Peter Thiel: Forerunner of Antichrist?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a fascinating interview between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. For those who don’t know, Douthat is an opinion columnist for the Times, a politically conservative Roman Catholic. Thiel, meanwhile, is a titan of Silicon Valley who helped launch the political careers of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. His political and religious convictions are more ambiguous, but he is most famous for his transhumanism.

Lately, Thiel has become preoccupied with the idea of Antichrist. This is the most interesting part of the interview—and the most disturbing. Thiel says that, in his opinion, Antichrist will be a sort of reactionary Luddite, an enemy of progress and a promotion of a fear-filled “stagnation.” To quote Thiel:

The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.

In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

Douthat doesn’t hesitate to push back. He posits that the exact technologies that Thiel promotes will prove to be indispensable to Antichrist’s efforts to establish a one-world government:

One of the key failures of totalitarianism in the 20th century was it had a problem of knowledge — it couldn’t know what was going on all over the world. So you need the A.I. or whatever else to be capable of helping the peace and safety totalitarian rule. So don’t you think you essentially need your worst-case scenario to involve some burst of progress that is then tamed and used to impose stagnant totalitarianism? You can’t just get there from where we are right now.

Indeed,  Douthat challenges Thiel directly:

You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

Watching the video, it’s clear that Thiel is troubled by this question. The only reply he’s able to muster is, “I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.”

Interestingly, this interview appeared just one day after the YouTube channel Roots of Faith interviewed Archpriest Peter Heers about this exact question. “That is the spirit of our age,” he says:

What do we see from the Reformation especially on? We see attempts and desires for a utopia, an earthly kingdom, an earthly paradise. It’s an attempt within Protestant circles—have an attempt to make cities and places in the 15th and 16th century into a kind of utopia, which was, of course, very, very mistaken. But then eventually it departs from the Christian circles, and it’s taken up among the Enlightenment people. Now in our day we have the transhumanists, and we have the globalists, and they're pushing for an earthly paradise through technology—through this, through that. All of this is the spirit of Antichrist. It’s preparing humanity for the person of Antichrist, one-world government, eventually, in which everyone will be united in this desire for utopia.

Curiously, in his interview with Douthat, Thiel mentions Orthodox Christianity by name. He argues that our belief in theosis is a kind of transhumanism. He describes some early forms of transhumanism, such as sex-change surgeries, which are designed to help human beings “transcend” and “improve” their natural bodies. Thiel explains that, as a transhumanist, “we want more transformation than that”:

The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural. It’s, ‘Man, it’s so pathetically little.’ And okay, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.

This is a gross perversion of the doctrine of theosis. Thankfully, Fr. Peter articulates the true Orthodox understanding of personal transformation in his interview with Roots of Faith:

If we’re concerned not to fall into this trap, not to turn Christianity into a worldly pursuit, we have to consciously try to acquire the opposite. We have an eschatological stance. In other words, we’re standing with our eyes and our mind in heaven, looking for Christ, looking to Christ, desiring to be in heaven. That’s what the Eucharistic Assembly—the Eucharist—is all about. It’s ascending into heaven. That's where the Eucharist is carried out. It’s not an earthly event. And in order to be able to participate in that now and forever we have to divest ourselves of the spirit of the world, and that’s through the whole process of purification—in other words, asceticism, fasting, prayer, picking up your Cross. All of the ascetic practices are meant to purify us so that we can be participants now in the reality of the Kingdom.

Transhumanists wish to unleash the mind by augmenting the body. Orthodox Christians seek to restore the natural harmony between body and soul.

The praxis of Transhumanism is surgical mutilation. The praxis of Orthodoxy is prayer and fasting—spiritual maturation. 

The Transhumanist would perfect human nature. The Orthodox Christian would say, with Dr. Jean-Claude Larche, “There is no such thing as pure human nature; man is man-god, or else he does not exist.”

Transhumanism seeks to abolish all illness, all suffering, even death itself. The Orthodox Christian agrees with St. Gregory Palamas: “Assimilation to Christ, that is the health and perfection of the soul.”

Fr. Peter teaches clearly what Douthat suggests: Transhumanists like Thiel are, indeed, forerunners to Antichrist. Their pursuit of perfection in this life, in this world, is a denial of God’s plan: to bring about a New Heaven and a New Earth. And that transformation can’t come about through man’s efforts, no matter how ingenious. They can only be achieved by the grace of God.

Indeed, what Thiel does is this: he renews the promise which the Devil made to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He offers us theosis without Theos.

Dr. Timothy Patitsas, in his masterpiece The Ethics of Beauty, says this of our first parents: “The serpent deceived them with a partial truth. He told them that in trespassing the forbidden section in the Garden they could become like God. However, he did not tell them that to become like God they would have to die with God.”

This is the choice we all face. To become like God, we have to die with God. Whoever says otherwise risks hearing the Savior speak those terrible words: “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44).

Saint Paul refers to Antichrist as "the Lawless One." Transhumanists like Peter Thiel break a law that, before now, we didn't know it was possible to break. He is breaking the laws of nature, transgressing against the fundamental order of the Cosmos. May he wake up from his delusion before it's too late.

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