[START OF LECTURE]

PETER THIEL

All right, thank you.

I think that's probably a compliment, since in that world I think Palpatine is at least reasonably competent and pretty

high on that scale. Last time I talked about Daniel 12:4—“knowledge shall be increased in the end times.” Tonight I will

explore the other half of this prophecy, that “many shall run to and fro,” which I read, much like Francis Bacon did, as a

prophecy about globalization, empire, and the dangers of a one-world state. This will naturally lead us to a discussion of

the Katechon, the mysterious force that restrains the Antichrist from Paul's Second Epistle to the Thessalonians.

Before I get into the meat of today's lecture, I want to recap this big theme from last week about the relationship

between science, technology, and history. I always want to leave you with a sense of history. That history is one of the

great things of the Judeo-Christian inspiration. We live in a world in late modernity, which is very different from early

modernity. In early modernity, utopian scientists like Francis Bacon believed that science had this anti-Christian vibe to it

and that perhaps the church was holding back science.

In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the Antichrist like Eliezer

Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the Antichrist has

somehow become anti-science.

You can give this a timeless and eternal gloss on it: in all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the

Christian God for our problems. In early modernity, the Christian God was blamed for holding back science. In late

modernity, as the project has gotten scary and dangerous in some ways, the Christian God is blamed for accelerating it.

I’ve argued it’s not the fault of the Christian God or the fault of science and technology; it’s probably some vowel deep

problems that lie in ourselves.

There’s a lot of complicated nuance to this. There's all sorts of figures that are still “early modern” or “late modern.”

There's way you can think of Richard Dawkins the evolutionary biologist as a pro-science, anti-Christian person—you

can think of him as a fossil from 1780. The vibe of late modernity is drive much more by Oppenheimer than Edward

Teller—effective altruists and people like that. And the part that's confusing is, sometimes in a single lifetime, people

shift from early modern to late modern. There's a way that the Eliezer Yudkowsky of 2005 was a transhumanist, utopian

—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The Eliezer Yudkowsky of 2025 is late-modern: dystopian, luddite: “If

anyone builds it, everyone dies.”

It's almost like you need a worldwide government to stop all the wizards”working on computer technology—it is anti-

anyone who’s like Harry Potter. There are all sorts of variations on this. My fiercest critics on life-extension technology

are liberal atheists: they say it's unnatural to live too long. It goes against the environment, or maybe it will bankrupt the

quasi-socialist healthcare system, or things like this. There is this way in which the feel of history has just changed.

I want to get at this transformation in history through another lens. This is always...what are some of the signs of the

apocalypse? Will it be in the newspaper? Can we identify the Antichrist? Maybe it's hard to do in the present and it's

always sort of controversial. But can you at least identify the Antichrist in literature. I'm going to try to illustrate this

change in history through these four books. There's these four quadrants they map onto.

The early modern, pro-science, anti-Christian: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. The anti-science, pro-Christian rebuttal

one hundred years later is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. When we get to late modernity, the quadrants are

inverted. You have an anti-science, anti-Christian in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and the pro-science, pro-Christian one is

the other quadrant.

I could probably spend an hour going through all of these books, so I'm going to do a 15-minute super-fast riff on these

four books.

Francis Bacon sets a course for modernity. Most Bacon scholars believe he was a heterodox Christian, it was who he

pretended to be. But if you read New Atlantis, it's a Utopian story. It was too dangerous to publish in his lifetime. It was

quite literally anti-Christian. Unlike Old Atlantis, the New Atlantis has overcome the laws of nature, it can overcome the

gods. It weather's natural disasters with technology. They control the weather. It's transcended the classical cyclical

model of history.

And it's set on this ship that sails west from Peru, it gets into a storm, they crash in the island. As the story unfolds, it

has a lot of creepy vibes where, later on you want to control the weather, so was it really a natural storm or not? And

there's a mysterious thing called the College of the Six Days’ Works or Solomon's house that creates Bensalem, the

name of the island... technology. It's of course ambiguous word, College of the Six Days’ Works. Are the scientists

honoring God's works, mimicking them or perhaps succeeding them? And King Solomon, we'll come back to him later.

The other namesake for the institute and the wisest man in the Old Testament. It's also an ambiguous figure. He had

hundreds of foreign wives and even Dante doubted whether he was ultimately saved.

And then the sort of rough spoiler. It is this fantastical scientific island. It is both Bacon's dream for modernity and be

literally run by the Antichrist. There's this one character Jobin, who's a Jew from one of the lost tribes of Israel. The

narrator probably introduces him as the Chaplin of the ship, The Priest. And he discovers that Joabin is Jewish and

circumcised, sort of a fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel 11:37 about the Antichrist. He's from the lost tribe of Israel.

Bensalem would mean son of peace, son of safety. The slogan of the Antichrist 1 Thessalonians 5:30. It is a

cornucopian society that refutes Matthew 26:11: for you shall have the poor with you always. It's cornucopian. There are

towers that are taller than the Tower of Babel. Nothing happens.

And then the story ends with this description of the vast scientific apparatus that Bensalem controls. Including weapons

more powerful than any...there's this island sort of in the South Pacific that's sort of the antipode of Jerusalem. It's the

anti-Jerusalem. It's somewhere between Tahiti and New Zealand.

The Old Atlantis story in Plato's Timaeus, it's unfinished, but the unfinished part is a speech by the god Zeus explaining

why the Old Atlantis was destroyed. The New Atlantis, the ending that's not included, is a new action. Where the pro-

science Antichrist is going to conquer the world with science. And the Chaplin gets converted into the Church of the

Antichrist. He becomes sort of a false prophet. And so it's a short leap from empiricism to empire. Large bounds of

empire as far as possible.

One of the interesting things about Bacon is that Hobbes was Bacon's secretary. And he writes this book on how you

can have a new, reformed government called Leviathan. And there's all sorts of details one can go on this, but if you

think of it, it was like the two of them talked to each other. Hobbes knew what Bacon was trying to do. He had a plan for

the Antichrist and then Hobbes sort of provides the mechanisms.

Again, a medieval painting of the Antichrist riding on Leviathan to take over the world. It has all these anti-Christian

images. The Leviathan is all these people, many in one or something like this. It's maybe a riff on 1 Corinthians 12:12:

for as the body is one has many members and all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is

Christ.

