Where is Peter Thiel in this moment?

Peter Thiel is either dead, imprisoned, a liar, or intellectually inept.

From the last page of The Straussian Moment, which I consider to be Peter Thiel’s magnum opus work of political philosophy:

“But also there cannot be a decision to avoid all decisions and to retreat into studying the Bible in anticipation of the Second Coming, for then one will have ceased to be a statesman or stateswoman.”

What a strange sentence. What does he mean?

The opening paragraph of this final segment of the essay addresses the fact that the modern age, even if it is in twilight, still exists. At the beginning of the essay, he says that the 9/11 terrorist attacks called into question the modern age, with its “emphasis on deterrent armies, rational nation-states, public debates and international diplomacy.” Further, in the middle of the essay he highlights that the inconsistencies apparent from Enlightenment thinkers could possibly be bridged with “Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” This line is much more interesting in the context of Palantir, the privately-held global data analysis corporation that Peter Thiel cofounded.

Returning to the my first point, in the final section of the essay Peter asks: “what then must be done by the Christian statesmen or stateswoman aspiring to be a wise steward for our time?”

His response is to highlight the problems with Carl Schmitt’s thinking and John Locke’s Enlightenment era thinking (which summarize Peter’s prior points in the essay), before then making this strange statement that one cannot retreat into making no decisions and studying the Bible and the apocalypse, where one would not just stop being a Christian statesman or stateswoman, but would stop being any kind of statesman or stateswoman.

And yet, at the very moment that Palantir seems to be globally integrated into governments and corporations alike, and we seem to be on the edge of a new era of Artificial Intelligence personal tools and corporations and weapons, Peter is out in the world doing the very thing that he highlights a statesman or stateswoman would not be doing — talking about Bible verses and the antichrist. Why is he not instead talking more publicly about the problems of artificial intelligence, which are partially addressed in Alex Karp’s new book the Technological Republic?

Returning to analysis of The Straussian Moment essay — Immediately after not using the term Christian in the sentence highlight above, he then picks up the language of Christian statesman or stateswoman in the paragraph after this, guiding Christian statesmen and stateswomen to diverge from Leo Strauss’s thinking in one key respect, which is to remember that at some point in the future “all will be revealed, all injustices exposed, and those who perpetrated them will be held to account.”

Further, he declares that a Christian statesman or stateswoman, in any close case where violence can be deployed to resolve a problem, should always choose the path of peace. Finally, he points out that what qualifies as a “close case” is impossible to define with a formula, but is clear that the decisions made may accumulate into a destiny for the post-modern world, which could be much worse or much better than the modern world. His specific description of much worse is “the limitless violence of runaway mimesis”, and his specific description of much better is “the peace of the kingdom of God”.

Both of these are, importantly, conceptual spaces with extensive support of new books and research that compare learnings in the present moment to centuries of scholarship and tradition.

To unpack the meaning of these final points of Peter’s essay, we must think carefully and also compare between multiple texts and the very actions of Peter’s life. Why?

1. Peter concludes his foundational discussion of political philosophy by highlighting the work of Rene Girard as “The End of the City of Man.” Girard discovered theories of mimesis that show that imitation is foundational to both human behavior and human institutions. That means two things: 1) any actions that one takes will be imitated by others (either positively or negatively) and 2) anyone who realizes this (especially a Christian who believes in final judgement, which Peter highlights in the paragraphs above) must live their life extremely carefully and design and guide institutions as to minimize mimetic conflict (or at least attempt to steer mimetic dynamics into a productive direction). In short, if one believes in truth and final judgement (regardless of if one is atheist, Christian, or any other religious believer), then align actions with words, and align both actions and words and the way one lives one’s life with the confidence that one will be imitated, and one will be held to account on how one lives. Girard himself advocated this exact point of needing to live one’s life carefully. Girard is also famous for deriving his theory from intertextual comparisons of literature, a point that is important to note when considering Leo Strauss’s explanation of the need for esoteric writing. I do not think Girard was a Straussian, but I am stating clearly that I think Girard helps us to read any book or essay in a way that Strauss would approve of, by not just thinking about multiple layers of any one text, but to also by comparing it to other texts of the same author or that the author references and of other authors during and before a given book author’s time period.

