Transcript of Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech

Two, that it remains our duty, again, Cardinal Newman’s word duty, to watch for the signs that it might emerge. And three, that that duty is now almost entirely neglected and forgotten. Fair?

PETER THIEL: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. Tell us, go ahead.

PETER THIEL: There’s so many different things one can say about it. I think it was Ivan Illich who said that in the time before Christ, there were many forerunners to Christ. In the time after Christ, there will be many forerunners of the antichrist. So in some sense, it’s a type. So Nero was a type of the antichrist, or maybe Napoleon was a type of the antichrist.

It’s someone which aspires for world domination, the creation of this sort of one world state. In some ways Alexander the Great was sort of a pre-Christ prototype of the antichrist. It’s very parallel to Christ. They both die at thirty-three. Alexander conquers the world. Christ saves us. It’s a sort of a compare and contrast.

But in some sense, the antichrist as an idea is something that really comes into being in the world after Christ. And there’s a lot of things about it that are mysterious. In some ways, the antichrist copies Christ. The antichrist pretends to be greater than Christ. Hyper-Christian, ultra-Christian, and then maybe only ultimately, deeply, deeply anti-Christian.

INTERVIEWER: So you point… Go ahead.

PETER THIEL: And then you can think of it as the system, where maybe communism is a one world system. So it can be an ideology or a system. And then of course, you can also think of it as Newman did, where it’s sort of the final dictator of one world state, where it’s still stressed more as a person.

You can leave it as a type, a system, a person. It has something to do in this post-Christian world. It is in some ways related to Christ in a very complicated way. So the theological question you can always ask is, is it possible to be too Christian? And in theory, no. But in practice, if you think you’re more Christian than Christ, you’re in trouble.

Fictional Portrayals of the Antichrist

INTERVIEWER: From a prophecy two thousand years old to our own times, you draw attention to two portrayals, fictional portrayals of an antichrist from about a century ago. Vladimir Solovyev, a Russian mystic, in 1900 wrote a novella, “A Short Tale of the Antichrist,” and then a 1905 novel by a Roman Catholic English priest called Robert Hugh Benson, and the novel is “Lord of the World.”

In both of these fictional accounts, the Antichrist emerges as a charismatic figure, a kind of Superman. Solovyev, quote, “There was a remarkable person. Many called him a superman. He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul, he preferred himself.”

In Benson, the Antichrist is portrayed again as a charismatic figure. He becomes president of Europe. Then in some mysterious way, he’s elected president of the world. But in both of those fictional accounts of a century ago, there’s a plot hole. We don’t we’re not given the mechanism by which this strange charismatic figure achieves dominance.

And your argument is, again, if I understand it correctly, that now, today, a century after Solovyev and Robert Hugh Benson, we can understand a mechanism. We could imagine a mechanism by which such a figure might emerge.

PETER THIEL: By the way, those are both fantastic books. I have a preference for the Solovyev one, but Benson and Solovyev are both terrific books. There are all these extraordinary ways that they still resonate one hundred years later.

So Solovyev envisions the United States of Europe, sort of a European Union, the super state. In Benson, the Antichrist is a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. And I was a bit nervous about Bernie Sanders.

INTERVIEWER: Not too much on the nose.

PETER THIEL: There are elements of them where—by the way, you’re not quite the only person. I noticed in reading up on this, Benedict XVI several times mentioned approvingly the Robert Hugh Benson book, and Pope Francis over and over again has referred to it. So two popes and Peter Thiel.

There are all sorts of parts of it where they have this feeling of being near great literature. But the plot hole is how does a world takeover actually happen? And it’s kind of not a deus ex machina, but it’s like a daemonium ex machina. It’s like the antichrist just gives these hypnotic speeches where nobody can remember a word and then sort of just swindles people’s souls out of them and they submit to this totalitarian state or something like this.

