It'd be bad enough if he was just some random crank, but the fact he's got the level of power and influence needed to actually make his beliefs happen makes it exponentially worse.
Who should take into their hands the job to stop him, and to what lengths should they push themselves?
In his case - I assume most of it is from Palantir these days. Therefore stop your governments from contracting with them.
People need to start seeing power is as much about who, whom as well as a specific government system or framework. Voting, debate, democracy are for people that are on the same team. Thiel, the neocons, yarvin etc are not Americans and not on our team. You do not vote your way out of these problems.
Im sorry, but I dont agree with this one bit. Debate and the spread of ideas that you think are good is really the only thing that is lasting, regardless of which "team" you are on.
I also dont think America(ns) have been on the same team for its entire history. Its not a very recent phenomenon that neocons have pioneered.
> You do not vote your way out of these problems.
Are you suggesting something else?
Thiel is only "relevant" because he's wealthy.
In a system that allows wealth to equal political power, systematically weakening the impact of wealth on civic and political systems is an effective method. Whether that can be done in America, with the current understanding of the constitution and the current philosophy that many take towards taxation/wealth is questionable; but the idea that we can do nothing is just not true. We don't need to slide back into an era of 19th century robber barons and pseudo-aristocracy. If we do, it's because we largely gave up or allowed it to happen.
Unfortunately the political rhetoric have smeared "the globalists" and equated people that want global coordination to limit those multinationals with power, with the ones abusing it. Even the platform that was promising to drain the swamp turns out was just another swamp, so one would need to start from the scratch for that political movement.
I also like a two-pronged approach which includes taxing the billionaires out of existence. I haven't heard any significant downside to doing that. All the more so when weighed against the possible upsides.
I think what frustrates me above all else is that we, as a society, as a people, could have it so much better.
We could all be living in such a better world but for the allowances we make for the most sociopathic and greedy among us.
When you reach an arbitrary score, like $100 million, you get presented with a cup that says ‘congratulations, you won capitalism’ on it and are given the choice of either playing again from the start but this time on hard mode, or keeping your winnings but fucking off to an island somewhere to never be seen or heard of again.
Seriously though, that billionaires can exist, that so much power and wealth can be concentrated in the hands of so few while so many have nothing is utterly repugnant.
Thiel has been obviously and evil sack of shit for decades but more than half of HN viewers revere him. I fear we have no hope, and the good people asking how we can democratically solve this problem makes me feel even more hopeless. Yall don't get it.
Why is Thiel, whose parents were American evangelical and whose own beliefs are described as "heterodox", trying to sell this in Catholic packaging outside the US?
I'll do you one further, as someone from a deeply catholic country: Considering the triggering of Armaggedon in daily politics is seen as batshit crazy.
Putting effort in triggering the end of the world is nowhere on the spectrum though. I think if you told a priest you're pushing for that he would be seriously alarmed, like calling the police alarmed if you hold power.
No, but as a general rule, Catholics don’t and have never fretted about the end times the way all sorts of Protestant sects have, historically. Which is curious given Matthew 24:36 and all the hullabaloo Protestants make about being “scriptural”. And perhaps more importantly, because it has authority on such matters, Church teaching makes no claims about when the end of the world will occur and it never has, because it cannot.
I would venture that it is less than half of Christians who believe in this idea at all. It does seem to be the domain of wild eyed TV evangelists though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
Russia bit of the prophecies:
> [...] If my requests are [not] heeded, Russia [...] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.
I'm not sure it is fair to call it propaganda when it is bang on the money. Even the Holy Father bit checks out, seeing how John Paul II narrowly survived a KGB-sponsored assassination attempt.
> The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
"Wormwood", a type of bitter plant, translates to Russian as "Chernobyl", and Ukrainian "Chornobyl": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl > Etymology
So do the Evangelicals believe that Chernobyl disaster triggered the apocalypse, and that it has been happening ever since? I don't think so.
See also: bean soup / "what about me?*
It is also common among these folks to believe that the end times don't just happen and that instead it is our responsibility to create the circumstances that enable the end times. This can either mean creating a state of instability and violence or creating a worldwide christian theocracy that lasts for 1000 years. Both involve massive upheavals of global systems.
In lack of a better word, that sounds more like anti-Cristian
So, you (not you, a generic you) believe that Armageddon is happening in your lifetime, and the event is the literal moment when God will pour his Holy Wrath against unrepentant sinners in a final judgement as the world wraps up... And you, deeply religious as you are, will obviously go to Heaven, while all the annoying people you rightly hate will go to Hell, to be punished for eternity.
Considering this, is it not obvious that this hypothetical person would wish for Armageddon already? I mean, for you it is the final prize.
I believe these people don't want a future. They want the end.
I think it's built into our selves that we think this way, or it's a common fallacy or thinking error or perhaps conscious decision to state that the present is the most important time ever and so that position brings a sense of urgency and force to ones argument. We see it on every political side left, right and centre and I think it's more easily seen in environmentalism which uses it as a central point. It doesn't mean that the arguments are necessarily wrong, more like it's a (potentially manipulative) way to spur action.
Looking at history and considering the past might be an antidote to manipulation. I'm still trying to find what the term is properly, Presentism and Chronocentrism seems to be on the right track?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysi... Chronocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronocentrism
Anyhow these lectures feel to me to be ultimately based on this - to motivate change according to some desired end. To think of the end of the world happening soon, so you better get motivated.
