Thunberg are agents of the Antichrist.

To summarize the argument presented above: (1) eschatological thinking is intoxicating and seductive because it offers a powerful source of comfort and hope in this weary world of gratuitous hardships and infuriating injustices. (2) Eschatological narratives can inspire people to act like no other ideologies or worldviews can, and “justify” (in the eyes of true believers) virtually any measure, no matter how extreme, to preserve paradise. (3) Charismatic or otherwise influential figures can wield such narratives for political ends by convincing people that the enemy is Evil and the threat is apocalyptic: if this battle is lost, then all is lost forever. And (4) charlatans like Peter Thiel probably understand the extraordinary political power of weaponized eschatological beliefs, and that's why he's talking about Armageddon and the Antichrist.

5. Peter Thiel Is Really Weird

A second reason he might be obsessing over the Antichrist is that, well, the guy is just really weird. Perhaps he genuinely believes in his conception of the Antichrist, and sees his lectures as a genuine contribution to the relevant branch of theology. Maybe this is why he chose to give these talks in secret — or maybe he’s just testing out the waters before making more public statements. Perhaps he imagines himself as a prophet who’s offering the correct interpretation of scripture. Many billionaires in Silicon Valley, after all, do see themselves as messianic figures, and Thiel is no exception to the rule.

The irony, of course, is that Thiel is a much better candidate for the Antichrist, or an agent thereof, than Thunberg. As Ross Douthat of the New York Times said to Thiel during a recent interview:

Douthat: And my very specific question for you: You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.

Lolz.

So, those are my initial thoughts on the matter.⁴ What do you think? What am I missing? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section — I do read everything that people write! :-)

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

1. Indeed, the whole reason for desiring utopia is precisely because the world is quite bad.

2. This is why ISIS conquered the small Syrian town of Dabiq: prophetic passages in the Hadith suggests that’s where Islam’s version of Armageddon will take place, and ISIS wanted that to happen.

3. My guess is that Flannery wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t know for sure.

4. Thanks so much to Remmelt Ellen for reading over a draft of this post!