CONCLUSION: WHO IS THE ANTICHRIST TODAY

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The tech billionaire and MAGA supporter Peter Thiel – who comes very close to an actual figure of the antichrist – is permanently attacking his opponents as figures of the antichrist. Thiel, the founder of the data intelligence company Palantir Technologies – the Pentagon contractor whose AI systems are being used in the US and Israeli attack on Iran – is preoccupied with the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” obstructing scientific and technological progress. He depicts those who lobby for tech regulation as harbingers of the antichrist:

“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. The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”¹

The antichrist exploits fears of the apocalypse – due to nuclear Armageddon, climate change, or the threat posed by AI – to control a “frightened population” – but why do we need to evoke the antichrist? Thiel’s combination of Christian conservatism and radical libertarianism is rooted in his background: the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Raised in a German evangelical Christian family, he developed a strong interest in the antichrist and repeatedly used this biblical figure to criticize individuals and public institutions he believes present themselves as forces for peace and stability while they argue “for world government to stop science” (he often mentions Greta Thunberg). His argument essentially goes like this: authoritarian agents have disguised themselves as bearers of safety and security, taking advantage of people’s sense of vulnerability in a dangerous world. When people are convinced that doomsday is around the corner, they’ll give up individual liberties for the promise of survival. For Thiel, this trade-off of safety for liberty is what he calls “the Antichrist.”

A clear enough libertarian stance – however, although Thiel strongly opposes “totalitarianism,” many of his comments clash with the libertarian worldview: he criticizes “zombie liberalism” and “lame libertarian abstractions,” preferring an anti‑communist ideology where “you could do some pretty bad stuff because the communists were so much worse.” For example, Thiel praises the CIA of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s for being “sort of this rogue thing outside the State Department,” which he says was full of communists.

Consequently, Thiel’s stance towards state power is ambiguous: he characterizes the American empire as simultaneously “the natural candidate for Katechon” – the entity that delays the emergence of the antichrist – “and Antichrist; ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state.” So what concrete features make the state a figure of the antichrist? Thiel names “tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture” as defining features of the “Antichrist-like system” of international governance. Thiel explains how “it’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money” in the wake of the Patriot Act, the “extensive” administrative state (the Treasury Department in particular), and the international messaging network known as SWIFT, which banks use to process global payments. All of these factors make it impossible to “escape from global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen.”²

In short, Thiel sees the antichrist in globalization and the regulation of technology, plus “a reluctance to let billionaires make more money.”³ When Thiel celebrates creative free individuals who want to escape the control of the antichrist by way of hiding their money, the obvious model of these individuals are the new digital oligarchs who control, in a monopolistic way, the web. In short, Thiel “fuses his right-wing beliefs with the increasingly techno‑futurist religious fervor of Silicon Valley”: he hypocritically argues that “‘centralization’ of state power and the system of global NGOs is akin to the Antichrist – while also founding/running Palantir, one of the most invasive, destabilizing, and totalitarian companies ever created, and while also funding oligarchs who consolidate power and wealth over/against the ‘masses’ which (in his reading of Girard) are trapped in mimetic cycles of envy and resentment.”⁴

The mention of René Girard is crucial here: apart from the Trumpians appropriating Gramsci’s notion of ideological hegemony and the characterization of our era as a time of morbid phenomena, the way the new Right is using concepts of the great progressive theory reached its peak with Thiel’s reference to the theories of Girard, especially his notions of mimetic desire and sacrifice.

Decades ago, Thiel was a student of Girard, and Girard’s notion of mimetic desire gave him the idea to use digital media to expand ideas and thus control public opinion; later, he also made J. D. Vance read Girard. Even the notion of sacrifice was mobilized by him in a distorted way: while Girard wants to break out of the closed circle of sacrificial logic, Thiel and Vance use it to conceptualize the exclusion of immigrants, sexual minorities, etc.⁵ How? Here Thiel introduces a conceptual couple not found in Girard: competition and monopoly. He turns around the usual praise of market competition as good and monopoly as bad: for him, competition is for losers, while monopoly is good. Competitors are caught in a mimetic desire: they try to do something others are already doing in a cheaper way and thereby push the price down and especially diminish the profit rate. But if I try something radically new, I act as a monopolist and don’t have to worry about the competitors diminishing my profit rate:

“Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend… So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.”⁶

So when Thiel celebrates creative individuals who escape mimetic desire, he is really talking about “oligarchs who consolidate power and wealth over/against the ‘masses’ who (in his reading of Girard) are trapped in mimetic cycles of envy and resentment.”⁷ Plus, his advocacy of monopoly against competition is a clear‑cut case of defending new techno‑feudalists. However, at this point Thiel moves in a direction which totally differs from Girard’s. Girard’s basic insight was nicely summed up by Alexander Douglas: at a certain point, humans

“begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: ‘I have become an enigma to myself.’ Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard rejects this vision as a lie — he calls it the ‘Romantic lie’. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.”

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that ‘man is nothing other than what he makes of himself’. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.”⁸

How to break out of this violent, self‑destructing abyss of mimetic desire in which my (or a group’s) identity can stabilize itself only through a sacrifice of some figure of the other (Jews, immigrants...)? At this point, one should mention that Jacques Lacan provides a much more appropriate account of the insight that desire is desire of the Other. First, he proposes three ways to read it. It means that my desire is always directed outwards: I desire another human being. It means that I want to be desired by another human being, to be his/her object of desire. And it means the mimetic moment on which Girard focuses: I desire what another human being desires – the moment which introduces competition and resentment.

Second, Lacan introduces here a crucial distinction which is missing in Girard: I not only desire what others desire, imitating their desire; “desire is desire of the Other” also means that what I desire does not grow out of my inner space, that it is overdetermined by the big Other, the anonymous symbolic structure, the social substance of our lives. This thick network of written and unwritten rules and customs serves as the background against which I make my choices, and it is important to note the complexity of this background: unwritten rules often codify how and to what extent we are not only allowed but even expected to violate explicit rules. There is no place here to elaborate this crucial aspect; suffice it to point out that the big Other as the third agency in every relation to others allows individuals to break out of the frame of mimetic desire. Since both Girard and Thiel basically ignore this dimension, no wonder that their solutions radically differ:

“Thiel draws heavily on Mimetic Theory: the more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again. So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodelled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.”⁹

Girard’s solution is totally different, a Christian one. The self‑destructive cycle of mimetic desire can only be interrupted through a paradoxical sacrifice destined to end sacrificial logic itself – the sacrifice of Christ, the embodiment of innocence. When we – humanity – do this, the sacrificed innocent victim makes it clear that the sacrificed were not guilty, that we just projected onto them our own guilt. What follows is the Christian stance best rendered by Father Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov Brothers: “each of us is guilty of everything against all, and I am more than all” – a stance totally incompatible with how Thiel and Vance act.

To avoid a misunderstanding, Thiel makes some valid points, especially in his critique of competition. I agree with Thiel when he says that “trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission.” But I would define mission in a much broader sense, in the sense of vocation. Not just rich oligarchs but also many people engaged in low‑paid jobs like caretaking experience their job as a vocation, as something that has nothing to do with competition. This notion (with a religious background, but nonetheless open to a materialist reading) shows a way to make one’s life meaningful without falling into the trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning. In his Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses are those who consider their job a vocation:

“From the conversations I’ve had with the nurses, with whom I spend most of my days, and some of my nights – not having known any before – they consider their work to be a vocation, a calling, a whole way of life. They dress and undress me, wash my body, genitals and arse, cleaning everything. They brush my hair, change my dressings, feed and engage me in conversations; insert suppositories, change my catheter and brush my teeth, shave and transfer me from bed to chair – this is their everyday work. /…/ The nurses here are cheerful, they sing and make jokes, but they are not well paid. Wages are certainly lower in Italy than they are in the UK but they have been doing this for years and, as far as I can tell, want to carry on.”¹⁰

We are not talking here about some higher form of creativity (art, politics, science…) which passionately occupies us, although this is also not a job we are doing just for money. We are talking about hard, unpleasant work which brings little remuneration – we do it because we feel that we simply cannot not do it. There is no place in Thiel’s mental space for vocation in this expanded sense: when he confronts competition and monopoly, his standpoint is strictly that of bankers and capitalist managers who worry about how to maximize their profits. The majority of capitalist managers, as well as those they employ and exploit, are reduced to a crowd caught in mimetic desire, and they avoid the self‑destructive abyss of competition by projecting their evil onto an external intruder to be sacrificed. So not only is the majority a crowd held together by mimetic desire; the new masters celebrated by Thiel, the masters who have succeeded in breaking out of the mimetic logic, invest most of their “creativity” and money into how to develop further the digital media under their control in order to ruthlessly exploit the mimetic desire of the media’s users.

