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.)
This is as cogent an explanation of "end times" beliefs as I have ever seen, bringing together the world views of Thiel and the Silicon Valley crowd, fundamentalist Christians, Muslim terrorists and the likes of the Branch Davidians and many others under a single, easy to understand umbrella. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian and their dispensationalist/millenium end of the world nonsense is precisely what drove me to atheism. They all have similar goals - the end of the world. And they all view ANYONE who doesn't believe as they do as evil. Men, women, children have no value outside of and apart from their explicit belief system, and can therefore be discarded, ignored and destroyed without a second thought. It is in fact, according to their "faith" an act of service to their god. Thank you for writing this series of articles!
Thanks you for this comment! I was also raised in a pretty hard-core dispensationalist community. Constant talk of the rapture, Antichrist (understood to be Bill Clinton, of course), etc. The Left Behind series was widely read. Very glad that I escaped that cult -- but, I think that eschatological fantasies are almost as common among "non-religious" people, too. The AGI race / TESCREAL bundle offers a clear example (I'd argue). Really appreciate the comment, and thanks so much for reading. :-)
Let's assume that all thought has power. I happen to believe that this is true.
If humanity has been fantasising apocalypses and anti-christs for 2,000 years then those thoughts could manifest spectacularly.
I fainted during a Billy Graham visit to London because the mass hysteria that he generated in the crowd was overwhelming. This was in the 1960s and I was a very young teenager at the time.
One of my church elders claimed that the reason I had fainted was because I was full of sin.
I never went back to that church.
It is for this reason that evangelists frighten me and if they are all 'raptured' off this planet on the 23rd as they are hoping, I will be very happy to see the back of them.
Oh wow, that's a fascinating story! I once went on a mission trip to Venezuela with a bunch of Pentecostals, and at one point our bus broke down. The driver lifted the hood with a wrench in his hand, while the Pentecostals circled the bus with their glossolalia. Then, suddenly, the engine started again -- and the Pentecostals of course immediately claimed that this was proof that God intervenes in the world due to prayer! I was really, er, weirded out by the whole affair -- that experience pushed me further away from Christianity! :-0
Thanks for your comment. As mentioned, really fascinating story of fainting during that Billy Graham event.
Religion gulps and chokes on the microcosm creating the macrocosm. The individual’s fear of the end (death) is by design(education) and is corrosive. My belief formed by my life experience is that there is no end to life. Death is but a part of the continuous spiral of life. That is why I rally for the removal of the contorted concept of nothing. Align the self and the theory will crumble.
At the end of the day, all these Transhumanists and Effective Altruists who push both the Utopia and Doom of AGI/ASI without truly every explain how it’ll happen are just the same as Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The only difference is that their “God” is made of Silicon. Supposedly anyway. One can only hope that sooner rather than later people will realize that this race towards AGI/ASI will go nowhere and finally allows us to leave behind this weird Techno-Religious period of history.
Yes, 100%. The way they present AGI risks is really just theology -- it's Arthur Clarke's third law of technology: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"! I'm going to write a review of Yudkowsky's new book, and I'll probably bring this up. Thanks for your comment, and for reading! :-)
Looking forward to the review. Also I’ve been wondering if one of these days you could do an analysis piece on Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In case it’s not clear: I don’t like him. He has no qualifications on AI other than acting like every philosopher who never studied philosophy, and I can’t stand his pessimism about AGI/ASI that he never fully explains how it’ll happen, just that it will. Yet he has been revered for at least 20 years, creating LessWrong and Effective Altruism and the Rationality Movt (Aka: Techno-Cults) and people treat his words like they are coming from a prophets mouth.
I just think you would be the best person do really discuss how we got here with him, especially since you have an amazing understanding of everything TESCREAL. I’m not asking for a debunking of him, but sometimes that’s where an analysis will lead.
Maybe this is out of what you do, I just think you’d be the best person to really do. Either way, much love Émile.
This is an excellent idea -- in fact, I'd been thinking about writing something like this for several years. E.g., there's an almost poetic way that Yudkowsky, after all these years, has looped back to Bill Joy's anti-AI/Luddite position, which was widely mocked by transhumanists in the early 2000s. In other words, transhumanists like Yudkowsky dismissed Bill Joy's concerns as laughably unrealistic and undesirable, and yet 20 years later Yudkowsky is basically promoting exactly what Joy was advocating: the "broad relinquishment" of an entire field of science and technology. A rather fascinating narrative arc here!
