Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

An AI montage show a black and white school at the centre of a red and yellow circular grid upon which are the San Francisco skyline and map.

San Francisco Antichrist.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Sometime between 95 and 110 AD, a Christian called John the Evangelist (it is said) wrote about ‘the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and even now is now already in the world.’

Fast forward two thousand years, and the Antichrist is back on the agenda, this time via Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (a data analytics company) and the first external investor in Facebook, who is currently offering his thoughts on the “politics of the Antichrist” in a four-part lecture series in San Francisco.

Thiel previously said, in an interview in 2024, that he thinks that if the ‘Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.’ By Armageddon, he means the destruction of the world arising, for instance, from nuclear war, bioweapons, climate change, or AI. And in that interview, Thiel referenced an instructional documentary film from 1946: One World or None. Its thesis is that the answer to atomic warfare is to have the nations of the world unite. According to Thiel, such a global government would be the most insidious danger of them all. ‘The slogan of the Antichrist,’ he said, is ‘peace and safety’, which ‘resonates’ in ‘a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon’. So, the promise of perfect peace is a false one: it would lead only to a one-world totalitarian government.

We have been here before. On 13 January 1814, at one of thousands of services of national thanksgiving to celebrate the Peninsular Army’s entry into France, which heralded the end of the Napoleonic Wars, The Venerable Joseph Holden Pott, the Archdeacon, ascended the pulpit in the St Martin-in-the Fields Church on Trafalgar Square in central London. There had, he said, never been a ‘fitter moment’ to encourage ‘patriot zeal’ ‘on sound and righteous principles’, which he expounded for his flock. Jesus Christ was ‘a true patriot’. First, he loved the place of his birth and the people around him; then, he demonstrated love for the whole world. The ‘spirit of true Patriotism regards the good of other Countries as connected always with its own.’ However, one’s home country always come first.

Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon, who rose to power on the wave of revolutionary unrest in France, was cast by the ruling elite in Britain as the Antichrist. Protestant Britain was depicted as the new Israel, which would deliver Europe from all its woes. With the risk of political Armageddon in their own country, the establishment reasserted the importance of religion to the nation state.

The politics of the Antichrist will always tend to have traction, but the risk is that the response to the belief that the Beast is rising out of the sea, to use the image deployed in the Christian Bible, will be just as destructive: a religious revival that is all about reactionary politics or remembrance of things past.

Thiel’s take on history is that it its linear, angled toward the End Times. His thought is cyclical, collapsing in on itself, in that it is a tired trope that has been used before. For instance, it has been used during the Napoleonic Wars, and it is not guaranteed by a strong faith that can move mountains, which is arguably what the world needs more than anything else.

Saint John meant, by the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’, ‘every spirit that does not acknowledge’ Jesus Christ as Lord. And soon after, the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who sold Christianity in a competitive marketplace, wrote about the ‘sects both of barbarian and Hellenic philosophy’ that unlike Christ ‘each vaunts as the whole truth the portion which has fallen to its lot’.

The risk with Thiel is that he is simply validating unchecked ‘tech’ taking over the world. It is also sectarian that Thiel’s thoughts, for all their seemingly counter-cultural boldness, are often expressed in the shadows. His remarks in his current lecture series in San Francisco, for example, will go unrecorded. They are speculative in their nature.

By contrast, those writers who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, which Thiel sees as a turning point in the politics of the Antichrist, flaunted their wares in public, with incisive clarity. They spoke of the way in which the spirit of Christ transcends time and all other ideology, like Clement of Alexandria in the first century.

One such writer was C. S. Lewis, who wrote an article ‘On Living in Atomic Age’ (first published in 1948), in which he exhorted us not to exaggerate ‘the novelty of our situation’. We were always going to die, irrespective of the politics of the world around us, and as ever our mission is to better ourselves by turning to Christ. We should not assume that we alone can save the world. But Peter Thiel sounds he like does.

So, we still have much to learn from the Christians from the early church. Saint Paul wrote to Christians in Thessalonica warning them not to be deceived by the Antichrist, who ‘sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.’ And anyone encountering Peter Thiel’s (or indeed any one’s persons) political ideas would do well to remember that.

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge a gift now

Review

Books

Culture

29 April 2024

6 min read

Are we being anxious about anxiety?

Haidt's diagnosis of a 'doomed' youth is off. Instead, we should learn from them.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A child sits atop a bunk bed holding a phone in front.

It’s common these days to hear about social anxiety, health anxiety, or climate anxiety – but I think I can see that a new pathology is beginning to emerge: anxiety anxiety. This is where parents, politicians, academics, or just members of society in general, start to get anxious about the fact that everybody is anxious. Diagnosis rates of clinical anxiety have shown a steep increase in the past decade, and numbers, we assume, don’t lie.

