Peter Thiel’s Political & Theological Vision

He is also a heretic.  So maintains Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan priest and the Vatican advisor on technological issues.  He unpacks what that means in an essay for the French journal The Great Continent entitled American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?  I’m not sure whether that unfortunate subtitle is a joke, an editor’s idea of clickbait, or a Vatican official just being a Vatican official.

Though Benanti never gets around to answering that question, his essay does unpack Thiel’s complex political, economic, and theological ideology.  Not only a technology innovator and venture capitalist, Thiel is a deep and influential thinker, so it’s important to understand his heresy.

Benanti sees Thiel not just as a religious heretic but as a heretic “against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.”

Thiel cites as a catalyst for his thinking the work of French social philosopher René Girard.  He’s actually a very interesting thinker, best known for his work on the social and psychological function of scapegoats.  Girard, a Catholic Christian, further shows that the Bible undermines the scapegoat mechanism, culminating in the innocent scapegoat, Jesus Christ, who overcomes and shows a way forward from these dysfunctions.

Thiel traces his Christianity to the influence of Girard, but he mainly picks up on another aspect of his thought:  mimetic desire.  Benanti explains:

At the heart of Girardian theory lies the idea that human desire is neither autonomous nor spontaneous, but fundamentally mimetic: we desire what others desire, not for the intrinsic value of the object, but because the desire of others marks it as desirable. While seemingly benign, this dynamic carries considerable destructive potential: when two or more individuals desire the same thing, the convergence of desires inevitably transforms them into rivals, triggering a competition that can degenerate into mimetic violence—a spiral of conflict that can disintegrate the social fabric.

Thiel turns this into an economic theory:

Thiel does not merely study this theory; he internalizes it. He transforms it into an operational doctrine for the business world. Where classical economic reasoning and capitalist rhetoric celebrate competition as the engine of progress, Thiel, through the Girardian lens, sees it instead as a deadly trap: a form of collective madness that would erode profits and destroy value.

If competition is the commercial equivalent of mimetic violence, then the winning strategy is not to be a better competitor but to reject competition itself. 

So in opposing competition, which is the engine of capitalism, Thiel advocates monopoly.

Thiel argues that a company’s objective should not be to prevail in a saturated market, but to create something absolutely unique in order to achieve a monopolistic position. From this perspective, monopoly becomes the only escape from the mimetic violence of the market, the only space where it becomes possible to produce and capture lasting value.

Notice how today’s major technology companies are pretty much monopolies:  Google, PayPal, Facebook.  To be sure, other companies try to compete, but if they are successful, they are usually bought by the original innovator (as Facebook bought Instagram) or wither on the vine.  One exception, though, is AI, with several companies fiercely competing with each other (see this), though one will likely prevail.

“Thiel’s heresy does not stop at economics: it extends to the very structure of political power,” says Benanti,  as Thiel “announces the inevitable decline of the nation-state, destined to dissolve under the effect of the digital revolution and cryptocurrencies.”

A neo-medieval future is emerging in which democratic politics is nothing more than a vestige and where all essential services for life in society — including security — are privatized and administered by corporate entities.

In this universe appears a new aristocracy of “sovereign individuals”: a cognitive elite detached from geography, operating in a cyberspace free from jurisdictions, leaving behind a mass of individuals who have become superfluous.

Talk about small government!  The primacy of the individual!  Private enterprise! Freedom!  These would seem to put Thiel in the conservative camp.  But then again, the withering away of the state is the Marxist dream.

Thiel advocates the end of democracy.  In another essay, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”  He is against all collectivist systems, from communist totalitarianism to constitutional republics.  “The people” are not sovereign, as in the U.S. constitution.  Rather, the individual is sovereign.

What this means politically is rule by an aristocracy consisting of technological entrepreneurs whose corporations take over the functions of government.

Benanti says that Thiel is profoundly anti-establishment (thus his fondness for Trump), and that he seeks to use technology to redefine “the very infrastructures of social interaction, work, information, and security.”  Benanti gives examples:

Facebook has colonized human relationships.

LinkedIn has mapped and structured the professional world.

YouTube has democratized — while also fragmenting it to the extreme — video production.

Palantir Technologies — founded by Peter Thiel with the support of the CIA through its venture capital fund In-Q-Tel — introduced the logic of data analysis into the very heart of intelligence and military devices.

So where does Thiel’s current obsession with the Antichrist fit in?  Strangely, Benanti says little about this, other than to say that his apocalyptic vision is nothing like the second coming of Christ.  But we posted about that last year in Tech Magnate Is Worried About the Antichrist.

Briefly, Thiel believes that the threat of nuclear war, environmental collapse, or some other disaster will bring about a reaction against technology and the rise of some kind of global authoritarian government.  As I say in that post, quoting an article on the subject,

All of this is to say that the public will become so afraid of technology and of all of these potential “existential” risks, that we will turn to a charismatic leader and accept a  totalitarian one-world government that promises to save us.

According to the article, Thiel “encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.”

Thiel has said that environmentalist Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist, or AI safety crusader Eliezer Yudkowsky, or someone emerging from the United Nations or the World Court.  He thinks that President Trump or maybe Vice-President J. D. Vance are the katechon, the “restrainer” who holds back the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7).

According to Thiel’s eschatology, the Antichrist will be followed  by Armageddon, the complete collapse of society.  But then will come a new, more Christlike age, a more “theological” society, which will be the equivalent of the return of Christ.  Transhumanism, the union of the body with the machine, may be the prophesied resurrection of the body.  The medical technology of extending life indefinitely (which Thiel has invested heavily in) may be the life everlasting.

This is Dispensationalism without the second coming of Christ, which, to Thiel like the rest of the Bible is metaphorical.

So, yes, I would agree that Peter Thiel is a heretic.  Should he be burned at the stake?  I would oppose that on principle.  I just hope that our future tech lords won’t take us tech critics–whom he considers to be “legionaries” of the Antichrist–and burn us at the stake.

Photo:  Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Peter Thiel, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115190877