Here, sort of, the state replaces the church. So that's sort of the pro-science early modernity. You think Jonathan Swift

writes Gulliver's Travels about 100 years later. Swift is sort of an Anglican preacher. He's somewhat anti-science and it

sort of has these anti-Bacon riffs. People always focus on the first two voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. But the third

and fourth voyages are to the distant future. Voyage three is sort of a distant future where it's a flying island that's sort of

controlled by science. And sort of run by the Antichrist king, blots out the sun and threatens to crush his people's cities.

Isaiah 14:14, I will send them the heights of the clouds. It's sort of an allusion to the Antichrist.

And then there's sort of a parody of the College of the Six Days’ Works. From Bacon's the Academy of Lagado where

the science is mostly bad, it just doesn't work. Gulliver who's gullible, you shouldn't trust anything Gulliver says. He

meets a scientist trying to draw sunlight out of cucumbers. Struldbrugs with long life spans but they're sort of very

unhealthy, suffering from dementia. And that the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses and ruins, the people

without food or clothes. It's all going to this useless science that just doesn't work.

Voyage four is to Queenham land. It's a land governed by horse philosophers. Psalm 32:9: be not as the horse. This is

sort of the philosophers who reason without faith. And the Queenhams are enslaving, hunting and exterminating the

humans, the Yahoos. The Yahoos are the followers of Yahweh. They are Christians enduring the great tribulation. And

there's sort of this constant debate the horses have whether they should just exterminate all the Yahoos once and for

all. And presumably that happens at some point.

This is sort of the other quadrant. But now when we fast forward—this is again the feel of how late modernity is different

—when we fast forward 250 years to Watchmen, which is set on an alternate Earth in the 1980s. It's the Cold War. No

one talks about the Antichrist; everyone fears the apocalypse. In this alternative world, there are superheroes that

heighten the stakes. The plot follows that someone is murdering the superheroes one by one. Dr. Manhattan is sort of

the synthesis of AI and a nuclear weapon. And there's a superhero named Ozymandias—“king of kings,” Alexander the

Great and Ramesses II, types of the Antichrist—and he's the opposite of Francis Bacon. He wants to stop apocalyptic

science and tech, but he still believes he can conquer chance.

And what he does, you can sort of see on the right slide, is he stages a fake alien invasion in New York. Where this fake

squid monster kills lots and lots of people, and that scares everyone and the Russians and Americans put aside their

differences; it ends the Cold War. It's strangely adjacent to the Carl Schmitt idea in The Concept of the Political that

humanity cannot come together for political because it is not....at least not on this planet, so invent space aliens.

Of course, there are a lot of nuances. The antihero Ozymandias, the Antichrist-type figure is sort of an early-modern

person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution—eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In

early modernity, you have ideal solutions, "perfect" solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of

probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr. Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that

"nothing lasts forever." So you embrace the Antichrist and it still doesn't work.

I’ll give credit to my Gen-X person, Sam Wolfe—how many people here have heard of One Piece? This is an epic

Japanese manga series. Something like over 520 million copies of magazines have sold. There are more Reddit fans

on it than Star Wars or Harry Potter. And it's basically if...if in Watchmen, we make the argument for the Antichrist being

five minutes before midnight. Five minutes before a nuclear war starts. In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world

again an alternate earth, but it's 800 years into the reign of this One World state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually

gets darker and darker.

You realize...in my interpretation is that who runs the world is something like the Antichrist. There's Luffy, is the pirate

who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ's crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, it transforms into

a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation. Where it's sort of...1:14, "His head and his hairs were white as wool, as

white as snow and his eyes were as a flame of fire." Sort of the elder of days. And then he proceeds to kill Kaidu, the

dragon. "The dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil." Revelation 12:9. And then he kills Big Mom, the

whore of Babylon, this cannabalistic woman in the One Piece story. Revelation 17:6, I saw the woman drunken with the

blood of the saints.

Eventually, you figure out that the ruler of the One World government is this guy Nerona Imu. So like Nero. And Imu,

beast from the sea. The undercurrent of this is: you have a world government that suppresses science because it

knows science is too dangerous. There's this past where science was more advanced. At some point, they execute a

scientist who resembles Einstein. And so science is too dangerous. You need the totalitarian One World state to stop it.

There is this way in late modernity that the Antichrist theme hasn't gone away, but it's somehow been relegated to the

margins. It's sort of funny, ironic that you get a Christian account of the end times from the not-very-Christian Japan, the

only place where nuclear bombs were used. And you have to somehow get back to the future and make the anti-

Antichrist argument from the point of view of a world where he's been in control for 800 years.

Recapping the argument. From early modernity to late modernity. There's rapid tech progress in early modernity. Tech

stagnation, although even the tech that you have is still too scary. Tech relieves man's estate, even the limited parts we

have is too scary. Optimism has given way to apocalypticism. World government is a distant hope. World government

an immediate necessity. And then that sort of early modernity where you try to integrate and unite knowledge to late

modernity where everything is fragmented.

Now let's go on to "many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased." It means science progressing,

technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these

things...I'm not sure they're completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there's a linear progression of

knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing,

science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural

disasters. Then of course we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization

is...you have trade in goods and services. There's certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course

there is danger in the One World state of the Antichrist.

One of the kinds of questions we had a little bit of a riff on, Cold War II or World War III in the last lecture, where we

know World War III, or any war involving thermonuclear weapons, will be unjust. But then the risk is, we try for peace at

any cost, which makes us think much less hard about whether we end up with an unjust peace. Similarly with

globalization, it's very hard to come up with any picture of the world where globalization gets fully rolled back. This is not

supposed to be an anti-globalization argument simply. But the risk, just like we avoid unjust war at all costs, if we avoid

anti-globalization at all costs, we end up with unreflective, most likely very bad forms of globalization.