Again, not only is a crowd under the spell of mimetic desire the main object on which the “creative” individuals celebrated by Thiel work; their aim is even to enhance mimetic desire – they focus on how to control the crowd through using digital algorithms that regulate and manipulate mimetic desire. In their kingdom, individuals do not imitate others and compete with others: the models individuals imitate are already defined by the digital space over which “creative” geniuses exert monopoly power. In other words, the digital masters tend to replace our traditional big Other, the symbolic substance of social interactions, with the algorithms of a digital big Other they control. Exerting monopoly power involves a single entity controlling a market to dictate prices, limit competition, and maximize profits, and digital monopolists like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates maintain their monopoly by ruthlessly crushing every competition.

Thiel’s reflections are thus to be taken very seriously, not just because we find there many valuable insights (his attempt to move beyond competition points in the right direction; it contains an unexpected emancipatory dimension), but above all because Thiel provides a very convincing description of how what Varoufakis and others call techno‑feudalism functions as a social practice: through a gap in the ruling class itself that separates ordinary capitalists caught in competition from digital feudal masters controlling the entire space of social interaction.

This is why we should not reduce Thiel to a figure in the Trumpian universe. The US global hegemony is now gradually dissolving, and Trump’s attempts to behave like a master of the world intervening anywhere he wants, from Venezuela to Iran, are in their very arbitrary and excessive form more and more a comedy – a dark comedy, but nonetheless a comedy. The US hegemony was not just a bad thing – for example, it did help to maintain peace in Europe in the Cold War years. Now this hegemony is not declining just because of the rise of other superpowers: Trump himself, with his chaotic policy, is accelerating this decline. However, even if the ongoing Iran war will turn out to be the end of the Trump reign as he practiced it in the last year, Thiel’s vision will remain relevant, inclusive of its basic paradox of fighting against the antichrist from a position which ultimately is that of the antichrist. Is this not the truth of nationalist‑populist Christians? Are they not the ultimate figure of the antichrist today?

The enigma is here: why does Thiel, a proponent of digital control, refer to the notion of the antichrist? Why does he not act as many others do, as a simple radical technocrat who thinks only unconstrained AI can save us? (Not to mention the fact that many big inventors of AI warn against its dangers.) Why does he justify the unconstrained reign of digital corporations with a reference to Christian spirituality? I think that, in a deeper sense, Thiel is right against pure technocrats. Digital technocracy cannot survive alone; it needs some kind of spiritual foundation, and since our societies are predominantly Christian, the most obvious way is to present their antichristian stance as true Christianity – a nonsense, but a nonsense which obviously works. As a matter of fact, I much prefer to Thiel Ali Larijani, the recently “eliminated” grey eminence of the Iranian regime, who graduated in Artificial Intelligence and wrote three books on Immanuel Kant – since Larijani was a close confidant of Ali Khamenei, no wonder we find a book with a big portrait of Kant clearly visible on the cover behind the left shoulder of Khamenei.

1. https://www.ft.com/content/fc1e7e9a-9d5d-4217-b9b2-38069eb1197b.

2. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/

3. https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2025/10/01/i-m-priest-s-should-reject-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-talk/

4. https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1o4py7s/peter_thiel_and_the_apocalypse_of_bad_theory/.

5. From Philosophy To Power - Salmagundi Magazine.

6. https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1o4py7s/peter_thiel_and_the_apocalypse_of_bad_theory/.

7. Op.cit.

8. https://unherd.com/2025/06/tech-bros-dont-get-rene-girard/.

9. Op.cit.

10. Hanif Kureishi, Shattered, London: Penguin 2024, p. 154-155.