That (caring for poor people) is anti-christ to the goals of Thiel, who wants to get rid of democracy and create city states governed by autocratic rulers.
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
If you are the sort of person for whom some finite amount is adequate, you will probably not make billions. I mean this in a nice way. If you are a person who thinks certain things outside money and power are more important, you are unlikely to do the odious things necessary to make billions.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry as a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean?
"support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Yes but you just have to make the other side extreme and voila now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time. trying to delete my comment, forgot to never speak my mind here unless it conforms to whats on tv
> now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time.
What are you talking about? The US was founded by getting people out into the streets and countryside to fight over politics. The Civil War was a fight over politics (the politics of slavery for the South where they wanted to keep it legal). The US has constantly had fights, actual violent fights with many deaths, over politics. It isn't something that just started after you were born.
> now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics.
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
There’s a reason it’s called “fuck you money” and the wealthy tech guys really lean into the “fuck you” part. They seem to think it’s fun. It’s also the mark of a sociopath!
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"
What, about the pope? I'm not Catholic, I just prefer the people who are in control of massive amounts of power and absurd political influence to be less extreme than unironically thinking everyone who says things against him is the antichrist
Apparently there are many supporters of the Antichrist, his greater and lesser demons actively working to make earth a living hell. Unfortunately they're not as enthusiastic about empathy and humanity.
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Gave up exploring space? Are we living in the same reality? Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots. We’d never have pictures of Pluto if we were hyper-focused on manned missions.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
> Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.
More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.
I'm with the other guy. Humans exploring space is fun an exciting to me. Sending drones into space is cool, but far less fun and exciting. I want to explore space. I want recreational spacecraft for humans. I want technologies which allow humans to explore the outer regions of our solar system. You might think flying to Mars is a waste of time but I think that's incredible. I would have signed up before I had a family, even if it were a one way trip.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Science progressed, but it didn't bring the kinds of physical innovations we expected. At least, not until recently. Where are the flying cars? Why haven't we cured ageing? Why don't we have a base on the Moon? Why isn't energy effectively unlimited and free? We had an explosion in information sciences. The internet is a marvel. iPhones and chip technology are incredible. AI is unbelievable to witness. But why did we slow down so much on physical scientific innovation?
Space exploration is wonderful, i quite saw Armstrong walking on the regolith.
But if we dismantle NASA and its supporting ecosystem to hand it over to the private sector, which is precisely what is happening, we ought to be asking ourselves why there is no funding left to invest: The reason is that trillions, globally, have been funneled into financial speculation, a trend that has accelerated dramatically over the last 25 years.
And it is not just space; the entire economy is caught in this same current.
And these people are talking about the "Antichrist"? It’s no wonder some get riled up.
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Sorry, you have read his essays and listened to interviews but don't know his companies??? That, frankly, is not believable. The article above goes into detail about the problems with his companies. Who reads essays by Thiel but doesn't know about Palantir and his hand in the creation of facebook? You know about the "meme-level comments" but don't know about what they're criticizing?
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Thiel who's been a longtime supporter of Trump said a few weeks ago that the US “should not have” launched the Iran war and that "there were a lot of mistakes that were made and that US may lack both the hard power and the soft power to prevail". i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
> i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
I agree that "you must give away all your wealth" is not a command binding on all Christians (based on other passages in the New Testament), but generosity is commanded pretty often IIRC: Matt. 6:19–21 and 6:24, 1 Tim. 6:17–19, James 2:15–16, etc.
He definitely isn't a Catholic. "Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology." says Wikipedia. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical household. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Ha, he is the living embodiment of supply side Jesus.
Well, some of that actually is common among the Protestants in Western Europe. The belief is that God will punish you for doing bad (quite common in many religions), and therefore that your are faithful if you're doing well. These were not the persecuted minorities that fled to the USA, but dressing greed as piety did cross the pond.
One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)
I guess it depends on what you mean by "aware". Does awareness imply that someone simply knows that what they did was immoral, or does it also imply remorse? Psychopaths know that their actions are immoral but are incapable of feeling remorse.
