Chuck DarwinPeter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by theologians and mocked by comedians,
but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist.
This week, the billionaire delivered his trademark four-part Antichrist lecture at a private venue within sight of the Vatican.
At the height of his power
—with his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency
—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.
He is on an Antichrist world tour, having given his talks in Austin, San Francisco, England, Austria and, now, Rome.
The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir.
Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions:
"Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus:
a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated."
Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism.
He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving
“the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual”
to argue against democratic society itself.
It’s clear that Benanti has done a deep study of Thiel and knows exactly what the billionaire is up to with all of this Antichrist talk.
The priest hits Thiel for weaponizing René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire
—the theory that people learn desire by imitating other people
—in a demented search for
the “perfect algorithmic implementation” of its destructive force.
Benanti points to Thiel’s early investment in Facebook as an effort to create “a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.”
He also calls out Thiel’s love for The Sovereign Individual,
a 1997 book that taught Thiel
“to view technology not only as an instrument of profit, but as a tool for managing the decline of liberal democratic institutions.”
Benanti further connects Thiel’s ideas to the TESCREAL movement
—“philosophies, championed notably by Elon Musk,
see technology as the instrument for transcending the biological and social limitations of humanity.”
TESCREAL ideologies like transhumanism and longtermism are Silicon Valley’s true religion.
Thiel’s Antichrist meditations attempt to put a Christian mask on these ideas, but Benanti argues that Thiel’s vision is structurally pagan
https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-antichrist-circus-smacked-down-in-rome/
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