The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They've been a road map for the billionaire ever since. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the (the scriptural term for "that which withholds" the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world--in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel's katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show--which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I've been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there. The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel's chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon--and all the things he believed were "not enough" to prevent it. By Thiel's telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our "listless" and "zombie" age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the "endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web." But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon--the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI--modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist. According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. "How might such an Antichrist rise to power?" Thiel asked.