It must be fun to be super rich. They live in high castles where few reach, and talk with cloud over their heads. They hold parties high in wine and drug, that flows down into the river through the aqueduct, then picked up by the masses.
I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.
I suppose the kind of character traits that enable becoming super-rich probably also lend themselves to giving such talks.
Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.
TED is a venue for middlebrow ideas by middlebrows for other middlebrows.
Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.
They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.
There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.
You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?
We all know why he did it: because people wrote on and listened to twitter a lot, and he didn't like what they said. He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
He is going around talking about biblical prophecies and the antichrist so regardless of whether you consider thiel a Christian or whether he considers himself a Christian the comment you are responding to is entirely accurate in saying he is interested "only in the hate and doom parts of [Christianity]".
Peter grew up in an Evangelical household which probably shaped his framing/worldview. As an adult he still identifies as a 'heterodox protestant'. Which in America usually means he's not really Christian, he just picks and chooses some ideas from it. The way he uses 'Antichrist' to talk about politics and tech (not just a single person or religious entity) seems to confirm that idea.
It’s because it helps their addiction to wealth. By saying that being against economic progress is the biggest evil, he’s saying everyone must say yes to what these tech elites push onto the world. Like you might dislike 1 million satellites polluting the night sky but don’t speak up against it unless you’re the antichrist.
Religion is also leverage for their goals. Like they support evangelical driven age verification for porn (defacto porn ban) because it lets them push age verification more broadly, to let them advertise more.
I wonder if he has any positive memories. All these billionaires are so detached from regular life that they don’t experience what humans normally do. It’s why they’re mostly sociopaths.
Makes you wonder if that's where they got the name of Palantir, since Denethor went mad by using one (at least according to the Peter Jackson movies, I reckon the situation was different in the books).
That’s pretty much what happened in the books. More accurately he lost all hope for the world after being fed visions by Sauron to manipulate him. Hey wait…
Thats true, but in the books, Denethor is competent and a seasoned strategist and has a battle of strategy with the witch king, one upping them in most instances, answering with brilliant maneuvers to the brilliant maneuvers of the witch king.
Perhaps that's why Sauron's trick is to use the Palantir to show him some things while hiding others, so as to convince him that his every move would be futile.
I'm not sure even this is what destroys Denethor's mind though so much as it is the thought of the ring. He sees it as his by right of need. He sacrifices both his sons in his madness to have it, for the madness of power. His view of the world is so bleak that saving it in a way that destroys it seems "right" to him
In the extended edition of Two Towers they show him in a flashback of Gondor retaking Osgiliath.
It's not a particularly flattering portrayal- the military success is shown as belonging to Boromir more than Denethor- but at least it shows him sane.
This guy is obviously on drugs half of the time, his wealth shields him from reality and the yes-men around him let his crazy anti-humanist ideas fester in his mind and turn into religious psychosis. No need for AI here.
In any sane place, his hate of democracy and freedom would make him a pariah. Instead, he is the current US Vice President's mentor and most trusted advisor.
Couldn't this antichrist stuff be his sane/rational strategy to manipulate the powerful but religious rightwing people under his sway? Is there evidence to assume he himself is on the verge of some kind of psychosis and not fully in control of his faculties?
I'm not sure battling the Vatican over interpretations of an obscure philosopher who mentored him back when he was an undergrad is the easiest way of winning over the religious right. Most of whom will happily go along with generic arguments about Peter Thiel's portfolio being essential to defeat Communist China and the woke libs. Treating Eliezer Yudkowsky as an irrelevant nutter probably works better on people with all kinds of views on religion and politics than attempting to elevate him to the status of antichrist
> This guy is obviously on drugs half of the time, his wealth shields him from reality and the yes-men around him let his crazy anti-humanist ideas fester in his mind and turn into religious psychosis. No need for AI here.
