Fear and Loathing in San Francisco

Unpacking Peter Thiel’s very American eschatology

It is evening at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The mostly white, mostly male audience filters into the stadium seating, settles. The stage lights dim. Peter Thiel, billionaire PayPal and Palantir founder, slouches into an archetypal boxy conference chair and begins to intone about the Antichrist. They watch him, heads cast back, chins resting on palms, good students of the Great Man.

There’s something almost penitential about these lectures, delivered over four weeks in September and October 2025— a man performing theology in public, casting about for cosmic justification for what might otherwise look like simple compulsion. He defines the Antichrist as “a luddite who wants to stop all science,” the embodiment of “degrowth, anti-scientific” forces, perhaps a rabid technocrat imposing limits. He warns that stagnation and existential risk “are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.”

What the crowd witnesses isn’t prophecy. It’s the sound of someone trapped inside a doomed logic, using millennial language to justify what they can’t stop doing. Thiel is afraid: afraid of death, afraid of limits, afraid of stagnation, and that fear drives him deeper into the only response he knows: accumulation, extraction, the building of systems of control. The theology merely provides the permission structure. If one is building toward an eschaton (the end of things), if the Antichrist is whoever imposes limits, then the hoarding can continue. It must continue. The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate: he, we, might have to stop.

Thiel can see the contradictions. He knows “things are really stagnant.” He observes that “maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress” (AI) “because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant.” He complains about the lack of major scientific advances since the 1960s. He recognizes that the late 1990s was “broadly optimistic” in a way the present isn’t.

This is a man struggling in a web which blocks not only his capacity to perceive it, but the whole world. To understand Thiel’s obscurantism, we need to step back and look at the system itself: the world-system of capitalist accumulation that produced Silicon Valley, that produced Thiel, and that is now, through him, narrating its own justification for behaviors it cannot stop even as they destroy the conditions for continuation. Blinking into the stage lights, he cannot see that he is describing the world he helped create.

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory revealed that capitalism isn’t what it claims to be: it doesn’t actually privilege anything like a “free market”. Wallerstein observed that markets that are relatively monopolized are far more profitable than markets with many producers who compete on mostly even terrain. He defined capitalism as a system that gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital— where individuals and corporations accumulate simply in order to accumulate more, ad infinitum. This type of system actually requires oligopolistic protection, not open competition.

Thiel knows this intuitively. His famous dictum “competition is for losers” aligns perfectly with Wallerstein’s analysis. But he frames it as strategy, as insight, rather than as description of the hoarding mechanism itself— because that’s what monopoly is in this context: the compulsive hoarding of resources and power, the inability to stop accumulating even as accumulation creates the very stagnation he claims to oppose.

Capitalism based on endless accumulation requires a very specific structure: unequal entities existing in relationships that enable wealth flows from the less powerful to the more powerful, maintained by state intervention that protects the powerful, even while offering the illusion of a free market. The system cannot tolerate either a true world-empire (where political power would override economic accumulation, as in the “America First” ideology) or a truly free market (which would create “self-liquidating” conditions through perfect competition).

The stagnation Thiel laments is the direct result of this structure. Hoarder capitalism externalizes costs: ecological damage, public infrastructure, and the exhaustion of natural materials. But it also externalizes intellectual and creative costs: the innovations that never happen because market concentration kills them, the research that doesn’t get funded because it threatens existing monopolies, the scientists who pursue safe incremental advances rather than risky fundamental breakthroughs. “The least expensive way to deal with the transformation of ecology,” Wallerstein observed, “is to pretend it isn’t happening.”

From inside the system, this looks like mysterious stagnation, like something has gone wrong with the world. From outside, it’s simply the logical endpoint of the structure itself. The hoarding is destroying what it claims to build, but it’s difficult to see this if you’re the one doing the hoarding. Even when the realization occasionally breaks through (wealth hoarders do occasionally scatter largesse to the populace), it creates cognitive dissonance and the need for a permission structure to manage it. While there are many such structures floating about, (the Giving Pledge, effective altruism, or any number of corporate analogues) Thiel seems most comforted by the brimstone of millenarianism.

Although deeply rooted in the origins of Christianity, millenarian thought rose to prominence in medieval Europe and has enjoyed widespread influence ever since. Christian millenarians believe Jesus will return to rule over the earth for a thousand years, ushering in a re-founding of history: a Big Do-Over. It is an inherently apocalyptic system of belief, both in the biblical sense (divine mysteries are progressively revealed at the end of time) and unfortunately often in the colloquial (a giant disaster will take out the sinful multitude and rescue the godly faithful).