2. Strauss advocates several philosophical points, which Peter clearly states that we should follow with the exception of always remembering that “all will be revealed” and briefly stating what follows from that for Christian statesmen and stateswomen. This means that the one thing we should not follow with Strauss is his program of hiding things, or at least hiding things with the view that they can or should always remain hidden. Can we say that Peter is advocating the use of hiding something with the knowledge or design that one day it will become exposed if it could be politically advantageous? Perhaps. One point of Leo Strauss’s that Peter doesn’t seem to disagree with is the need to write carefully and at times esoterically, specifically in order to avoid being attacked and destroyed politically. Or, just as a way to best get across a truth to smart individuals. Another key point from Strauss is that he advocated rule of cities and states by hidden philosopher kings, a point that Strauss develops from his readings of Al Farabi. Peter makes direct reference in Straussian Moment to books that discuss this exact point. 

3. Peter has stated in an article or interview in 2015: “I remember a professor once told me back in the ’80s that writing a book was more dangerous than having a child because you could always disown a child if it turned out badly…You could never disown anything that you’ve written.” Further, he then addresses a contentious idea and gives an updated perspective. He uses the term “updated version”, but he does not reject either the point or his original point. 

4. Finally, understanding that Peter’s actions have been very carefully executed over many years, and under the influence of the ideas he writes about, one can also raise that Peter has publicly espoused many times being a chess player, and then further having built both a monopoly of a business (PayPal) and a mafia of former business associates. Further, in Zero to One he talks about the similarity between Kings and Founders, and how a well-run monopoly business works both because of creative problem solving and because the company is operated as a kind of kingship or queenship with the founder(s) at the helm.

So why am I now raising it as important that Peter made a point about retreating into Bible study with specific reference to the Second Coming (of Christ, we must assume) related to the circumstance of ceasing to be a statesman or stateswoman?

Because there is a trend of usage of Bible quotes and Bible themes in Peter’s writings following the publication of Straussian Moment, culminating in Peter’s recent publications and speech tour that talk bluntly about combatting the Antichrist and an impending biblical Apocalypse:

1. In The Straussian Moment, Peter doesn’t cite a single Bible verse. Not one. Further, he doesn’t even cite a single theologian. Most of his citations are of Leo Strauss (the defining political philosopher of the 20th century), while also citing Locke and Rene Girard (an anthropologist who is very clear that he does not do the work of a theologian; he leaves that work to Raymond Schwager and others) and other political philosophy writers. The closest Peter gets to citing a theologian is citing Catholic statesman Thomas More, who could be considered as a founder of political philosophy and the secular with his work “Utopia”, which is the origin of our use of the term Utopia, and which predates Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon and Marx and Steve Jobs and so many other utopian political visionaries. 

2. Following the release of The Straussian Moment in 2007 (but written in 2004), Peter published “Spending the Future”, “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”, and “Against Edenism” across 2007 and 2008. All three of these works open with Bible verses. “Optimistic Thought Experiment” is notable in that it contains several points about apocalypse, and ends with a point about faith. Should also be noted that it uses a few Straussian writing techniques, most notably alluding somewhat explicitly to multiple meanings for each of China and “China”, Finance and “Finance” and Technology and “Technology”.

3. Then there’s “Education of a Libertarian” published in 2009, which doesn’t cite any Bible verses. It does make two controversial claims, with the points that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible” and a point about “extending the franchise” of voting to women. It makes mention of “preaching to the choir”, which is a common phrase by protestants referring to preaching backwards to the choir who are singing instead of out to the public. One strange thing here — why would the person who consistently repeated the phrase “statesman and stateswoman” in Straussian Moment make a public gaffe about the issue of extending the franchise to women? Further, how is it possible that the writer of Straussian Moment, who puts such emphasis on Strauss, who’s central question is about politics being totalizing, even write the sentence “I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.” and “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”” Both Strauss and Girard would stress that leaving politics is impossible, at least with our current humanity. That means the statement “The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.” is an absolute nonsense statement. The same author that wrote Straussian Moment could not have written this, without either changing his position taken previously, intentionally trying to test the reader or something else entirely. Further: “A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. ” is an incredibly strange pair of sentences following what was stated at the end of The Straussian Moment. At best, he may be pointing to the philosophy of Heidegger. Further “Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount.”