Certain serial killers maybe? I get that people are fascinated by them, but to me such people are oddly boring. Their crimes are horrific, but the justifications (if not outright delusional) seem to be just "I can do whatever I want if I find a way to get away with it".
Most other people we might consider 'evil' have more moralistic justifications - such as religious fanaticism, or nationalism, or revenge against some perceived enemy. Not that this makes them right in absolute terms, but presumably they do not consider themselves evil.
My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
> My understanding is that he was raised evangelical.
Was that before or after he spent part of his childhood in a Namibian settlement called Swakopmund that venerated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party?
> Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler.
> Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents.[12][13] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[13] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
It is not mutually exclusive. Klerofashism was and still is a thing. Current pope is NOT nazi, very much not. But, parts of church are and historically were
He says he is a Protestant, and he probably identifies as one. He may believe he believes in Jesus Christ, but does he actually believe, or is he just fooling himself? Can you even know if you genuinely believe in something, because you are always the easiest person you can fool?
There are many doctrinal differences between different branches of Protestantism. Lutheranism teaches that while good works do not imply faith, faith does imply good works. The absence of good works can therefore seen as evidence for the absence of faith, from that perspective.
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
Thanks for highlighting this - I won't be able to unsee how well this does in "x person is bad" clickbait headlines vs "Christ V2: A Revised Edition" which seems to be more accurate and honest. I admit I've fallen for this for trop for ages ...
FWIW I think the parent comment is incorrect (unless I misunderstood it, of course); I responded in more detail here [0] but the tl;dr is that the Bible does describe the (big-a or little-a) "antichrist" as more-or-less entirely opposed to Christ. (Not to mention that Jesus himself warned about copycat "Christs", in Matthew 24:23–27, and calls them "false" and says that they "deceive".)
Thanks, I see. I thought this was more settled and the authoritative tone of the parent comment was enough for me buy it. (One would hope a youth in Catholic education wouldn't have me so clueless and looking stupid in public, but here we are!) Clearly I need to learn more about this
I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
That's interesting. Thanks for the correction and for sharing.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a historically dominant power structure?
Not a theologian. My understanding is that during Jesus' time on Earth, the Jews were under the heavy yoke of the Romans. At that time, there were many Jewish sects who all claimed secret knowledge and were led by a "messiah" who would deliver the Jews from the Romans and re-establish Judah as a military-political power. The Anti-Christ as mentioned in Revelations and in Catholic texts were a warning to Christians. Christians should not be led astray by demagogues who preached salvation by political or military means. Instead, for Christians, salvation lay in Christ's commandments to love God, love neighbor, and love like he loved us.
> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?
I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).
Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)
Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—some denominations consider the Antichrist to be allegorical, while some Lutheran denominations consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).
More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)
Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other religions (e.g. how Jehovah's Witnesses shun those who leave). Still, I think the argument has the problem that it's unfalsifiable, at least when considered in a vacuum: If the Bible is false, then perhaps it makes sense that it would present itself as the exclusive way to God, but isn't that also the case if the Bible is true? Like, if Jesus really is "the way, the truth, and the life" and "no one comes to the Father except through" him (John 14:6), I'd certainly hope the Bible would go out of its way to tell everyone for their sake.
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%204%3A4&v...; N.B. "friend of the world", AFAICT, isn't used in the sense of being friendly with most everyone (which is a good thing and indeed repeatedly commanded in the New Testament), but rather in a deeper sense of e.g. going along with the morality of one's environment rather than the law of God.
[5] I'm not sure what the current secular scholarly consensus is on the biblical canon. However, many Christian (specifically, Protestant) scholars would argue that the canon was organically decided, rather than being imposed by some top-down institution (even the Catholic church didn't "infallibly" declare its version of the canon until the 1500s, as a response to the Reformation). I recently read Canon Revisited by Michael Kruger and it seemed pretty convincing to me, but I'm also just some random guy on the internet, so what do I know :-P
I don’t have anything more to add to this discussion but I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate you taking the time to share this. I enjoyed reading your perspective and I’ve got a few notes here I want to go study a bit. You took a fairly thin thought I had and gave it depth, which I can consider more fully.
Thanks so much for the kind words; it was my genuine pleasure, and I'm deeply grateful myself that you actually took the time to read it :-) Happy hunting with whatever you decide to investigate more deeply, and God bless.