Philosopher John Gray’s work on millenarianism reveals how apocalyptic thinking functions as a kind of signed permission slip for behaviors that would otherwise be indefensible. As Gray notes, “Christianity injected eschatology into the heart of Western civilization,” and this millennial thinking thoroughly shapes American utopianism, including the ostensibly secular mythos of Silicon Valley. The idea of linear progress, of orderly and desirable plodding to a glorious culmination, is a bedrock of the American worldview. However, “theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses,” Gray observes. “They are myths that answer the human need for meaning.”

The structure of millennial thinking solves a crucial psychological problem: when reality fails to match the utopian vision, the vision itself is never wrong. “It is somehow never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of utopia. It is the workings of evil forces. This is the classic millenarian syndrome.” There must be an Antichrist figure, an external force of evil preventing the eschaton. Without this figure, one has to confront the possibility that the vision itself is flawed, that we aren’t building toward salvation but toward collapse.

This is why Thiel’s redefinition of the Antichrist is so revealing to his own struggles. In the 17th century, he muses, the Antichrist would have been “a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.” But in the 21st century, the Antichrist “is a luddite who wants to stop all science.” The figure has inverted because the vision has to serve his emotional needs: innovation (Silicon Valley’s great ideological achievement) is now the path to salvation, thus anything that constrains it must be demonic.

This accomplishes a handy psychological function: it transforms any call for limits into cosmic evil. Concerns about ecological boundaries? Antichrist. Questions about whether technological disruption serves accumulation more than human flourishing? Antichrist. Suggestions that perhaps immortality isn’t achievable or even desirable? Antichrist. The millenarian framework doesn’t just permit hoarder capitalism to continue; it makes the addiction to it a moral good. To stop hoarding would be to fall into sin, to surrender to the forces of darkness.

Gray notes that “a project is utopian if there are no circumstances under which it can be realized.” The dream of conflict-free existence through technological means, of infinite growth on a finite planet, of exit from ecological limits through seasteading or Mars colonization— these are utopian in the strong sense. They cannot be realized because they “break down on the enduring contradictions of human needs.” But the millennial framework conveniently prevents one from seeing this. The project isn’t impossible; it’s just opposed by evil forces. The solution isn’t to stop, but to accumulate more power and resources to overcome the opposition.

Thiel’s fear of a “one-world government” is equally paradoxical given his role in building anything approaching a world-empire through surveillance and data infrastructure. But it’s also unfounded in Wallerstein’s terms: a true world-empire would undermine the core-periphery dynamics that enable accumulation. What terrifies Thiel isn’t tyranny; it’s the collapse of the structure that allows his accumulation to continue. The Antichrist represents whatever would end the game, whether that’s political consolidation that overrides economic power, ecological limits that make endless growth impossible, or social movements that refuse to be periphery anymore.

Thiel might take the tech-millenarian framework into a uniquely concrete realm, but he didn’t invent it. It emerged directly from what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identified in 1995 as the Californian Ideology—”a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism.” This ideology performed a useful contortion: it reconciled New Left dreams of individual liberation with New Right market fundamentalism by making technology the mediator of opposites: the computer would set us free! The internet would route around censorship and central planning! Innovation would render the state obsolete! We would zoom down the “infobahn” to an “electronic agora”: a fully open space of exchange where ideas and products would flow freely between enlightened netizens.

This reconciliation, however, required a hefty suspension of disbelief. “For those not blinded by free market dogmas,” Barbrook and Cameron noted, “it was obvious that the Americans have always had state planning, only they call it the defense budget.” The entire digital revolution: the public infrastructure of the Valley, ARPANET, GPS, touchscreens, the internet itself— emerged only via massive public investment. Yet the ideology attributed progress to individual genius rather than collective achievement. Acknowledging the state’s role would (sad!) undermine the entire libertarian edifice.

Yet the Californian Ideology contains an even deeper contradiction, one that reaches back to the American founding. The Valley’s invocation of Jeffersonian democracy (self-reliance, decentralization, small government, individual liberty, and technological expansionism) as the ideal state ignored its original sin: freedom for some has always come at the expense of others— white folks’ liberty came only at the price of black slavery. This is a contradiction preserved to this day in hoarder capitalism: when human rights clash with property rights in America, property rights tend to win.