And I think if we were to speculate on how to solve that plot hole, we have an answer in the world after 1945 that people in 1900, early twentieth century, were not yet scared of apocalyptic weapons. They could not imagine anything of the scale that we have by the second half of the twentieth century. And so the antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon.

One World or None

INTERVIEWER: Let’s show this brief video, which we will edit into the show, of course. “One world or none.”

[Video plays: “There is no secret. When a neutron strikes the atom is swift. The least neutrons flick other atoms, the result is atomic energy.”]

INTERVIEWER: So that’s the 1946 video. Everything about it, the images, the tension in the narrator’s voice, the background music, is to be scary. The choice is this or one world. That dates from 1946, as I said, but here’s a quotation from just a few years ago.

From a paper titled “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” by the very hip technophilosopher Nick Bostrom. Quote, “What is needed to solve problems that involve challenges of international coordination, challenges such as nukes, pandemic dangers, techno threats, what is needed is effective global governance.”

Franklin Roosevelt designed the United Nations to serve in some way as a kind of world parliament after the end of the Second World War. The United Nations didn’t work, but maybe FDR was just ahead of his time.

PETER THIEL: Well, it is the same. This is the plot hole in Solovyev and Benson. And it’s an interesting question. What is the difference between the very secular language, “one world or none,” and then the sort of overly religious question, “Antichrist or Armageddon.” And my thesis is they’re somehow the same.

If I had to say what the difference between those two ways of asking the questions are is, “antichrist or Armageddon,” it sounds like they’re both bad options. And that way of asking the question, it pushes us to find a third way and not to just steer from one into the other. “One world or none,” those sound like they’re exclusive, but they’re also exhaustive possibilities. And since we don’t want to have no world, we want the one world.

The Problem with Global Governance

INTERVIEWER: Harvard Law School, Adrian Vermeule, wants big government. He’s already argued for continent-wide government which would represent a step toward global governance. And his view is that if the government is based on some understanding of Christian ethics and you make sure that it reflects subsidiarity, the principle that problems should be solved by the smallest unit possible, then big government coordination, international coordination—this is a good thing, not a bad thing. And you just don’t buy that.

PETER THIEL: I do not buy it. I think I’m much more in the Lord Acton camp that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it would be a power with no check. There would be no outside left. It would be, in a sense, the biggest crowd. It would be the biggest bubble.

Probably a place where the Bible differs from enlightenment rationality. Enlightenment rationality believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the madness of crowds. And if you have a world state that’s in some sense the largest crowd, it’s the whole humanity closing in on itself—it’s a global mob.

So there are these intuitions that are probably adjacent to ideas about the fallen nature of man and original sin that make me nervous about the one world state. Subsidiarity is good in theory and practice. The devil is in the details. And if too much of the power has to be at the top level—if you absolutize things like climate change or nuclear weapons control or things like this, that has to all be at the top echelon. It’s not going to be decided by the city of Palo Alto or by some kind of a subsidiary layer.

I have sort of more prosaic intuitions where I wonder what would be the marginal tax rates in one world state where people couldn’t move. I suspect they would be quite high. It sort of would be like East Germany with no escape. You couldn’t move to Texas or Florida and get to zero income tax. And then I think California would push them higher and the US would push them higher. And the limit of that seems quite bad.

And then of course, if you go down the Bostrom argument, you need effective global government and extremely effective global policing. And so if you think about things like AI technology, we have to stop anyone from programming the AI. And so you have to, in some sense, monitor every keystroke everywhere. So something that’s powerful enough to control the whole world.

INTERVIEWER: So this goes back to your argument in our first conversation that for the first time in history, we can actually imagine human beings destroying the world. That’s quite a plot. Now, also, we have the mechanisms that would make world government a gigantic global surveillance state plausible.

PETER THIEL: That seems plausible too. And I think, again, to come back to the Solovyev-Benson plot hole, on its own, they both seem not that desirable. Why would we have a crazy surveillance state? Why would we do this? But if you’re scared enough of these things, that’s the weapon.

