内容来源：https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

内容总结：

美国知名投资人彼得·蒂尔近两年来持续通过巡回讲座传播其带有宗教色彩的末世论观点，引发广泛关注。这位硅谷亿万富翁在巴黎、华盛顿等地以《圣经》中的"敌基督"与"阻挡者"概念为框架，提出现代文明正因对技术末日的过度恐惧而面临危机。

蒂尔的核心论调认为，当前社会对创新的排斥、持续下降的生育率以及沉溺虚拟世界的文化现象，正在为敌基督的崛起创造条件。他将任何试图建立世界统一秩序的努力都视为潜在威胁，并多次在公开场合引用已故法裔学者勒内·吉拉尔的模仿理论作为其思想支撑。

值得注意的是，奥地利神学家沃尔夫冈·帕拉弗对蒂尔的思想形成具有关键影响。尽管二人在政治立场上存在分歧——帕拉弗作为和平主义者曾撰文批判纳粹法学家卡尔·施米特，而蒂尔却将施米特的理论融入其地缘政治主张——但两人保持着持续数十年的学术交流。这种复杂关系凸显了吉拉德理论中关于对立者会相互模仿的悖论。

随着蒂尔资助的"国家保守主义"政治运动兴起，及其门生J.D.万斯在美国政坛的崛起，其末世论思想正通过政治实践产生现实影响。尽管蒂尔公开建议人们"去教堂"以规避末日危机，但其创立的帕兰提尔公司正在构建全球监控网络，这种矛盾行为引发外界对其真实意图的质疑。

在当代思想界，蒂尔现象折射出科技巨头将宗教学说与政治议程交织的复杂趋势。正如帕拉弗所警示："当保护自身安全成为首要目标时，人们往往是在玩火。"这场关于末世论的思辨，已然超越学术讨论范畴，成为观察权力与信仰交织的重要窗口。

中文翻译：

彼得·蒂尔的末日巡回演讲——如同这个世界一般——尚未终结。整整两年间，这位亿万富翁持续穿梭于各大场合，通过一群表现各异、时而难掩困惑的采访者，传播他充满圣经隐喻的末日理念。他与经济学家兼播客主泰勒·考恩在舞台上探讨过"拦阻者"（《圣经》中延缓末日降临的存在）；与《纽约时报》专栏作家罗斯·杜塔特在镜头前陷入令人窒息的沉默；此刻更正在旧金山开展关于敌基督者的四讲闭门系列讲座。

世人对此反应各异——或觉荒诞，或感痴迷，或难以忍受，或毛骨悚然——这位权倾天下的巨头竟沉迷于布道词与恐怖电影中的意象。但这些演讲背后的思想脉络，正是解读蒂尔如何审视自身在全球政治、科技与人类命运中扮演关键角色的密码。要真正理解他的"拦阻者与敌基督"理论，需回溯其末日巡讲的首场重要演说——那是在2023年巴黎一个异常酷热的日子里进行的。没有影像记录这场活动，也没有记者报道，但通过采访亲历者，我得以重现当日情景。

这场演说选址于某年度学术会议，与会学者专攻蒂尔最重要的思想源泉——已故法美理论家勒内·吉拉尔（蒂尔自称"硬核吉拉尔主义者"）。在那场未公开的演讲当晚，数十位来自全球的吉拉尔学派哲学家与神学家鱼贯走入巴黎天主教大学一间朴素的演讲厅。蒂尔在讲台上进行了近一小时的阐述，分享他对哈米吉多顿的思考，以及所有他认为"不足以"阻止末日的因素。

据蒂尔所言，现代社会对自身技术恐惧过度。他将这个"倦怠"而"行尸走肉"的时代特征归结为：对创新的日益敌视、骤降的生育率、过度的瑜伽练习，以及沉溺于"万维网无尽循环"的文化。但在神经质地竭力规避技术末日（核战争、环境灾难、失控人工智能等真实威胁）的过程中，现代文明反而更容易遭遇更危险的威胁：敌基督者。

某些基督教传统中，敌基督者将在末日降临前统一人类。对蒂尔而言，其邪恶本质与任何统一世界的企图无异。"敌基督如何掌权？"蒂尔设问，"通过利用我们对技术的恐惧，用'和平与安全'的口号诱惑我们沉沦。"换言之，它以拯救人类免于末日为承诺，将惊恐的族群捆绑在一起。

为具体说明，蒂尔暗示敌基督者可能以哲学家尼克·博斯特罗姆的形式出现——这位AI末日论者在2019年提出建立全球治理应急体系、预测性警务与技术限制方案。但博斯特罗姆并非孤例。蒂尔在一众人与机构中看到了潜在敌基督者，他们"不惜代价执着于将我们从进步中拯救出来"。

因此人类陷入双重困境：既要避免技术灾难，又要抵御敌基督统治。但对讲台上这位亿万富翁而言，后者更为恐怖。基于吉拉尔理论，蒂尔认为这种政权在经过数十年病态压抑后，必将引爆足以终结文明的全面暴力。而他不确定是否有任何"拦阻者"能遏制这股力量。

蒂尔发言结束后，主持人开启问答环节时直言这场演讲令人沮丧。若世界正冲向末日危机，这位亿万富翁有何建议？

"击退敌基督。"蒂尔回答。但他补充道，与吉拉尔一样，他并不擅长提供实际建议。

片刻后，观众席有人起身纠正："您对吉拉尔的描述并不准确。"带着清晰可辨的奥地利口音，这个男声传递着沉静而令人熟悉的权威感。"多次场合下，"发言者继续道，"年轻人问吉拉尔'我们该怎么办'，吉拉尔告诉他们'去教堂'。"

蒂尔终于辨认出说话者，倾身凑近麦克风："沃尔夫冈？"

