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Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy
- LogicFailsMe 11mo agoAnd here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?
- solumunus 11mo agoNo the dude is genuinely cooked.
- danudey 11mo agoAs are we all, with these people in charge.
- LogicFailsMe 11mo agoThe federal government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent?
- AnimalMuppet 11mo agoLonger than you can stay alive. That's not just a statement about how long it can remain irrational. Federal irrationality can kill you in several ways.
- LogicFailsMe 11mo agoThat would be consistent with his assertion that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist. Because really? Greta Thunberg is the best that a nearly omnipotent second only to the Creator itself can do? Did he ever watch The Omen movies? Insist on nothing less than Sam Neill's portrayal of Damian Thorn as the Antichrist. In contrast, Greta Thunberg would be the six-fingered AI slop of antichrists. Is he insinuating that Satan has been replaced with generative AI? If so, times are much worse than I thought.
- snapdeficit 11mo agoOdd for a gay man to court those who support Leviticus stoning of gays. Self hating? Or just savvy?
- yannyu 11mo agoIn the current setup, having enough money protects you from the laws of the country and the judgment of others. Thiel is rich enough and therefore powerful enough that these culture wars will never personally affect him or anyone he cares about.
- CalChris 11mo agoAnd that includes the Catholic Church.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 11mo ago"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
- philipallstar 11mo agoThere's no point misrepresenting a political stance. Well, there is a point, but it's malicious.
- mindslight 11mo agoPersonally I find that quote tired and trite. But so-called "conservatives" could certainly stand to clear up the matter by articulating what their constructive political stances actually are these days - that is beyond merely vice signalling, performative cruelty, and a cult of personality around Dear Leader. As a libertarian, I certainly have my problems with the progressive orthodoxy. But every time I've tried to work out current conservative principles, by generally appealing to what they claim to be, I've basically just gotten a brush off of why those traditional ideals are not applicable and then a bunch of whataboutism to justify why they have to kill our society to purportedly save it.
- rsynnott 11mo agoNot everything is a conspiracy; sometimes a crazy person is just a crazy person.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agopeter thiel, however, is in the business of conspiracies
- poszlem 11mo agoI mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.
- danudey 11mo agoNice "both sides" argument, very subtle.
- qwerpy 11mo agoWhen one side of crazies goes after a different side of crazies, “both sides are crazy” is an appropriate way to look at it.
- micromacrofoot 11mo agoI guess if you want to completely abandon nuance... but at that point everyone is some variety of crazy. Half the US believes in ghosts.
- numbers_guy 11mo agoThere is obviously a huge difference between fascist-aspiring westerners and communist-aspiring westerners. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Tankies are crazy and I don't approve of their ideology, but they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population.
- lowkey_ 11mo ago> they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population They dehumanize and kill everyone equally. I think the West (US especially) has a great system of government figured out, and I wouldn't try to say any group attempting to break that is better than another. It's not disingenuous to say that both are authoritarians who kill millions.
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- fidotron 11mo ago> This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated. The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.
- js8 11mo agoI downvoted you. It's well-known that The Jacobin is named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins.
- shadowtree 11mo agoWhich in turn were named after the original Jacobins. ...and man, did Haiti turn out to be a perfect example of Third-Worldism. Ethnocide, ecological disaster, full on regression into a post-civilizational nightmare.
- jmathai 11mo agoMaybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
- lm28469 11mo agoOn the contrary, people should talk about these parasites more so we can get rid of them, they thrive in the shadows
- bananapub 11mo agoyou should care, he and his fellow nutters have siezed control of the USA and most tech-mega-corp leadership either agree with them or will go along with them.
- throw310822 11mo agoThis is the article's second sentence: "Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
- robertkoss 11mo agoThe problem that this article has is essentially this: > Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza. Thiel is IMO not doing this for profit. He is deeply ideological, which should be more worrisome.
- shevy-java 11mo agoHe 100% uses this for profit. Why does he not give away his money? It is profit. The craziness is just the cover for it.
- philipallstar 11mo ago> He 100% uses this for profit. Why does he not give away his money? You haven't given away your money. Does that mean everything you do (including writing the above comment) is for profit?
- galleywest200 11mo agoSure, but I don't profit from wars.
- BugsJustFindMe 11mo agoEverything else aside, this is a really stupid comparison. A multi-billionaire giving away even 99% of their billions of dollars is not the same as any normal person giving away a substantially smaller percentage of their money. Thiel can give away 99% of his money and would still have hundreds of millions of dollars left, which is already quite literally more money than any normal person can spend in their entire lifetime. Even at only 3% interest, he would get more interest money alone per year than the income of almost anyone on the planet.