Then of course, you can ask: how is it entangled with technology? Does it distract us? Does it come about through the

technology, the early modern thing. Or is it justified by the desire to control science and tech? The lecture title is End of

Empire, which again, end is always this dual Hegelian sense of culmination and termination. What is the purpose of the

world state and of the empire? In a Christian account, I think it's quite dual. The empire is both providential and

demonic. Christ is born into the Roman Empire. So somehow it's easy to communicate and spread the good word. But

then, there's always a way to reach trinitarianism. Christ is the son of God and so a rebuke of Caesar Augustus. Caesar

is not...Augustus is not the son of the divine Caesar. The Roman Empire is not simply God's will.

There's sort of a way the Great Commission gets fulfilled with the roads grown felt. But then you also have Satan's

temptation in the desert, where he offers Christ all the kingdoms of the world. It would not be a temptation if in some

sense, the kingdoms of the world were not under Satan's control or somehow linked to it. Then of course, there are all

sorts of passages that cut in complicated ways, both ways. There's Romans 13:1-2, "let every soul be subject to the

higher powers for there's no power but of God. Powers that are ordained of God. Whatsoever therefore resist the power

resist the ordinance of God." This is a non-Libertarian verse, I don't like it. And the other side is something like the

Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. A daily reminder that God's will is done always in heaven,

rarely on earth."

One of the early Antichrist accounts was written in the 10th century by Adso, this monk who collects all these things.

There's this genre of literature in the Middle Ages, the life of saints. And there's a sub-genre of the lives of very evil

people, which is also kind of interesting. So there's a life of Antichrist that he writes around 960, 970 AD. And one of the

dramatic, really clumsy, silly plot devices, is: just before the Antichrist comes, you have this emperor of the last days,

the last Roman emperor. "Some our learned men say that one of the kings of the Franks will success to the Roman

Empire. He'll be the last time and the great and the last of all kings."

There's this dramatic...it's almost the case that Christianity encompasses the whole world and then it collapses and the

Antichrist takes over. There's a way in which this is just a silly plot device, but we should think there's some deep logic,

where maybe, the expanding empire is healthy and then, once the empire is completed, it's very, very dangerous. By

something like this, you could say it about every company. It's healthy when it grows, when it stops growing, you better

watch out.

One other kind of gloss on the ambiguous place of empire in Christian thought is looking at Schmitt's three conceptions

in Christian history. He presents these as the Great Parallel, the Katechon, and the Epimetheus. I'm going to explain

why these are in some sense the three comprehensive ideas.

So, the first Christian, big picture conception of the meaning of history is the Great Parallel. And it's basically

understanding our current moment with reference to the fall of the Roman Empire. You know, the end of the world is like

the end of Rome. The problem, if you just believe this one is, you retreat into your prayer group, sort of the Benedict

option. You got into something monastic and if you're just retreating into the past, in effects it ends up being completely

accelerationist to all that's necessary.

So yeah, the first one is this Great Parallel. The second conception that we're going to unpack a lot more is the

Katechon. This is a mysterious restrainer from 2nd Thessalonians 2:6-7, "this unnamed force that restrained the

Antichrist." In some ways, it's even more mysterious than the Antichrist. St. Augustine claims that he's at a complete

loss as to what Paul's meaning is in the city of man. But, St. Augustine may have been at a loss, but maybe that's what

he had to say because many theologians like Tertullian had identified the Katechon simply with the Roman Empire.

And the Roman Empire believed in Roma Eterna. It was going to last forever. And so, if the Katechon is a temporary

thing that restraints the Antichrist for the time being, perhaps it's just a code word for the Roman Empire, because it

would have been politically incorrect to suggest that Rome wouldn't last forever. In some ways, we can go a lot further

than Augustine today because there's a lot of history that's happened.

I sort of outline a few different ways to interpret it. There's sort of a Calvinist/preterist view where the Katechon/

Antichrist are in the past. Claudius, the good emperor, was the Katechon. He gives way to Nero, a type of the Antichrist.

But in the preterist view, the actual, final Antichrist in the Book of Revelation describes events that happened in the

past.

A lot of these 16th century Protestants, the Lutherans, the Anglicans, believe that the Roman Empire was the Katechon.

And when it ends in 476 AD, the Catholic Church becomes the new Rome and the papacy or the Popes are the

Antichrist system. Or the many Antichrist described by John. The Book of Revelation describes events happening, in a

sense, in the present, but have been sort of going on for a long time. The view that I'm probably the most partial to is

the Catholic, evangelical, Puritan view where maybe the Roman Empire is the Katechon. In some sense, it never fell. It

gets reconstituted in other forms such as the East Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire. This is what Anso, Thomas

Aquinas believed. Or maybe even, it was not strictly the Roman Empire, but there were other kinds of things that could

be Katechontic over time.

I'll repeat: I'm a classically liberal, but insofar as I want to have a state, I want it to work, and most importantly, I want it

to stop the Antichrist. And if the Antichrist is in our future, which is what the Catholic evangelical view is, the Katechon is

an extremely important part of the present. You can have all these scriptural ways you can argue about this, but I want

to stress this is not a matter of scriptural exegesis, but simply a historical observation that our time is more apocalyptic

than of Claudius or Nero or of the16th century. More apocalyptic than any previous age, and it strips the Antichrist of his

role as an end step before apocalypse, suggests that he was in the past or has been with us since 476 AD.

Now, there are a lot of caveats on the Katechon. There's a way it's sort of violent and pagan. It's more good than bad for

its time, but not more good than bad for all time. It has a time bound component. Matthew 6:19: "lay not up for

yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, where thieves break through and steal." There are

individuals that could have been Katechontic: Charlemagne, Frederick II, Charles V, Metternich, maybe even Queen

Elizabeth II. But they were not around forever. They were around for a short time. They were Katechontic for their time,

not for all time.

Then of course, there is a way where the Bible has deconstructed culture. One interpretation of the version of the

Katechon was the Catholic Church, for a thousands years. They refused to translate the Bible into vernacular. And in

some ways this was Katechontic because if people started reading the Bible, they'd go crazy. And it worked for a while.

Eventually, 1453, Gutenberg invents the printing press. So it's something that, maybe it's good for its time, it's not good

for all time.