And this is where my speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.

INTERVIEWER: Peter Thiel, the Antichrist would talk about Armageddon all the time. He’d scare people, and then offer to save them.

PETER THIEL: Yes. It’s the First Thessalonians 5:3, the slogan of the antichrist is “peace and safety.” And there’s nothing wrong with peace and safety, but you have to imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things. Then that’s where peace and safety gets you way more than it would have in 1750.

INTERVIEWER: René Girard, in “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning,” one of his books: “The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver.”

PETER THIEL: There are probably all these elements where it’s downstream from Christianity. You can think of “the poor shall inherit the earth,” Sermon on the Mount. Marxist theory is we’re going to be more Christian. We’re going to accelerate it. We’re going to bring it about faster.

So the antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as a great redistributive figure, as an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist—all of those kinds of things. And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong. There are ways Christ wants to unify the world.

# Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech

The Parable of the Good Samaritan and Forced Globalism

PETER THIEL: You have the parable of the good Samaritan where you should take care of people even if you’re not related to them. That’s good to act like the good Samaritan and to take care of people not just in your family or tribe or country. But if you force everyone to be a good Samaritan and you force a borderless world, that’s somehow adjacent. Somehow it’s an intensification, but it’s somehow also very much the opposite.

Scylla and Charybdis: The Twin Dangers

INTERVIEWER: Scylla and Charybdis. And we come here. It’ll take me another moment to set this up, but we come here. We depart now from Peter Thiel’s analysis, and we come to Peter Thiel’s exhortation. What needs to be done?

Step or two to complete the analysis and then leads to what needs to be done, what we need to questions at least we need to be asking. Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus is on his way home, and he has to sail past two sea monsters. Scylla is a six-headed monster who will devour sailors, and Charybdis is a whirlpool that swallows ships whole and then spits them back out. And, of course, they stand for sort of the horns of a dilemma.

That’s the way Scylla and Charybdis get used, the phrase. Peter Thiel, everyone is worried about the Charybdis of Armageddon, nukes, pandemics, AI. Everyone is worried about the Charybdis of one world government, the Antichrist. Explain.

PETER THIEL: Well, this just seems obviously correct. If you think about the language that we’ve been using in this program, Armageddon is not that taboo. You can just talk about that by referencing the newspapers. We are sleepwalking into Armageddon, maybe not in Ukraine or the Middle East, but maybe with Taiwan and China. So there are all these—everybody feels the dread.

We can use Armageddon, and maybe it’s literal, and maybe it’s metaphorical, but that’s totally acceptable. So that tells you that’s not the thing that’s taboo. Antichrist is like, “Wow, what planet are you from?” And so that tells me that the existential risks are very selective of the sort that we’ve given, and the fears about a one world state are downplayed because they are the solution to the other ones.

That is, the self-governing, politically atheist, humans governing themselves solution to Armageddon is what Bostrom says. It’s effective world government with extremely effective policing to stop dangerous technologies from being developed and to force people to not have too diverse a set of views because the diversity of views is what’s going to push some scientists to develop technology they shouldn’t be developing. And so we are just so grooved to the Antichrist solution. Don’t worry about it because it presents itself as the solution to all these others.

And then my intuition is that what that tells me is that we should worry about both, but if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one’s worried about it.

And of course, I don’t know how literally one should take these biblical accounts, but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first. Because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist perhaps. The Antichrist comes first. It doesn’t quite work. The one world state doesn’t work.

It still goes haywire. Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad, and you still get to Armageddon. But that’s what comes first.

Three Possibilities for the Future

INTERVIEWER: As I understand it, you see three possibilities here. Now we begin to move toward what is to be done. One is to end globalization outright, end world trade, but that would produce a dramatic, all but unthinkable, drop in living standards. So end globalization, but that’s all but unthinkable. Two, permit globalization to continue in an unfettered manner, but that would be likely to lead to world government.