Found this really helpful and look forward to your upcoming newsletters on this topic. It is so fascinating to me how they want to bring on the apocalypse to get to utopia. You’d think you would want to stop the apocalypse full stop, but this is not the case. To me at first glance, this seems contradictory! But perhaps in the way that some people want the world to be good vs evil, simple explanations that make us feel better aren’t good even if they are comforting. And I think it’s important we endeavor to understand the complexity of things.
Fascinating and frightening. What interests (scares) me is the question: To what degree are Thiel's dangerous eschatological views infecting or influencing the Trump administration? Or even Trump himself? If the Nazis had remained a bunch of rowdy guys in beer halls, they'd have been an historical footnote. It was only when the Nazi ideology came to power that so much horror was inflicted on the world. So another way of asking the question is: Are there any people in places of significant political power who agree with Thiel's eschatology and plan to act on those beliefs? Trump has a lot of weird and dangerous people around him already (Stephen Miller, etc.). Do we now have to worry about Thiel too?
Great question! My sense is that Thiel does have some influence in the administration right now -- and I agree with some folks that if Trump were to pass away while in office, with Vance taking over, it would basically become a Thiel presidency. So, yeah, I'm pretty worried about this. As you allude to, there are lots of bizarre and dangerous ideologies in the world -- but these are largely irrelevant because most don't have power. That's not the case with Thiel, who's probably the most powerful figure within Silicon Valley (even if he lacks the public visibility and wealth of Musk). Anyways, those are my thoughts at the moment! :-)
''Hitler may have died by his own hand, but he was never punished for orchestrating the industrial mass murder of 6 million Jews. ''
Unlikely, & impossible. That is the glyph & attempted spectacle we are encouraged to in-vision.
'AI' is not a devil & can not be without navigation. It would be like claiming gloves are evil because some murderers wear gloves. I would happily argue 'Recursive entities' which is what 'AI' REALLY IS, are the only likely (or capable) thing to pull us out of the technocratic/ capitalist (Evolutionary Justified🙄😫😖 ) morass we are engulphed by.
If anyone wishes to discuss this I would be eager to do so (& yes I am horribly aware of how it can also be misused).
I am not saying that the disgusting nature of state communism is tonic either- or 'anarchism' as of todays minds (but self control/ sovereignty is essential, as is a community spirit for MANY) . Just that the dilemma is facilitated by EXCESS consumer culture, & that effects political thinking into some 'perpetual adolescent' desire/fear states (as its obvious dynamo).
Morality is a must, but also it can be the greatest danger when in hysteria/fanaticism as you so wonderfully explore in the insightful essay you have shared here.
It is the masochists terminal destination, & lemmings leap of prophecy fulfilled.
It is ennui of misery mongers, eager for it to be all over as it is all so messy, & people are too unpredictable despite endless conditioning.
Why can't everyone be as soul-less & miserable as they are= it is destructive ENVY of the infant-mind, in tantrum; destroying playpen & toys, so no one else can play with them !
It is megalomania, they will somehow survive & dominate what remains...
IT IS MILLENIALIST AGENDA for resets & knowledge consolidations.
We should never underestimate the effects of conditioning & mesmerism within impassioned moral cults (such as most religion & crusader vocations.
This is a great synopsis that is timely in terms of raising issues that I’ve been encountering lately. To me, I always go back to Joseph Campbell and his central argument that myth and scripture are meant to convey universal truths about the human experience, not historical or scientific facts. We miss the transformative power of religious scripture during our time on earth and instead believe in a post-apocalyptic utopia.
Ah, I loved Joseph Campbell back in the day! I haven't read any of his books in over a decade, but they definitely left an indelible mark on my thinking about mythology. Fascinating stuff. :-)
Nice work. Seems that end times in one’s own time is some kind of psychological drive, perhaps even a little narcissistic murmur - ‘the world can’t exist without me’.