声音来自沃尔夫冈·帕拉弗，因斯布鲁克大学的64岁神学家。两人上次相见是2016年在吉拉尔葬礼上共同致悼词时。这位学者圆脸、书卷气的白胡子，眼角永远带着笑纹。但巴黎那晚，他的声音毫无幽默痕迹，显然赢得了亿万富翁的敬重。

半年后，蒂尔在美国天主教大学重讲末日主题。据参会者回顾，其论点基本未变，但此次他给出了在末日与敌基督夹缝中求存的建议："去教堂。"

在胡佛研究所的十月访谈中，蒂尔再次强调："吉拉尔总说只需去教堂，我也努力践行。"今年春天，当播客主乔丹·彼得森多次试图插话时，蒂尔直接打断："吉拉尔的答案依然是：你该去教堂。"

不仅是这句话。尽管蒂尔从未公开承认帕拉弗的影响，但这位奥地利神学家的思想贯穿了蒂尔关于敌基督与拦阻者的所有论述。1990年代，帕拉弗曾系列撰文批判被纳粹利用来为德国民主转向独裁辩护的法学家卡尔·施米特——尤其关注其神学与末日论思想。自1996年初识后，这些论文始终令蒂尔着迷。在近期的末日讲座与访谈中，蒂尔的措辞常直接呼应帕拉弗的学术研究。

当世界最具影响力的亿万富翁——点燃Facebook与AI革命引信、联合创办PayPal与Palantir、助推美国副总统职业生涯的投资者——开始将公开露面专注于借鉴自纳粹法学的末日论时（此人曾迅即为希特勒的"长刀之夜"发表著名辩护），你便知身处怪诞时代。

但对帕拉弗而言，时代更为诡异。作为终身和平主义者，他最初研究施米特末日理论是希望彻底铲除这些思想。然而多年来，他目睹自己的吉拉尔式解读不仅为蒂尔的巡回演讲提供路线图，更影响了其全球政治战略——从军事科技投资到塑造JD·万斯与唐纳德·特朗普的政治生涯，再到支持国家保守主义运动。若蒂尔认真对待自身思想，他似乎将这些行动视为对人类历史终结的干预。

过去一年间，两人保持定期联系，曾在蒂尔家中会面，并通过短信邮件辩论。去年八月，帕拉弗更在因斯布鲁克大学为蒂尔举办了旧金山敌基督系列讲座的为期两天闭门"彩排"。帕拉弗向奥地利媒体《Falter》表示，他同意与蒂尔合作是"希望促其重新审视立场"。在与我的数月交流中，他坦言担心这位投资者对施米特作出了可能引发灾难的解读。

信不信由你，两人的关系甚至更为复杂。帕拉弗不愿公开反对蒂尔，交谈中有时淡化自身影响力及与亿万富翁的分歧。或许因为作为吉拉尔追随者，二人都坚信强烈对抗的双方（如帕拉弗对抗施米特，蒂尔对抗敌基督）注定会相互模仿并纠缠。正如蒂尔所言："或许过度谈论末日者，正在暗中推动敌基督的议程。"

某种程度上，帕拉弗与蒂尔始终是彼此的镜像。

帕拉弗在奥地利阿尔卑斯山区小镇长大，距德国边境不到一小时车程。童年风景如诗：起伏山谷草场间点缀着小教堂，雪峰如屏。历史背景却远非祥和：他出生时距盟军最后一次轰炸奥地利仅13年；四岁生日前月，古巴导弹危机将世界推向核战边缘。

帕拉弗自幼便是和平主义者，18岁登记为良心拒服兵役者，大学时期组织反核武运动。在关于人类暴力根源的课堂上，他接触到勒内·吉拉尔的前沿理论——当时正在欧洲部分学界引发轰动。

他领悟到吉拉尔的核心洞见：人类从欲望开始便是模仿者。"一旦自然需求满足，人类便产生强烈欲望，"吉拉尔写道，"但不知具体渴望什么。"于是人们模仿最令人印象深刻的邻人渴望——"从而确保与既憎恨又钦佩的对象陷入永恒争斗与竞争。"

据吉拉尔所述，这种"模仿"在人际间弹射累积。群体中众人趋同于少数范式，模仿相同欲望，激烈争夺相同目标，最终变得相似。这种"模仿性竞争"未能爆发为全方位战争的唯一原因是：终将转化为全体对个体的战争。通过所谓"替罪羊机制"，所有人联合对抗被指认为群体祸源的不幸目标。吉拉尔写道，此机制对文化凝聚力至关重要，以致替罪羊叙事成为所有古老文化的奠基神话。

但吉拉尔认为，基督教的降临标志着人类意识的转折点——它一劳永逸地揭示替罪羊实为无辜，暴众才是堕落。在十字架叙事中，耶稣死于集体暴行。但与几乎所有其他献祭神话不同，这个故事从替罪羊视角讲述，使观众不得不认清不公。

吉拉尔写道，随着这种顿悟，旧式替罪羊仪式因被揭露与质疑而失效。人类不再从集体暴力中获得同等解脱。社群仍在不断寻找替罪羊，但由此产生的凝聚力日益衰减。历史终点等待我们的，将是失控、传染且终末的模仿性竞争暴力。

然而十字架叙事的积极意义在于为人类提供道德救赎。对吉拉尔而言，结论明确：无论终局如何，必须彻底拒绝寻找替罪羊。模仿虽不可避免，但我们可以选择范式。在他看来，前进的正道是模仿耶稣——这位永远不会成为"迷人竞争者"的范式——过基督教非暴力生活。

吉拉尔理论立即成为年轻帕拉弗的指路明灯，他视其为连接和平行动主义与神学的桥梁。"发现吉拉尔后，"帕拉弗说，"你突然获得了批判所有替罪羊操纵者的完美工具。"这位年轻活动家当时已锁定某些重要目标。