Somehow this comment was flagged to death, I really don’t get it. Anyway, I clicked “vouch” and now it’s back.
I can’t imagine humans would flag this comment and not your others (like i could vaguely imagine some militant atheist going crazy, but why only flag the “thanks my pleasure” comment then?), so it’s gotta be some weird HN algorithm. Weird shit!
If the highest good is a belief in Christ, as is Christian doctrine, then an anti-Christ that is good in every other way is still evil by Christian doctrine.
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.
This is very interesting. One other thing I think gets glossed over a lot is that there is "the" Antichrist as you explained, but there are also MANY other Antichrists. The latter are constantly trying to attack the Christian faith by saying they _are_ Christians but behaving very un-Christlike _on purpose_. I think we see a LOT of this happening now.
The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
Also there is no singular antichrist. Samson was an antichrist. We are antichrists when we oppose his will. Thiel is the worst kind of dispensationalist.
AI has always seemed like a convenient panacea for the excesses of accelerationism. An overloaded term in the equation that should balance everything, but only if the right conditions are met. That framing discrepancy alone should indicate that AI is being marketed as something that it will clearly never be.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
> Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is
These guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
personally i think its pretty cool to see that some books from thousands of years ago are applicable to a world the authors could never have imagined. it sure is a lot cooler than detonating earth to make peter thiel and other evil men of his ilk very briefly happy. from my angle, the absurdity is watching evolved monkeys toil to cease gigacenturies of evolution by permanently ruining their home.
Some ideas of Thiel seem to be good.
Everything is fine until you harm the lives of other people.
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
at risk of Godwinning the whole discussion -- hitler had good ideas too. Banned smoking, efficient highways and development, shockingly reasonable animal rights laws for the time, etc.
"broken clocks" etc. etc.
and frankly most of thiel's "technology uber alies" approaches seem would be religion couched in technological terms -- he wants to believe he's part of something, even through he, trump, or maybe elon, are the best candidates for anti-christ in history.
My latest psyop conspiracy theory is that Russian trolls wants you to sing kumbaya and direct all your spend into social causes until you are so weak that 3 day special military operation is actually enough to capitulate.
Thanks for the link. As it was expected, at some point he starts lecturing about "immortality" and about "defeating aging", which goes to show how scared shitless he is about such a natural thing like death, death which a Slavic babushka is way more capable in confronting head-on than this so-called oligarch. And he should leave the "Antichrist" discourse to us, genuine Manichaeans/Bogomils, but with many other things original the Protestants have managed to make a mess of it all. I blame it on they being located at the end of the civilized world, with nothing better to do back in the day.
Listening to Thiel feels like opening a complicated mechanical device while running and looking at the mechanism that makes it tick. Its so raw, its beautiful in its own way. It removes the spell on so many things, it gives you the "I understand why those people do what they do now" kick. It relieves you from emotional baggage.
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
AFAIK He can't in US, at least legally. What I expect to happen is that he will eventually get his city-state with the right combination of people and structure and be the president of it. Just not sure if the ICBMs come first or after.
I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
I don't think he believes in Antichrist, the same way Elon Musk doesn't believe we'll go to Mars. I think these are calculated statements to manipulate people. (The U.S. oligarchs find some of the more gullible fundamentalist evangelicans to be a useful ally.)
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
While there are valid criticisms of Thiel, some of his ideas are wacky and he does come off as a bit of a pompous asshole, however this article reads like a political hit piece. It cannot be taken seriously unfortunately.
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
For one thing, Thiel doesn't need bias against him to look like an evil piece of shit. But for another, hit piece or not, facts are facts. If the author writes about this kind of stuff every week, it doesn't make him wrong.
Lets be blunt. The whole "The End is coming", Antichrist, the "Beast", the "Whore of Babylon"... The whole lot of it reads like a really bad bronze age fantasy novel.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.
I don’t know why, but it brings me a story to mind: A thief breaks into a house, and when he’s discovered by the owner—and the police arrive—he starts shouting, "Thief! Thief!" while pointing at the owner.
