Peter Thiel is a big thinker, and these days he’s been thinking about Doomsday. In a series of four lectures he’s given three times, at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin, he’s tried to understand human history, and particularly modernity, within the framework of biblical prophecies of the End of Days. Thiel believes that the Antichrist, whose identity is uncertain — is it a person, a system, a global tyranny? — is “not just a medieval fantasy”. His free-ranging lectures, moving rapidly between disparate texts (Gulliver’s Travels; Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen) and topics (sacred violence; high-velocity global financial systems), defy easy summary. But their leading themes include the Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon and the roles of technology and empire in the Antichrist’s rise. It’s an ambitious, thought-provoking attempt to weave, from seemingly unrelated strands of meaning, a theological/anthropological/historical narrative that aims to make sense of the whole of human experience.