Of course, one of the paradoxes is that Christianity deconstructs violence, stopping the Antichrist. Christ reveals that

the powers and principalities, the empire, the Katechon, the state, are somewhat satanic. Once you see this

government is satanic, it can no longer function. This is the Carl Schmitt version where, in Concept of the Political, he

says "politics is the arbitrary division of the world into friends and enemies." And Schmitt thought he was being

Katechontic and strengthening politics. But when you show how the sausage making factory works, you sort of get

turned off on politics, and maybe it stops working altogether.

I can probably do a whole lecture on this. I'm going to just do this at lightning speed. So the Katechon asks what is to be

done. It's focused on the present. It's not on the side of the eschatons. It is sort of a pagan form of Christianity. It's not

pure Christian mercy, pure Christian justice. You can sort of have all these things that...it's the Christianity of

Constantine versus the Christianity of Mother Teresa. Sacred violence versus non-violence.

There's sort of financial versions. Dynastic wealth is sort of Katechontic, giving pleasures, giving away all your money.

The sort of cornucopian kingdom of heaven. A church that's richer than God is probably not that rich versus a post-

economic church that has no money. All these different kinds of things that cut on one side or the other. And I'll just

frame it as a question. There's a way that things on the left risk being retro, not quite working, dated, past their time.

The things that are on the right end up being extremely pure. They also run the risk of being almost more Christian than

Christ, maybe antichristic, things like that.

Ivan Illich, the Catholic theologian described the welfare state as an antichristic parody of the Good Samaritan., where

you're going to be forced to be a Good Samaritan. Or, I don't know, I don't think crypto versus AI is fully enough to drive

this. But I always think, if you could say crypto is libertarian is the decentralized world versus AI is the centralized future

thing. There's things that you can put into each of these categories.

And then the third conception of history is this very strange one called the Marian one. Which it's Mary, the mother of

Christ. Maybe she knows that Christ is going to die, but there's nothing wrong with hoping against hope that he doesn't

have to die, and that you can somehow make history turn out better. You don't want to jettison the Katechon. It's more

good than bad, it's necessary, but because it decays and it's focused on the present, we want to look to the future too.

And then the sense in which you can say these conceptions are exhaustive is that they're past, present, future. The

Great Parallel, the part where it's repetition of the past. The Katechon is what has to be done in the present. And then

Mary is the activist hope for the future. In some ways, you want to combine all three of these.

If you go back to the greatest Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages, in some sense they combine all three. Past,

present, future. There's Charlemagne, 880. Frederick II, 1194 to 1250. Charles V, the Habsburg emperor at the time of

the New World. In some sense, it was the recreation of the Roman Empire. The Great Parallel, it was Katechontic

where they were stopping the forces of Islam from the Battle of Poitier in 732, to the end of the 1683, for a thousand

years. And then in some sense, it was a new and improved Roman Empire.. It was progressive. It was a Holy Roman

Empire. The Gates of Hercules was inscribed non plus ultra. You cannot go beyond these limits. Charles V's motto was

plus ultra. Or maybe the Holy Roman Empire was the new and improved Roman Empire in a way Christian democracy

in the 20th century in Europe was better than the empire. It was democracy, it was better than holy, it was Christian.

The super tricky question is always: at what point does the empire become evil? does it become bad? There's sort of

Christopher Columbus who, he was a propagandist, he interpreted his voyages as having sort of an apocalyptic

urgency and expansion of the empire. His enterprise to the Indies was simply a fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy in Isaiah

42:1-4. "Behold my servant, I will uphold him, my elect, my soul lighteth in. I give him my spirit upon him and the islands

shall wait for his law." And his favorite verse in the Bible was John 10:16. "And other sheep I have which are not of this

fold, them also must bring, they shall hear my voice and there shall be one fold and one shepherd." He wasn't talking

about space aliens or anything like that.

In a way, Columbus thought that once he discovered the New World, the Great Commission was almost completed and

maybe there was only a century, century and a half left to go. I don't know exactly where one must go into the sort of

non-apocalyptic, syrupy all-positive account of globalization. But my candidate for something that's too far on the other

side is Wendell Wilkie's book One World. Wilkie was the Republican nominee for president in 1940. After he lost, FDR

send him on this trip around the world and he writes this book called One World. It's the best selling non-fiction book in

the US written until that point in time. And it has this sort of Hegelian inevitability and normativity. The unified One World

state is inevitable and also the reader should help support and build it. He meets Stalin in Moscow and it's this

wonderful charming man who dresses in light pastel shades. And then cooperation between the US and Russia is

desirable and inevitable.

This is always the question, of what point does it go too far. If we go to the fulfillment of the Great Commission, this is

again from Romans 10:14, "How many have not heard?" And you know, Columbus arriving in America, there's Captain

Cook in Australia in the 18th century. It's probably a pretty big place but not as big as the Americas. The upper right

picture are the North Sentinel Island natives. This is the island in the Andaman Ocean where the American missionary

John Chau tried to reach them in 2018 and got promptly killed. But he thought this was literally the last place in the

world that had not heard the gospel and it had this eschatological vibe.

The bottom right picture is from the Bible Museum in Washington DC, which I always think of as sort of this weirdly

atheist museum. Just all the rooms with not much in them. They're all just basically empty. But the most interesting

room is the one where they have all these Bibles that are being translated into all these different languages. The point

of it, in a way, is to reassure people that we're not in the end times. There still are thousands of languages the Bible

hasn't been translated into. Thousands where it's just partially translated. We still have a long, long way to go when

probably all these people already speak English and are on the internet. And everyone speaks English anyway.

I interpret this as a sort of psychological form of repression. This is the picture from December 1972, where you have

the image of the entire earth from space. The Blue Marble taken by astronauts on Apollo 17. No national boundaries,

30,000 miles away nations do not exist. The year Nixon went to China. To quote John Paul II from a February 2001

homily, which against sounds optimistic but we need to interpret as sort of an eschatological, almost apocalyptic.

Speaking to cardinals: "You come from 27 countries on four continents and speak various languages. Is this not a sign

of the church's ability? Now that she has spread to every corner of the globe to understand people with different

traditions and languages and bring to all the message of Christ." It's past tense. The Great Commission has been

fulfilled.

I always sort of wonder what functions as the Katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt's 1947 diary. "I believe in

the Katechons for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The Katechon needs

to named for every epoch for the past 1948 years." The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has

no idea what the Katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the

Soviets get the bomb and my sort of provisional answer is the Katechon for 40 years, from '49 to '89, is anti-

communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian, but very, very powerful.