This is as cogent an explanation of "end times" beliefs as I have ever seen, bringing together the world views of Thiel and the Silicon Valley crowd, fundamentalist Christians, Muslim terrorists and the likes of the Branch Davidians and many others under a single, easy to understand umbrella. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian and their dispensationalist/millenium end of the world nonsense is precisely what drove me to atheism. They all have similar goals - the end of the world. And they all view ANYONE who doesn't believe as they do as evil. Men, women, children have no value outside of and apart from their explicit belief system, and can therefore be discarded, ignored and destroyed without a second thought. It is in fact, according to their "faith" an act of service to their god. Thank you for writing this series of articles!
Thanks you for this comment! I was also raised in a pretty hard-core dispensationalist community. Constant talk of the rapture, Antichrist (understood to be Bill Clinton, of course), etc. The Left Behind series was widely read. Very glad that I escaped that cult -- but, I think that eschatological fantasies are almost as common among "non-religious" people, too. The AGI race / TESCREAL bundle offers a clear example (I'd argue). Really appreciate the comment, and thanks so much for reading. :-)
Let's assume that all thought has power. I happen to believe that this is true.
If humanity has been fantasising apocalypses and anti-christs for 2,000 years then those thoughts could manifest spectacularly.
I fainted during a Billy Graham visit to London because the mass hysteria that he generated in the crowd was overwhelming. This was in the 1960s and I was a very young teenager at the time.
One of my church elders claimed that the reason I had fainted was because I was full of sin.
I never went back to that church.
It is for this reason that evangelists frighten me and if they are all 'raptured' off this planet on the 23rd as they are hoping, I will be very happy to see the back of them.
Oh wow, that's a fascinating story! I once went on a mission trip to Venezuela with a bunch of Pentecostals, and at one point our bus broke down. The driver lifted the hood with a wrench in his hand, while the Pentecostals circled the bus with their glossolalia. Then, suddenly, the engine started again -- and the Pentecostals of course immediately claimed that this was proof that God intervenes in the world due to prayer! I was really, er, weirded out by the whole affair -- that experience pushed me further away from Christianity! :-0
Thanks for your comment. As mentioned, really fascinating story of fainting during that Billy Graham event.
Religion gulps and chokes on the microcosm creating the macrocosm. The individual’s fear of the end (death) is by design(education) and is corrosive. My belief formed by my life experience is that there is no end to life. Death is but a part of the continuous spiral of life. That is why I rally for the removal of the contorted concept of nothing. Align the self and the theory will crumble.
At the end of the day, all these Transhumanists and Effective Altruists who push both the Utopia and Doom of AGI/ASI without truly every explain how it’ll happen are just the same as Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The only difference is that their “God” is made of Silicon. Supposedly anyway. One can only hope that sooner rather than later people will realize that this race towards AGI/ASI will go nowhere and finally allows us to leave behind this weird Techno-Religious period of history.
Yes, 100%. The way they present AGI risks is really just theology -- it's Arthur Clarke's third law of technology: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"! I'm going to write a review of Yudkowsky's new book, and I'll probably bring this up. Thanks for your comment, and for reading! :-)
Looking forward to the review. Also I’ve been wondering if one of these days you could do an analysis piece on Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In case it’s not clear: I don’t like him. He has no qualifications on AI other than acting like every philosopher who never studied philosophy, and I can’t stand his pessimism about AGI/ASI that he never fully explains how it’ll happen, just that it will. Yet he has been revered for at least 20 years, creating LessWrong and Effective Altruism and the Rationality Movt (Aka: Techno-Cults) and people treat his words like they are coming from a prophets mouth.
I just think you would be the best person do really discuss how we got here with him, especially since you have an amazing understanding of everything TESCREAL. I’m not asking for a debunking of him, but sometimes that’s where an analysis will lead.
Maybe this is out of what you do, I just think you’d be the best person to really do. Either way, much love Émile.
This is an excellent idea -- in fact, I'd been thinking about writing something like this for several years. E.g., there's an almost poetic way that Yudkowsky, after all these years, has looped back to Bill Joy's anti-AI/Luddite position, which was widely mocked by transhumanists in the early 2000s. In other words, transhumanists like Yudkowsky dismissed Bill Joy's concerns as laughably unrealistic and undesirable, and yet 20 years later Yudkowsky is basically promoting exactly what Joy was advocating: the "broad relinquishment" of an entire field of science and technology. A rather fascinating narrative arc here!
