Peter Thiel, a Devil, and a Self Serving Theology

“making all his nowhere plans for nobody"

I read an article in Fortune that set me off. It was a soft profile of Peter Thiel's theory of the Antichrist, and it treated the whole thing as a fascinating intellectual curiosity from a serious man. It is neither. It is one of the most manipulative pieces of reasoning I have seen a powerful person put into public view, and the article helped him do it. So let me take the theory apart in plain language, because once you see how it works you will see it is self serving nonsense.

Here is Thiel's idea in a sentence. The Antichrist, in our century, will not be a monster. He will be a kind and reasonable administrator who talks about safety and cooperation, who builds global rules to manage dangers like climate change and artificial intelligence, and who wins the world's trust before he takes its freedom. The people helping him are not villains. They are climate activists and AI safety researchers who think they are doing good. They are the foot soldiers who build the machinery a future tyrant would need.

Start with the simplest problem. There is no way to prove this wrong. Think about what that means. If regulators are aggressive and heavy handed, that proves the Antichrist is dangerous. If regulators are gentle and reasonable and popular, that proves the Antichrist is seductive, which the theory says is the real trick. Both outcomes confirm the theory. A hostile regulator confirms it. A friendly one confirms it. When every possible thing that could happen counts as evidence for your belief, you do not have a belief about the world. You have a mirror. Whatever walks past it comes back looking like proof.

Now the part that should bother anyone. Look at who the Antichrist turns out to be. He is the person who wants Palantir to explain its surveillance software. He is the regulator who wants OpenAI to submit to an outside audit. He is the treaty, the climate agreement, the international body. In other words, Thiel's cosmic figure of ultimate evil is a precise sketch of every single person and institution trying to put limits on Peter Thiel's companies and Peter Thiel's politics. Ask yourself which is more likely. Did a man study scripture with an open mind and happen to discover that God's great enemy is identical to his own list of business obstacles? Or did the business interests come first, and the theology get built afterward to bless them? A belief that hands you everything you already wanted, on every question, with no exceptions, deserves a hard look. Feeling sincere about it changes nothing. People are at their most sincere exactly when a belief flatters them.

Then there is what the theory does to conversation. If the people who want to regulate AI are servants of the Antichrist, then no honest discussion about AI regulation is possible. Not a bad discussion. No discussion. You cannot sit across from someone and weigh a rule on its merits if you have already decided the person is an unwitting agent of the end of the world. This is the real function of the whole framework. It is not an argument against regulation. It is a way to never have to make one. Call your opponent a legionnaire of a demonic power and you have excused yourself from ever answering what they actually said.

Watch the size of the thing too. A carbon price is a policy. You can argue it is too high or too low or badly designed. Model weights and emissions targets are the kind of thing reasonable people fight about with spreadsheets. Thiel takes those ordinary fights and inflates them into a war over the fate of human history. Once a carbon tax is a spiritual threat rather than a policy choice, you no longer have to ask whether this particular tax is any good. The cosmic story does the work that actual analysis is supposed to do, and it does it in whatever direction he already wanted to go.

I want to be fair, because the lazy version of this criticism is also wrong. Thiel is not stupid and he is not making it all up. The philosopher he leans on, Vladimir Solovyov, was real and wrote exactly the portrait Thiel describes, an Antichrist who arrives as a humanitarian and a peacemaker. The worry underneath all this, that a world run by experts and consensus can quietly lose its moral core, is an old and serious worry that does not depend on Thiel being honest about his motives. And a belief that happens to make you money can still turn out to be true. Pointing at his portfolio does not by itself refute him. I will grant all of that.

It does not save him. The trouble was never that his conclusion is definitely false. The trouble is the method. He has picked the one framework in the world that lets him treat every regulator as an enemy, absorb every outcome as confirmation, and never once be shown to be wrong. Even if global overreach is a genuine danger worth watching, and it may be, he has made himself unable to tell real overreach apart from ordinary disagreement. He has built a machine for never changing his mind.

And here is the part that should embarrass him. Read Solovyov's actual story. It is a warning about a specific kind of person. Not an open enemy of faith, but someone who takes the language and forms of religious seriousness and quietly fills them with his own ambition, who bends a sacred tradition to serve a political project it was never meant to serve. In the story the victory goes to the people who refused the clever deal, not to the sophisticated man who worked the system. A man who takes Solovyov's Antichrist and uses it to sanctify his own companies and his own politics has done something remarkable. He has cast himself, with real precision, as the figure the story was warning everyone about.

He built a theory that can never be proven wrong. It turns out it can.

He is the Nowhere Man, making all his nowhere plans for nobody, blindly convinced that his vast wealth and techutopian vision make him the hero of his own cosmic drama. But in his obsession with unmasking the "servants" of the Antichrist, Thiel has succumbed to the ultimate deception. By Solovyov's own definition, the true Antichrist is not a cartoonish monster, but a brilliant, ultra wealthy elite who co-opts sacred language to validate his own ambition and shields a massive, global apparatus of control from accountability. In building Palantir to track humanity while preaching a theology that brands his regulators as demonic, Thiel has done something truly remarkable. He has constructed a perfect mirror, looked directly into it, and failed to realize that the existential threat he warns the world about is the man staring right back at him.