\n<\/p>\n
Peter Thiel famously isn\u2019t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.<\/p>\n
In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor Ren\u00e9 Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.<\/p>\n
Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.<\/p>\n
Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. \u201cYou realize,\u201d he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, \u201cin my interpretation \u2026 who runs the world is something like the antichrist.\u201d Here\u2019s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.<\/p>\n
To be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admissions rates, scholarly output and Nobel Prize recognition would seem to contradict it. To Thiel, even then, Jerusalem was definitely not build\u2019d here, among these dark Satanic diploma mills.<\/p>\n
In September, Falter in Austria published a long profile about the theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who is one of those academics Thiel used as beta testers on his antichrist material. Palaver says it makes sense to him that Thiel is seeking out academics: \u201cIt\u2019s really difficult in his environment: who tells him the truth to his face?\u201d<\/p>\n
There is something deeply funny imagining a rapt audience, cowed by Thiel\u2019s legend and wealth, following the billionaire into the autodidact\u2019s private cosmos, in lectures whose bullet points were certainly more robust at the start of lecture one than at the close of lecture three. Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations. You picture the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Piece, Alan Moore\u2019s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies \u201cthe legionnaires of the antichrist\u201d, such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate. With enemies like these, who needs friends?<\/p>\n
But such is Thiel\u2019s odd relationship to academia. For someone who dislikes universities and researchers, he has a hard time staying away. Thiel, who received a bachelor\u2019s degree from Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, was deeply impressed with the thinking of Girard, his Stanford professor. He has spent decades promoting Girard\u2019s \u201cmimetic theory\u201d, including attributing his famous investment in Facebook to \u201cbetting on mimesis\u201d. His current \u201cWhore of Babylon\u201d tour started with a presentation at a Paris conference devoted to Girard\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
Thiel clearly admired Girard not just for his arguments but for his style of argumentation. These lectures don\u2019t so much feel inspired by Girard\u2019s ideas. They feel like his attempt to do Girard.<\/p>\n
Girard\u2019s books were breathtaking in their range. They were deeply eclectic, but managed to be a mad dash through the western canon. The connections the philosopher made could seem to come out of left field, but at times the absurd swerves were held together by the sheer force of his erudition. Most importantly, Girard was always having a conversation all his own: his work could look like theology, but it wasn\u2019t ultimately that religious; his work could look like philosophy, but wasn\u2019t really in dialogue with academic philosophy. In San Francisco, Thiel appeared to be cosplaying this kind of performance.<\/p>\n
One of the things he replicates is the airtight and airless insularity of Girard\u2019s thought. Thiel seems to take on board objections only to then barrel ahead with his initial instinct. Palaver is quoted in Falter as saying that he is \u201cno longer the professor, and he\u2019s no longer the graduate student\u201d. It\u2019s a funny remark because watching Thiel take feedback makes him seem exactly like a graduate student about to crash out of his comprehensive exam.<\/p>\n
In his telling, Thiel is already a part of an intellectual community. He loves telling his audience what he \u201calways\u201d says, he refers to standard answers and even a \u201cspiel\u201d that he gives. He seems a little bored with himself. Based at least on the recording, the actual audience in San Francisco seemed puzzled by Thiel\u2019s disquisitions.<\/p>\n
Like his inspiration Girard, Thiel is prone to speaking in absolutes that, in order to make any sense at all, have to be quite a bit less than absolute. \u201cIn all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems,\u201d he said in his second lecture. Big if true, as they say.<\/p>\n
What is Thiel actually arguing? He suggests that we live in an age obsessed with apocalyptic thinking (keep that \u201cwe\u201d in mind, it\u2019ll become important later). \u201cIt\u2019s AI, of course, it\u2019s climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war,\u201d \u201cmaybe fertility collapse\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n
His overall point is that the current fixation on the apocalypse gets it wrong in two different directions: we\u2019re too apocalyptic and \u201cnot apocalyptic enough\u201d. Not apocalyptic enough because we tend to think of the various plausibly forecast ends of days as mutually exclusive: either climate change will get us, or nuclear war. The antichrist is Thiel\u2019s attempt to think about the end of the world holistically.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019re also too apocalyptic: in each lecture, Thiel comes back to the idea that \u201cthe Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop.\u201d Or, as he puts it in the second lecture, \u201cthe Antichrist might present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon\u201d, meaning that withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. This lecture is more or less a gloss on Carl Schmitt\u2019s assertion in Nomos of the Earth, that the Katechon was what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman empire. The doubleness of Thiel\u2019s apocalypse \u2013 that what halts the apocalypse might in fact bring about the apocalypse \u2013 allows the billionaire to tilt boldly at any number of big questions: empire, Christianity, progress, and Silicon Valley\u2019s dominance. Each of these, to Thiel, is ambiguous, might stymie or accelerate Armageddon.<\/p>\n