4. Then “Swift Blind Horseman” and “The End of the Future”in 2011, which have different titles but seem to be the same essay. The essay opens with Bible verse Revelation 6:5-6. Anyone aware of Leo Strauss’s principles will recognize that repetition of the same line twice (especially in near vicinity within an essay or the same essay or same book) is an intentional signal of some deeper message. It means to look closer. There are no further Bible quotes in the essays, but Peter does highlight the Fourth Commandment about the Sabbath. Whoops, the essay claims it’s about the Sabbath, but instead the Fourth Commandment is “Honor your father and mother”. That’s strange. It’s the Third Commandment which says to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. He does later make mention of Moses, but it is Robert Moses the planner and builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s.

5. Then we get two essays in 2014 derived from Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, neither of which make reference to the Bible. The full book Zero to One, which is based on a class that Peter Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012, also doesn’t make a single reference to the Bible or to Christ, despite having sections that reference cults, the extreme personalities of founders, and the notion of kingship.

6. “Thinking of Higher Education” is published in the Washington Post in 2014. It doesn’t reference the Bible, but it does reference the Reformation at the end with the quote “A Reformation is coming, and its message will be the same as it was 500 years ago: Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.” Strange that this essay was published in the Washington Post of all places with this point being made at the conclusion (rather than First Things or one of the smaller publications where Peter has published previously). Possibly inspired — Mike Gibson and Danielle Strachman, who led the Thiel Fellowship since it’s founding in 2010, started 1517 Fund in 2015 with a manifesto modeled after Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (the founder of the Reformation). Peter is cited as an early backer, but not a leader of the fund, but I think it’s still worth noting the religious reference given the points raised in Straussian Moment.

7. “Developing the Developed World” is published by Independent Institute in 2015, or a talk of it is. This interview covers much of Zero to One, and no Bible references are made. There is some slightly new content in the question and answer session.

8. “Against Edenism” is published in mid 2015, which opens with a Bible quote, but one that really points to St Augustine’s City of God. 

9. “New Atomic Age We Need” in mid 2015.

10. And points about Gawker in Aug 2016.

11. “Good for Google, Bad for America” shows up in Aug 2019. 

12. “Back to the Future” is published in March 2020, which first references Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society, and seems to be a kind of response to the Decadent Society. The essay makes no mention of Bible quotes, but it does discuss statesmen (but notably not statesmen and stateswomen): “For technologists, that means pursuing goals that are difficult but possible: cures for cancer and ­Alzheimer’s; compact nuclear ­reactors and fusion power. For statesmen, that means deconstructing the ­corrupt institutions that have falsely claimed to pursue those goals on our behalf.” Why would Peter be so precise about using stateswomen repeatedly in 2004 but not do the same here? Maybe doesn’t matter, but the language seems so precise in Straussian Moment. 

13. “Sovereign Individual” is republished in 2020 with a new preface by Peter Thiel, which raises some points of the intellect, which are loose references to the thinking of Thomas Aquinas and questions of voluntarism. The rest of the short essay talks of centralization vs decentralization. 

14. Then there seems to be a few years with nothing before “Nihilism is not Enough” from 2023/2024. Many of the points seem to be rehashing from previous essays, but in slightly more blunt explication. Most strangely is at the beginning two quotes, one from Lord of the Rings and one from GK Chesterton. The quote from Lord of the Rings is from Bilbo in discussion with Gandalf, right before Bilbo leaves the Shire for good. There is more extensive discussion of the concept of the Antichrist in this essay, and Peter began more publicly discussing the concept of the Antichrist and the apocalypse at this time.
15. There is also Peter saying in 2023 in an interview with the Atlantic that he’s taking a break from politics in an article titled “Peter Thiel is taking a break from Democracy.” with the specific point that “And what was that thing he needed to say, loudly? That he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician, including Donald Trump, in the next presidential campaign.” 

