Last week I was part of a two-part “CounterPoint” to entrepreneur Peter Thiel, creator of PayPal, Palantir, and other successful Silicon Valley start-ups.
Recently, Thiel has been publicly ruminating on the Antichrist in talks at Harvard, Oxford, to clergy in Innsbruck, and most recently in a four-part series in San Francisco. I have studied the transcript of those talks.
We share some positions in common. He is critical of the Enlightenment, and so am I. He is critical of contemporary academia, and so am I—in fact, that is why I designed my own pedagogy over 45 years to teach spirituality. I felt the current educational models in the West make it impossible to teach values because they ignore what Einstein calls “the intuitive brain” as distinct from the “rational brain.” And humanity today requires wisdom and not mere knowledge to survive.
Thiel cites many Catholic philosophers and theologians whom I also admire. People like Cardinal Newman (now a saint and soon to be doctor of the Church), Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac (whom I studied with in Paris), Thomas Aquinas, and others.
I agree wholeheartedly that “Christianity is not one of the great features of history, history is one of the great features of Christianity.” My mentor, Père Chenu, a renowned historical scholar and theologian, held that position as well: Christianity is all about history because the divinity joining history was its core message.
And both Judaism and Christianity were keen on seeing history not just in a cyclical way as prevails in the East, but in somewhat of a spiral way. History has a meaning and a direction that we can influence by our decisions—a direction, hopefully, of an increase in justice, compassion, and love.
Sadly, I did not see that spelled out in Thiel’s talks, however. Nor did I see much evidence of gratitude for being alive or for the 13.8 billion years that rendered our Earth possible: gratitude that Thomas Aquinas says is the very essence of religion—“Religion is supreme thanks or gratitude,”* Aquinas writes.
Thiel’s message seems to be the polar opposite of what Jean Goodall, whom we honored in yesterday’s DM, stood for—“amor mundi” (love of the world).
Today, as I write this, is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: Gratitude is most powerful as a response to the Earth because it provides an opening to reciprocity, to the act of giving back….[to] liv[ing] in a way that the Earth will be grateful for us.**
Peter Thiel, like so many in MAGA, seems utterly stuck in the species narcissism and anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment, despite his desire to move beyond it.
Thiel was one of the first big shots in Silicon Valley to back Donald Trump beginning in 2015, and it has paid off bigly for him. He lifted J.D. Vance from obscurity to senator with a campaign check of $13 million, and convinced Trump to name J.D. Vance his vice president (even though Vance had previously called Trump an “American Hitler”).
At first, Thiel was shunned in Silicon Valley, but now a parade of Silicon Valley billionaires (Zuckerman and Musk, for example) have followed him into the MAGA camp.
His Palantir company specializes in gathering people’s private data and has been rewarded with billions of dollars in contracts from the defense department and from ICE itself.
Near the end of his last talk, he said he is practically unique in talking about the antichrist and the apocalypse today. This is not so: for example, theologian Elizabeth Fiorenza has written a very solid book on Revelation: Vision of a Just World that essentially understands it as a diatribe against the Roman empire in the first century.
And I treat it in my recent book, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Antichrist. Thiel says he’s open to dialoguing on the topic, and if he is sincere about that, I am open to discussing it publicly or privately with him.
Thiel complains loudly about having to pay taxes and rules being placed around AI, proposing that such demands may be a mark of the antichrist. He and many of his fellow billionaires seek to rid themselves of all such inconveniences, not taking into account what happens to the rest of society, who are left to pick up the bills. (After all, billionaires profit from roads, military, schools, infrastructure, etc. that taxes pay for.) He seems quite oblivious to “loving one’s neighbor” or the rest of society and creation.
A strange new religion indeed is arising from powerful places in America.
To be continued.
*Matthew Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp. 41-44.
** Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Returning the Gift,” Center for Humans and Nature.
Banner Image: Peter Thiel at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit, Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree with Kimmerer that gratitude is a way of giving back to Mother Earth, who will one day be grateful to us? How do we show our gratitude to Mother Earth? And how can we invite people like Peter Thiel to join us?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson and Jen Listug
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
2 thoughts on “Peter Thiel, Billionaire & Silicon Valley Preacher of the Anti-Christ”
When I was a little girl growing up in the 1960s, all I wanted was to be a famous actress, singer, ballerina, or concert pianist. None of us ever dreamed that a weasel dashing through a particle accelerator would yank us all into a bizarro alternate reality where a tech billionaire would preach about the antichrist while trying to convince us he’s not the antichrist . . . . and yet here we are.
Yes! The ONENESS of our Sacred World and evolving Cosmos Creation, both the physical and the nonphysical spiritual Beings and realms, creates an awareness/consciousness that We’re All, even in our uniqueness, interrelated and interdependent so We’re grateful to one another through the Flow of Loving Creative Evolving DIVINE LOVE~WISDOM PRESENT within and among Us of Our COMPASSIONATE SOURCE~CO-CREATOR’S SPIRIT in the Sacred Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….