Of the many outcomes of ‘anxiety anxiety’, one is going to be people who (with the absolute best intentions) want to suggest solutions. One such person is Jonathan Haidt, with his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

From the spaceman on the cover to the opening vignette about sending our children to Mars, Haidt’s premise is clear: smartphones are the alien invaders of our society. These electronic parasites are feasting on the brain matter of our young people, directly causing what is now an epidemic of clinical anxiety and depression.

I’m quite ready to read a sensible analysis of the impact of smartphone culture on mental health, so I was disappointed to find that Haidt’s book falls so far short of that. From a scientific perspective, the argument is a barrage of statistics, arranged to the tune of ‘correlation equals causation’. Given Haidt’s seniority in his field, this approach is surprisingly unsubtle, something which has already been heavily criticised by peer review. Numbers, it seems, do lie – or at least they can be easily curated to prove your point.

But even if we accept Haidt’s point – which is that rates of smart-phone use (particularly social media) and rates of young people being diagnosed with anxiety disorders have increased over the same time period – what can be done? Haidt’s solution is to ban young people from owning smartphones at all until the age of 14, and from using social media until the age of 16, or even better 18. In this way, owning and managing one’s own device and its access becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. But note: whilst parents are urged to implement these unyielding boundaries for their children’s device-habits, Haidt does not ask grown-ups to make any changes to their own. Adults can continue with their current norms of smartphone use, ostensibly because their brains are fully developed, and they therefore have the maturity to handle their own risk to mental health.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate.

Of course, it does not suit Haidt’s argument to analyse why adult mental health is also seeing an increase in diagnosis of anxiety disorders. It may be true to say that rates are rising more quickly amongst young people, but there is still no consensus as to how much of that can be attributed to young people simply being better informed about mental health and more empowered to seek help than the generations before them. Noticeably, young people today have a language to talk about anxiety that simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and ironically enough, it is social media that has made that possible. Although suicide rates are on the rise, they are still quite significantly lower among young people than they are for those aged over 35, and it should be noted that a proven pathway to suicide prevention amongst young people is access to self-help via smartphone apps.

So whilst I am quite ready to believe that smartphone culture is one of many factors impacting the health and wellbeing of young people today, I think characterising smartphones as alien invaders, or as invasive parasites that have been selectively bred by Silicon Valley billionaires to infest the minds of our young people, seems to be a disingenuous response – and one that only serves to increase parental anxiety by implying that smartphones are sly, sentient beings, and out of our control.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate and a perfectly natural human desire to seek out entertainment and culture. True, technology and software are developed by billionaires, and marketing and algorithms can influence our choices – but at the end of the day, any developer will tell you that products only ever evolve in response to what the market demands. Adults: we have the money in our pockets; we are the market.

As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture.

In other words, we (the adults) selectively bred these ‘aliens’ ourselves – and rather than try (and no doubt fail) to lock up our experiment in a lab (or, as Haidt suggests, a lockable phone-pouch) we, the adults, have more than enough agency to continue that process of developing smartphones into devices that meet needs and provide entertainment in the way that they were always meant to do. In his defence, Haidt does refer to this approach briefly, but still only with a view to making the phones be for ‘us’ (the adults) and not ‘them’ (the young people) by removing content that appeals to a younger audience. To me feels like we are victim shaming the youth of today for the fact that they have inherited a problem created by their parents.

One day when Jesus was teaching a crowd of followers, he advised them “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?” His point was about hypocrisy – it is far easier to judge someone else’s behaviour than it is to take responsibility for our own. Where did any of us last read or hear terrifying information about the decline in young people’s mental health? Was it on our smartphones?

Here are a few things that Haidt’s selection of statistics doesn’t say about the youth of today. They are the most compassionate and empathetic generation that we have seen for decades (Konrath et. al., 2023). They are able to wait longer for rewards than their parent’s generation (Protzko, 2020), they are also less lazy, less narcissistic, more cooperative and more intelligent (Kriegel, 2016). In addition, whilst obvious damage is done by ‘filters’ on Instagram photos, making some young people strive for unattainable standards of beauty, it was the previous generation of smartphone users who began this trend, and it is the current generation of young people who can be credited with the #nofilter #nomakeup countertrends. This same generation is now fuelling the rise of insurgent social media sites such as Bereal, which emphasise the importance of authentic photos and meaningful connection with friends online.

Overall, perhaps instead of restricting and controlling our young people’s online lives, as Haidt would have us do, we ought to be talking to them? As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture and develop it towards solutions to the problems that we ourselves created.