16. And “A time for truth and reconciliation” from Jan 2025. This one touches on apocalypse, but uses a Greek reference without mentioning the biblical concept discussed in Straussian Moment (which is a little strange), along with a reference to the French revolution in use of ‘ancien regime’. There are other strange things about this essay, but clearest is mention of Eric Weinstein as “friend and colleague”, when the internet claims that Eric no longer worked at any of the Thiel companies as of sometime in 2023. This piece is also strange since the 2023 Atlantic article mentioned above talks of Peter Thiel stepping back from political involvement. 

17. And most recently “Voyages to the End of the World”, published in October 2025. This piece seems to echo many of the points in Nihilism is Not Enough from 2023. Notable is that it is listed with a co-author Sam Wolfe, who perhaps was a ghost writer or researcher on other essays. The essay compares Bacon and other enlightenment thinkers with Bible quotes.

In summary, we have a very astute writer who has outlined an important transition of modern political philosophy, and who makes very precise claims regarding modern, liberal enlightenment, Catholic and protestant political thought and the important work of Rene Girard in resolving several important problems in all of the above. And at the end of this extremely precise philosophical work that doesn’t cite a single Bible verse, this writer makes a strange statement about statesmanship and stateswomanship ending if one were to just “retreat into Bible study.”

Then, we have a series of essays and public appearances by Peter from 2008 to 2026 that make gradual use of Bible verses and apocalyptic imagery, culminating in actual discussion of the Antichrist being present in our time starting around 2024.

What in the world is going on here? Why is he writing so bluntly and openly about the Antichrist in a politically-integrated Christian frame today, knowing that Rene Girard warned against the risks of an accusatory ultra-christianity?

I hoped to get some answers directly when I met with Peter for breakfast in February 2025, a meeting that I’ve mentioned in previous posts. A mutual friend offered to introduce me to him in late 2024, and although writing and thinking in a similar space of technology and philosophy and theology, I did not feel the impetus to reach out for a meeting until early 2025. At this meeting Peter and I discussed his recent theories of the Antichrist, and I told him that I thought he was wrong on a number of points (and even further, that he was in a place of moral and/or spiritual danger) — citing works of Girard and Schmitt and some of my own writings (Catastrophe of the Soul). I took extensive notes during the meeting, which covered similar material to what Peter discussed in his public and private talks for Nihilism is not Enough. I told Peter about my newer but unfinished writings, some of which address issues in his current writing. I also shared notes on one of Gunther Anders’s philosophical tales, which I was surprised he didn’t seem to know (though he may have been feigning ignorance just to test me). He told me about “On Thermonuclear War” from Herman Kahn, which seemed to connect with Clausewitz’s “On War”, which is discussed extensively by Girard in his book Battling to the End. We also talked about the importance of how just a single person can change history, especially if one understands the implications of Girard’s work, the importance of the soul and what it means to attempt to embody principles (and not just speak or write about them).

As mentioned before, much of Peter’s newest work raises points from earlier essays or from points in his earlier essays. For instance, Gulliver’s Travels is referenced in Straussian Moment with the line “For the modern world, questions about the nature of humanity would be viewed on par with the struggle among the Lilliputians about the correct way to cut open an egg.” Gulliver’s Travels is then developed as a full theme in the latest essay from October 2025 “Voyage to the end of the World.” The title of this essay though, seems to be a direct reference to the line in “Optimistic Thought Experiment” from 2008: “As we embark on our ambitious voyage to the ends of the earth, one cautionary note is in order.” Oh?

Let’s review that section from Optimistic Thought Experiment further:
“As we embark on our ambitious voyage to the ends of the earth, one cautionary note is in order. Thought experiments are notoriously misleading. Unlike more rigorous forms of scientific investigation, there are no empirical means to falsify these mental exercises. The optimistic thought experiment exists largely in the mind. The vistas of the mind are not always the same as reality. One could do worse than to ignore Milton ’s seductive promise: “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.””