Three, permit globalization to continue but only in a permissible, good, salutary way, limited, tame it, make sure it never supplants nation states. Quote Peter Thiel, “Our only chance of achieving good globalization is to be critical of globalization, to recognize the narrowness of the path.” Peter?

PETER THIEL: Well, the way I would frame that is it’s certainly hard to see how things can work if we completely deglobalize. If you go back to this world that’s completely separated and with no trade, no flow of ideas between different parts of the world.

INTERVIEWER: Eliminate the Internet and container shipping, and you’ve got it.

PETER THIEL: It’s easier said than done. And but then it’s precisely because we can’t simply turn the clock back on all globalization that we end up having what I would call this Stockholm Syndrome.

And we, is globalization more good than bad? Is it just sort of a corrupt racket where, I don’t know, North Korea exports plutonium and counterfeit hundred dollar bills and imports Swedish prostitutes and whiskey or whatever they import? And so if you have this view that no globalization can’t be an option, you will have too Panglossian view of globalization.

And this is my critique of the Fukuyama, Clinton, Bush, WTO, the new world order, free trade. It was always abstracted. Everything takes care of itself. It will all work out for the best. And at a minimum, you need to just always think there are so many bad forms of globalization. Our only chance of getting to a good one is to realize how tough it is.

Maybe we should have trade treaties. We should negotiate them. They should always be negotiated by people who don’t believe in free trade. If you have someone who believes in free trade, we don’t need to pay attention to the details. It all always will work out for the best. So, yes, there’s a way I think one should try to negotiate these treaties, but you always want someone on your side who deeply doesn’t believe in it and who is going to hold out for all sorts of terms.

And that’s sort of how we might get our way through. But I think we had all these versions of this, there’s this strange Chimerica, the sort of mythical fusion of China and America that is maybe twenty-eight years from Bush forty-one to Obama from something like ’88 to 2016. And we don’t want to go to a nuclear war with China. We probably don’t want to go to a major war, but it’s a very complicated way to manage this relationship. And simply the Panglossian intuitions that everything will automatically work out don’t probably don’t quite make it.

There’s always a book I like to reference from 1910, “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angel. This is a pre-World War I book. 1910. And it is the world is connected through trade and finance that there cannot be a world war because it would just destroy more than it would create.

And it was a massive bestseller in 1910. Angel actually gets a Nobel Peace Prize for the book in 1933 even though spectacularly wrong. But one of the lines in it was Britain going to war with Germany makes as much sense as London invading Hertfordshire, the adjacent county to London. It was just the stock market would go down more and you couldn’t do this and everyone would lose—yet that happened. And so the sort of glib globalization I think is not going to work and we need to ask a relentless number of hard questions about it.

Technology and Growth

PETER THIEL: I think we have to find some way to talk about these technologies where the technologies are dangerous, but it’s probably, in some senses, even more dangerous not to do them. It’s even more dangerous to have a society where there’s zero growth. If we go full on with the Club of Rome limits to growth, we have this fully Luddite program.

That, again, my intuition is that that will end very badly politically. It’s going to be a zero sum, nasty, Malthusian society, and it will push towards something that’s much more autocratic, much more totalitarian because the pie won’t grow. People will be much nastier.

Political Implications

INTERVIEWER: So let me ask what you’re asking for a little bit here. You said at the Cambridge Union earlier this year that you were going to stay out of politics this time. So I won’t ask you about politics exactly. But you are arguing that we should be supporting candidates who put America first. Is that roughly where we’re going here? Skeptics of free trade, this all tends toward one side of the political argument.

Or are you aiming this at universities and simply calling for renewed, far more practical debate, far more alive to the dangers that we now face that have never been faced by humanity before?

PETER THIEL: Well, my starting answer for all these things is always, surely the first step is to think about these things really hard. Ask the questions that are not being asked. Questions that are not being asked. Maybe the way I framed them are too dramatic, but if that’s what it takes for us to ask these questions, that’s better than being stuck in some weird silly Groundhog Day game.

