I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
That's interesting. Thanks for the correction and for sharing.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a historically dominant power structure?
If the highest good is a belief in Christ, as is Christian doctrine, then an anti-Christ that is good in every other way is still evil by Christian doctrine.
Thanks for highlighting this - I won't be able to unsee how well this does in "x person is bad" clickbait headlines vs "Christ V2: A Revised Edition" which seems to be more accurate and honest. I admit I've fallen for this for trop for ages ...
FWIW I think the parent comment is incorrect (unless I misunderstood it, of course); I responded in more detail here [0] but the tl;dr is that the Bible does describe the (big-a or little-a) "antichrist" as more-or-less entirely opposed to Christ. (Not to mention that Jesus himself warned about copycat "Christs", in Matthew 24:23–27, and calls them "false" and says that they "deceive".)
Thanks, I see. I thought this was more settled and the authoritative tone of the parent comment was enough for me buy it. (One would hope a youth in Catholic education wouldn't have me so clueless and looking stupid in public, but here we are!) Clearly I need to learn more about this
This is very interesting. One other thing I think gets glossed over a lot is that there is "the" Antichrist as you explained, but there are also MANY other Antichrists. The latter are constantly trying to attack the Christian faith by saying they _are_ Christians but behaving very un-Christlike _on purpose_. I think we see a LOT of this happening now.
The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
> Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is
These guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
AI has always seemed like a convenient panacea for the excesses of accelerationism. An overloaded term in the equation that should balance everything, but only if the right conditions are met. That framing discrepancy alone should indicate that AI is being marketed as something that it will clearly never be.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)
Certain serial killers maybe? I get that people are fascinated by them, but to me such people are oddly boring. Their crimes are horrific, but the justifications (if not outright delusional) seem to be just "I can do whatever I want if I find a way to get away with it".
Most other people we might consider 'evil' have more moralistic justifications - such as religious fanaticism, or nationalism, or revenge against some perceived enemy. Not that this makes them right in absolute terms, but presumably they do not consider themselves evil.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "aware". Does awareness imply that someone simply knows that what they did was immoral, or does it also imply remorse? Psychopaths know that their actions are immoral but are incapable of feeling remorse.
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
> My understanding is that he was raised evangelical.
Was that before or after he spent part of his childhood in a Namibian settlement called Swakopmund that venerated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party?
> Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler.
> 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.[12][13] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[13] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
He definitely isn't a Catholic. "Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology." says Wikipedia. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical household. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Ha, he is the living embodiment of supply side Jesus.
Well, some of that actually is common among the Protestants in Western Europe. The belief is that God will punish you for doing bad (quite common in many religions), and therefore that your are faithful if you're doing well. These were not the persecuted minorities that fled to the USA, but dressing greed as piety did cross the pond.
One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
Also there is no singular antichrist. Samson was an antichrist. We are antichrists when we oppose his will. Thiel is the worst kind of dispensationalist.
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.
Listening to Thiel feels like opening a complicated mechanical device while running and looking at the mechanism that makes it tick. Its so raw, its beautiful in its own way. It removes the spell on so many things, it gives you the "I understand why those people do what they do now" kick. It relieves you from emotional baggage.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
AFAIK He can't in US, at least legally. What I expect to happen is that he will eventually get his city-state with the right combination of people and structure and be the president of it. Just not sure if the ICBMs come first or after.
Some ideas of Thiel seem to be good.
Everything is fine until you harm the lives of other people.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
I don’t know why, but it brings me a story to mind: A thief breaks into a house, and when he’s discovered by the owner—and the police arrive—he starts shouting, "Thief! Thief!" while pointing at the owner.
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry as a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean?
"support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Yes but you just have to make the other side extreme and voila now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time. trying to delete my comment, forgot to never speak my mind here unless it conforms to whats on tv
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Gave up exploring space? Are we living in the same reality? Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots. We’d never have pictures of Pluto if we were hyper-focused on manned missions.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
I'm with the other guy. Humans exploring space is fun an exciting to me. Sending drones into space is cool, but far less fun and exciting. I want to explore space. I want recreational spacecraft for humans. I want technologies which allow humans to explore the outer regions of our solar system. You might think flying to Mars is a waste of time but I think that's incredible. I would have signed up before I had a family, even if it were a one way trip.
> Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Science progressed, but it didn't bring the kinds of physical innovations we expected. At least, not until recently. Where are the flying cars? Why haven't we cured ageing? Why don't we have a base on the Moon? Why isn't energy effectively unlimited and free? We had an explosion in information sciences. The internet is a marvel. iPhones and chip technology are incredible. AI is unbelievable to witness. But why did we slow down so much on physical scientific innovation?
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"
What, about the pope? I'm not Catholic, I just prefer the people who are in control of massive amounts of power and absurd political influence to be less extreme than unironically thinking everyone who says things against him is the antichrist
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Sorry, you have read his essays and listened to interviews but don't know his companies??? That, frankly, is not believable. The article above goes into detail about the problems with his companies. Who reads essays by Thiel but doesn't know about Palantir and his hand in the creation of facebook? You know about the "meme-level comments" but don't know about what they're criticizing?
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
If you are the sort of person for whom some finite amount is adequate, you will probably not make billions. I mean this in a nice way. If you are a person who thinks certain things outside money and power are more important, you are unlikely to do the odious things necessary to make billions.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
Thanks for the link. As it was expected, at some point he starts lecturing about "immortality" and about "defeating aging", which goes to show how scared shitless he is about such a natural thing like death, death which a Slavic babushka is way more capable in confronting head-on than this so-called oligarch. And he should leave the "Antichrist" discourse to us, genuine Manichaeans/Bogomils, but with many other things original the Protestants have managed to make a mess of it all. I blame it on they being located at the end of the civilized world, with nothing better to do back in the day.
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
That (caring for poor people) is anti-christ to the goals of Thiel, who wants to get rid of democracy and create city states governed by autocratic rulers.
I don't think he believes in Antichrist, the same way Elon Musk doesn't believe we'll go to Mars. I think these are calculated statements to manipulate people. (The U.S. oligarchs find some of the more gullible fundamentalist evangelicans to be a useful ally.)
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Thiel who's been a longtime supporter of Trump said a few weeks ago that the US “should not have” launched the Iran war and that "there were a lot of mistakes that were made and that US may lack both the hard power and the soft power to prevail". i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
> i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
While there are valid criticisms of Thiel, some of his ideas are wacky and he does come off as a bit of a pompous asshole, however this article reads like a political hit piece. It cannot be taken seriously unfortunately.
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
Lets be blunt. The whole "The End is coming", Antichrist, the "Beast", the "Whore of Babylon"... The whole lot of it reads like a really bad bronze age fantasy novel.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.
I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Further reading, nos. 675-677 at the bottom of this page: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
That's interesting. Thanks for the correction and for sharing.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a historically dominant power structure?
[delayed]
Sure ok. But to the true pope and his followers, the antipope is definitely evil and going to hell. It's a matter of perspective.
If the highest good is a belief in Christ, as is Christian doctrine, then an anti-Christ that is good in every other way is still evil by Christian doctrine.
Thanks for highlighting this - I won't be able to unsee how well this does in "x person is bad" clickbait headlines vs "Christ V2: A Revised Edition" which seems to be more accurate and honest. I admit I've fallen for this for trop for ages ...
FWIW I think the parent comment is incorrect (unless I misunderstood it, of course); I responded in more detail here [0] but the tl;dr is that the Bible does describe the (big-a or little-a) "antichrist" as more-or-less entirely opposed to Christ. (Not to mention that Jesus himself warned about copycat "Christs", in Matthew 24:23–27, and calls them "false" and says that they "deceive".)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243942
Thanks, I see. I thought this was more settled and the authoritative tone of the parent comment was enough for me buy it. (One would hope a youth in Catholic education wouldn't have me so clueless and looking stupid in public, but here we are!) Clearly I need to learn more about this
Sorry I didn't mean to sound authoritative. I am, by some definitions, antiauthoritative.