You just described a good dozen or so VC/Tech Bros
It seems these lectures are closed but does anyone have a transcript or writeup of the core arguments? I'd be interested to know what he is saying first hand.
I can see the logic of talking to the people who believe they will live forever, once you start wondering "what if people could actually live forever?"
At some point people are going to start asking awkward questions going all the way back to the PayPal mafia and everything that has subsequently happened. Thiel landing on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group just looks too ridiculous, but is a thing, and now this guy goes off ranting about the Antichrist?
I am actually sympathetic to much of what Thiel has done, but the current arc makes the supposed Howard Hughes oddities look positively reasonable.
They don't own Rome anymore, the Vatican is their own country now thanks to ol' Benny. Anyway, both parties here are idiots with high opinions of themselves who actually believe in a pile nonsense, but which of the two has really caused more harm for humanity?
There is no "THE Antichrist" there are only antichrists, plural, normal not supernatural people and organizations that behave in a notably non-christlike way, and both parties here seem to qualify easily.
> There is no "THE Antichrist" there are only antichrists, plural
Funnily enough, the bible agrees, or at least John's epistles.
People who fantasize themselves as the antichrist (like Thiel, he's not very good at hiding it) ought to remember that antichrists being a dime a dozen is quite biblical.
Not completely true, the bible mention "antichrists" as in many and a particular "The Antichrist". The Antichrist is supposed to be the apex of the hubris.
If you like, we could compare a single Thiel adulthood to individual randomly chosen lives of popes. The average pope has a lot more blood on their hands. Both are bad, but one has caused more harm to humanity no matter which way you slice it. To argue that a single heretic is worse than the whole catholic church rings pretty silly to me. The best would be if they were to both destroy each other, but let's be real and acknowledge that Peter Thiel is going to die and become irrelevant long before the catholic church, which may very well continue on for another two thousand years for all we know.
>> both parties here are idiots with high opinions of themselves who actually believe in a pile nonsense, but which of the two has really caused more harm for humanity?
That's not really a reasonable argument, because Thiel hasn't had the power of the Vatican (especially the power the vatican used to have), but what he's done with his power so far is much more concerning to me that what the vatican has done in the last 4 years, yes.
I think we both agree that the catholic church has received an unwarranted elevation and presumption of beneficence in media, but the distinction I'm drawing is that a billionaire who's toiling in American politics and claiming Greta Thunburg could be the antichrist is actively concerning.
I think it's a reasonable argument that we should be more concerned with the organization that has the better part of a two thousand year track record of murdering people, but in either case I did just accuse both of them of being antichrists. Anyway, Greta is my queen.
Unlike a lot of the posters here, I find Thiel interesting.
I agree with his idea that humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years, and I'm glad we're out of it. I wish we were building more stuff faster (housing, nuclear, renewables, electric cars, etc). I don't consider myself a "transhumanist" but I do think that humanity should orient itself towards overcoming what have been our fundamental limitations (scarcity, death, etc). Ultimately, that could lead to some form of transhumanism albeit in the far, far future.
Thiel's "antichrist" spiel is the idea that fear related to existential risks (climate, nuclear, AI, etc) will make people too timid, and lead to a one-world government that de-prioritizes progress and economic freedom, resulting in longterm stagnation. I'm not especially worried about that, but I do think that excessive timidity is a real problem. I don't mind that Europe increasingly doesn't care about economic growth and has made it harder to invent/build/create, but I don't want the whole world to be like that.
If you disagree with this broad view, think about it more concretely. Take the example of nuclear reactors. If we had been steadily building nuclear reactors for the past 70 years, they would be smaller, safer, more efficient, energy would be more plentiful, and climate change would be less of an issue. Ultimately it was excessive fear that led to the decline of nuclear energy. So, if you find the "antichrist" stuff bizarre and off-putting, at least consider the basic point: excessive fear is a real obstacle towards the goal of fundamentally bettering the human condition.