I've argued that the Katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing

where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the Antichrist, the Antichrist might even

present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon, or hijack the Katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A

similarity between the Antichrist and the Katechon, they're both sort of political figures. The Katechon is tied in with

empire and politics. If the Antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

Of course, you have all these examples where it's one toggle switch from Katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to

Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism.

Which is, you know, the Bush 41 New World order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there's no

communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the Katechontic, ransnational anti-

communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs

one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the Antichrist, it

probably isn't that good as a Katechon.

And so the Katechon is this elusive Goldilocks life: a not too strong, not too weak, solution to our problem. If it's too

strong, it risks becoming the Antichrist. If it's too weak, it can't stop the Antichrist. So, how does one sort anything out in

this? We're talking in some ways about Katechon thanks to Schmitt, who deserves some credit for that. If I were to

critique him, it's that he talked about the Katechon at the expense of the Antichrist. All these from 1888 to 1985, all

these different essays he writes. There's an early one in 1916 where the Antichrist makes an appearance. And then it's

touched on in the most vague, elusive, cryptic sort of way.

This is from 1942, Schmitt's book Land and Sea. "To both the mythic beasts, Leviathan and Behemoth, the third would

be added a great bird. If one recognizes the explosive motors by means of which air machines are moved, then it

appears that it is the fire that is the additional genuinely new element of human activity." And so, you know, what is a

mythic beast that's a fiery bird? It is a dragon. And then Leviathan is the beast from the sea, the Antichrist. The dragon

is Satan. The Behemoth is the beast from the land, the false prophet, the sort of unholy Trinity. And so it's all this

language, but it's written in such a way, how is anybody supposed to figure this out? I met this person who translated it.

We explained to them this is the anti-Christian Trinity of Satan, Antichrist, false prophet. And they were like never

thought of that.

It's almost as though he wrote it not discussing more. His last book, Political Theology II written in 1970, he somehow

comes back to the Antichrist. At this point he's 82 years old, you are sort of post-respectability. You could say 80 is the

new 18. It's the age at which you are allowed to write irresponsibly.

The sort of interesting contrast is Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor. He made a very strong case for

political violence. He made the case that Adolf Hitler was the Antichrist and joined the plot to assassinate Hitler in July

of 1944. And when you go through the Bonhoeffer history, there are all these ways he lays out the case. The Reich

church, the Nazi church, denied that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. Because he claimed that

Christ was Aryan, not Jewish, and therefore not of semitic descent. He sort of constantly comes back to this. The

Fuhrer could be a seducer or misleader. In 1935, he said "the Antichrist is not sitting in Rome or even in Geneva, but in

the Reich church government in Berlin."

In both the case of Bonhoeffer and Schmitt, the Antichrist gets censored. Schmitt censored himself, downplayed the

ways in which his ideas were sort of adjacent to Christianity. It wasn't academically respectable, people would think he

was deranged. Bonhoeffer gets remembered as sort of an anti-Hitler partisan, almost existentialist who acts on faith

alone. It's almost like a schizophrenic person who hears voices in their head or something like this. You can read all

sorts of books on Bonhoeffer, the historians censor all the Antichrist parts.

But perhaps it's hard to blame Schmitt too much or even the historians who write about Bonhoeffer because the

lockdown on the Antichrist has lasted for nearly four centuries. The Antichrist was debated ad nauseam in Medival

Europe. Popes, emperors, etc. were refusing to be the Antichrist. Perhaps most famously Frederick II and Joachim of

Fiore's prophecies from the 13th century. It builds to a crescendo in the 17th century. Protestants and Catholics are

accusing each other of being the Antichrist. Anglican Bishop John Jewel, 1565 in Britain. "There is none, neither old nor

young, neither learned nor unlearned, but he hath heard of Antichrist." Sort of really overdosed.

Then we touched on this last week. The Treaty of Westphalia 1648, this is a picture from the conference, ends the 30

Years War in Europe. The English Civil War ends and we decide that discussing something as fundamental as the

Antichrist is too dangerous.

And then we touched on sort of the last week, right? But the treaty of West failure 1648, this is a picture from from the

conference, ends the 30 years war in Europe, the English Civil War ends and we decide that discussing something as

fundamental as the Antichrist is too dangerous. I want to suggest this was not just this sort of minor, little thing that

doesn't get discussed. If you can't talk about the Antichrist on some level, you reduce Christianity, something holy

internal, that couldn't say anything about politics, history, or the particularity of Christ. Christianity becomes something

spiritual but not religious. It becomes very difficult to have honest conversations about some Christ comments. Matthew

10:34: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." Luke 22:36: "...he

that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one" On and on. The Overton window just narrowed.

The way Chesterton writes about it in Orthodoxy in 1908: "His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel,

but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems

unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth,

of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so

very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in."

The shift from exteriority to interiority. I always have this riff where the multiverse was a gateway drug to Boltzmann

brains and the matrix and escaping into yourself. Or to quote Leo Strauss: "People became so frightened of the ascent

to the light of the sun, and so desirous of making that ascent utterly impossible to any of their descendants, that they dig

a deep pit beneath the cave into which they were born..." this sort of multi-colored, artificially lit pit beneath the natural

cave.

You can call this period of darkness and slumber the enlightenment. And I do not question that it may have been good,

or even necessary for its time. But the world has changed a great deal since then.

We have since the Peace of Westphalia, we've had 377 years of history to catch up on as Christians. My modest hope

is that we can start doing so tonight. Thank you.

[END OF LECTURE]

[START OF INTERVIEW]

PETER ROBINSON

Peter, I've heard of an earlier version of these lectures. You and I have talked about them. We recorded a couple of

interviews on them a year and a half for Silo Hill. And I just listened to lecture two again. Of the four lectures, this one

strikes me as the densest, which is likely to be the case because I myself am so dense. But I'm going to take you, I

don't want you to repeat the lecture, but I want to make sure I understand some of the the basic concepts.