This is very interesting. One other thing I think gets glossed over a lot is that there is "the" Antichrist as you explained, but there are also MANY other Antichrists. The latter are constantly trying to attack the Christian faith by saying they _are_ Christians but behaving very un-Christlike _on purpose_. I think we see a LOT of this happening now.
The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
> Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is
These guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
AI = Anti Ictus.
It was there all this time. I need renowned writer Dan Brown's email ASAP.
It's Supercedes Ictus now
This shit writes by itself. Easiest best seller ever.
Anti ichthys?
AI has always seemed like a convenient panacea for the excesses of accelerationism. An overloaded term in the equation that should balance everything, but only if the right conditions are met. That framing discrepancy alone should indicate that AI is being marketed as something that it will clearly never be.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
For whatever it's worth, this is very close to the opposite of what Peter says
Peter is properly, openly and deeply Protestant. Jesus Christ is his Christ
When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)
Is it even possible for an "evil" person to be evil while being consciously aware that they're evil? Has a notable figure like this ever existed?
I guess it's a question of perspective like I wiped out a bunch of bed bugs and I guess I'd be the evil destroyer from the bed bug perspective?
Certain serial killers maybe? I get that people are fascinated by them, but to me such people are oddly boring. Their crimes are horrific, but the justifications (if not outright delusional) seem to be just "I can do whatever I want if I find a way to get away with it".
Most other people we might consider 'evil' have more moralistic justifications - such as religious fanaticism, or nationalism, or revenge against some perceived enemy. Not that this makes them right in absolute terms, but presumably they do not consider themselves evil.
There is a reason why in Christianity you can "repent". In the middle ages you could even pay for a get out of hell card.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "aware". Does awareness imply that someone simply knows that what they did was immoral, or does it also imply remorse? Psychopaths know that their actions are immoral but are incapable of feeling remorse.
yes, they're called sadists
That is his stated position. His actions and words don't often support it.
He has a lot of company.
Can you exapnd on this? Especially on the specifics to what you think those actions are and how their against/anti Protestant or Catholic beliefs.
E.g. I think what your getting at is something akin to, "you can't be Catholic if you are for abortion".
How about "You can't be Catholic if you go about creating your own Jesus and rewriting the rules as you see fit".
Sounds like something an Atheist would say?
When you don't buy in to religion it affords you the ability to view it objectively. Religious people tend to get very mad about that.
A quote I heard recently: “You may not live what you profess, but you will live what you believe”
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Yes, he's Lutheran, and yet he practices the theology of glory. He has lost the plot, very likely deliberately as you suggest.
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:24
Also in Mark 10:17 and Luke 18:18.
Sounds like that can be interpreted in many different ways. Isn't this why we are here?
Yes, rich people just need to create tiny camels that can easily go through the eye of a needle, and rich people are suddenly good people.
No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
why would you want someone to repeat the parent comment
you cant be a catholic if you are for abortion. stop being dense.
your religion is a nest of child rapists why dont you talk about that?
Can you shed some light of childhood in the church? Sounds like you have some experience in what your claiming.
My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
> My understanding is that he was raised evangelical.
Was that before or after he spent part of his childhood in a Namibian settlement called Swakopmund that venerated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party?
> Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
> 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.[12][13] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[13] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund
He is evangelical Protestant, not Catholic.
He definitely isn't a Catholic. "Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology." says Wikipedia. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical household. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Ha, he is the living embodiment of supply side Jesus.
If you've not seen it before.
https://imgur.com/gallery/gospel-of-supply-side-jesus-bCqRp
Well, some of that actually is common among the Protestants in Western Europe. The belief is that God will punish you for doing bad (quite common in many religions), and therefore that your are faithful if you're doing well. These were not the persecuted minorities that fled to the USA, but dressing greed as piety did cross the pond.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
The US version was pretty big, but the general idea is something that permeates all of humanity.
Not was, is. The prosperity gospel is very popular among US conservatives.
I'm sorry, you are correct.