I think my intuition is the stakes are very high. The political stakes are high because there are a lot of crazy things that can happen. It’s hard to evaluate which of these candidates are better. But it’s not just about the price of eggs or marginal inflation rates or things like this. It is about maintaining freedom in the US and also not sleepwalking into Armageddon.

Awakening Sleeping Consciences

INTERVIEWER: Peter, I have a confession to make. In my mind, when you first started talking about Scylla and Charybdis, this analysis, I wronged you. I thought to myself, this is Peter being Peter. He loves building intellectual models. He has the kind of mind that goes in that direction, Hegel, Weber, Strauss.

Reality is of second order. The real importance here is the model, the intellectual model, because you enjoy it for its own sake. And I do think you do that—you do have a mind that looks for structures and frameworks. But here, then I come across this passage from our old friend Renée.

This is Renée Girard in 2009: “The more probable the apocalypse becomes, the less we talk about it. Therefore, we have to awaken our sleeping consciences.” And I thought, this is not a game for Peter. You are taking this seriously. You believe that you see questions that need to be asked that are not being asked, and you are trying to awaken our sleeping consciences. Will you accept that compliment?

PETER THIEL: I’ll take that.

INTERVIEWER: So, Peter Thiel, I’m quoting you now. “What I hope to retrieve is a sense of the stakes of the urgency of the question. The stakes are really, really high. It seems very dangerous that we’re at a place where so few people are concerned about the Antichrist.”

PETER THIEL: All the reasons we’ve gone through this.

Public Response

INTERVIEWER: What kind of response have you been getting? By the way, you haven’t written a book. I understand you’re thinking about a book on this, but you haven’t written a book yet. You’re still going through various iterations to talking to small groups of people. I heard you give a series of talks on this. What has the response been?

PETER THIEL: It certainly takes a while for people to get into the frame, and then people are extremely engaged. And there is—it’s not like the anxiety doesn’t exist. It’s not like people think everything is quite as normal as it should be.

And I think the point of it is not to be, in some sense, defeatist. This is just inscribed in the future. The point of it is to start thinking about what can be done, what some of the choices are.

And Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, we can envision a third way. One world or none. That’s pretty hard to envision a third way. And so that’s where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it’s actually more hopeful.

One world or none, those are the two options if you’re a political atheist. We have human self-government or human self-destruction. And it’s a choice of two incredible evils. And I don’t think these things are—I’m not a Calvinist. I don’t think these things are determined.

INTERVIEWER: Or predestined.

PETER THIEL: I always believe there’s a space for human agency, for us to shape history and a step has to be not to just bury our heads in the sand or whatever the equivalent is.

# Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech

The United States as Katechon or Antichrist?

INTERVIEWER: So the United States, two quotations. Ronald Reagan: “It’s always been my belief that by a divine plan, this nation was placed between the two oceans to be sought out and found by those with a special brand of courage and love of freedom.” So could it be that the United States is itself a katechon, a restrainer, a force that by its economic power and military might and the example it sets to the world holds back the chaos. I would like to believe that.

You and I aren’t that far apart in age. We both grew up when the country still worked under Reagan. Here’s a second quotation. This is Peter Thiel, quote, “one obvious candidate for the Antichrist is the United States.” Answer that without breaking my heart, please.

PETER THIEL: I think the US is a natural candidate for both. Certainly, the Cold War history, 1949 to 1989, I think Christian democracy was catacontic. Anti-communism was the supranational ideology that stood against the one world state of communism.

But if you think that the one world state is a military power, it’s a financial economic power, it is somehow an ideological power, there still is a natural way where if things go wrong in the US, it would be the fulfillment of FDR’s vision of the new dealers running the world. And so the US is, yeah, it is ground zero of globalization, and it’s ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization. We’re both. That’s why it matters so much.