The literature, the literary comparisons on the Schmidt's three views of history. And then if I may take you to

understanding the Katechon correctly in our own day. All right. So, and I'm going to put, I'll give you sort of the overall

way I look at the four books that you mentioned, correct me if I've got even that wrong. It's important to mention these

books. Bacon, Swift, um, who's this other that Sam Wolfe knows about these right because One Piece. One Piece,

because otherwise we might get the idea that we're relying entirely on a 26 or 2800 year old piece of scripture in Daniel,

2000 year old piece of scripture in Revelation. And in fact, there is something going on with regard to notions of the

Antichrist, the end of the world, our views of science that infuse the whole culture and that shows up in these books.

Fair?

PETER THIEL

Yes.

PETER ROBINSON

All right. Man, why do you do all the work. Okay, so the New Atlantis, I'm going to recap the the uh the plot extremely

quickly. The European crew is lost in the Pacific. So right there we already have a clue. They're out exploring. There's

something new going on there. They discover an island in which the governing institution is a kind of um House of

Scientists. And uh it is commonplace. I looked up this book and looked at reviews of it and so forth and it is totally

commonplace in the literature to receive the New Atlantis a foreshadowing of the modern research enterprise. But

you're the only one who ties it into the argument about Antichrist. Just recapitulate that.

PETER THIEL

Well, it's uh in some ways, you know, early modern science was—it's complicated—but parts of it were complementary

to Christianity, and parts of it were a substitute for Christianity. In the classical world, if you said, “It's not fair that you

die,” Aristotle or Plato would say, “Well, that's just nature. That's just the natural order.” In a 17th–18th century context,

Christianity says that you have eternal life, and there's natural life, and you will be immortal and live forever. If science

has to cure that, then there's a way where it's linked to Christianity; maybe it's an alternative. So that sort of is part of

the animation.

Yeah, the Royal Society was modeled on the cause of six days works, and when people debated this—the British

scientists, the Royal Society—they actually made explicit reference to Bacon, and this is what he envisioned. And of

course there are already a lot of the weirdnesses of the modern research university there too, where it's extremely

specialized, and even though in theory it's run by the scientists, no single scientist really knows what's going on. And

Joe would be more of this political person. He's sort of the go-between, like a general secretary who talks to everybody,

and he's the one person who really knows what's going on. That's kind of why the general secretary was so powerful in

the Communist Polit Bureau: you were the secretary who talked to everybody, and then you somehow had all the

power. So it has a sort of political dimension and then raises, of course, all these questions—you know, how it works,

and on and on. But yes, I think there are all these ways where it's—yeah, it's—

It's meant to be—um—there are different ways of interpreting. You can interpret Bacon as a slightly heterodox Christian;

you can interpret it as this esoteric ancient knowledge, where it's like maybe, you know, the Egyptians or the Mayans

were rediscovering this lost knowledge from the past; or it can be something more futuristic and something new. And I

think that's the conception one should go with.

PETER ROBINSON

But at a minimum it represents something new in human history in the sense that here we see just springing forth full

form the pride of science. the the the the self-consciousness, the um vanity, the sense of of uh capacity of science, fair?

PETER THIEL

Well, it’s, in some ways, you know, early modern science was—it's complicated—but parts of it were complementary to

Christianity, and parts of it were a substitute for Christianity. In the classical world, if you said, “It’s not fair that you die,”

Aristotle or Plato would say, “Well, that’s just nature. That’s the natural order.” In a 17th–18th century context,

Christianity says that you have eternal life—there’s natural life, and you will be immortal and live forever. If science,

science has to cure that. And so there’s a way where maybe it’s linked to Christianity; maybe it’s an alternative. So

that’s part of the animation.

The Royal Society was modeled on the “cause of six days’ works,” and when people debated this—the British

scientists, the Royal Society—they actually made explicit reference to Bacon, and this is what he envisioned. And, of

course, a lot of the weirdnesses of the modern research university are there too: it’s extremely specialized and, even

though in theory it’s run by the scientists, no single scientist really knows what’s going on. And Joe would be more of

this political person—he’s the go-between, like a general secretary who talks to everybody, and he’s the one person

who really knows what’s going on. That’s kind of why the general secretary was so powerful in the Communist

Politburo: you were the secretary who talked to everybody, and then you somehow had all the power. So it has a

political dimension and then raises all these questions—how it works, and on and on. But yes, I think there are all these

ways where it’s a—yeah, it’s…

It’s meant to be—there are different ways of interpreting. You can interpret Bacon as a slightly heterodox Christian. You

can interpret it as esoteric ancient knowledge—maybe the Egyptians or the Mayans—we’re rediscovering this lost

knowledge from the past. Or it can be something more futuristic and new. And I think that’s the conception one should

go with.

Not quite. Well, yeah, but it basically assumes that it’s also, you know, optimistic. There are—you know—you can do

almost anything that’s possible. Empiricism can lead to this universal empire. And, yeah, there are parts of it that are

creepy, strange, and there’s always this question of whom is it really run. But I think the coded message is: yeah,

Bacon’s on the side of the Antichrist, and he thinks this is better; it’s a new and improved Christ. There are some creepy

parts, but it’s meant to be much more positive than negative.

PETER ROBINSON

And then we get to Swift and Gulliver exactly a century later. He publishes Gulliver’s Travels: the island of Laputa—who

knows how to pronounce it—this floating island that seems to be run by scientists. And Swift mocks them. Now, he

mocks politics, he mocks the legal system, he mocks humans in general; on the island he makes the Houyhnhnms—the

horses—rational, and the human beings, the Yahoos, irrational. But the important bit is that he treats the scientists as

fools. He refuses to take them seriously. Is that anti-science, or is it simply recognition that they’re human after all?

PETER THIEL

It doesn’t quite live up to what it’s expected to be, and there’s an early-modern part where Bacon probably had the

better part of the argument for a long time. But when we get to late modernity, there are elements of the Swift argument

that have obviously…

They have—there’s, you know—yes, we put more and more resources into it; we have diminishing returns. But I also

think the part that’s very different in late modernity is the way that the Antichrist is more anti-science than pro-science.