One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
I think lots of Catholics don't take that bit too literally though, eh? Like they might practice contraception despite what various Popes have said.
All Catholics do things they consider to be sinful. That's why confession exists.
Sure, they might ignore some stuff, but they don't usually go and publish religious creeds that go directly counter to the Pope's teachings.
> He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic
He’s never claimed to be - GP is confused, or just plain wrong.
I was incorrect, he is evangelical Protestant
Do you really believe he’s honest? Are you being intentionally naive?
Also there is no singular antichrist. Samson was an antichrist. We are antichrists when we oppose his will. Thiel is the worst kind of dispensationalist.
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.
Sorry folks. The flying saucers are never coming.
Listening to Thiel feels like opening a complicated mechanical device while running and looking at the mechanism that makes it tick. Its so raw, its beautiful in its own way. It removes the spell on so many things, it gives you the "I understand why those people do what they do now" kick. It relieves you from emotional baggage.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
are you wondering if he will run for president?
AFAIK He can't in US, at least legally. What I expect to happen is that he will eventually get his city-state with the right combination of people and structure and be the president of it. Just not sure if the ICBMs come first or after.
Your comment in this thread led me to Vilos Cohaagen of Total Recall vibes...
I guess he owns a mirror
Most vampires don't own a mirror.
Some ideas of Thiel seem to be good. Everything is fine until you harm the lives of other people.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
>My belief is
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
I don’t know why, but it brings me a story to mind: A thief breaks into a house, and when he’s discovered by the owner—and the police arrive—he starts shouting, "Thief! Thief!" while pointing at the owner.
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
If you haven't yet read it, his essay on the antichrist and One Piece is hilarious.
https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry as a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
>it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!)
It's wild how just having the facade of wealth will get you a following in the US, for free.
Americans blindly idolize the wealthy. It's crazy. Truly a "not get millionaire" mindset for a lot of this country.
Hustle culture and the Elon cult keep young men docile. There is value, and perhaps intentionality, in that.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean? "support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Yes but you just have to make the other side extreme and voila now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time. trying to delete my comment, forgot to never speak my mind here unless it conforms to whats on tv
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Gave up exploring space? Are we living in the same reality? Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots. We’d never have pictures of Pluto if we were hyper-focused on manned missions.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
I'm with the other guy. Humans exploring space is fun an exciting to me. Sending drones into space is cool, but far less fun and exciting. I want to explore space. I want recreational spacecraft for humans. I want technologies which allow humans to explore the outer regions of our solar system. You might think flying to Mars is a waste of time but I think that's incredible. I would have signed up before I had a family, even if it were a one way trip.
> Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
Why? What are you going to do on Mars?
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
Why tho? What's the added value? Those places are terribly inhabitable.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Science progressed, but it didn't bring the kinds of physical innovations we expected. At least, not until recently. Where are the flying cars? Why haven't we cured ageing? Why don't we have a base on the Moon? Why isn't energy effectively unlimited and free? We had an explosion in information sciences. The internet is a marvel. iPhones and chip technology are incredible. AI is unbelievable to witness. But why did we slow down so much on physical scientific innovation?
Every time the Antichrist gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than a lesser demon.
I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...
..broad revaluation of rules based on outdated values such as morality, empathy, democracy, collective good of humanity..
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
Probably because Peter Thiel shares many techno-authoritarian views with Curtis Yarvin.
His religious bullshit just amounts to a divine right to rule.
He does not care about you, at all. He does not care that you, or anyone you care about becomes a casualty in the consequences of his act.
He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"
This is a curious bias you're pointing to.
What, about the pope? I'm not Catholic, I just prefer the people who are in control of massive amounts of power and absurd political influence to be less extreme than unironically thinking everyone who says things against him is the antichrist
Ah, no!
About the fact that people may tend to judge people as characters in a book and not as real people with influence.
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Sorry, you have read his essays and listened to interviews but don't know his companies??? That, frankly, is not believable. The article above goes into detail about the problems with his companies. Who reads essays by Thiel but doesn't know about Palantir and his hand in the creation of facebook? You know about the "meme-level comments" but don't know about what they're criticizing?