Is this a warning about his late writings? Or, is Peter trying to point us to consider his writings in comparison to each other? Or, is he calling us to a more reigorous form of scientific investigation that we may be unaware of? A more confusing question – is Peter the one writing all or most or at least some of these newer essays? We don’t know.

Maybe the answer is hinted by his most recent essay being co-authored by Sam Wolfe, who in my understanding is a researcher for Peter. After the breakfast meeting in February 2025, Peter invited me to join a group at Harvard to hear four lectures on the Antichrist in March 2025, and I met Sam briefly during that event. The lecture event covered both Antichrist theories and certain theories of empire and sovereignty. Some of the material was new, and some of it connected closely with old points made in prior essays.

One point to raise — these studies or lectures have all been happening in private. Could they be said to be Bible studies? Are Bible studies always private groups? Perhaps so, perhaps not.

That question may seem to be over-analyzing. However, the root of my line of thinking in this essay is to raise the oddness of the overall situation, with a growing awareness of the importance of even the smallest details of writing and action from any person that claims to be a follower of both Leo Strauss and Rene Girard.

Why is Peter Thiel meeting with Prime Ministers and represented as “shadow president of the USA” by the Japanese media in 2026, while at the same time Peter has explicitly published that he did not endorse or donate to Donald Trump in 2023 and wanted step back from Democracy?

At best — maybe Peter is still operating as a kind of statesman, specifically as a post-Strauss kind of Christian statesman following the points in Straussian Moment, but is being a little loose in his commitment to stick to points made in former essays. And possibly he’s just run out of ideas and vision, because he hasn’t recently given us any vision of major areas of future technology to build or asked any scarily aggressive questions. In his discussion with Eric Schmitt 2012, he points out that many of the companies that run out of ideas have just become banks, and how problematic that is. That recorded debate is fascinating because of the energy of debate shown, which seems fitting for someone digging at the most foundational questions of governance and technology and faith. One would expect that same Peter Thiel, as author of Straussian Moment and Optimistic Thought Experiment and Zero to One, to spend more time on the technology questions and vision shown in this video, and less time showing up to handshake photo ops with Prime Ministers. 


At worst — maybe Peter is getting the Weekend at Bernie’s treatment and the line in Straussian Moment that I highlight at the beginning of this essay is part of a cleverly designed canary signal or dead man’s switch. In my world of technology and security, dead man’s switches or canaries are necessary to reveal government intrusion (to customers or the wider world), especially when one cannot legally disclose some information without severe consequences. For Leo Strauss (and Girard), the whole point of esoteric writing is that in the past, explaining sensitive truths might get one killed. That is still true today. So it wouldn’t be out of the question that in an essay titled “Straussian Moment”, it is possible Peter designed a written Straussian signal (for those that knew how to read carefully) to know that he was no longer in a statesman role of leadership (and/or maybe no longer alive).

Or, somewhere in the middle — perhaps Peter designed a clever mazetrap of a gradual retirement scheme, and he just likes hanging out mostly with Catholics such as Luke Burgis (who I met at Novitate, then ran into again at Peter’s Boston talk, and who I noted was also at Peter’s antichrist talk in Rome) and discussing Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley — a framework that can be read as an improvement to Leo Strauss as reason, revelation, and… reason? Maybe Heidegger can help? Or Peter can help, who tells us clearly in Straussian Moment that the Christian statesman would depart from Strauss in only one respect (which is not necessarily a shift away from Strauss’s discussed agon of reason vs revelation, but rather is a point that with the notion that revelation is definite on a long enough time horizon means one must choose carefully in actions as a statesman or stateswoman). I say this not only to question Luke, but to highlight the strangeness of the comparison of Peter’s currently noted public company with his past writings and with his statement in video discussion about Straussian Moment with Peter Robinson in 2019 that he has a “two world rebuttal as to why he is not Catholic: Pope Francis.”

But would Peter Thiel — who repeatedly cites longterm thinking and planning, is inspired by Lord of the Rings legends, and has stated that he believes we don’t go far enough in considering the possibility of dramatically transforming/upgrading the human body with technology — really simply retire? If he died, would he just die? Could he just die? Or would he have planned (or have needed to plan) an epic and unusual send off worthy of a Bilbo/Gandalf/Aragorn? He did at least once publicly claim that he’d signed up to be frozen after death in 2023. Frozen as in Idiocracy? Or, frozen as in Han Solo?