The president of the United States maybe is the katechon. Maybe it’s a type of antichrist. But presidential elections matter. They don’t matter for the president of Europe. And I think the intuition that they matter in the US is correct. I’m not saying that will be the case for all time, but certainly second half of the twentieth century and still today.

Personal Faith and Political Action

INTERVIEWER: A couple of last questions here. Renee Girard again in 2009, quote, “to make the revelation wholly good and not threatening at all, to eliminate this fear, this dread, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ,” close quote. Renee himself, as you know, ended his life as a very devout Catholic. Has this analysis had any effect on your own religious life, or is it in some way a kind of cop out to say, “oh, no. All we need to do is all practice personal holiness as best we can”?

PETER THIEL: Well, Girard always said, you just need to go to church. Right. And I try to go to church. Renee would be very happy.

And then at the same time, I also think that there is some part of it that is political or social or something like that. And maybe it’s always a way in which I’m not as much of a saint as I should be. But I want to always try some of both. Right.

Both the personal and the political. I think Mother Teresa was a greater saint than Constantine, but there’s still a part of me that has a preference for the Christianity of Constantine. We still need something like that.

Fear Not: Divine Assurance and Human Agency

INTERVIEWER: Revelation is a very frightening book in my judgment in any event. We’ve got plagues and beasts and the end of the world. But at the very beginning, I went back to prepare for all of this. I went back and looked at Revelation again. At the very beginning of the vision that Saint John describes in the book of Revelation, here’s what we get: “Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning, I saw one like a son of man. His voice was like the sound of rushing water, and his face shone like the sun. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me saying, fear not. Fear not. I died, and behold, I am alive,” close quote.

So what are we to do with this “fear not”? You’ve mentioned this a number of times, this notion. It’s always the problem in trying to understand history. What is going to happen no matter what we do, and what scope is there for personal action. “Fear not” is an injunction in the book of Revelation from Christ himself. So Christians are meant to take it very seriously. But you could easily take it as a kind of, “oh, it’ll all work out. There’s nothing I need to do. There’s nothing any of us need to do. It’s out of our hands. It’ll all work out.” What do you do with “fear not”?

PETER THIEL: Well, this is sort of starting to get way, way, way above my theological pay grade. But I think it means something. I think God will work it all out no matter how bad the choices are we make. And so in some sense, in the end, God will work it out.

And then at the same time, I’m not sure that we should always be looking at it from God’s point of view. From a human point of view, human agency matters. It surely matters a lot.

Advice for the Young

INTERVIEWER: Last question. Let me quote you one final time. Quote, “maybe people think about this stuff a lot more than they let on,” close quote. So what do you have to say to some bright twenty-something who does think about this stuff? What should some young American read? What should he or she do? What advice about how to lead a good life when we think we may be in the end times? What advice do you have for a young Peter Thiel?

PETER THIEL: I’m always so bad in this department, but I’ll stumble through it. I think, if it’s too high a lift to go to church or something like that, I would say that it’s important to try to find a way to integrate your life. We’re fragmented in all these different ways and to integrate the knowledge, to connect what we think is going on in your life with history, with our society.

We need to somehow not have this postmodern MTV-like incoherence. And there’s some way that asking these questions is a way to try to—we need somewhat more integration. We need to somehow pull things back together. It’s what the universities were supposed to do. Don’t think they will do it.

INTERVIEWER: After years of deconstruction, you’re calling for an active reconstruction.

PETER THIEL: Yeah. It may not happen in the progressive cult that is the university. But still, there’s, you know, it is really a time for Reconstruction.

INTERVIEWER: Peter Thiel. Thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson.

Related Posts

• The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics – Joshua Citarella on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)
• Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Distorted Version of the Monroe Doctrine (Transcript)
• Robin Day Speaks With Svetlana Alliluyeva – 1969 BBC Interview (Transcript)
• Grade Inflation: Why an “A” Today Means Less Than It Did 20 Years Ago
• Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive? – Jeffrey Edmunds (Transcript)