Yeah I reject the point. People aren’t excessively fearful of global warming. Clearly people aren’t scared enough, or they wouldn’t be building 1GW data centers powered by gas turbines
Do you think that someone who could spend the average person's entire lifetime income without a second thought might have a blind spot when it comes to obstacles blocking humanity's betterment?
I dunno. You can hear the same spiel on any city bus in the us, but the guy giving it isn’t rich.
How come the whole “world government” thing doesn’t set off tiny alarm bell for you? It’s the politics version of reading a math paper that suddenly starts talking about P=NP; you might be dealing with a crank. Is it not important to you that most other people going on about one world governments eventually turn out to just mean “the Jews”?
And why are we supposed to wade through Thiel’s screeds? To learn that nuclear power is good and that people are scared of things?! Is he the only or the best place to learn that? Is that even all that novel?
Based on my recollection of The Bible and the Book of Revelation (it's been almost 30 years since I was last forced to read it), Peter Thiel and his ilk match the definition of what an "antichrist" is or should be.
The book of Revelation doesn't mention any antichrist. Only the epistles of John mention antichrists and the definition of what they are. Any proposed link between any antichrists and the book of Revelation was created in the past few hundred years.
I don’t think the church would consider the broad contours of Darby heretical. It’s not heretical to talk about many antichrists plus one final Antichrist.
ehhh, for a lot of traditional Catholics neither Thiel nor Rome are Catholic currently so I think there would be disagreement with both sides here
I thought Thiel's argument was that the anti-AI crowd might tend towards a pagan primitivism (like with mentioning those like Greta) and authoritarian measures to stamp out technology with an Anti-Christ leader, emphasizing base physical pleasure over technological "progress". I guess that's one "End Times" possible trajectory.
Catholicism's not necessarily really for or against (classically) liberal democracies, with exception of specific configurations that might be condemned afaik with books like "Liberalism is a Sin" (liberalismisasin.com) or writings against the "heresy of Americanism".
p. 11 says, in contrast to a top comment here that claims there is no singular Anti-Christ figure: "the Sacred Scriptures speak of Antichrist in various places as being a particular person or individual."
Rome has been thought to have fallen to modernism with the Vatican 2 changes, which sets them up more for accepting or bringing about the rise of an Anti-Christ movement in the views of some traditionalists
> His florid arguments have the architecture of a conspiracy theory, weaving together random and disconnected elements to make grand assertions. And those assertions—cosmic and sweeping—are more concerning than convincing.
To this extent, Shpiel is like any zealot who stalks the halls of institutional religion.
However...
> Thiel is consciously seeking to position himself as a figure of religious authority, using scripture and philosophy to preach in favor of a capitalism that murders democracy. He clearly wants to recruit people to his cause, perhaps to start a movement.
Many US voters have already joined the movement and the current Presiking speaks and acts as though he has no intention of being removed.
US voters need to wake up if ever an awakening was needed. Home-grown lunatics and thieves now run the country. As oligarchs, they are positioning themselves to be untouchable by destroying democracy and the rule of law:
> his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.
>but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist
Well with the antichrist in charge of the US, I guess he has a good example to follow :)
To me, all this shows is being rich still won't make you smart.
With that said, I wish the Pope would send a real message. Start excommunicating Roman Catholics who enable Trump. I would start with the ones on the US Supreme Court then move on to Congress and the VP.
I think Peter Thiel is smart, but exhibiting one of smart people’s most common modes of failure, overestimating one’s ability while not maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism about the correctness of one’s own beliefs.
Put simply, he (and many other tech bros) have galaxy brained themselves into some very stupid stuff.
That is not the Vatican’s article at all. It’s just a website. You make it sound like the Catholic Church is openly discussing burning someone, it is not the case. And the trope "faut-il brûler … ?" is common in French and completely metaphorical. Again, nobody is advocating putting anyone on a bonfire.
