Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
> Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I suspect that you may have it backward in a way. The majority of people are raised religious from childhood. There are a lot of people with various religious beliefs that may seem strange to you, but you don't hear from most of them, because they're not famous.
AFAICT "self-made" billionaires are typically narcissists who have no beliefs or principles, because becoming a billionaire requires a great deal of ruthlessness. Thus, it's likely rare for someone to become a billionaire with preexisting beliefs intact. In that respect, Thiel is the exception, not the rule.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry is a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean?
"support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Yes but you just have to make the other side extreme and voila now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time. trying to delete my comment, forgot to never speak my mind here unless it conforms to whats on tv
> now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics.
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
There’s a reason it’s called “fuck you money” and the wealthy tech guys really lean into the “fuck you” part. They seem to think it’s fun. It’s also the mark of a sociopath!
I was unfamiliar with the second one, which is the one you give.
I was familiar only with the first one: the ability to leave your job, and burn your bridges behind you by swearing at your former co-workers. I think that's the older meaning; I found it in a 1970 book:
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Science progressed, but it didn't bring the kinds of physical innovations we expected. At least, not until recently. Where are the flying cars? Why haven't we cured ageing? Why don't we have a base on the Moon? Why isn't energy effectively unlimited and free? We had an explosion in information sciences. The internet is a marvel. iPhones and chip technology are incredible. AI is unbelievable to witness. But why did we slow down so much on physical scientific innovation?
Space exploration is wonderful, i quite saw Armstrong walking on the regolith.
But if we dismantle NASA and its supporting ecosystem to hand it over to the private sector, which is precisely what is happening, we ought to be asking ourselves why there is no funding left to invest: The reason is that trillions, globally, have been funneled into financial speculation, a trend that has accelerated dramatically over the last 25 years.
And it is not just space; the entire economy is caught in this same current.
And these people are talking about the "Antichrist"? It’s no wonder some get riled up.
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
I also think his thesis about the antichrist is actually probably not all that wrong, although overstated. (In a nutshell, that defensive degrowth might be net worse than the prognosis of the actual diseases caused by growth. Citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as the two main figures.)
The core issue with him, in my view, are his openly anti-democratic beliefs, as well as this interesting trend one sometimes sees of the "autocratic libertarians" and sometimes even "monarchist anarchists". He's close with Curtis Yarvin, etc.
He's a giga-libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
In my view, oligarchs in general should be scorned. No republic should suffer private princes in my opinion, the mere fact of being someone who can influence policy outside of the democratic apparatus simply by being extremely wealthy is dangerous to the democratic apparatus. Thiel is a particularly egregious example in my view, because he makes no effort to hide the oligarchical nature of his influence on a democratic society. He even personally disdains democracy, seeing it as incompatible with liberty.
I also think he is fundamentally mistaken about the nature of liberty too. Since antiquity an enduring view of liberty has been the condition of non-domination; that is to say you are free when you are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of an external actor to go about your life, even a private actor. Even a maximally benevolent oligarch is inherently dangerous to liberty in this traditional framing of the concept. Destroying the domineering aspects of the state so he can instead dominate people in a private capacity is an ideology in the service of oppression, not liberty in my view.
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Thiel who's been a longtime supporter of Trump said a few weeks ago that the US “should not have” launched the Iran war and that "there were a lot of mistakes that were made and that US may lack both the hard power and the soft power to prevail". i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
> i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), which (AFAIK) is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
That's interesting. Thanks for the correction and for sharing.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by the "what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a power structure?"
Not a theologian. My understanding is that during Jesus' time on Earth, the Jews were under the heavy yoke of the Romans. At that time, there were many Jewish sects who all claimed secret knowledge and were led by a "messiah" who would deliver the Jews from the Romans and re-establish Judah as a military-political power. The Anti-Christ as mentioned in Revelations and in Catholic texts were a warning to Christians. Christians should not be led astray by demagogues who preached salvation by political or military means. Instead, for Christians, salvation lay in Christ's commandments to love God, love neighbor, and love like he loved us.
> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?
I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).
Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)
Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—Lutherans, for example, consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).
More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)
Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other relig...
I don’t have anything more to add to this discussion but I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate you taking the time to share this. I enjoyed reading your perspective and I’ve got a few notes here I want to go study a bit. You took a fairly thin thought I had and gave it depth, which I can consider more fully.
Somehow this comment was flagged to death, I really don’t get it. Anyway, I clicked “vouch” and now it’s back.
I can’t imagine humans would flag this comment and not your others (like i could vaguely imagine some militant atheist going crazy, but why only flag the “thanks my pleasure” comment then?), so it’s gotta be some weird HN algorithm. Weird shit!
If the highest good is a belief in Christ, as is Christian doctrine, then an anti-Christ that is good in every other way is still evil by Christian doctrine.
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us.