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
It is a confirmation, though always somewhat surprising, to see a deluge of facts and diverse, individually accurate citations, cemented together by unbridled opinions, coalesce into something entirely nonsense.
Or perhaps the point is precisely to dilute any genuine discourse with this kind of chatter, which serves to give an air of intellectual depth to the stance of someone who,"having only a hammer as a tool, approaches the world as if it were all made of nails". Unfortunately, he is not the only one who embodies this particular intellectual attitude.
He likely identifies with Christ, seeing Antichrists everywhere, or perhaps he simply uses religion to better peddle his own "ideas." And this obsession with "who is in charge" may well stem from an inability to govern (or know) oneself, driving to try and reshape the world in his own image, just to feel secure. ok,too much psychoanalysis...
I get the impression that this is a story seen many times over the last two or three thousand years.
things now make more sense, thank you for clarifying. in this new light, thiel's vision of transhumanism can be seen as the inverse of catholicism, where both meet at the concept of the soul from diametrically opposed angles (soul = undiscovered solution for some vs. soul = inherent mystery for all).
i like your ending quote, it is a great reframing of another quote, "beware of unearned wisdom".
lambdadelirium | 19 hours ago
Finnucane | 19 hours ago
onemoresoop | 19 hours ago
blocked_againnn | 19 hours ago
cowlevel | 18 hours ago
blocked_againnn | 16 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 13 hours ago
Vaushite | 19 hours ago
louwrentius | 19 hours ago
edoceo | 19 hours ago
louwrentius | 18 hours ago
graemep | 18 hours ago
On the other hand, the people Christ and his followers most often condemned were the rich and powerful.
pixl97 | 18 hours ago
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
watwut | 23 minutes ago
lgl | 19 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 13 hours ago
nope1000 | 19 hours ago
Zigurd | 19 hours ago
kashunstva | 19 hours ago
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
Gravityloss | 19 hours ago
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
BodyCulture | 19 hours ago
edoceo | 19 hours ago
pixl97 | 18 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
Gareth321 | 18 hours ago
triceratops | 18 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
chneu | 18 hours ago
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
jacquesm | 19 hours ago
onemoresoop | 19 hours ago
bluefirebrand | 18 hours ago
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
abenga | 18 hours ago
graemep | 18 hours ago
Its what a normal person does with excess wealth, as opposed to sociopaths and megalomaniacs.
chneu | 18 hours ago
It's what a decent person does. It's not what a "normal" person would do.
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
just because they're not filthy rich =/= they'll be any nicer with big money.
Melonai | 18 hours ago
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
dreamcompiler | 18 hours ago
And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.
alphawhisky | 18 hours ago
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
rcr-anti | 18 hours ago
fatbird | 3 hours ago
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
[0] https://x.com/LouLakeyDraws/status/1488076999105323011
Zigurd | 19 hours ago
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
spiderfarmer | 18 hours ago
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
chneu | 18 hours ago
It's wild how just having the facade of wealth will get you a following in the US, for free.
Americans blindly idolize the wealthy. It's crazy. Truly a "not get millionaire" mindset for a lot of this country.
Zigurd | 17 hours ago
dionian | 18 hours ago
mcphage | 18 hours ago
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
dionian | 15 hours ago
Jtsummers | 14 hours ago
What are you talking about? The US was founded by getting people out into the streets and countryside to fight over politics. The Civil War was a fight over politics (the politics of slavery for the South where they wanted to keep it legal). The US has constantly had fights, actual violent fights with many deaths, over politics. It isn't something that just started after you were born.
Zigurd | 14 hours ago
mcphage | 13 hours ago
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
watwut | 12 hours ago
You haven't done much reading about history, did you?
deeg | 11 hours ago
myersj | 11 hours ago
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
Henchman21 | 11 hours ago
dzhiurgis | 7 hours ago
slibhb | 19 hours ago
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
thatguy0900 | 19 hours ago
bananaflag | 19 hours ago
thatguy0900 | 18 hours ago
bananaflag | 17 hours ago
About the fact that people may tend to judge people as characters in a book and not as real people with influence.
cosmicgadget | 7 hours ago
nchmy | 19 hours ago
I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...
lioeters | 18 hours ago
lioeters | 13 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 19 hours ago
QuadmasterXLII | 18 hours ago
Gareth321 | 18 hours ago
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
nkrisc | 18 hours ago
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
paganel | 18 hours ago
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
nkrisc | 18 hours ago
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
paganel | an hour ago
I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.