It's not as official as releasing a formal statement via the Holy See Press Office or some kind of encyclical. Made the headline feel a little misleading when I found out it was an op-ed.
The Catholic church has a very shall we say complicated stance on democracy, freedom of religion and human rights.
Nowadays they realise that the Western world has shifted from their theological and biblical position so they couch it in word salad sophistry.
Perhaps one unifying principle behind all the iterations of the Catholic church as social mores changed over time and its influence waxed and waned and was coopted by secular kingdoms, is that every single one of them might have written an article entitled "should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake", if someone had taken the time to explain Peter Thiel to them in terms they might understand. And concluded "yes, probably".
The "nowadays" Catholic church, for better or worse, is also very, very different from the Catholic church that existed before "nowadays". They don't even engage in holy wars anymore, as just one example, that's up to other governments nowadays.
The interesting thing about religions as a whole is that the timespan is so big that you can really see how the backbone of the narrative stays the same while the fanbase and how they pick winners changes a lot, the Vatican state itself is a theocratic state created by an agreement between the pope and the Mussolini.
And if you wanna go back even further just remember that while Europe and christian countries were living in the dark ages the Islamic world was the one driving forward scientific knowledge and the exchange of ideas with the East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
Two thousand years and they still haven't figured out that Christ wasn't covering himself in gold and jewels. The Vatican has evolved, but not to conform to the ideals espoused by Christ. Note also that evolution isn't synonymous with progress. Lamprey eels evolve too.
It must be fun to be super rich. They live in high castles where few reach, and talk with cloud over their heads. They hold parties high in wine and drug, that flows down into the river through the aqueduct, then picked up by the masses.
I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.
I’ve had similar thoughts. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t fully imagine the unlimited wealth these people have and what it does to your brain.
It’s all deeply weird, and films like the Mountainhead increasingly seem like they might be more accurate than not.
There’s just clearly some limit around accumulated wealth where it detaches people further and further from reality.
Well it is their reality. It's more like most people live in a different, crueller reality than them.
I suppose the kind of character traits that enable becoming super-rich probably also lend themselves to giving such talks.
Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.
I think I’d pay people to tell me my ideas were whacky and not to share them.
TED is a venue for middlebrow ideas by middlebrows for other middlebrows.
Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.
They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.
There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.
One might say that Elon's acquisition of Twitter is the ultimate manifestation of this.
You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?
We all know why he did it: because people wrote on and listened to twitter a lot, and he didn't like what they said. He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
These people are not interested the love and charity parts of Christianity. They are interested only in the hate and doom parts of it.
Thiel is not a Christian?
He is going around talking about biblical prophecies and the antichrist so regardless of whether you consider thiel a Christian or whether he considers himself a Christian the comment you are responding to is entirely accurate in saying he is interested "only in the hate and doom parts of [Christianity]".
Peter grew up in an Evangelical household which probably shaped his framing/worldview. As an adult he still identifies as a 'heterodox protestant'. Which in America usually means he's not really Christian, he just picks and chooses some ideas from it. The way he uses 'Antichrist' to talk about politics and tech (not just a single person or religious entity) seems to confirm that idea.
Its ironic because he was homodoxxed by Gawker
But he is a wanker. Does that help?
It’s because it helps their addiction to wealth. By saying that being against economic progress is the biggest evil, he’s saying everyone must say yes to what these tech elites push onto the world. Like you might dislike 1 million satellites polluting the night sky but don’t speak up against it unless you’re the antichrist.
Religion is also leverage for their goals. Like they support evangelical driven age verification for porn (defacto porn ban) because it lets them push age verification more broadly, to let them advertise more.
Are you referring to Thiel, the Catholic Church or both?
He seems like the kind of guy who was only ever a few bad days away from having a full-on break with reality.
I wonder if he's been talking to AI a lot and it pushed him over the edge to psychosis?