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
Term Limits.
Alone they fix nothing. You need systemic action behind them to avoid creating a shadow government that just puts their next puppet in place.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
It could be a requirement.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
Is that not what MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) did?
Its what a normal person does with excess wealth, as opposed to sociopaths and megalomaniacs.
Hard disagree on the use of the word "normal".
It's what a decent person does. It's not what a "normal" person would do.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
If you are the sort of person for whom some finite amount is adequate, you will probably not make billions. I mean this in a nice way. If you are a person who thinks certain things outside money and power are more important, you are unlikely to do the odious things necessary to make billions.
I used to think this was a universal law but then there's Warren Buffett, who's rich but doesn't seem stupid. Of course he's not a tech billionaire.
And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
Here is the full interview for anyone interested in what it's all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU
Thanks for the link. As it was expected, at some point he starts lecturing about "immortality" and about "defeating aging", which goes to show how scared shitless he is about such a natural thing like death, death which a Slavic babushka is way more capable in confronting head-on than this so-called oligarch. And he should leave the "Antichrist" discourse to us, genuine Manichaeans/Bogomils, but with many other things original the Protestants have managed to make a mess of it all. I blame it on they being located at the end of the civilized world, with nothing better to do back in the day.
I'm interested in the immortality and anti aging stuff and it doesn't mean I'm terrified of dying. I'm probably pretty average that way.
Which one of them is the antichrist again? Is it Thiel or Musk?
Greta Thunberg. I am dead serious, this is what Thiel believes.
The only way Greta Thunberg can be the antichrist is if Peter Thiel thinks he's Christ.
Doesn't she want to help poor and oppressed people? That seems a pro-crist position.
Exactly, even if you disagree with her its obvious she is trying to do the right thing.
On the other hand, the people Christ and his followers most often condemned were the rich and powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
That (caring for poor people) is anti-christ to the goals of Thiel, who wants to get rid of democracy and create city states governed by autocratic rulers.
https://epsteinexposed.com/persons/peter-thiel You will know them by their fruits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_grandeur
For him they are not delusions. He really is a billionaire.
Religious delusions.
Peter Thiel knows about the antichrist
He shall know himself
Peter Thiel helped fund his campaign.
I don't think he believes in Antichrist, the same way Elon Musk doesn't believe we'll go to Mars. I think these are calculated statements to manipulate people. (The U.S. oligarchs find some of the more gullible fundamentalist evangelicans to be a useful ally.)
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Thiel who's been a longtime supporter of Trump said a few weeks ago that the US “should not have” launched the Iran war and that "there were a lot of mistakes that were made and that US may lack both the hard power and the soft power to prevail". i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
Hindsight is always 20/20. And as an outsider to the administration, it costs him nothing to admit the obvious failure.
>Outsider to the administration
Hahaha. Haha. You serious?
> i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
While there are valid criticisms of Thiel, some of his ideas are wacky and he does come off as a bit of a pompous asshole, however this article reads like a political hit piece. It cannot be taken seriously unfortunately.
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
As much as Thiel is a POS, this author clearly only writes stuff like this and shouldn't be taken seriously.
There is way too much bias and need to generate controversy on part of the author.
Agreed
The author is not even attempting to sound impartial or objective
> It cannot be taken seriously unfortunately.
What, like his views on the antichrist?
Is this supposed to be a "gotcha" type of comment or something?
I don't think so
It's not obvious to me what's the point of your comment then, tbh
That his views on the antichrist shouldn't be taken seriously. Not sure why you're pretending there is more to it than that very obvious point.
Was assuming that's just obvious and that we were discussing something beyond the obvious
Lets be blunt. The whole "The End is coming", Antichrist, the "Beast", the "Whore of Babylon"... The whole lot of it reads like a really bad bronze age fantasy novel.
Just go have a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_the_Antichrist_i... and see what's said directly, and all the allegations of 'well that there looks like the Antichrist', when its someone people disagree with.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.