This is very interesting. One other thing I think gets glossed over a lot is that there is "the" Antichrist as you explained, but there are also MANY other Antichrists. The latter are constantly trying to attack the Christian faith by saying they _are_ Christians but behaving very un-Christlike _on purpose_. I think we see a LOT of this happening now.
The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
Also there is no singular antichrist. Samson was an antichrist. We are antichrists when we oppose his will. Thiel is the worst kind of dispensationalist.
AI has always seemed like a convenient panacea for the excesses of accelerationism. An overloaded term in the equation that should balance everything, but only if the right conditions are met. That framing discrepancy alone should indicate that AI is being marketed as something that it will clearly never be.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
> Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is
I think a good example of this is how these guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
personally i think its pretty cool to see that some books from thousands of years ago are applicable to a world the authors could never have imagined. it sure is a lot cooler than detonating earth to make peter thiel and other evil men of his ilk very briefly happy. from my angle, the absurdity is watching evolved monkeys toil to cease gigacenturies of evolution by permanently ruining their home.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is a lot of the theological beliefs about the Antichrist/antichrists evolved much later in time as interpretation of biblical scripture, and are not something that is explicitly stated by biblical authors (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_the_Antichrist_i... for a quick summary).
I was raised in an evangelical religious environment with strong premillennial dispensationalist beliefs. It wasn’t until I later took theology classes at university that I discovered those beliefs I was taught as a child aren’t universal among christians, or even strongly supported by biblical scholars.
Some ideas of Thiel seem to be good.
Everything is fine until you harm the lives of other people.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
at risk of Godwinning the whole discussion -- hitler had good ideas too. Banned smoking, efficient highways and development, shockingly reasonable animal rights laws for the time, etc.
"broken clocks" etc. etc.
and frankly most of thiel's "technology uber alies" approaches seem would be religion couched in technological terms -- he wants to believe he's part of something, even through he, trump, or maybe elon, are the best candidates for anti-christ in history.
My latest psyop conspiracy theory is that Russian trolls wants you to sing kumbaya and direct all your spend into social causes until you are so weak that 3 day special military operation is actually enough to capitulate.
Listening to Thiel feels like opening a complicated mechanical device while running and looking at the mechanism that makes it tick. Its so raw, its beautiful in its own way. It removes the spell on so many things, it gives you the "I understand why those people do what they do now" kick. It relieves you from emotional baggage.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
Thanks for the link. As it was expected, at some point he starts lecturing about "immortality" and about "defeating aging", which goes to show how scared shitless he is about such a natural thing like death, death which a Slavic babushka is way more capable in confronting head-on than this so-called oligarch. And he should leave the "Antichrist" discourse to us, genuine Manichaeans/Bogomils, but with many other things original the Protestants have managed to make a mess of it all. I blame it on they being located at the end of the civilized world, with nothing better to do back in the day.
I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
I don't think he believes in Antichrist, the same way Elon Musk doesn't believe we'll go to Mars. I think these are calculated statements to manipulate people. (The U.S. oligarchs find some of the more gullible fundamentalist evangelicans to be a useful ally.)
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
While there are valid criticisms of Thiel, some of his ideas are wacky and he does come off as a bit of a pompous asshole, however this article reads like a political hit piece. It cannot be taken seriously unfortunately.
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
For one thing, Thiel doesn't need bias against him to look like an evil piece of shit. But for another, hit piece or not, facts are facts. If the author writes about this kind of stuff every week, it doesn't make him wrong.
Lets be blunt. The whole "The End is coming", Antichrist, the "Beast", the "Whore of Babylon"... The whole lot of it reads like a really bad bronze age fantasy novel.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.
I don’t know why, but it brings me a story to mind: A thief breaks into a house, and when he’s discovered by the owner—and the police arrive—he starts shouting, "Thief! Thief!" while pointing at the owner.
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
It is a confirmation, though always somewhat surprising, to see a deluge of facts and diverse, individually accurate citations, cemented together by unbridled opinions, coalesce into something entirely nonsense.
Or perhaps the point is precisely to dilute any genuine discourse with this kind of chatter, which serves to give an air of intellectual depth to the stance of someone who,"having only a hammer as a tool, approaches the world as if it were all made of nails". Unfortunately, he is not the only one who embodies this particular intellectual attitude.
He likely identifies with Christ, seeing Antichrists everywhere, or perhaps he simply uses religion to better peddle his own "ideas." And this obsession with "who is in charge" may well stem from an inability to govern (or know) oneself, driving to try and reshape the world in his own image, just to feel secure. ok,too much psychoanalysis...
I get the impression that this is a story seen many times over the last two or three thousand years.
things now make more sense, thank you for clarifying. in this new light, thiel's vision of transhumanism can be seen as the inverse of catholicism, where both meet at the concept of the soul from diametrically opposed angles (soul = undiscovered solution for some vs. soul = inherent mystery for all).
i like your ending quote, it is a great reframing of another quote, "beware of unearned wisdom".