Did Thiel seem in any way sane before the advent of LLMs? Don't have a single positive memory about anything he's ever done or said.
The book Zero to One is legitimately good.
His actions helping Hulk Hogan against Gawker were also thoroughly deserved.
He only cared cuz it exposed his own hypocrisy
I wonder if he has any positive memories. All these billionaires are so detached from regular life that they don’t experience what humans normally do. It’s why they’re mostly sociopaths.
Makes you wonder if that's where they got the name of Palantir, since Denethor went mad by using one (at least according to the Peter Jackson movies, I reckon the situation was different in the books).
That’s pretty much what happened in the books. More accurately he lost all hope for the world after being fed visions by Sauron to manipulate him. Hey wait…
Thats true, but in the books, Denethor is competent and a seasoned strategist and has a battle of strategy with the witch king, one upping them in most instances, answering with brilliant maneuvers to the brilliant maneuvers of the witch king.
Perhaps that's why Sauron's trick is to use the Palantir to show him some things while hiding others, so as to convince him that his every move would be futile.
I'm not sure even this is what destroys Denethor's mind though so much as it is the thought of the ring. He sees it as his by right of need. He sacrifices both his sons in his madness to have it, for the madness of power. His view of the world is so bleak that saving it in a way that destroys it seems "right" to him
That’s a good point, in the movie they only show the already “broken” Denethor.
In the extended edition of Two Towers they show him in a flashback of Gondor retaking Osgiliath.
It's not a particularly flattering portrayal- the military success is shown as belonging to Boromir more than Denethor- but at least it shows him sane.
This guy is obviously on drugs half of the time, his wealth shields him from reality and the yes-men around him let his crazy anti-humanist ideas fester in his mind and turn into religious psychosis. No need for AI here.
In any sane place, his hate of democracy and freedom would make him a pariah. Instead, he is the current US Vice President's mentor and most trusted advisor.
One way to view AI-induced psychosis, is that it's just giving regular people access to the kind of sycophancy powerful people always had.
It's wealth-induced psychosis. Still reassuringly exclusive.
I believe the term is democratization?
Couldn't this antichrist stuff be his sane/rational strategy to manipulate the powerful but religious rightwing people under his sway? Is there evidence to assume he himself is on the verge of some kind of psychosis and not fully in control of his faculties?
Its possibly just an SEO trick. People have been calling Thiel the antichrist for a long time.
My guess is it's just his megalomania playing out in a religious arena instead of a political or economic one.
I'm not sure battling the Vatican over interpretations of an obscure philosopher who mentored him back when he was an undergrad is the easiest way of winning over the religious right. Most of whom will happily go along with generic arguments about Peter Thiel's portfolio being essential to defeat Communist China and the woke libs. Treating Eliezer Yudkowsky as an irrelevant nutter probably works better on people with all kinds of views on religion and politics than attempting to elevate him to the status of antichrist
> This guy is obviously on drugs half of the time, his wealth shields him from reality and the yes-men around him let his crazy anti-humanist ideas fester in his mind and turn into religious psychosis. No need for AI here.
You just described a good dozen or so VC/Tech Bros
It seems these lectures are closed but does anyone have a transcript or writeup of the core arguments? I'd be interested to know what he is saying first hand.
I'm curious too, but here's a recap of the nonsense he's spewed thus far:
- Expressed hesitation on whether the human should survive without being moved into computers [1]
- That Greta Thunburg could be the antichrist and cause the end of humanity [2]
- (Leaked) Apparently he has also called Pope Leo the antichrist [3]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs
2. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ao_umPlSV6o
3. https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/new-jd-vances-top-donor-...
I can see the logic of talking to the people who believe they will live forever, once you start wondering "what if people could actually live forever?"
This guy belongs in an institution, not in control of an entire power apparatus.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-mind-bending-convers...
probably on other podcast outlets also
Why would that be interesting to you?