So who or what is the antichrist? Thiel is admirably and uncharacteristically specific on this matter in a scattershot sort of way. The antichrist wants to erect a one-world state, which largely seems to mean any kind of global regulatory regime. Longtime Thiel watchers will recall his preoccupation with sovereignty and seasteading. The antichrist appears to be any force opposing that. The antichrist also is people who are against AI, especially those who seek to regulate it. If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown. It does lead, however, to the insight that the antichrist is \u201csomeone like Greta\u201d, as in Thunberg, the climate activist, but \u201cnot Andreessen\u201d, as in Marc, the venture capitalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because, you know, the antichrist is popular.\u201d Respect where it\u2019s due: that is a good line.<\/p>\n
But let me return to Thiel\u2019s list of possible apocalypses: artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing. Thiel is probably not wrong to say that people are pretty worried about the climate crisis. But the examples of AI, bioweapons and fertility collapse in particular suggest that Thiel has confused the world\u2019s worries for those of a very recherch\u00e9 set of aging tech entrepreneurs he hobnobs with. And the antichrist, too, seems very Silicon Valley-coded. This suggests, I think, that in Thiel\u2019s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.<\/p>\n
Thiel thinks that by both increasing knowledge and particularizing knowledge, modernity has made thinking of the totality more difficult. He has observed there is \u201cthis sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge\u201d. We do more science than ever but without true insight. In the \u201cpost-modern multiversity\u201d, \u201cscience continues to grow like a colony of rabbits\u201d, but since the inputs, in terms of people, degrees awarded, investment, etc, keep increasing, \u201cyou have to suspect that there are diminishing returns,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
So for those playing along at home: Thiel is both a \u201cclassical liberal\u201d who just thinks in terms of inputs and outputs and wants the university to be as efficient as it can possibly be. And he is a fire-breathing theologian who thinks that the university is failing at its job of considering the totality, venerating at the altar of hyperspecialization and postmodern deathworks. He is the libertarian offended at researchers \u201cstealing money\u201d and \u201cnot doing anything\u201d, he says in one lecture. And he is the campus critic he was during his Stanford days, the one who refers to former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as \u201cthe DEI person\u201d.<\/p>\n
How any of that mishmash fits together isn\u2019t as important as why it goes together: it serves as a justification for Thiel\u2019s own autodidactism.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s important to note that he holds himself to a vastly different standard than just about anyone else: he thinks just raising some questions about the antichrist might be useful in its own right \u2013 which may be true for all I know. But then he wants to quantify what everyone else contributes to knowledge in a way I can only describe as Doge-like. It would be difficult to count the monetary value of theorizing about Armageddon, as he is doing while pontificating about the cost-ineffective academic from the other side of his mouth. The rules appear to be different for Thiel, at least in his own mind. And such is Thiel\u2019s odd relationship to power.<\/p>\n
One is reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen\u2019s character comes across a platoon and asks who\u2019s in charge here. \u201cAin\u2019t you?\u201d Ain\u2019t you running the world, Peter? If it isn\u2019t you, who is?<\/p>\n
If we want to look at Thiel as something he can\u2019t seem to see himself as \u2013 as, in the end, a pretty standard specimen of homo siliconvalliensis \u2013 then what is interesting in these lectures is not the amateurish breadth and ambition. It\u2019s the narrowness. Thiel\u2019s vision of the antichrist may not be holistic enough. In the first lecture, where Thiel proposes that the catastrophes we see in the various end-of-days narratives in the Bible are threatening to play out literally in our day. He says we shouldn\u2019t think of \u201cthe apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible \u2026 in a mystical way\u201d, but almost as \u201crational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not changed or improved\u201d.<\/p>\n
But that is surely not what Revelation is about: the end of days in the Bible is in there because it attests to a view of the cosmos, its alpha and omega, its entire meaningful constitution. Otherwise, it is just a bunch of trumpets and locusts and people who give suspiciously good speeches. In the end, it isn\u2019t clear how meaningful these four lectures make the antichrist or indeed the apocalypse.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not even clear how they make meaning. During the Q&A after the second lecture, someone in the audience asked Thiel whether he is moving away from his erstwhile teacher Girard \u2013 which is the central question, though perhaps not for the reason the questioner thinks. It gets at what Thiel is aiming at with these lectures. Perhaps some of their surface strangeness is explained by the fact that Thiel is ultimately engaging in some kind of Girardian play with doubles, mirrors and imitation. Not least among those would be the fact that the description he gives of the antichrist might also apply to one Peter Thiel.<\/p>\n
So maybe getting stuck on the details means we are missing the hidden, esoteric meaning within? But in that case, what\u2019s the point of these lectures? As he warns in his third lecture, \u201cexcessive esotericism means you don\u2019t really think coherently enough about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly\u201d. It feels like Thiel is keeping both options open. He gets to tap dance between \u201cI said what I said\u201d and \u201cyou don\u2019t understand what I\u2019m doing here\u201d. He seems to want to stand apart from his own immense power \u2013 apart from his own positions, apart from his own attempts to make himself understood \u2013 in something like bemused contemplation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Thiel famously isn\u2019t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing. In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[16288,16285,16287,16289,16286,16284,1994,1507,16283],"class_list":{"0":"post-27249","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-adrian","9":"tag-antichrist","10":"tag-armageddon","11":"tag-daub","12":"tag-lectures","13":"tag-offtherecord","14":"tag-peter","15":"tag-reveal","16":"tag-thiels"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}