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 11.0 ms ] threadI probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I suspect that you may have it backward in a way. The majority of people are raised religious from childhood. There are a lot of people with various religious beliefs that may seem strange to you, but you don't hear from most of them, because they're not famous.
AFAICT "self-made" billionaires are typically narcissists who have no beliefs or principles, because becoming a billionaire requires a great deal of ruthlessness. Thus, it's likely rare for someone to become a billionaire with preexisting beliefs intact. In that respect, Thiel is the exception, not the rule.
And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
[0] https://x.com/LouLakeyDraws/status/1488076999105323011
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
It's wild how just having the facade of wealth will get you a following in the US, for free.
Americans blindly idolize the wealthy. It's crazy. Truly a "not get millionaire" mindset for a lot of this country.
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
You haven't done much reading about history, did you?
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
Do you think he realizes he will be discarded?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_you_money
I was unfamiliar with the second one, which is the one you give.
I was familiar only with the first one: the ability to leave your job, and burn your bridges behind you by swearing at your former co-workers. I think that's the older meaning; I found it in a 1970 book:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Deceivers/XoxBAAAAI...
Other books from the 70s appear to have that sense.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Since the 1960s, the worker-to-retiree ratio halved indeed, but productivity went 4x.
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Forgive the rant; better to look at the stars.
I also think his thesis about the antichrist is actually probably not all that wrong, although overstated. (In a nutshell, that defensive degrowth might be net worse than the prognosis of the actual diseases caused by growth. Citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as the two main figures.)
The core issue with him, in my view, are his openly anti-democratic beliefs, as well as this interesting trend one sometimes sees of the "autocratic libertarians" and sometimes even "monarchist anarchists". He's close with Curtis Yarvin, etc.
He's a giga-libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
I also think he is fundamentally mistaken about the nature of liberty too. Since antiquity an enduring view of liberty has been the condition of non-domination; that is to say you are free when you are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of an external actor to go about your life, even a private actor. Even a maximally benevolent oligarch is inherently dangerous to liberty in this traditional framing of the concept. Destroying the domineering aspects of the state so he can instead dominate people in a private capacity is an ideology in the service of oppression, not liberty in my view.
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
Hahaha. Haha. You serious?
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Further reading, nos. 675-677 at the bottom of this page: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), which (AFAIK) is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by the "what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a power structure?"
> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?
I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).
Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)
Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—Lutherans, for example, consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).
More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)
Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other relig...
I can’t imagine humans would flag this comment and not your others (like i could vaguely imagine some militant atheist going crazy, but why only flag the “thanks my pleasure” comment then?), so it’s gotta be some weird HN algorithm. Weird shit!
It was there all this time. I need Dan Brown's email ASAP.
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us.
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
Afail, many antichrists constantly attacking us is not a thing in catholic church or in "normal" european evangelical church.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
I think a good example of this is how these guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
I was raised in an evangelical religious environment with strong premillennial dispensationalist beliefs. It wasn’t until I later took theology classes at university that I discovered those beliefs I was taught as a child aren’t universal among christians, or even strongly supported by biblical scholars.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
"broken clocks" etc. etc.
and frankly most of thiel's "technology uber alies" approaches seem would be religion couched in technological terms -- he wants to believe he's part of something, even through he, trump, or maybe elon, are the best candidates for anti-christ in history.
My latest psyop conspiracy theory is that Russian trolls wants you to sing kumbaya and direct all your spend into social causes until you are so weak that 3 day special military operation is actually enough to capitulate.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
Eh? Eh?
honks clown nose
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
What, like his views on the antichrist?
Just go have a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_the_Antichrist_i... and see what's said directly, and all the allegations of 'well that there looks like the Antichrist', when its someone people disagree with.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
It is a confirmation, though always somewhat surprising, to see a deluge of facts and diverse, individually accurate citations, cemented together by unbridled opinions, coalesce into something entirely nonsense. Or perhaps the point is precisely to dilute any genuine discourse with this kind of chatter, which serves to give an air of intellectual depth to the stance of someone who,"having only a hammer as a tool, approaches the world as if it were all made of nails". Unfortunately, he is not the only one who embodies this particular intellectual attitude. He likely identifies with Christ, seeing Antichrists everywhere, or perhaps he simply uses religion to better peddle his own "ideas." And this obsession with "who is in charge" may well stem from an inability to govern (or know) oneself, driving to try and reshape the world in his own image, just to feel secure. ok,too much psychoanalysis...
I get the impression that this is a story seen many times over the last two or three thousand years.
i like your ending quote, it is a great reframing of another quote, "beware of unearned wisdom".
> ... but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he admitted he had reread a dozen times
Can't be that smart then. Read the book a dozen times and didn't understand the core message once.