1983年——初识吉拉尔课程同年——因斯布鲁克主教试图阻止帕拉弗集结年轻天主教徒参加欧洲史上最大规模反美导弹抗议。主教以地缘政治天真为由驳斥其观点，推荐他阅读德国文集《兄弟情的幻觉：拥有敌人的必要性》。帕拉弗发现书中充满卡尔·施米特的思想——政治基于区分敌友。阅读时，他意识到自己"几乎反对每个句子"。

因此作为博士生，这位奥地利青年决定撰写吉拉尔式施米特批判。他将用吉拉尔理论对抗欧洲上次大灾难的法律构建者——其思想当时正激励着酝酿下次危机的冷战斗士。"聚焦施米特，"他解释道，"意味着反抗我和平主义态度的头号敌人。"

至1980年代末，帕拉弗已成为因斯布鲁克大学吉拉尔学派的小圈子成员。吉拉尔思想在欧洲其他学界也日渐兴盛，但吉拉尔本人仍在大西洋彼岸的斯坦福大学相对沉寂地发展理论。

1980年代中期蒂尔入读斯坦福时，他是个青少年自由意志主义者，热衷里根时代反共思想，因在南非严苛预科学校的经历而憎恶从众，并渴望赢得"接连不断的竞争"。他迅速成为经典过度成就的保守校园批评家：参加国际象棋队、保持优异成绩、创办右翼学生刊物《斯坦福评论》——当大规模学生示威抨击西方正典与南非种族隔离时，该刊大肆嘲讽多元文化与跨文化政治的潮流。

因此蒂尔被罗伯特·汉默顿-凯利吸引并不意外。这位脾气暴躁、神学保守的校园牧师自称"受过法西斯寄宿学校教育的南非乡巴佬"，教授西方文明课程，据校报记载至少一次被校园反 apartheid 观众嘘声打断。据多位知情者透露，蒂尔视其为导师，正是通过他结识了吉拉尔本人。

汉默顿-凯利是吉拉尔在斯坦福的密友，也是模仿理论在美国最积极的推广者。他在校园拖车房举办双周吉拉尔读书会，经其邀请，蒂尔在1990年代初成为常客。蒂尔自承最初被吉拉尔模仿理论吸引纯属逆反心理。"它与时代精神格格不入，"蒂尔在2009年访谈中说，"自然对叛逆本科生具有吸引力。"此外他的第一印象是模仿理论"疯狂"。

但某刻蒂尔意识到——与安·兰德笔下少数英雄式自我决断个人主义者屹立于苍白从众者背景板的幻想相反——无人能免受模仿性欲望及其挫败的影响。从斯坦福法学院毕业后，他获得令人艳羡的华尔街证劵律师职位——却几乎瞬间厌恶这份工作。"外表看是人向往之处，"蒂尔后来说，"内里却是人想逃离之地。"当他申请为保守派最高法院大法官安东尼·肯尼迪与安东宁·斯卡利亚担任助理时，均遭拒绝。据其自述，吉拉尔的竞争理论逐渐击中高度模仿的蒂尔。"二十多岁经历滚动式青年危机时，"他说，"我开始质疑这种激烈竞争与求胜欲望。"

最终，在瑞士信贷集团短暂担任衍生品交易员后，蒂尔回到湾区开创使其成名科技事业。但重返加州也意味着回归吉拉尔。1996年夏，28岁的蒂尔参加在斯坦福举办的吉拉尔年会。活动最后一天，他坐在演讲厅里。素未谋面的沃尔夫冈·帕拉弗正准备发表关于卡尔·施米特敌基督与拦阻者理论的首批英文批判之一——这将为蒂尔未来30年的思想设定新航向。

作为理论家，施米特最令人铭记的是两点：魏玛时期对自由主义的犀利批判，以及在二战前夜加入纳粹党（1936年被帝国抛弃）。帕拉弗告诉听众，施米特投靠纳粹源于恐惧"全球国家下世界撒旦式统一"——他视此与敌基督统治同义。

帕拉弗称，二战期间施米特将苏联的全球主义野心视为此类末日风险。他说施米特拼命寻找"拦阻者"——保罗《帖撒罗尼迦后书》中提及的阻挡敌基督以延迟末日的神秘存在。帕拉弗告诉听众，施米特"最大失败在于认为希特勒是能阻止毁灭性世界国家降临的拦阻者"。

根据吉拉尔模仿理论，施米特试图解决无解政治难题。他支持希特勒实质是赌注加强替罪羊机制能奏效——德国通过将怒火导向犹太人、罗姆人、外国势力等纳粹指定的帝国毒害者来实现社会稳定。但帕拉弗说，施米特的拦阻者从开始就注定失败。

"施米特过迟意识到支持希特勒实为服务敌基督，"帕拉弗告诉吉拉尔学者。施米特警告"统一世界极权危险"正确，但旧式替罪羊仪式已难持续。施米特依赖残酷民族主义精神，视同胞为友，余者为敌。吉拉尔已证明世界正进化至超越此方案可行的阶段。最终施米特计划适得其反：纳粹暴行如此令人作呕，促成了人类史上首个真正全球机构的自发形成——大屠杀为联合国铺平道路。他的拦阻者自始至终都是敌基督。

这便是吉拉尔困境。若旧有遏制暴力结构失效，暴力的世界终结似乎不可避免。帕拉弗提出，欲塑造历史者有两种行动路径：追随施米特或追随耶稣。追随施米特意味着投资拦阻者——通过建立允许暴力对待替罪羊的体系，或可延迟更恐怖的末日暴力。但对帕拉弗而言，唯一道德可接受的答案明确：即便替罪羊机制能暂缓末日，我们也不应使用。他以吉拉尔"最终放弃暴力"的呼吁结束论文。

演讲结束后，蒂尔急忙上前自我介绍。"他熟悉施米特，"帕拉弗告诉我，因知施米特对列奥·施特劳斯很重要——后者在蒂尔运营《斯坦福评论》时期是保守派关键思想源泉。但施米特许多著作因禁忌从未译成英文。此刻帕拉弗的学术研究架起了蒂尔保守政治理论兴趣与吉拉尔著作的桥梁，蒂尔迫切希望探讨。

当日，他们与约20位参与者同往吉拉尔家参加会后聚会。"我们在那儿关于如何理解施特劳斯与施米特谈了一个半小时，"帕拉弗告诉我。这位奥地利青年欣喜于有听众对其演讲感兴趣。"学界通常少人热衷倾听，"他说，"很高兴找到真正对此主题感兴趣的对话者。"多年后帕拉弗才意识到两人对同一主题的痴迷何等迥异。

2004年夏，蒂尔与导师汉默顿-凯利在斯坦福组织为期一周吉拉尔研讨班，邀请吉拉尔与帕拉弗参与。这场仅八人闭门研讨会是蒂尔作为吉拉尔知识分子的自我策划首秀。PayPal以15亿美元出售后新晋富豪的他承担全部费用，并资助出版研讨会论文集。

经帕拉弗建议，会议主题定为"政治与启示录"。此时距9/11已三年，模仿理论家仍在解读恐袭是否预示历史终局"全球模仿性竞争"的爆发。但对坐于研讨桌首的蒂尔而言，袭击主要暴露西方可悲的深层自卫无能。

"9/11残酷事实要求重检现代政治根基，"蒂尔在七月提交的论文中写道，"今日，仅自我保存就迫使我们重新审视世界，思考陌生新观念，从而从漫长获益的知识沉睡与遗忘——被误导性称为'启蒙'——中苏醒。"

很快可见蒂尔深入思考过两人1996年初遇时帕拉弗的论文。他欲让听众接受的"陌生新观念"大体正是卡尔·施米特的思想。

在帕拉弗反感之处，蒂尔颂扬施米特"强健政治概念"——"人类被迫选择敌友，余者皆为幻象"。他引施米特："政治高点在于具体清晰识别敌人为敌人的时刻。"蒂尔心中，奥萨马·本·拉登能践行此类政治，而沉迷个人权利与程序的西方则不能。

蒂尔推测施米特会呼吁对伊斯兰发动圣战。但他似乎恐惧西方正滑向政治之外，创造乏味"囊括世界的经济技术组织"。这是施米特的噩梦场景。蒂尔说，此世界中"现实表征或将取代现实：暴力战争被暴力电子游戏取代；英雄壮举被刺激游乐设施取代；严肃思想被肥皂剧式'各种阴谋'取代。"但蒂尔论证，这种虚假现实只是"预示末日终灾的短暂和谐"——即施米特所说的敌基督和谐。

蒂尔对施米特的讨论只字未提希特勒或纳粹。

论文过半，蒂尔彻底转向。似经重新考虑，他判定施米特"激烈方案"在核武时代"挟带过多暴力"。继而转向设想"巩固现代西方之路"——通过误导、隐义与不透明绕开民主制度，此法他归功于理论家列奥·施特劳斯（论文标题《施特劳斯时刻》）。

"美国宪法机器阻断了直接前路，"蒂尔说，"但行动可能超乎表象。"诡异的是，对全球统一如此疑虑的他，竟在全球监控网络中看到行动可能。"与其要充满冗长无果议会辩论、似痴人妄语的联合国，"蒂尔说，"我们应考虑...世界情报机构秘密协调，作为实现真正全球美国和平的决定性路径。"此监控超级

英文来源：

Peter Thiel’s Armageddon speaking tour has—like the world—not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for “that which withholds” the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco.
Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.
The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel’s chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. (Thiel identifies as a “hardcore Girardian.”) On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon—and all the things he believed were “not enough” to prevent it.
By Thiel’s telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our “listless” and “zombie” age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the “endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web.” But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon—the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI—modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist.
According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. “How might such an Antichrist rise to power?” Thiel asked. “By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety.” In other words: It would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse.
By way of illustration, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist might appear in the form of someone like the philosopher Nick Bostrom—an AI doomer who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing to erect an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology. But it wasn’t just Bostrom. Thiel saw potential Antichrists in a whole zeitgeist of people and institutions “focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.”
So humanity is doubly screwed: It has to avoid both technological calamity and the reign of the Antichrist. But the latter was far more terrifying for the billionaire at the podium. For reasons grounded in Girardian theory, Thiel believed that such a regime could only—after decades of sickly, pent-up energy—set off an all-out explosion of vicious, civilization-ending violence. And he wasn’t sure whether any katechons could hold it off.
When Thiel was finished, a moderator kicked off the Q&A session by noting, in so many words, that the speech had been a huge bummer. If the world was hurtling toward an apocalyptic crisis, he asked, what might the billionaire suggest we do?
Fend off the Antichrist, came the reply. But beyond that, Thiel said that he—like Girard—wasn’t really in the business of offering practical advice.
A few moments later, someone in the audience stood and offered a correction. “It’s not true what you said about Girard,” a man’s voice said.
Thiel—who often has a tendency to stonewall or steamroll his interlocutors—squinted in the speaker’s direction, trying to determine exactly who was pushing back. The voice had the rounded vowels and soft Rs of a recognizably Austrian accent and conveyed a quiet, familiar authority. “On many occasions,” the speaker went on, “young people asked Girard, ‘What should we do?’ And Girard told them to go to church.”
Thiel finally seemed to recognize who was speaking. He leaned in toward the microphone: “Wolfgang?”
The voice belonged to Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year old theologian from Innsbruck, Austria, whom Thiel had last seen in 2016, the year they both delivered eulogies at Girard’s funeral. Palaver has a round face, a bookish white mustache, and eyes permanently crinkled at the corners by laugh lines. But that night in Paris, there was no trace of humor in his voice. And he evidently commanded the billionaire’s respect.
Six months later, Thiel delivered his Armageddon lecture again, now at The Catholic University of America. According to a recap posted by one attendee, Thiel’s argument was pretty much the same. Except this time Thiel told his listeners how they might personally navigate the slender path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: “Go to church.”
In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel echoed the line again: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” This spring, during one of the podcaster Jordan Peterson’s many failed attempts to interject, Thiel cut him off: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church.”
It’s not just that line. Although Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian’s influence arguably runs through nearly everything Thiel has ever said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazis to justify Germany’s slip from democracy to dictatorship. Palaver’s papers critiqued a lesser-known, theological, and apocalyptic line of Schmitt’s thinking—and they seem to have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996. In his recent doomsday lectures and interviews, Thiel’s language often mirrors Palaver’s scholarship directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing it. (Thiel did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment.)
You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)
But the times have been even weirder for Palaver. A lifelong peace activist, he first wrote about Schmitt’s apocalyptic theories in hopes of driving a stake through their heart. Yet for years now, Palaver has watched as his own Girardian take on Schmitt seems to have provided a roadmap not only for Thiel’s speaking tour but for his considerable strategic interventions in global politics—from his investments in military tech to his role in shaping the careers of JD Vance and Donald Trump to his support of the National Conservatism movement. If Thiel takes his own thinking seriously, he seems to regard these moves as interventions in the end of human history.
For the past year or so, the two men have been in regular touch, meeting together once at Thiel’s home and debating with each other over text and email. In August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day, closed-door “dress rehearsal” of the billionaire’s four-part San Francisco Antichrist lecture series. In an interview with the Austrian news outlet Falter, Palaver said he’d agreed to the event with Thiel “in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions.” In my own months of conversation with Palaver, he has said he fears that the investor has arrived at a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt.
And believe it or not, the nature of Palaver and Thiel’s relationship gets even more complicated. Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly, and in our conversations he sometimes downplays his own influence and disagreements with the billionaire. Perhaps that’s because, as followers of Girard, both men believe that any two figures who oppose each other strongly enough—as Palaver has opposed Schmitt, as Thiel opposes the Antichrist—are bound to mimic each other and become entangled. As Thiel himself has said, “Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist.”
In some ways, Palaver and Thiel have always been mirror images of each other.
Palaver grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps, less than an hour from the German border. The landscape of his childhood was idyllic: rolling valleys and meadows, dotted with small churches and boxed in by towering, snow-capped mountain ranges. The historical context was less so. Palaver was born 13 years after the Allies dropped their last bombs on Austria, and within a month of his fourth birthday, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
From a young age, Palaver was a peace activist, registering as a conscientious objector at 18 and then organizing against nuclear weapons in college. It was in a class about the roots of human violence where he came to study the work of Rene Girard—whose unusual theories were generating buzz in parts of Europe.
Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”
According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.
But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.
With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.
The upside of the crucifixion narrative, however, is that it offers humanity moral redemption. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: No matter the endgame, one must wholly reject scapegoating. Imitation remains inescapable, but we can choose our models. And the sound path forward, as he saw it, is to mimic Jesus—the one model who will never become a “fascinating rival”—in leading lives of Christian non-violence.
Girard’s theory almost immediately became a lodestar for the young Palaver, who recognized it as a bridge between his peace activism and theology. “You discover Girard,” Palaver says, “and you suddenly have a perfect tool to criticize all the scapegoaters.” And the young activist already had certain major scapegoaters in his sights.
In 1983—the same year as that first class on Girard—the bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from rallying a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe. Dismissing Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivete, the bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to an idea—coined by Carl Schmitt—that politics is grounded in distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized he was “more or less against every sentence.”
So as a doctoral candidate, the young Austrian decided to write a Girardian critique of Schmitt. He would use Girardian theory against a legal architect of Europe’s last great calamity, who was now inspiring the Cold Warriors stoking its next. “Focusing upon Schmitt,” he explained, “meant for me turning against the archenemy of my pacifist attitude.”
By the late 1980s, Palaver had become one of a small cadre of Girardian devotees on faculty at the University of Innsbruck. Girard’s ideas were also picking up steam in academic circles elsewhere in Europe. But Girard himself continued to develop his theories in relative obscurity across the Atlantic, at Stanford University.
When Thiel arrived at Stanford in the mid 1980s, he was a teen libertarian with a zeal for Reagan-era anti-communism, a hatred for conformity stemming from his time in a draconian South African prep school, and a drive, as he has described it, to win “one competition after another.” He quickly filled the role of a classic overachieving conservative campus gadfly. He played on the Stanford chess team, maintained excellent grades, and was the founding editor of The Stanford Review, a right-wing student publication—which heaped scorn on the trendy politics of diversity and multiculturalism at a time when mass student demonstrations were railing against the Western canon and South African apartheid.
So it’s not surprising that Thiel found himself drawn to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a cantankerous, theologically conservative Stanford campus minister who once referred to himself as a “bumpkin from South Africa armed with fascist boarding school education.” Hamerton-Kelly taught classes on Western Civilization and, according to the school newspaper, was booed on at least one occasion by anti-Apartheid audiences on campus. According to several people who knew them both, Thiel came to see Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor. And it was through him that Thiel got to know Girard personally.
Hamerton-Kelly was one of Girard’s closest friends at Stanford and one of mimetic theory’s loudest champions in the United States. He also led a biweekly Girardian study group in a trailer on campus, and at his invitation, Thiel became a regular fixture in the early 1990s. By Thiel’s own admission, his initial attraction to Girard’s mimetic thinking was simply contrarian. “It was very much out of temper with the times,” Thiel said in a 2009 interview, “so it had a sort of natural appeal to a somewhat rebellious undergraduate.” Beyond that, Thiel’s first impression was that mimetic theory was “crazy.”
But at some point, Thiel came to realize that—contrary to Ayn Rand’s fantasy of a few heroic, self-determined individualists striding against a backdrop of pale conformists—no one is immune to imitative desire and its frustrations. After graduating from Stanford law school, Thiel landed a highly coveted job as a securities lawyer at a prestigious Wall Street firm—and almost instantly hated it. “From the outside it was a place where everybody wanted to get in,” Thiel would later say. “On the inside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get out.” Then, when he applied to clerk under the conservative US Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both men turned him down. By his own account, Girard’s theory of rivalry was gradually hitting home for the hyper-mimetic Thiel. “As I had this rolling quarter-life crisis in my twenties,” he has said, “there was something about this intense competition and desire to win that I came to question.”
Finally, after a brief stint as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group, Thiel headed home to the Bay Area to launch the career in tech that would make him famous. But in returning to California, Thiel was also coming back to Girard. In the summer of 1996, the 28-year old Thiel attended the annual conference of Girardians, held at Stanford that year. On the final day of the event, he found a seat in a lecture hall. Wolfgang Palaver—whom Thiel had never met—was squaring up to present one of the first English-language critiques of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the Antichrist and the katechon. It would help set a new course for Thiel’s thinking for the next 30 years.
As a theorist, Schmitt is best remembered for two things: his incisive Weimar-era critique of liberalism and his decision to join the Nazi party in the run-up to the Second World War (before being cast aside by the Reich in 1936). Schmitt’s embrace of the Nazis, Palaver told his audience, stemmed from his fear of “the satanic unification of the world” under a global state, which Schmitt treated as synonymous with the reign of the Antichrist.
During the Second World War, Schmitt saw the globalist ambitions of the USSR as presenting precisely this kind of apocalyptic risk, according to Palaver. Schmitt, he said, was desperate to locate a katechon—the shadowy figure, referenced in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, who stands in the way of the Antichrist in order to hold off the end of the world. Schmitt’s “greatest failure,” Palaver told his audience, “had been to think that Hitler was a katechon able to prevent the coming of a destructive world state.”
According to Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt was trying to solve an unsolvable political problem. Schmitt’s support of Hitler was effectively a bet that cranking up the volume on the scapegoat mechanism could work—that Germany would achieve social stability by channeling all of its fury toward Jews, the Roma, foreign powers, and all the other enemies that the Nazis designated as poisonous to the Reich. But Schmitt’s katechon, Palaver said, was doomed from the start.
“Far too late did Schmitt realize that his support of Hitler was actually serving the Antichrist,” Palaver told the Girardians. Schmitt was correct to warn against “the totalitarian dangers of a unified world,” but the old scapegoating rituals were no longer sustainable. Schmitt relied on a brutal nationalist ethos that saw countrymen as friends and everyone else as vile enemies. Girard had proved the world was evolving beyond the workability of such a scheme. So ultimately, Schmitt’s plan backfired. The atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi party had been so revolting, they’d prompted the spontaneous formation of the first truly global institution in human history. The Holocaust paved the way for the United Nations. His katechon had been an Antichrist all along.
This is the Girardian conundrum. If the old structures for containing violence no longer work, a violent world-ending apocalypse seems all but inevitable. For anyone who wants to shape history, Palaver suggested, there are two available courses of action: Follow in the footsteps of Schmitt or follow in the footsteps of Jesus. To follow Schmitt would be to invest in the katechon. By creating systems that permit violence against scapegoats, one might be able to postpone the far greater violence of the apocalypse. But for Palaver, the only morally acceptable answer was clear. Even if scapegoating could hold off the apocalypse for a time, we should not scapegoat. He ended his paper by quoting Girard’s call for “the definitive renunciation of violence.”
After the presentation ended, Thiel rushed to introduce himself to Palaver. “He was familiar with Schmitt,” Palaver told me, because he knew Schmitt had been important to Leo Strauss, a key intellectual influence among conservatives around the time Thiel was running the Stanford Review. But much of Schmitt’s writing, taboo as it was, had never been translated into English. Now here was Palaver’s scholarship, bridging the gap between Thiel’s interest in conservative political theory and the work of René Girard, and Thiel was eager to discuss it.
That day, they joined around 20 other participants for an after-party at Girard’s house. “There, we talked for one and a half hours about how I see Strauss and Schmitt,” Palaver told me. The young Austrian was thrilled to learn that someone in the audience had found his presentation interesting. “Usually in academia, not many people will eagerly listen,” he said. “ So I was happy to find a conversation partner who was really interested in the topic.” It would be years before Palaver started to realize how much their fascinations with the same subject diverged.
In the summer of 2004, Thiel and his old mentor Hamerton-Kelly organized a weeklong Girardian seminar at Stanford and invited Girard and Palaver to take part. The gathering was a small, closed symposium with only eight participants and served as Thiel’s self-orchestrated debut as a Girardian intellectual. Newly wealthy after having sold PayPal in a deal valued at $1.5 billion, he footed the bill for the week and also helped underwrite the publication of a book that would collect all the papers presented at the seminar.
At Palaver’s suggestion, the theme of the conference was “Politics and Apocalypse.” It had been three years since 9/11, and mimetic theorists were still processing whether the terror attacks augured history’s final explosion of “planetary mimetic rivalry.” But for Thiel—who sat at the head of the seminar table—the attacks mainly exposed the West’s deep and pathetic inability to protect itself.
“The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics,” Thiel wrote in the paper he presented that July. “Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”
It would quickly become apparent that Thiel had spent some time considering the paper Palaver presented the day the two men met in 1996. The “strange new thoughts” Thiel wanted his audience to entertain were, it turned out, largely those of Carl Schmitt.
Where Palaver had been repulsed, Thiel extolled Schmitt’s “robust conception of the political,” in which “humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies,” and everything else is delusion. “The high points of politics,” he quotes Schmitt as saying, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” In Thiel’s mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics. The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not.
Schmitt, Thiel conjectured, would have responded to 9/11 by calling for a holy crusade against Islam. But the West was instead slipping beyond politics altogether, Thiel seemed to fear, toward the creation of a bland “world-embracing economic and technical organization.” This was Schmitt’s nightmare scenario. In such a world, Thiel said, “a representation of reality might appear to replace reality: Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts,’ as in a soap opera.” But that counterfeit reality, Thiel argued, would just be the “brief harmony that prefigures the final catastrophe of the Apocalypse”—the harmony, in Schmitt’s telling, of the Antichrist.
Thiel’s discussion of Schmitt didn’t mention Hitler or the Nazis once.
Then, about halfway through his paper, Thiel switched gears completely. As if having second thoughts, he ruled out Schmitt’s “drastic solutions” as “fraught with far too much violence” in an age of nuclear weapons. Then he shifted toward imagining “a way to fortify the modern West” that involved working around democratic institutions via misdirection, hidden meanings, and a lack of transparency—an approach he identified with the theorist Leo Strauss. (He titled his paper “The Straussian Moment.”)
“A direct path forward is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery,” Thiel said. “Still, there are more possibilities for action than first appear.” Strangely for someone so suspicious of global unity, Thiel saw one such possibility for action in the creation of a worldwide surveillance network. “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots,” Thiel said, “we should consider … the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” This surveillance supersystem, Thiel wrote, could act as “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.”
Sitting down the seminar table from Thiel, Palaver had no idea that Thiel had more than an academic interest in spycraft. Just a year earlier, Thiel had quietly incorporated a new company called Palantir Technologies, where he would spend the next two decades developing some of the most sophisticated surveillance infrastructure in human history. At the time of the conference, the firm was still in its infancy. But it would soon land its first major client: the CIA.
As Palaver recalls it, Thiel’s paper received little pushback from the Girardians around the table in 2004. “I reread it recently,” Palaver tells me. “You can feel the anxiety. You feel that he was worried.” After 9/11, Palaver sighs, “I think Thiel’s first reaction was: We have to build tools to never again be in a situation where people can sneak into the United States without discovery.”
About a month after the symposium, Thiel committed his most famous act of putting his money where his Girardian mouth was. In August of 2004, he put $500,000 in TheFacebook.com, becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s first major investor. On numerous occasions, Thiel has described this as a wager on the explanatory power of Girardian theory. “I bet on mimesis,” Thiel would later say. LinkedIn intellectuals began referring to Girard as “the godfather of the Like button.” One critic even speculated that Thiel saw Facebook as “a mechanism for the containment and channeling of mimetic violence.”
But that wasn’t the only investment Thiel would make based on the power of his favorite theories.
After World War II, according to Palaver, Schmitt himself eventually soured on the idea that Hitler was the katechon. Clearly, the Führer had been a bad bet.
In Schmitt’s postwar book The Nomos of the Earth, he pitched a new kind of katechon. This would be a world order “based on the equilibrium of several independent large blocs,” as Palaver summarized it in 1996. In Schmitt’s multipolar world order, each hegemonic power would have its own distinct “culture, race, language, and national heritage.” The world would be disunified by design. There would be no global regulatory bodies and no global enforcement mechanisms—no United Nations, no International Criminal Court.
In July of 2019, Thiel went onstage to present a keynote lecture at the inaugural US conference of a new international political force: the National Conservatism movement. Established that year by the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, National Conservatives are opposed to “universalist ideologies” and want to “see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative.”
Thiel has presented a lecture at all but two US-based conference of the National Conservatives, where illiberal world leaders meet with their international counterparts and where right-leaning intellectuals from across the globe gather to give talks on the failures of liberalism, the necessity of reevaluating the separation of church and state, and the virtues of closed borders and self-interested, soil-deep nationalism. In 2021, Thiel was listed among the conference’s biggest donors of $50,000 or more.
Almost since the beginning, observers have noted that Hazony’s theories—and those of the National Conservatives in general—appear to be “suffused with the ideas of the German jurist Carl Schmitt,” though Hazony has disavowed the connection. Among the relatively few people associated with National Conservatism who do cite Schmitt openly in their own work are Thiel and Michael Anton, the essayist and sometime Trump administration official.
In 2023, Thiel returned to Schmitt’s ideas yet again when he gave his first major lecture on the Antichrist before the Girardians in Paris. This time he did refer obliquely to Schmitt’s “misadventure in nationalism”—a cute way of referring to his vigorously prosecuted Nazism—and gave much more air to the idea of the katechon.
After Thiel finished his talk—and Palaver issued his “go to church” correction from the audience—the Austrian went up to Thiel to say hello and make sure there were no hard feelings. As Palaver recalls it, Thiel responded that, in fact, he hoped they could discuss the substance of his lecture more deeply. So a year later, at Thiel’s invitation, Palaver flew to California to meet with Thiel in his sprawling Los Angeles home.
Before he arrived, the theologian was surprised to learn that Thiel had already decided what they would discuss: one of Palaver’s old papers critiquing Schmitt. “I had to reread it myself,” Palaver told me, “and I was partly astonished by what I had collected there and had to address.” It had been years since he’d thought about his mid-’90s scholarship. By the evening’s end, Palaver realized the same could not be said for his host.
As time went on, Palaver realized that he may have become a major vehicle for his once-taboo archenemy’s thought. “Some of those crazy ideas were really presented by myself for the first time,” Palaver says in his somewhat broken English. “And now they are all over the place.”
As the National Conservatism movement picked up steam, its members began angling to have a man in the White House by 2024. They pinned their early hopes on Ron DeSantis, but when his campaign fizzled out, all eyes turned toward Ohio senator JD Vance.
It’s no secret that Vance is largely a product of Thiel—the billionaire has helped architect nearly every professional endeavor of Vance’s adult life, including his meteoric political rise. After Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, he published an essay in the Catholic magazine The Lamp, partly attributing his conversion to the influence of two men: Peter Thiel (“he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”) and the late René Girard. “His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale,” Vance wrote. “But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.”
As Vance put it, “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.” In applying this to his own life, Vance focused mainly on his generation’s petty online habits in the 2010s. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced,” he wrote. “We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”
It was a fairly shallow gloss on Girard’s theory. But to many Girardians, it suggested Vance knew exactly what he was doing when—two months after Donald Trump selected him as a running mate—the nominee began tweeting that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets. And when, on the campaign trail and in televised debates, he contorted himself to blame nearly every American crisis on immigrants.
For some Girardians, this was a breaking point. The mimetic theorist Bernard Perret lambasted Vance and his billionaire mentor in a French political journal, accusing them of “casting a shadow over Girard’s legacy.” Within months, several more prominent Girardians followed suit. “It’s difficult to claim Girard, who fundamentally believes that violence is linked to exclusion, and at the same time to accuse Haitians of eating dogs,” Girardian scholar Paul Dumouchel told a Canadian newspaper. “Either you didn’t understand Girard, or you’re a liar.”
It’s possible that Vance may have genuinely misunderstood the scapegoat mechanism. Or he may have been familiar enough with Girardian mimetic theory to recognize that, while the old sacred rituals might not work perfectly, they aren’t entirely broken yet. Collective acts of violence still bind people together somewhat—perhaps enough to win an election. “They feel relieved of their tensions and they coalesce into a more harmonious group,” Girard wrote. “They now have a single purpose, which is to prevent the scapegoat from harming them by expelling and destroying him.”
By February of 2025, Thiel’s Armageddon tour had gotten to the point where he was handing out T-shirts that said “Don’t Immanentize the Katechon.” (This was a nerdy Thielian play on the anti-utopian quote, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton”—meaning don’t try to manifest heaven on Earth.) In a recent interview, Thiel was asked whether or not Donald Trump might be the katechon, and he refused to answer. His reticence to name a katechon is a lesson he seems to take directly from Palaver’s account of Schmitt and Hitler. “If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong,” Thiel told Cowen. “There’s always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist,” he said, echoing Palaver’s 1996 paper.
Throughout Thiel’s strange circuit as an itinerant preacher, he and Palaver have been in frequent touch. The first time I spoke with Palaver, he’d recently emailed Thiel to express his disgust over JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where the vice president called for greater inclusion of nationalist populist parties like Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany. Thiel engaged with Palaver's criticism of Vance without really conceding it, Palaver says. Whether the message trickled down to the vice president is unclear.
Last summer, I signed up to attend the 35th annual Girardian conference in Rome so I could spend time with Palaver in person. In the days leading up to it, I had dozens of unplanned conversations with mimetic theorists—in between lectures, in the back seats of taxis, and over espressos and cigarettes at tiny Roman cafés. The Girardians are a remarkably welcoming bunch, and many were reasonably eager to express how misrepresented they felt by the media. Several noted how disturbed they’d been to see a recent illustration, which accompanied a story in the Financial Times, of a smirking carved bust of Girard wearing a bright red MAGA hat.
By virtue of his enormous fortune (and his tendency to name-drop Girard whenever he speaks to the media), Thiel is easily the most well-known Girardian on the planet. He does not, however, speak for the vast majority of mimetic theorists—particularly the European contingent. Certainly, none of the Girardians I spoke with seemed remotely interested in constructing katechons.
It’s not that they aren’t thinking about the apocalypse. There’s no way to take Girard’s mimetic theory seriously without acknowledging his conclusion: As scapegoating becomes less and less effective, the world begins to fall apart. It was just that the Girardians I met seemed to be at peace with the thought that we might be living through the denouement of human history.
They were not interested in building katechons, they told me, because they do not want innocent people to get hurt. Their work is concerned with scapegoating less, not scapegoating more. Come what may. “Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness,” Girard wrote. “The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope.”
Palaver wanted to make sure I understood that he, too, was concerned with scapegoating less—he seemed worried that I might be scapegoating Peter Thiel. It was a lesson he himself had learned over and over. “Schmitt was the type of thinking I was fighting against,” Palaver told me. “And partly I’m still fighting against Schmitt.” But over the years, Girard had prodded him to see that he was becoming mimetically entangled with his opponent. “To understand mimetic theory properly means to reflect also on your own possible scapegoats.” So when I wanted to talk to him about Thiel’s hand in Palantir and National Conservatism, Palaver kept steering the conversation back to the condition of the billionaire’s soul.
In a June interview, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat asked Thiel whether he—with his heavy investments in AI, military tech, and the data analysis firm Palantir—is actually building tools that work in the service of the Antichrist. The halting six seconds the men subsequently devoted to unpacking the idea, which immediately became a meme, were remarkably underwhelming.
Less than a month before Douthat spoke with Thiel, I posed the exact same question to Palaver, and it elicited more of a response. Why was Thiel, given his fixation on preventing a one-world state, building surveillance tools that a totalitarian dictator could use to seize power? Was he on the side of the katechon or the Antichrist?
Palaver told me he wasn’t entirely sure. “There’s a tension between those two things, and in some ways he goes along with both of them,” he told me. “It’s a good strategy, if you have the means—to have something at stake on all the sides.” In other words, maybe the billionaire is hedging his bets—investing heavily in both the katechon and the one-world, totalitarian Antichrist.
But to understand why Thiel may be willing to take that risk, Palaver says you need to first understand that he’s human. “What I’ve observed are traces of deep fear,” he told me. “Fear of death, fear of terrorism.” It all comes down to a lack of trust and a craving for security, Palaver suspects. “There are so many cases where he expresses fears and concerns and a need for protection,” Palaver says. “And if your main thing is seeking protection, you play with fire.”
Palaver has decided that he has to pick his battles with Thiel. “We have different political views of the world. That's quite clear for him and for me,” he says. But matters of religion are different. “That’s where I hopefully can have an influence on him,” Palaver says. Ultimately, Thiel needs to choose who he is going to imitate. “In the end, you have to decide: Are you really going to be a Christian in a proper sense? Or are you a Schmittian?”
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