Peter Thiel Delivers Bizarre Lecture on the Antichrist

​Billionaire conservative tech mogul Peter Thiel had once been interested in UFOs and ancient aliens, sponsoring a paranormal conference where ufologists and ancient astronaut theorists plied their trade. Now, however, he has traded secular monsters for religious ones and claims to seriously believe that Satan, demons, and the Antichrist are on the verge of seizing power. In a recent lecture, Thiel spoke about the Antichrist and claimed that government regulation of artificial intelligence technology will hasten Satan’s conquest of the Earth.

​Thiel is currently delivering a series of top-secret lectures on the Antichrist to sold-out crowds at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that Thiel demanded be kept strictly off the record. However, Kshitij Kulkarni, who works at a tech company named Succinct, took notes on Thiel’s lecture and published them on his personal website. These notes were quickly removed after organizers of Thiel’s event told Kulkarni that he was in violation of Thiel’s secrecy agreement—but not before the media picked up the story and the page of notes was archived.
 
According to Kulkarni’s notes, Thiel’s lecture was both a defense of Christianity as a revelation of truth and an attempt to argue that the apocalypse is imminent—unless Big Tech is given more power and freedom from government regulation. (Of course.)
 
Thiel began his lecture by denigrating the ancients, arguing that they saw time and history as cyclical, so the Jewish prophet Daniel was the “first real historian” because he predicted a linear progression to the End Times rather than an eternal recurrence. This claim is odd—history does not require a teleological purpose to be legitimate, and the future is of course not history—but the purpose of this claim is obvious. Thiel argues that Christianity alone is “progressive” and demands we believe that the new is better than the old, for “Revelation moves forward”—a claim tech bros pushing the hot new thing certainly want to hear. Never mind, of course, that every successive revelation, from Manichaeism to Islam to UFO cults have made the same claim to supersede what came before and to be the superior belief by virtue of being new.
 
Thiel then lamented the slowing pace of scientific discovery. A more nuanced thinker might suggest this is because we rapidly grabbed all the low-hanging fruit and have generally correct theories now, so incremental increases in knowledge will more likely be subtle refinements rather than wholesale paradigm-shifts. But for Thiel, this is a “stagnation” born of insufficient religiosity that has left our culture unmoored from an ideology of teleological accomplishment.
 
Into this secular world of stagnant misery, Thiel fears the Antichrist will arise as a “one world government.” According to Kulkarni’s notes, Thiel claimed that “We should at least suspect that the apocalypse in our newspaper headlines is the apocalypse of the Bible. This is not mysticism but simple extrapolation of human nature. Wisdom has not increased, even if information has.” What apocalypse, though? Even amidst Trump’s chaos, the world today is safer, more prosperous, and more stable now than it was in the past. Compared, for example, to the truly apocalyptic in scale crisis of 1914-1945 and the subsequent collapse of the Western empires, it's difficult to see what, other than the elite’s refusal to discomfort themselves to limit the impact of climate change, would constitute a Biblical-scale apocalypse.
 
Thiel argues that the Antichrist will use the threat of an existential A.I. crisis to seize power and create a one-world government—a claim that does not have a foundation in the Biblical text, nor in the early Christian prophecies of the Antichrist. In the New Testament, the “Antichrist” is a type of person who attempts to deceive by falsely depicting himself as the Messiah. It was Hippolytus of Rome who first claimed the Antichrist would be a king.
 
The notion of the one world government actually comes from two sources. One is the non-canonical and heterodox prophecy of the nine suns falsely attributed to the Tiburtine Sibyl, the first and most important Antichrist text, written in the fourth century and widely believed in the Middle Ages. There, in the time of the Antichrist, the Roman Emperor surrenders his imperium and the Antichrist then reveals himself and sits in the “House of the Lord in Jerusalem” (i.e. the rebuilt Temple), triggering the final battle between the Antichrist and Christ. A similar story occurs in the later Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.
 
In these prophecies, there is a universal world government, but it doesn’t belong to the Antichrist. The Roman Emperor defeats the evil tribes of Gog and Magog and achieves universal rule in the name of Christ, which he lays down so Christ may take his throne.
 
The more direct source is Cyril of Jerusalem, who explicitly claims in his 15th catechetical lecture that the Antichrist will rule the world for three and a half years. Reversing the Pseudo-Sibyl’s prophecy, he saw the Antichrist as being the final Roman Emperor and taking the power of Last World Emperor for himself rather than in opposition to him, as the Sibyl had it.
 
The two prophecies follow almost the same progression in nearly identical words, but they invert the role of the Last World Emperor, reflecting two different views toward Roman power in the fourth century. Cyril’s view was not just the minority view but also widely rejected. Indeed, all the major Protestant reformers rejected the notion of the universal rule of a single Antichrist.
 
There is also an Antichrist in Islam. The Islamic version of Antichrist, Dajjal, derives from the version in the Tiburtine Sibyl’s prophecy and is also not the ruler of the world. In later Islamic mythology, he has a white fortress on an island in the Gulf of Thailand where he waits for his day to come.
 
Thiel’s theology, however, has little connection to the most ancient accounts of the Antichrist and much more of a connection to modern novels like Left Behind and Victorian conspiracies about the Pope as the Antichrist than it does to the understanding of the Antichrist in history. Perhaps this is because he believes the new is always better than the old. Perhaps he simply isn’t as well-read as he thinks he is. Given his answers to questions in a Q-and-A session that followed his lecture, it sounds like he is deeply enmeshed in eighteenth and nineteenth century Antichrist literature, which was largely composed of political polemics, rather than the actual texts that were manipulated into an Antichrist legend that isn’t explicitly present in the Bible in the form Thiel imagines it to be.