The externalized costs always land somewhere; the periphery is always someone. Wallerstein’s core-periphery dynamics aren’t just economic abstractions; they’re the structural requirement for accumulation to continue. Someone must suffer for someone else to hoard. Technology hasn’t changed this. If anything, its speed and disruptions have accelerated and scaled it; the Californian Ideology became the 21st century’s Manifest Destiny in which it is simply taken for granted that anything and everything should be run as a business, preferably a high-tech one.

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this “business ontology”, part of what he termed “capitalist realism”, which is both a totalizing narrative and a pervasive miasma hanging over the experience of living within hoarder capitalism. It “invariably aims at making impossible what used to be practicable for the largest number and making profitable for the dominant oligarchy what did not used to be so.” Capitalist realism as an ideological position has become naturalized, seen not as a position at all but a fact. That’s just capitalism. American ingenuity, in this framework, seeks to refute or circumvent limitations rather than work within them as creative constraints. This leads to what I’d call a fundamentally immature cultural psychology: a refusal of limitation that creates increasingly violent ruptures when outside systems dare to intrude.

Thiel’s past advocacy for life extension and his current warnings about stagnation both reflect this refusal of limitation— death becomes the ultimate unfairness rather than a fact of existence. Ecological boundaries become obstacles to overcome rather than conditions to work within. The suggestion that growth might have limits becomes cosmic evil rather than basic physics.

To this end, the most accidentally revealing moment in Thiel’s lectures comes when he discusses Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt’s concept of the katechon— the restraining force that holds back the Antichrist. Thiel quotes Schmitt’s 1947 diary: “I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch.” Thiel interprets this to mean Schmitt himself didn’t know what the katechon was in his own time, and suggests anti-communism functioned as the restraining force from 1949 to 1989, but then warns: “the Antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon.” There’s “a similarity between the Antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures.”

Silly: he’s describing himself and can’t see it.

What if the forces he identifies as Antichristic: calls for “degrowth”, ecological limits, skepticism about technology, concerns about surveillance capitalism— are actually the katechon? What if these are the restraining forces preventing hoarder capitalism from completing its self-liquidating logic? What if the real Antichrist is the person who compulsively, violently accumulates despite clear evidence of harm, who builds surveillance infrastructure while warning about tyranny, who demands unlimited growth while lamenting stagnation, who seeks immortality while building systems of death?

The distinction between katechon and Antichrist collapses because Thiel embodies both. He’s the restraining force that has become the thing it claimed to restrain. Or perhaps more acutely: the system itself has reached the point where its immune response and its disease have become indistinguishable.

This is what happens at the endpoint of an addiction: the thing one uses to manage anxiety and pain becomes the source of anxiety and pain, but stopping is unthinkable because the fear of withdrawal is now worse than the fear that inspired the addiction in the first place. Expand that to the world-system of hoarder capitalism, its structures and ideologies that spin the very air we breathe, and it’s easy to see why what we’re witnessing in Thiel isn’t coherent theology; it’s the narrative of the system itself attempting to justify its continuation. The lecture series is a rambling teleology of addiction— the very voice of endless accumulation trying to explain why it must continue even as it destroys the conditions for life. The Antichrist is symbolic of cognitive dissonance made external, made cosmic, made into something that can be fought rather than something that must be faced. Peter Thiel stares into the abyss, the abyss stares back, he blinks.

Thiel is less a prophet than a symptom. His incoherent eschatology where the Antichrist is both everywhere and nowhere, where stagnation and existential risk feed each other, where technological salvation requires unlimited growth while denying catastrophe— is simply American ideology thinking out loud about its own impossibility. It’s what happens when you take the contradictions seriously but can’t abandon the narrative framework that produced them.

The millennial structure promises inevitable progress toward an eschaton. The hoarder capitalist structure requires endless accumulation maintained through core-periphery extraction. The Californian Ideology promises technology will transcend politics and scarcity without anyone having to suffer. The libertarian framework denies the state’s role while depending on it. The theology of innovation makes any limit into cosmic evil. All of these collapse into each other in Thiel’s lectures, revealing not a coherent worldview but a justification for his signed permission slips that allow the loops to keep looping.

But as Lacan well understood, there is no exit from the Real. Try as he might, Thiel can’t hoard his way to immortality, nor disrupt a way out of ecological limits, nor build surveillance infrastructure massive enough to control all contradictions. The desert of the Real was there all along— he’s just trying to avoid confronting it.