- philipallstar 11mo ago> which is already quite literally more money than any normal person can spend in their entire lifetime They don't spend it - if you think someone with a net worth of X has that money in cash then you need to go to school. Even if they did - that's a greedy person's way of thinking. They invest money they do have, which employs people and pushes world R&D forwards.
- sd9 11mo agoThiel's ramblings seem so unhinged, delusions of grandeur. I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.
- exogeny 11mo agoAt a certain threshold of wealth, you stop having anyone around you that will tell you anything other than platitudes about how great and wonderful you are. If he ever had any self-awareness or humility -- and that is questionable -- it's been Dunning Krugered and yes-manned into absolute shreds. He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
- drcongo 11mo agoThere's a timecube level of unhinged to his antichrist ramblings - spurious connections steadfastly believed. If he wasn't a billionaire there would be men in white coats chasing him.
- rsynnott 11mo ago> I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out. Fortunately, Silicon Valley has now provided a machine to do that for you. I'd be somewhat concerned that this type of severe detachment from reality may become more common as LLMs make the obsequious ego-buffing that was previously available only to billionaires too cheap to meter.
- flag_fagger 11mo ago> I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out Why not, it’s not as if you’d face any real consequences for your own reckless stupidity.
- JohnFen 11mo agoBecause I like to be able to live with myself.
- akomtu 11mo ago> Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion ... into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization. Thiel warns about Antichrist, while doing the very thing that's enabling his coming. Unrestrained technological expansion is exactly what's erasing the human spirit and replacing it with a machine culture.
- bryanlarsen 11mo agoSupposedly Thiel's earlier writings warn about an Antichrist that sounds very similar to the Thiel and Musk of 2025. OTOH Thiel's current writing claims the antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agostandard right-wing "blame them before they're able to blame us (cuz we're actually guilty af)"
- cowpig 11mo agoYou are right. It is a classic tactic of fascism, called [accusation in a mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror)
- exogeny 11mo agoLike anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities. The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.
- DudeOpotomus 11mo agoHubris. It will end him, and his insanely stupid ideology. He is obviously a sociopath with very deep childhood trauma. Karma will get him. Probably cancer as he seems to be genially rotten soul.
- BugsJustFindMe 11mo agoI don't think cancer works that way. Also there's no such thing as karma, at least not within a person's lifetime. That much should be extremely obvious by the consequence-free success of a great many sociopaths.
- shevy-java 11mo agoHis ramblings aren't that relevant. The problem is that the money is used to get influence; we could see this with Musk too. Something has to change. The superrich act as parasites and broken all inter-generational promises. The USA really messed up here - they should have put down control systems to prevent this parasitic situation.
- browningstreet 11mo agoYour first sentence is belied by everything else you wrote. Saying weird/extreme shit and then building a movement is a way of qualifying initiates and those willing to rally to the cause. It's part of the cult programming playbook. You build an in-crowd and you aim their energies at the out-crowd. It often leads to more unhinged positions too.. these things don't self-correct. Thiel's a loon, Elon's a loon, Trump's a loon, Vought's a loon. Pointed dismissiveness completely misses the point.
- ajuc 11mo agoMedia without regulation = oligarchy.
- kcplate 11mo agoBut how many people is he actually influencing?. His primary audience is probably more like the folks in the HN community and no one here seems to be taking these ramblings seriously. A half dozen preachers at medium to large congregations reach and influence far more people with these kind of ideas without his billions and press at their disposal. He’s actually small potatoes in this apocalypse space. I say let him talk, who cares?
- yoyohello13 11mo agoI would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain. The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
- okokwhatever 11mo agoI fact I think exactly the opposite observing how the nations are ruling their people.
- palmotea 11mo ago> I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain. IMHO, that's the obvious end-state of AGI: the economy eats the world and a few trillionaires sitting atop AGI armies control the economy, and nearly everyone else becomes powerless, irrelevent, and eventually "ended."
- jhbadger 11mo agoThe problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products. Henry Ford was a terrible person in many ways, but his idea of paying his auto workers decently so they could afford to buy the Model T's they were building was not only good for the workers but smart business.
- adolph 11mo agoIf you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions. This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by international law.
- relaxing 11mo agoYou’re allowed to use ad hominem when you’re writing a profile feature. Addressing the man is kind of the point :)
- aeternum 11mo ago[flagged]
- havblue 11mo agoWhile it's possible this is true, I would have preferred that the article make its own case on why Thiel is crazy and not just cite the Guardian. The article is written for someone who already agrees with the title.
- relaxing 11mo agoJacobin magazine is a leftist partisan publication, so yeah.