At some point people are going to start asking awkward questions going all the way back to the PayPal mafia and everything that has subsequently happened. Thiel landing on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group just looks too ridiculous, but is a thing, and now this guy goes off ranting about the Antichrist?
I am actually sympathetic to much of what Thiel has done, but the current arc makes the supposed Howard Hughes oddities look positively reasonable.
They don't own Rome anymore, the Vatican is their own country now thanks to ol' Benny. Anyway, both parties here are idiots with high opinions of themselves who actually believe in a pile nonsense, but which of the two has really caused more harm for humanity?
There is no "THE Antichrist" there are only antichrists, plural, normal not supernatural people and organizations that behave in a notably non-christlike way, and both parties here seem to qualify easily.
> There is no "THE Antichrist" there are only antichrists, plural
Funnily enough, the bible agrees, or at least John's epistles.
People who fantasize themselves as the antichrist (like Thiel, he's not very good at hiding it) ought to remember that antichrists being a dime a dozen is quite biblical.
Not completely true, the bible mention "antichrists" as in many and a particular "The Antichrist". The Antichrist is supposed to be the apex of the hubris.
>but which of the two has really caused more harm for humanity?
I take it you would like to compare against the whole of the Vatican's existence, and not against just the whole of Peter Thiel's adulthood?
If you like, we could compare a single Thiel adulthood to individual randomly chosen lives of popes. The average pope has a lot more blood on their hands. Both are bad, but one has caused more harm to humanity no matter which way you slice it. To argue that a single heretic is worse than the whole catholic church rings pretty silly to me. The best would be if they were to both destroy each other, but let's be real and acknowledge that Peter Thiel is going to die and become irrelevant long before the catholic church, which may very well continue on for another two thousand years for all we know.
What is the average pope? Fabian? Felix IV? Linus? Eusebius? Pius IV?
> there are only antichrists, plural
Agreed, it would be exceptionally hard to choose just 1 (or even 10) right now.
>> both parties here are idiots with high opinions of themselves who actually believe in a pile nonsense, but which of the two has really caused more harm for humanity?
That's not really a reasonable argument, because Thiel hasn't had the power of the Vatican (especially the power the vatican used to have), but what he's done with his power so far is much more concerning to me that what the vatican has done in the last 4 years, yes.
I think we both agree that the catholic church has received an unwarranted elevation and presumption of beneficence in media, but the distinction I'm drawing is that a billionaire who's toiling in American politics and claiming Greta Thunburg could be the antichrist is actively concerning.
I think it's a reasonable argument that we should be more concerned with the organization that has the better part of a two thousand year track record of murdering people, but in either case I did just accuse both of them of being antichrists. Anyway, Greta is my queen.
Unlike a lot of the posters here, I find Thiel interesting.
I agree with his idea that humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years, and I'm glad we're out of it. I wish we were building more stuff faster (housing, nuclear, renewables, electric cars, etc). I don't consider myself a "transhumanist" but I do think that humanity should orient itself towards overcoming what have been our fundamental limitations (scarcity, death, etc). Ultimately, that could lead to some form of transhumanism albeit in the far, far future.
Thiel's "antichrist" spiel is the idea that fear related to existential risks (climate, nuclear, AI, etc) will make people too timid, and lead to a one-world government that de-prioritizes progress and economic freedom, resulting in longterm stagnation. I'm not especially worried about that, but I do think that excessive timidity is a real problem. I don't mind that Europe increasingly doesn't care about economic growth and has made it harder to invent/build/create, but I don't want the whole world to be like that.
If you disagree with this broad view, think about it more concretely. Take the example of nuclear reactors. If we had been steadily building nuclear reactors for the past 70 years, they would be smaller, safer, more efficient, energy would be more plentiful, and climate change would be less of an issue. Ultimately it was excessive fear that led to the decline of nuclear energy. So, if you find the "antichrist" stuff bizarre and off-putting, at least consider the basic point: excessive fear is a real obstacle towards the goal of fundamentally bettering the human condition.