PETER ROBINSON

Right, which brings us to the Watchmen and One Piece. and um I don't know. help me here. uh basically I have to

convince me that a 1986, 1987 12 issue graphic novel reading comic book or this manga series. um well I think I I think

I did a lot on One Piece. there was a lot there. Um you know Watchmen is probably the the trickiest one but it's yeah

yeah it's um more sort of this nihilist atheist on some sense. but the Antichrist is like a show.

PETER THIEL

Not quite. It is, you know—the one-world state is the solution. It’s the solution to apocalyptic science. It’s like Elizer: you

need a one-world government to stop the AI. He’s not going to explicitly talk about the Antichrist, but it’s somehow very

close, and it’s unclear how much is authorial intent or just subconsciously coming out. There’s a way Alexander the

Great is a type of Antichrist: he’s a world conqueror. Christ and Alexander both died at 33. I’m going to do more work on

that in next week’s lecture. Ramses, you know, is the Pharaoh at the time of Moses. You can think of Moses as the Raw

Moses. The Egyptian pharaohs have the name of a god and an Egyptian name, and Moses—there’s no Egyptian god;

he doesn’t—so there’s a way Raw Moses is the anti-Moses, quite the Antichrist. But It’s sort of been closer to the line.

And then, of course, it’s very strange where Moore is late modern—he’s nihilistic. Eventually your luck’s going to run

out; you have to bet on the Antichrist. Obviously you want the one-world state, but eventually something’s going to

break down. This is, in some sense, what the nuclear-deterrence people believe: if you have nuclear deterrence, it’ll

work for a while; it wouldn’t work for all time—eventually there’d be an accident, something would go wrong. The

effective-altruist people think you should outlaw it, and on some level they also think you should just go to Burning Man

and do lots of drugs, because it’s not really going to work at the end of the day. So it’s probably the late-modernity thing

that’s very strange, but it still has a lot of power.

PETER ROBINSON

Okay. Got it. Now, this much I do have—this much I think I understand. You go from Francis Bacon, who is

tremendously optimistic about science, to One Piece and Watchmen, where everything has suddenly become dark—

more than dark: scary, frightening. You made this point in your first lecture that perhaps one reason technology seems

to be stagnating is that we wanted to stagnate; it scares us now. Okay. At this point I want to get under Schmidt, but I’d

like to see what you make of a thinker whose views strike me as close to yours; maybe, in commenting on him, it will

illuminate your own thinking a little more—may cast your own thinking into some useful light. And that’s Jacques

Maritain.

I think you and I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t think we’ve had a long conversation about it. Maritain is a

mid-20th-century Catholic philosopher, and he argues—put as briefly as I’ve seen it put—that what is happening in

history is that both sin (original sin in the Garden of Eden) and redemption (Christ’s resurrection), both of these, are

working their way out in history at the same time. And what that means is that things are getting worse and things are

getting better at the same time, which reminded me—when I heard you in the first lecture last week talk about the dual-

use problem—of nuclear energy and nuclear bombs. Technology becomes more and more powerful; it can do more and

more for the good, and yet at the same time it becomes scarier and scarier. So here’s what Maritain wrote—I’ll give you

a couple sentences of him: “By a phenomenon that responds to profound laws”—you used the phrase this evening

“deep logic,” “profound laws”; we’ve gotten onto something like the same idea—“by a phenomenon that responds to

profound laws, the degradation of human conduct that is getting worse is accompanied by a progress in human

consciousness and in moral knowledge.” And Maritain goes on to refer to the parable of the wheat and the tears: good

and evil grow together until the final harvest.

Does that get at something like the way you view history?

PETER THIEL

Yes, although I think there’s a version Girard liked to quote—something like “things get better and worse all the time.”

The place where I push back a little is that Maritain is a Thomist-Aristotelian; these are timeless and eternal categories.

I want to give more of a one-time, world-historical account. That sentence somehow combines both: there’s a direction,

but it’s both better and worse—so there’s a direction to history, and there’s a timeless and eternal character to it.

Years ago I said the 20th century was the greatest and most terrible century in history, and there’s every reason to

expect the 21st century to be both greater and more terrible. But the caveat: at some point the “and” breaks down. Is

there a point where it can really be greater and more terrible? At some point it doesn’t go on forever. History does have

a destination.

And so there is some logic in the Maritain view that I think is very true, but he says it in such a way that you get a sense

we still have a really long time to go, and I want to push back on that. It’s like the Bible museum with the thousands of

untranslated Bibles.

PETER ROBINSON

So let's take the three conceptions of history—Schmidt's three conceptions of history—and I want to make very sure

that I, and everyone here, understands those three. And I figure: treat me as a slow student, which I am; if I understand

them, by the time I understand them everyone will.

Okay, the great parallel. Now, as I understand Schmidt, these three conceptions come from a 1950 article that he wrote.

The great parallel: he's referring here to the tendency of modern thinkers to draw an analogy between their own time

and the end time of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire fades as Christianity comes on. And so what he is talking about here is an impulse—a desire for

something new, a recognition that we live in old structures, and a desire to see them replaced by something new,

something fresh. That would be the parallel to the emergence of Christianity in the shell of the Roman Empire.

Have I got that? I don't think I have it quite yet.

PETER THIEL

I think the Roman Empire part is the continuity with the past. The Katechon is what’s new about the present—what we

need to do—and the Marian is somehow looking to the future. They all have an anti-cyclical vibe. There were all these

Weimar intellectuals, and Schmidt was relatively unusual in being vaguely adjacent to Christianity in a weird way. Most

Weimar thinkers were not Christian; their view was cyclical, timeless, eternal—nothing new under the sun. He sends the

essay to Armand Müller, who wrote an anthology of Weimar thinkers, with the note: from a “not fully dechristianized

scapegoat” on the theme of cycles. He thinks of it as a refutation of a cyclical view: combine these three—past, present,

future—and there’s some meaning in history. So the great parallel is the continuity with the past.

PETER ROBINSON

The Katechon takes us to the present. Let's take a moment or two on the Katechon because that is central to your

thinking and to the to the lectures to come, lectures three and four. So if I may, let me set this up. So we've got St. Paul

in 2nd Thessalonians 2:7, for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, only he who now restrains in Greek

Katechon, only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way.