Like the Bene Gesserit in the Dune novels, long running institutions like the Church, I believe at its best understand humanity and measure time and weigh the present on a more universal scale.
If you've gotten this far and are still puzzled, consider this thought experiment: Today is the closest we are to nuclear Armageddon, we must do something. Many would agree with this statement. Now, think of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 - its likely that was actually the closest we got to it, and so the statement about today is false and so the urgency to do something now is weakened. One can understand therefore that to counter this inherent bias or fallacy is not something that we generally want to do.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter...
A Google search turns up the usual stuff (e.g. his Wikipedia page) and then a Youtube video accusing him of destroying democracy, so if that is what he is trying its not working: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=peter%20thiel&sei=tfWzadnD...
We today have laws and moral separated from religion and institutions that both teaches it to the young citizen and uphold it. But that wasn't the case for vast majority of the history.
How would you convince a tribal person that can't perceive something beyond "good for me & my family/tribe is all justifications required" to act collaboratively beyond that view? Especially if that attitude is also causing suboptimal behavior around him.
Introduce the concept of "good behavior" but there's no guarantee he will follow. Even if you introduced law & punishment you really have no efficient way to enforce it, back in the days.
So you introduce the idea that "if you behave bad,(or your children does) you'll suffer beyond your death".
Just so happen this simple yet powerful idea don't really scale with a complex world
But why though? If that's what you believe and there's nothing more, we know the sun is going to explode and destroy everything and an asteroid impact is likely to happen that destroys even sooner than that, so why does that matter?
Call me cynical, but I haven't seen any improvement in human nature in 50 years.
Thiel has an enormous amount of money. This makes him and his ideas have power, regardless of whether his ideas are crap. It further convinces people that his ideas aren't garbage even when these ideas are in different domains than his business.
1) These are actual good faith views that are inspired by his own piety
2) This is some chess game he thinks he's playing in which he erects the world government/ totalitarian state as signals of the antichrist, with Thunberg and other "woke" leaders as candidates, because they pose a risk to his business interests. "Peace and safety" is a guise and a front, but conveniently, are just bad for Palantir.
3) He is too disconnected for too long and has disappeared up his own ass
For anyone considering investigating, I wouldn't advise it. He's given huge liberties by interviewers to give vague non-answers and is never (rarely) pressed about reconciling his actions as an investor with his alleged concern for humanity.
Maybe people should put some pressure on these outlets to do so.
My point is that it's not crazy, it's survival. It's a feature not a bug.
In other words this looks dangerous, but it's really just every day normality for all of us.
Journalists have a real knack for warping banal things into sensational, ominous nonsense. The implication here is that universities are monolithic coordinated machines with a single voice where all things are organized top-down. Some club here is hosting this event. That’s it. We had clubs at university that did the same thing. The quoted passages read like factual answers to questions posed by journalists to the Angelicum’s and CUA’s communications offices, not some frantic “distancing” or gotchas. They probably don’t care one way or another.
“the Catholic magazine First Things”
Not officially Catholic. Ecumenical is perhaps a better term. Even that word is not accurate, as there are plenty of contributions from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, etc writers.
“an ancient Christian concept of the order of love, received a famous slapdown from Pope Francis […] Prevost shared an article […] with the headline, ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’”
Charitably, Francis and then-Prevost were critical of what they privately perceived as a misapplication or misunderstanding of this principle, not the principle itself. Prevost’s own Augustinian order draws heavily from St. Augustine who expounded the concept of ordo amoris/ordo caritatis. The concept isn’t an endorsement of national chauvinism, but merely that our love must be prioritized and ordered. It is a moral obligation and is simply part of and entailed by the natural law.
In any case, I don’t see any relevance to the article. It’s like some mish-mash of disconnected propositions held together by dubious or meaningless associations to imply something significant has taken place. It would have sufficed to say “Peter Thiel lecturing on the Antichrist in Rome”.
What sort of mental gymnastics would be required to not only convince yourself the end of days is here, but that it's not directly being caused by the guy who is indiscriminately bombing foreign countries and spends each morning have a group of evangelical zealots call him the chosen one while praying on him.
Maybe that we all need to surrender all our data to an intransparent global surveillance tool, that gets more and more connected to automatic killer drones?
Oh and also despise democracy of course. Jesus Christ was on the side if the poor, so the antichrist would be on the side of the rich.
Any ideas who the new antichrist might be?
That being said, I don’t care much for Christian prophecies. Better to talk why than who.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, his views are deeply, deeply heretical. He’s so far out of pocket he’s in a completely different pair of trousers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
It's suitably insane rambling nonsense. It actually seems to dovetail pretty well with Andreesen's manifesto in that evil is portrayed as anyone who opposed relentless technological progress at any cost. If you worry about the economic or human effects of tech oligarchs (Grete Thunberg is named as a candidate) then you are preparing your evil army for the final battle. Seeking to regulate AI also makes you a candidate.
generally holds true soros marc rich bill gates musk thiel nassim taleb epstein etc
On Twitter, in my experience. The 'manosphere' is practically all philosopher-wannabe-billionaires.
archetype is people who sell their success as a model for you to follow while having none themselves, wrapped up as some kind of philosophical position, so they can make money
lots of self help authors, failed vc funds, podcasts
There's some context at the end about Thiels connections to the Trump administration. This is normal for reputable news agencies line AP, not everybody is as keenly aware of Thiel's influence as hn readers.
I guess that's what you get for electing an American as the Pope. /s