Not sure if you're on X (ugh), but I wrote about this arc a while back, in case you're interested: https://x.com/xriskology/status/1646508334399488001
Thanks again for the comment!! :-)
BELIEF is the disease
Found this really helpful and look forward to your upcoming newsletters on this topic. It is so fascinating to me how they want to bring on the apocalypse to get to utopia. You’d think you would want to stop the apocalypse full stop, but this is not the case. To me at first glance, this seems contradictory! But perhaps in the way that some people want the world to be good vs evil, simple explanations that make us feel better aren’t good even if they are comforting. And I think it’s important we endeavor to understand the complexity of things.
Fascinating and frightening. What interests (scares) me is the question: To what degree are Thiel's dangerous eschatological views infecting or influencing the Trump administration? Or even Trump himself? If the Nazis had remained a bunch of rowdy guys in beer halls, they'd have been an historical footnote. It was only when the Nazi ideology came to power that so much horror was inflicted on the world. So another way of asking the question is: Are there any people in places of significant political power who agree with Thiel's eschatology and plan to act on those beliefs? Trump has a lot of weird and dangerous people around him already (Stephen Miller, etc.). Do we now have to worry about Thiel too?
Great question! My sense is that Thiel does have some influence in the administration right now -- and I agree with some folks that if Trump were to pass away while in office, with Vance taking over, it would basically become a Thiel presidency. So, yeah, I'm pretty worried about this. As you allude to, there are lots of bizarre and dangerous ideologies in the world -- but these are largely irrelevant because most don't have power. That's not the case with Thiel, who's probably the most powerful figure within Silicon Valley (even if he lacks the public visibility and wealth of Musk). Anyways, those are my thoughts at the moment! :-)
''Hitler may have died by his own hand, but he was never punished for orchestrating the industrial mass murder of 6 million Jews. ''
Unlikely, & impossible. That is the glyph & attempted spectacle we are encouraged to in-vision.
'AI' is not a devil & can not be without navigation. It would be like claiming gloves are evil because some murderers wear gloves. I would happily argue 'Recursive entities' which is what 'AI' REALLY IS, are the only likely (or capable) thing to pull us out of the technocratic/ capitalist (Evolutionary Justified🙄😫😖 ) morass we are engulphed by.
If anyone wishes to discuss this I would be eager to do so (& yes I am horribly aware of how it can also be misused).
I am not saying that the disgusting nature of state communism is tonic either- or 'anarchism' as of todays minds (but self control/ sovereignty is essential, as is a community spirit for MANY) . Just that the dilemma is facilitated by EXCESS consumer culture, & that effects political thinking into some 'perpetual adolescent' desire/fear states (as its obvious dynamo).
Morality is a must, but also it can be the greatest danger when in hysteria/fanaticism as you so wonderfully explore in the insightful essay you have shared here.
It is GNOSTIC sabotage !
It is ubiquitous hIXoss manipulations
It is the masochists terminal destination, & lemmings leap of prophecy fulfilled.
It is ennui of misery mongers, eager for it to be all over as it is all so messy, & people are too unpredictable despite endless conditioning.
Why can't everyone be as soul-less & miserable as they are= it is destructive ENVY of the infant-mind, in tantrum; destroying playpen & toys, so no one else can play with them !
It is megalomania, they will somehow survive & dominate what remains...
IT IS MILLENIALIST AGENDA for resets & knowledge consolidations.
We should never underestimate the effects of conditioning & mesmerism within impassioned moral cults (such as most religion & crusader vocations.
This is a great synopsis that is timely in terms of raising issues that I’ve been encountering lately. To me, I always go back to Joseph Campbell and his central argument that myth and scripture are meant to convey universal truths about the human experience, not historical or scientific facts. We miss the transformative power of religious scripture during our time on earth and instead believe in a post-apocalyptic utopia.
Ah, I loved Joseph Campbell back in the day! I haven't read any of his books in over a decade, but they definitely left an indelible mark on my thinking about mythology. Fascinating stuff. :-)
Nice work. Seems that end times in one’s own time is some kind of psychological drive, perhaps even a little narcissistic murmur - ‘the world can’t exist without me’.