Yeah I reject the point. People aren’t excessively fearful of global warming. Clearly people aren’t scared enough, or they wouldn’t be building 1GW data centers powered by gas turbines
Do you think that someone who could spend the average person's entire lifetime income without a second thought might have a blind spot when it comes to obstacles blocking humanity's betterment?
I dunno. You can hear the same spiel on any city bus in the us, but the guy giving it isn’t rich.
How come the whole “world government” thing doesn’t set off tiny alarm bell for you? It’s the politics version of reading a math paper that suddenly starts talking about P=NP; you might be dealing with a crank. Is it not important to you that most other people going on about one world governments eventually turn out to just mean “the Jews”?
And why are we supposed to wade through Thiel’s screeds? To learn that nuclear power is good and that people are scared of things?! Is he the only or the best place to learn that? Is that even all that novel?
> spelling out Silicon Valley’s plan to weaponize religion in a war against democracy
:eye_roll: Is Google on board with that plan? Or Apple or Meta or Netflix or anyone? Who is “Silicon Valley” to this author?
Peter Thiel and cadre.
Based on my recollection of The Bible and the Book of Revelation (it's been almost 30 years since I was last forced to read it), Peter Thiel and his ilk match the definition of what an "antichrist" is or should be.
The book of Revelation doesn't mention any antichrist. Only the epistles of John mention antichrists and the definition of what they are. Any proposed link between any antichrists and the book of Revelation was created in the past few hundred years.
For all Thiel's supposed invention, he's having a lot of trouble building a needle you can thread with a camel.
It wasn't immediately obvious to me what you had written... so I had to Google it. Very clever statement :D
(Matthew 19:24) "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Maybe that's why he's on this weird technocrat-humanist tour of his.
Coming to grips with his Sin by trying to explain the Antichrist "but not THE Antichrist because that would require believe in the Bible".
Not a great time for blasphemy.. I have to wonder where a fatwa would lead with the US' conservative religious allies.
Power causes brain damage.
https://archive.md/sdLQP
Louis XVI would not disagree.
Technically, I think the blade did most of the brain damage to Louis XVI.
Where do they think Peter got his ideas?
John Nelson Darby largely. The Catholic Church's official stance is that any sort of literal antichrist and apocalypse is heretical.
I don’t think the church would consider the broad contours of Darby heretical. It’s not heretical to talk about many antichrists plus one final Antichrist.
"Believe in an antichrist... No, not like that!" said Peter and Paulo.
ehhh, for a lot of traditional Catholics neither Thiel nor Rome are Catholic currently so I think there would be disagreement with both sides here
I thought Thiel's argument was that the anti-AI crowd might tend towards a pagan primitivism (like with mentioning those like Greta) and authoritarian measures to stamp out technology with an Anti-Christ leader, emphasizing base physical pleasure over technological "progress". I guess that's one "End Times" possible trajectory.
Catholicism's not necessarily really for or against (classically) liberal democracies, with exception of specific configurations that might be condemned afaik with books like "Liberalism is a Sin" (liberalismisasin.com) or writings against the "heresy of Americanism".
The Vatican could have pointed to Catholic views of prophecy, like Rev. Huchede's "History of Anti-Christ", so people might compare views being presented: https://archive.org/details/huchede-history-anti-christ-best...
p. 11 says, in contrast to a top comment here that claims there is no singular Anti-Christ figure: "the Sacred Scriptures speak of Antichrist in various places as being a particular person or individual."
Rome has been thought to have fallen to modernism with the Vatican 2 changes, which sets them up more for accepting or bringing about the rise of an Anti-Christ movement in the views of some traditionalists
(can elaborate on anything if anyone requests it)
Ironic he fears the Antichrist yet backs Trump, who fits many of those traits.
