Peter Thiel's antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon

Summary

Peter Thiel famously isn’t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.Immanentizing the KatechonTo be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admis...