One clear indicator towards the truth of where Peter is in our present moment is that the new Technological Republic book published in 2025 by Peter’s college roommate and Palantir cofounder Alex Karp, makes almost no mention of Peter Thiel at all. Peter Thiel is not quoted anywhere in the intro or book endorsements.

How is it possible that a book that addresses the central questions of Peter Thiel’s life, those questions at the intersection politics and technology, written by the author who was his roommate and cofounder of a company, carries absolutely no endorsement or mention from Peter!? And carries only one single mention of Peter on page 50, but only in reference to an interview that he gave in 2011?

Further, Alex Karp’s book makes no mention of Carl Schmitt, and only very brief mention of Rene Girard (a limited mention on Generative Scapegoating, which bypasses many of Rene Girard’s most important ideas and conclusions) and then some limited mention of Leo Strauss. Strangely, the discussion of Leo Strauss’s points in Karp’s book seems to make the opposite points that Peter Thiel makes in the Straussian Moment. Karp talks of Strauss in a different section than the short mention of Girard, and talks of Strauss’s work pointing to the need for us to “embrace… value, virtue and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.” He then discusses Lee Kuan Yew’s implementation of this thinking as becoming a junzi in agreement with Confucius’s teaching, then a point from Sallust on the Roman Empire, and finally a quote from Irving Kristol critiquing a secular entertainment culture.

These points from The Technological Republic strangely follow a similar line of thinking of Carl Schmitt without referencing him, but they do so in a way that throws many of the recent generation of thinkers and companies under the bus. And that move is explicitly either an intentional implementation of Girardian sacrifice without any reference (which means it fits what Girard would see as a dangerous, ultrachristianity-trending antichrist move), or it is an ignorant and unaware implementation of archaic sacrifice, with no awareness of Girard’s breakthrough ideas at all. The truth value of the entire book project is called into question regardless of which one it is.

The same pattern appears in the beginning of the book and in some of the key quotes, where it is noted that: “Silicon Valley…turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products, rather than projects that speak to and address our greater security and welfare.” There is no acknowledgement that the global project of social networks enables commerce and dialogue, both of which have long been cited as ways to prevent warfare. Or that the development of the personal phone and personal computer enables not only new opportunities for scalable learning and development of the poorest areas of the world, but also that this network of devices serves as an avenue for global surveillance of the kind described in Straussian Moment. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with the current systems, but that is to be expected.

A key lesson from Rene Girard is that we have to work to improve our world and solve problems while carefully avoiding the sacrificial cycle whenever we can, both in language and in action, all while constantly watching ourselves for accidental relapse into sacrificial thinking. And further, whenever a sacrifice is necessary to keep the community together, all leaders should consider putting themselves and their own reputation on the line before throwing their employees or friends or community or even their perceived competitors or political enemies or predecessors under the bus. This doesn’t mean that bad behavior should never be called out, but rather it explains why we have to be precise with the method we use to call out and correct bad behavior. I believe Peter Thiel understood this point based on his writing and actions, which follows from Rene Girard’s works.

Peter Thiel’s The Straussian Moment essay is not mentioned at all in the book, despite the essay’s principles not being outdated in any way, as shown above. However, Alex Karp does write about the “Oppenheimer Moment” in the New York Times in 2023, in talking about the era of AI, where he cites a few points that are oddly relevant to Peter Thiel’s writings despite his lack of direct reference. I also found a 2026 blog post from a16z called “AI’s Oppenheimer Moment,” which seems entirely unrelated to Alex and Peter, but the post is still worth mentioning explicitly, as a warning to avoid because it is so ignorant of even the most basic principles that Alex and Peter are addressing in a more rigorous way in their essays. Finally, the book “Mobilize” from the CTO of Palantir cites in the intro that we are “in an undeclared state of emergency” which is a direct link to the sovereignty theories of Carl Schmitt. That makes the lack of Carl Schmitt mentions in Alex Karp’s Technological Republic even stranger.