More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.
karmakurtisaani | 17 hours ago
paganel | an hour ago
As was most of South America to the European man when Magellan did his thing.
Gareth321 | 17 hours ago
nkrisc | 14 hours ago
vladms | 18 hours ago
Gareth321 | 17 hours ago
goldenarm | 14 hours ago
Since the 1960s, the worker-to-retiree ratio halved indeed, but productivity went 4x.
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
effed3 | 8 hours ago
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Forgive the rant; better to look at the stars.
meowface | 18 hours ago
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
aerodexis | 17 hours ago
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
miltonlost | 18 hours ago
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
slibhb | 18 hours ago
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
miltonlost | 18 hours ago
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
slibhb | 16 hours ago
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
Dependance | 18 hours ago
HumblyTossed | 18 hours ago
expedition32 | 16 hours ago
paulryanrogers | 17 hours ago
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
10111001 | 19 hours ago
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
jialatsia | 18 hours ago
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
m000 | 18 hours ago
alphawhisky | 17 hours ago
Hahaha. Haha. You serious?
red-iron-pine | 12 hours ago
10111001 | 17 hours ago
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
b473a | 19 hours ago
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Further reading, nos. 675-677 at the bottom of this page: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
jdross | 19 hours ago
Peter is properly, openly and deeply Protestant. Jesus Christ is his Christ
Jtsummers | 18 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 18 hours ago
cramer4next | 18 hours ago
E.g. I think what your getting at is something akin to, "you can't be Catholic if you are for abortion".
kdnddmmdnd | 18 hours ago
you cant be a catholic if you are for abortion. stop being dense.
your religion is a nest of child rapists why dont you talk about that?
cramer4next | 15 hours ago
mysterydip | 18 hours ago
pixl97 | 18 hours ago
api | 18 hours ago
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
jfyi | 18 hours ago
cramer4next | 18 hours ago
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
pamcake | 17 hours ago
Matthew 19:24
cramer4next | 17 hours ago
arw0n | 15 hours ago
No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
cramer4next | 14 hours ago
jfyi | 12 hours ago
Isn't the exact opposite problem much more prevalent here? Namely, that extreme wealth simply buys access and exceptions to these ethical teachings.
cramer4next | 10 hours ago
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
bguebert | 16 hours ago
BalinKing | 14 hours ago
potatototoo99 | 18 hours ago
tgv | 18 hours ago
pixl97 | 18 hours ago
Ha, he is the living embodiment of supply side Jesus.
If you've not seen it before.
https://imgur.com/gallery/gospel-of-supply-side-jesus-bCqRp
tgv | 16 hours ago
pixl97 | 16 hours ago
The US version was pretty big, but the general idea is something that permeates all of humanity.
Jtsummers | 16 hours ago
joquarky | 11 hours ago
jdross | 18 hours ago
vrganj | 18 hours ago
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
dash2 | 18 hours ago
vrganj | 18 hours ago
masfuerte | 17 hours ago
jdross | 18 hours ago
happyopossum | 18 hours ago
He’s never claimed to be - GP is confused, or just plain wrong.
yulaow | 18 hours ago
Waterluvian | 18 hours ago
wavemode | 18 hours ago
gilleain | 18 hours ago
Most other people we might consider 'evil' have more moralistic justifications - such as religious fanaticism, or nationalism, or revenge against some perceived enemy. Not that this makes them right in absolute terms, but presumably they do not consider themselves evil.
GeoAtreides | 18 hours ago
expedition32 | 16 hours ago
tim333 | 15 hours ago
b473a | 18 hours ago
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
quickthrowman | 17 hours ago
Was that before or after he spent part of his childhood in a Namibian settlement called Swakopmund that venerated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party?
> Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
> Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents.[12][13] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[13] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund
watwut | 14 hours ago
Henchman21 | 17 hours ago
jltsiren | 12 hours ago
There are many doctrinal differences between different branches of Protestantism. Lutheranism teaches that while good works do not imply faith, faith does imply good works. The absence of good works can therefore seen as evidence for the absence of faith, from that perspective.
Waterluvian | 18 hours ago
triceratops | 18 hours ago
mwt | 18 hours ago
BalinKing | 18 hours ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243942
mwt | 16 hours ago
Waterluvian | 16 hours ago
mwt | 14 hours ago
BalinKing | 18 hours ago
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
Waterluvian | 18 hours ago
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a historically dominant power structure?
rawgabbit | 15 hours ago
BalinKing | 14 hours ago
> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?
I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).
Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)
Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—some denominations consider the Antichrist to be allegorical, while some Lutheran denominations consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).
More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)
Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other religions (e.g. how Jehovah's Witnesses shun those who leave). Still, I think the argument has the problem that it's unfalsifiable, at least when considered in a vacuum: If the Bible is false, then perhaps it makes sense that it would present itself as the exclusive way to God, but isn't that also the case if the Bible is true? Like, if Jesus really is "the way, the truth, and the life" and "no one comes to the Father except through" him (John 14:6), I'd certainly hope the Bible would go out of its way to tell everyone for their sake.
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2012:30...
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%203%3A16-2...
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%204%3A4&v...; N.B. "friend of the world", AFAICT, isn't used in the sense of being friendly with most everyone (which is a good thing and indeed repeatedly commanded in the New Testament), but rather in a deeper sense of e.g. going along with the morality of one's environment rather than the law of God.
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%201%3A16...
[4] This one's a bit more of a stretch, but IMO one of the "morals of the story" is that unbelief is not mere dispassionate skepticism: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2016:19-31...
[5] I'm not sure what the current secular scholarly consensus is on the biblical canon. However, many Christian (specifically, Protestant) scholars would argue that the canon was organically decided, rather than being imposed by some top-down institution (even the Catholic church didn't "infallibly" declare its version of the canon until the 1500s, as a response to the Reformation). I recently read Canon Revisited by Michael Kruger and it seemed pretty convincing to me, but I'm also just some random guy on the internet, so what do I know :-P
[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%207%3A13&v...
[7] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2015:1-...
[8] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2014&ver...
[9] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=galatians%201:6...
EDIT: Updated a sentence to be more specific.
Waterluvian | 10 hours ago
BalinKing | 7 hours ago
skrebbel | 18 minutes ago
I can’t imagine humans would flag this comment and not your others (like i could vaguely imagine some militant atheist going crazy, but why only flag the “thanks my pleasure” comment then?), so it’s gotta be some weird HN algorithm. Weird shit!
pvab3 | 6 hours ago
skrebbel | 21 minutes ago
bryanlarsen | 17 hours ago
aeve890 | 18 hours ago
It was there all this time. I need renowned writer Dan Brown's email ASAP.
epestr | 18 hours ago
pamcake | 18 hours ago
aeve890 | 18 hours ago
api | 18 hours ago
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.
Sorry folks. The flying saucers are never coming.
HumblyTossed | 18 hours ago
sham1 | 18 hours ago
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
watwut | 14 hours ago
Afail, many antichrists constantly attacking us is not a thing in catholic church or in "normal" european evangelical church.
gatlin | 18 hours ago
ecocentrik | 18 hours ago
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
moolcool | 16 hours ago
These guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
petemc_ | 10 hours ago
cosmicgadget | 8 hours ago
potsandpans | 5 hours ago
dzhiurgis | 7 hours ago
thin_carapace | an hour ago
jatindavis05 | 18 hours ago
Everyone can have their own opinions and beliefs and we should be working towards the best technology for humanity.
My belief is the if we did not spend huge budgets on military and put it to developing science and if we did not have nations and if all the nations acted as one then we would have been hundered or years ahead by now in technological progress.
pixl97 | 18 hours ago
The "If people didn't murder then everything would be good belief".
It's an easy belief to have, it doesn't require you to do anything. "The state forces me to pay for the military, I don't really want to". It takes no convictions, there are no actions needed by you. It's the penny rack at the dime bookstore.
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
"broken clocks" etc. etc.
and frankly most of thiel's "technology uber alies" approaches seem would be religion couched in technological terms -- he wants to believe he's part of something, even through he, trump, or maybe elon, are the best candidates for anti-christ in history.
dzhiurgis | 7 hours ago
My latest psyop conspiracy theory is that Russian trolls wants you to sing kumbaya and direct all your spend into social causes until you are so weak that 3 day special military operation is actually enough to capitulate.
pehtis | 18 hours ago
paganel | 18 hours ago
tim333 | 15 hours ago
mrtksn | 18 hours ago
I wonder when he will obtain bunch of thermonuclear warheads and ICBM.
busssard | 18 hours ago
mrtksn | 18 hours ago
pengaru | 17 hours ago
desolate_muffin | 8 hours ago
uludag | 18 hours ago
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
js8 | 18 hours ago
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
Guid_NewGuid | 18 hours ago
lopsotronic | 15 hours ago
Eh? Eh?
honks clown nose
extraextra | 18 hours ago
Among other things, Thiel is called both a tech oligarch and a failure in Wall Street & Washington. The author somehow tries to blame the wrongdoings of Facebook on Thiel. The intent behind such an article is clearly to smear a person.
The author writes a new anti-Trump article every other day, so this write-up can only be treated as a political hit piece against someone that supports a political figure. Is that good or bad? Up to you to decide, but it should be treated as such.
chneu | 18 hours ago
There is way too much bias and need to generate controversy on part of the author.
extraextra | 17 hours ago
The author is not even attempting to sound impartial or objective
freejazz | 17 hours ago
What, like his views on the antichrist?
extraextra | 17 hours ago
freejazz | 16 hours ago
extraextra | 16 hours ago
freejazz | 16 hours ago
extraextra | 16 hours ago
freejazz | 13 hours ago
extraextra | 7 minutes ago
Feel free to warn people from now on to not assume they will have an intelligent exchange with you
ghusto | 10 hours ago
extraextra | 9 minutes ago
nekusar | 18 hours ago
Just go have a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_the_Antichrist_i... and see what's said directly, and all the allegations of 'well that there looks like the Antichrist', when its someone people disagree with.
The whole really dumb part is that if you engage in zombie cannibalism, somehow erases all the bad stuff you did. Be as horrible as you want, but you eat that "body that was formally known as a cracker" that Sunday, and magically everything's alright. Yeah, uh huh. Still makes you a horrible person. But this whole Christ/Antichrist is part of this whole mythology, and it's off the rails.
effed3 | 17 hours ago
Who, then, would the Antichrist be?
From a simpler, more practical perspective, it seems to me that there is only one world—a common home for us all, more or less—and there is no guarantee (nor does happen in reality) that those who have great culture, eloquence, wealth, and knowledge are also intellectually honest, or, to put it more simply, of sound mind, regardless of the position or level they may have reached.
A final quote—I’m afraid I don’t recall the author, -mea culpa-, goes: "There is nothing more dangerous than a great idea in a small mind."
Jtsummers | 17 hours ago
https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/
effed3 | 9 hours ago
It is a confirmation, though always somewhat surprising, to see a deluge of facts and diverse, individually accurate citations, cemented together by unbridled opinions, coalesce into something entirely nonsense. Or perhaps the point is precisely to dilute any genuine discourse with this kind of chatter, which serves to give an air of intellectual depth to the stance of someone who,"having only a hammer as a tool, approaches the world as if it were all made of nails". Unfortunately, he is not the only one who embodies this particular intellectual attitude. He likely identifies with Christ, seeing Antichrists everywhere, or perhaps he simply uses religion to better peddle his own "ideas." And this obsession with "who is in charge" may well stem from an inability to govern (or know) oneself, driving to try and reshape the world in his own image, just to feel secure. ok,too much psychoanalysis...
I get the impression that this is a story seen many times over the last two or three thousand years.
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
thin_carapace | an hour ago
i like your ending quote, it is a great reframing of another quote, "beware of unearned wisdom".
ghusto | 11 hours ago
> ... but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he admitted he had reread a dozen times
Can't be that smart then. Read the book a dozen times and didn't understand the core message once.