> His florid arguments have the architecture of a conspiracy theory, weaving together random and disconnected elements to make grand assertions. And those assertions—cosmic and sweeping—are more concerning than convincing.
To this extent, Shpiel is like any zealot who stalks the halls of institutional religion.
However...
> Thiel is consciously seeking to position himself as a figure of religious authority, using scripture and philosophy to preach in favor of a capitalism that murders democracy. He clearly wants to recruit people to his cause, perhaps to start a movement.
Many US voters have already joined the movement and the current Presiking speaks and acts as though he has no intention of being removed.
US voters need to wake up if ever an awakening was needed. Home-grown lunatics and thieves now run the country. As oligarchs, they are positioning themselves to be untouchable by destroying democracy and the rule of law:
> his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.
>but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist
Well with the antichrist in charge of the US, I guess he has a good example to follow :)
To me, all this shows is being rich still won't make you smart.
With that said, I wish the Pope would send a real message. Start excommunicating Roman Catholics who enable Trump. I would start with the ones on the US Supreme Court then move on to Congress and the VP.
I think Peter Thiel is smart, but exhibiting one of smart people’s most common modes of failure, overestimating one’s ability while not maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism about the correctness of one’s own beliefs.
Put simply, he (and many other tech bros) have galaxy brained themselves into some very stupid stuff.
As someone put it, “it turns out 4d chess is topologically isomorphic to checkers.”
This is about the most accurate description of many of the "thought leaders" in the tech industry I've ever read.
Here's the Vatican's article (in French): https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/03/14/thiel-heresie-bena...
The title translates to:
>American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?
> Here's the Vatican's article (in French)
That is not the Vatican’s article at all. It’s just a website. You make it sound like the Catholic Church is openly discussing burning someone, it is not the case. And the trope "faut-il brûler … ?" is common in French and completely metaphorical. Again, nobody is advocating putting anyone on a bonfire.
The article on the website is written by the Pope's envoy on AI matters.
I think calling that "the Vatican's article" is fair.
Well, no, because it is not an official statement. It also does not change anything about the other points.
It's not as official as releasing a formal statement via the Holy See Press Office or some kind of encyclical. Made the headline feel a little misleading when I found out it was an op-ed.
Feels like a formal statement would be elevating Thiel too much.
But an article written by the Vatican's main guy on this very issue seems quite relevant still.
The Catholic church has a very shall we say complicated stance on democracy, freedom of religion and human rights. Nowadays they realise that the Western world has shifted from their theological and biblical position so they couch it in word salad sophistry.
Perhaps one unifying principle behind all the iterations of the Catholic church as social mores changed over time and its influence waxed and waned and was coopted by secular kingdoms, is that every single one of them might have written an article entitled "should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake", if someone had taken the time to explain Peter Thiel to them in terms they might understand. And concluded "yes, probably".
The "nowadays" Catholic church, for better or worse, is also very, very different from the Catholic church that existed before "nowadays". They don't even engage in holy wars anymore, as just one example, that's up to other governments nowadays.
The interesting thing about religions as a whole is that the timespan is so big that you can really see how the backbone of the narrative stays the same while the fanbase and how they pick winners changes a lot, the Vatican state itself is a theocratic state created by an agreement between the pope and the Mussolini.
And if you wanna go back even further just remember that while Europe and christian countries were living in the dark ages the Islamic world was the one driving forward scientific knowledge and the exchange of ideas with the East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
They're not selling 'indulgences' these days either.
One could also say that a two millenia old institution has evolved alongside the rest of humanity.
Two thousand years and they still haven't figured out that Christ wasn't covering himself in gold and jewels. The Vatican has evolved, but not to conform to the ideals espoused by Christ. Note also that evolution isn't synonymous with progress. Lamprey eels evolve too.
Look, I'm not a fan of the Church either. But I appreciate them smacking down this lunatic.
"When a devil gets caught by a monster, I, as a human being, can only hope that they both die."