Did Peter Thiel lose his faith in the works of Girard and Leo Strauss and the lessons that he wrote about in Straussian Moment? If so, why is he still citing Girard in his latest speeches and writings? And, if Peter is still important enough to meet with Prime Ministers, then how could a competitive (or some may argue complementary) work emerge without any reference or discussion from Peter? And, why is Karp lightly referencing Peter’s Straussian Moment essay in his 2023 NY Times article without directly addressing the important philosophical points that Peter made in that essay (and even worse, possibly committing the very errors that Peter is guarding against)? Why hasn’t Peter Thiel addressed the topic of The Straussian Moment in relation to either The Technological Republic or Mobilize in any interviews or speeches?

Did Peter start Palantir to save the world? Or to end it? By what we can read in The Straussian Moment essay and the strangeness of our present world moment, maybe he designed it to do both.

Maybe Peter designed the company with a name that would clearly call everyone in the world to carefully consider the fast growing powers of the technologies of data collection and artificial intelligence. Maybe he named it Palantir to forever bind himself, Alex Karp, the team, the USA and the world to the story of Saruman in Lord of the Rings (who uses the palantir magic stone to commune with the Dark Lord, thereby leading to his betrayal of the White Council and his downfall). And also to bind us to Aragorn in Lord of the Rings (who uses the palantir to distract Sauron). The palantir tool can be and is used for both good and bad, depending on how it is wielded (and not just by who).

Would avoiding commentary on Alex Karp’s book, which directly addresses Peter’s lifeworks, not clearly count as an instance of Thiel’s “avoid[ing] all decisions and to retreat into studying the Bible in anticipation of the Second coming, for then one will have ceased to be a statesman or stateswoman”?

The timing is certainly strange. There has been no discussion on the topic of Alex Karp’s book from Peter at all (which is perhaps the biggest topic of our present time), while at the same time Peter is discussing biblical revelation around the world in direct anticipation of both the Antichrist and Christ (arriving in the second coming after the Antichrist is revealed).

Was Peter Thiel a liar and untrustworthy? Was Peter Thiel intellectually inept?

I believe Peter Thiel was complicated, but was (and hopefully is) still one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century: a faith-that-moves-mountains believing, liberty protecting, Christian-principles following, humanity respecting, technology-growth enabling, truth-across-secular-and-religious-works-seeking realist and political philosopher.

Peter Thiel was one of the intellectual juggernauts of our time, who in writings synthesized Heidegger, Strauss, Girard and many others — but most importantly, then followed Girard in carefully embodying his writings in actions and coaching others in a way that **invites Americans and people around the world to unite against both technological and political tyranny (whether it is hidden or sitting out in the open).

I pray for Peter’s soul, wherever he is.

Peter led by example in creating Palantir and calling for Anduril and other new defense firms, telling us in the Optimistic Thought Experiment: “There remains a tremendous need for real defense against the proliferation of destructive technologies — reaching well beyond the Orwellian “defense” industry, with its proclivity for constructing new contraptions that kill large numbers of people.”

But balancing against this call and action, Peter also reminds us in Straussian Moment “it may well be that the cumulative decisions made in all those close instances will determine the destiny of the postmodern world” and “one must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account.”

And so, I also pray for Alex Karp and James Mattis’s souls too, and hope that today, rather than entertaining themselves with swords and luxurious Command and Conquer screens, they are digging deep into the lessons from Rene Girard’s writings and lifework — learning about the Straussian trap that Peter was building away from with help from Girard, and then, perhaps for the first time, feeling the true weight of their own words and actions in the way Girard describes in Evolution and Conversion as “hyper-mimetic, [when] one is in a better position to understand oneself as a puppet of mimetic desire” and forever subject to the deceptions of meconnaissance. If they do, they will understand why my essay is so pointed and will perhaps say a prayer for me too.

We can all do more, myself included, to not forget that even if we may be entering a new era of Artificial Intelligence, that in this era and in all the eras that emerge after this one, the Girard-discovered truth remains that the “world could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better — the limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.”