Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech

Comments · 339

• RA

  @rampartranger7749 · 1 year ago

  At the age of 18, my  eloquent biology instructor, who I thought was brilliant, told us that except for accidents, we would never die. I’m in my 8th decade of life. Should I ask for a tuition refund?

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• SH

  @sharonwagner7742 · 1 year ago

  I wonder if Thiel knows the word apocalyptic comes from a Greek word meaning "to unveil"?

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• MI

  @MitchellPorter2025 · 1 year ago

  A lot of commenters seem perplexed as to what he&apos;s saying. Partly it&apos;s because I think he&apos;s not sure how to tie it all together himself. On the one hand, he&apos;s taking a historical view and saying, today&apos;s western civilization is an heir to Christian civilization, and concepts like progress and the end of the world are somehow descended from Christian teleology and eschatology, and that was a paradigm shift from pagan antiquity, which believed more in eternal cycles. <br><br>Then on the other hand, he&apos;s trying to deal with the various apocalypses of technological modernity, real, possible, and imagined, everything from Hiroshima and the Holocaust to death by AI or by climate change. And while he has some worry about these existential risks, he&apos;s also worried that in order to deal with them, there will be a totalitarian world government, and he proposes that this too has its counterpart in Christian eschatology, possibly the Antichrist. <br><br>But then he also brings up this quite obscure biblical term &quot;Katechon&quot;, which is something that holds back the Antichrist until the true end arrives. It is apparently a role that both Catholic and Orthodox churches have assigned to themselves. It also appears in the thought of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi-era political philosopher whose ideas have some currency in today&apos;s post-conservative intellectual right-wing. I don&apos;t know the role it plays in Schmitt&apos;s thought, but he lives through Germany&apos;s mid-20th-century apocalypse - in which Germany first embraced the fascist cult of Hitler, and was then devastated along with most of Europe in a new world war - so I assume he was falling back on the older categories of religious thought, in order to understand what had happened to his civilization. <br><br>So part 2 may reveal the punchline, that this odd attempt to apply biblical categories to the nightmares of 21st-century technical civilization, is another chapter in the Trump-era right-wing&apos;s search for a philosophical alternative to liberalism and socialism.

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• DA

  @davidnikoloff3211 · 1 year ago

  Rules to live by. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/624">#624</a>: When you face eternity or serious change in your life, it is best to go back to the original sources for guidance.

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• AN

  @anthonygoodman48 · 1 year ago

  All our knowlege brings us near to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death, no nearer to God. Where the the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

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• JE

  @jeffreykalb9752 · 1 year ago

  My critique of Peter Thiel is similar to my critique of Jordan Peterson. Both have a kind of sociological understanding of things, Thiel from a technological basis, Peterson from a psychological basis. However, neither really seems to have anything resembling a metaphysical understanding of reality. That, I suppose, is just a result of our truncated education today. This leads them to have oftentimes truthful but superficial analyses.

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• JO

  @jonscottharp9591 · 1 year ago

  “The return of the mythical within the equations of the physicists.”

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• DR

  @drj602 · 1 year ago

  I believe the loss of optimism regarding AI is simply a reflection of lack of confidence in humankind in general.

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• FR

  @FrankieDaBat · 1 year ago

  I can’t wait

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• CO

  @conniekampas7074 · 1 year ago

  I’ll have to listen to Whitney Webb podcast again &nbsp;regarding what Mr thiel plans for Americans future. Didn’t sound promising

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• QU

  @quivalla · 1 year ago

  People want to understand the dark sayings of old, but they do not comprehend what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions

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• TI

  @timber-rider · 2 months ago

  One existential risk not mentioned is that of escalating population collapse because young people do not take steps to reproduce. There are a growing number of reasons this is occurring.

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