- linuxhansl 11mo agoHmm... If anybody meets the definition of his antichrist, it might be him. The notion that there is an antichrist and that "international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise" is ludicrous. The only reason we listen to his nonsense is because he has money, and with that comes power in this country. I suggest he take some shrooms and chill...
- tech_ken 11mo ago> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world. I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
- relaxing 11mo agoI think the author assumes a basic familiarity with the subject. FYI Thiel is chairman and co-founder of Palantir.
- tech_ken 11mo agoOkay :) I actually do have a pretty deep familiarity with all of this and that's why I'm criticizing the article. It felt like a rehash of known facts (Thiel is a christian fascist, his company Palantir does innovatively horrible stuff), rather than drawing new connections between those known facts. At a fine-grain I want to know how his ideology underpins the business decisions of his company, I don't need someone to gesture at the two together and mumble something about eschatology.
- drcongo 11mo agoI think we (and probably HN in general) aren't the target audience here. Last time I met up with some non-tech friends, Peter Thiel came up a lot in the pub chat - a year ago I'm not sure they would have known who he is. The more people outside of tech who understand what a deranged loon he really is, the better.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
- codr7 11mo agoThiel is a creepy fuck, as are most tech bros. I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.
- breppp 11mo agoLeft wing magazine discovers metaphor; confuses it for Nazism
- smallnix 11mo agoDo you mean cause Thiel says he based the core of his beliefs on Schmitts teachings, a fervent nazi? Don't get the connection otherwise.
- Uhhrrr 11mo agoTo me this piece just looks like someone who hates wealth and willfully misunderstands metaphors.
- smallnix 11mo agoI recommend to read the source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
- Uhhrrr 11mo agoThis supports my initial reaction. The "antichrist" indicators he points to are things like authoritarianism and homogenization, not burning bushes and bints with swords.
- Hikikomori 11mo agoSeems like any time posts about Thiel and a few other billionaires gain traction it flies off the front page quickly.
- zingababba 11mo agoIt's crazy how this is trickling down. I work with someone who has recently started openly talking about the antichrist and is convinced the final revelation is going to occur. This person has always been loony but it seems to be going into hyperdrive.
- noman-land 11mo agoAsk this person to give you all their stuff since they won't be needing it anymore.
- TrnsltLife 11mo agoIt's a normal part of Christian belief and biblical teaching, e.g. 1 John 2:18, 22: 18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour. ... 22 Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son. It has also always been a Christian belief that Jesus will return, the current world system will end, and God will establish new heavens and a new earth. 2 Peter 3 talks about this. It's too long to quote the whole chapter but here are some call outs. https://biblehub.com/bsb/2_peter/3.htm https://biblehub.com/bsb/2_peter/3.htm 4 “Where is the promise of His coming?” they will ask. “Ever since our fathers fell asleep, everything continues as it has from the beginning of creation.” ... 8 Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance.
- amai 11mo agoFossil fuel is the real antichrist! "Dozens of churches withdraw investments from fossil fuels" https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw-investments-fossil-141142881.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw...
- StoneAndSky 11mo agoWould that the mainstream press had treated the Gawker episode as the five-alarm free speech fire that it was.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agogawker was a piece of shit rag-bag that 100% got what it deserved. that it came from assholes instead of the righteous doesn't change that they deserved their curbstomp.
- RickJWagner 11mo agoFor anyone wondering about the source, here is how Jacobin describes themselves: “ Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. ”
- tsoukase 11mo agoWhatever he or his political servants believe, in a few years the Democrats will reign and he will be forgotten.
- IAmGraydon 11mo agoSometimes I wonder - do vast amounts of wealth and power precipitate mental illness in certain minds that are predisposed to it?
- TrnsltLife 11mo agoI don't think Thiel or Schmitt (whoever that really is) are good spokesmen for the Christian doctrines of the antichrist or the restrainer, concepts that go back to the first century early church. I also don't much like the implication that believing in these Christian ideas is extremely dangerous or the undertone that believing it should probably be stopped by any means. The restrainer (2 Thessalonians 2:6&7) is a bit of an enigma, but has been variously interpreted as the Holy Spirit, the Church, human government, or the archangel Michael. But to let Scripture speak for itself, here is an except from 2 Thessalonians 2: 1 Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to Him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily disconcerted or alarmed by any spirit or message or letter seeming to be from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has already come. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness—the son of destruction—is revealed. 4 He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So he will seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. 5 Do you not remember that I told you these things while I was still with you? 6 And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now restrains it will continue until he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and annihilate by the majesty of His arrival. 9 The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, 10 and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. 11 For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, 12 in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness.