Peter Thiel is a big thinker, and these days he’s been thinking about Doomsday. In a series of four lectures he’s given three times, at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin, he’s tried to understand human history, and particularly modernity, within the framework of biblical prophecies of the End of Days. Thiel believes that the Antichrist, whose identity is uncertain — is it a person, a system, a global tyranny? — is “not just a medieval fantasy”. His free-ranging lectures, moving rapidly between disparate texts (Gulliver’s Travels; Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen) and topics (sacred violence; high-velocity global financial systems), defy easy summary. But their leading themes include the Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon and the roles of technology and empire in the Antichrist’s rise. It’s an ambitious, thought-provoking attempt to weave, from seemingly unrelated strands of meaning, a theological/anthropological/historical narrative that aims to make sense of the whole of human experience.
Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.
Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilisation. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilisation, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.
Hellbound and Down 