St. Paul gives us a brief mysterious passage. St. Augustine says he has in the St. Augustine is in the fifth early fifth

century and he says I have no idea what this means and you doubt that he had no idea what it meant. But in any event,

we have John Henry Newman, whom I mentioned last time because you he gave four lectures in 1835, you're giving

four lectures in 2025.

Here's what I've quoted from Newman last week. "The subject may be summed up as follows that the coming of Christ

will be immediately preceded by a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil." This is Newman summing up the

church fathers. In the midst of which a certain terrible man of sin and sin and child of predition, the Antichrist will appear.

Okay. This week, let me continue with another sentence or two that this will be when revolutions prevail and the present

framework of society breaks to pieces, that at present the spirit which he will embody, the Antichrist is kept under by the

powers that be, but that on their dissolution, the Antichrist will rise.

So that's the that's the Katechon as the church fathers understood it, the framework of society or the powers that be.

Fair?

PETER THIEL

You can call it the empire, the powers and principalities—the state, the government, the old institutions. The family is a

Katechontic thing; maybe dynastic wealth is a catacontic thing. Why not big-K Katechons? They’re part of this structure.

There are Katechon-versus-Eschaton layers all the way down. I’ve often said I prefer the Christianity of Constantine to

that of Mother Teresa, but it obviously doesn’t work literally. If you grab a sword and mount a horse, that’s not even

viable military tech—by the Crimean War, the Charge of the Light Brigade proved as much.

Constantine isn’t exactly saint material: the “first Christian emperor” who wasn’t baptized until his deathbed, because he

believed that as emperor he had to do a lot of very non-Christian things. He can’t quite be a saint like Mother Teresa. So

the Constantinian model has pagan elements—useful, or more good than bad for a time—but they won’t work for all

time.

PETER ROBINSON

I was struck that this evening you mentioned Queen Elizabeth II, and I wanted to tease you out on that one because it

may not be Constantine, but at the same time she died within living memory even of Sam Wolfe here.

So there's a moment where we could see the before and after of the Katechon, and I felt when she died, or actually I felt

I was in London earlier this summer, and it became I thought it became clear to me, but I thought I was a crazy person.

And now I hear you who are not a crazy person say something, well, I'll tell you what I felt then you tell me what what

you mean by Queen Elizabeth II is a catacon, that it was as if in her very person, she was sustaining and maintaining a

particular notion of Englishness.

PETER THIEL

Or the British Empire. The moment she died, you could feel it dissipate. Maybe it had been gone for a long time. She

became queen in 1952—about 70 years to 2022. In ’52 they’d lost India, but most of the rest was still intact. People

from her time remembered the empire; by around 1970 it was mostly gone. There’s something catacontic there—

probably not very strong.

PETER ROBINSON

All right. The Marian vision. You move fast on this one. And so this this one I think I I want to come back to to ask you to

elaborate. Schmitt sees history as forever changed by that singular event. The incarnation, Christ through Mary. Now as

best I can tell, here Schmitt holds a view that in some ways is quite close to the the German Schmitt holds a view that in

some ways is quite close to that of the Frenchman Matin, that everything that has happened since the incarnation is a

working out of that event in history. That's fair?

PETER THIEL

At the same time, it implies a missionary impulse—it implies something religious that we all ought to be doing. It’s an

activist faith: there’s a hope that you can do more than just preserve some remnant of the past—more than the purely

defensive Katechon. Anything purely defensive doesn’t quite work.

And, again, we can debate this, but I think these prophecies aren’t meant to be written in stone. It’s not inevitable that

the Antichrist will take over. Maybe it’s likely—maybe it’s the default—but it’s like Jonah going to Nineveh, or even what

I said about Christ: he tells people to pray; they fall asleep; Christ gets arrested. The natural way to read it is that things

could have gone differently there. We don’t know how this ends.

So, yes, in some sense it’s right: things are getting better and worse all the time—and at some point they will either get

better or worse. At some point, it goes one way or the other.

PETER ROBINSON

Right. All right. Now I'd like to return to your treatment of the Cold War. And I worked really hard on this period. So when

you bat it away, just do so gently, all right?

Empire sees itself as a bullwork against the rise of Islam, which again, the struggle against Islam, well, the struggle

against Islam isn't over to now, but the Holy Roman Empire struggles against Islam for a thousand years. We often

forget that the Vienna was besieged as recently as 1683. And then the Marian vision, the emperor sought to expand the

empire in explicitly Christian terms.

You argue that from '45 to '89, the great Katechon was anti-communism. And again, if I understand you correctly, you

you see two out of three of Schmidt's views of history represented in the struggle against communism.

For four decades, we have not a Pax Romana, but a Pax Americana. The Catacon is the American led coalition to

contain, stand against communism. But you argue that it wasn't purely Christian, which I read as the Marian vision was

lacking.

And here, I would like to suggest, oh goodness, I would like to suggest that Peter Thiel rethink that point. So let me

quote to you a speech that Ronald Reagan delivered in 1987. In that speech he said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this

wall. He delivered this.

PETER THIEL

Who wrote that line?

PETER ROBINSON

All I know is he was underpaid.

PETER ROBINSON

And that's all that anybody remembers about that speech anymore. But let me quote another couple from that speech.

I'll speak very slowly in case you'd like to memorize it.

This is Ronald Reagan in 1987 standing in front of the Berlin Wall. "The totalitarian world produces such backwardness

because it does such violence to the spirit, fording the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. Then Reagan

goes on to describe a structure that was visible to his audience behind him, behind the wall, the East Germans had built

a television tower." Reagan says, "ever since constructing that tower, the authorities have been working to correct what

they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet

even today when the sun strikes that sphere, that sphere of the towers over all Berlin, the light makes the sign of the

cross." That's a president of the United States in a pretty big foreign policy address in the final phase of the Cold War.

So, I think I'd like to suggest very timorously, Peter, that in the great American effort to defeat communism, the Christian

vision was actually central.

PETER THIEL

Well, you started by saying “purely,” now you shut to the central. That’s a slight illusion.

I think it was very, very important—you know, my riff on the Reagan coalition was always that it was this weird alliance

of social conservatives, free-market libertarians, and defense hawks. What do the priest, the millionaire, and the general

have in common? It’s a really weird coalition. What are they going to talk about if you get these three people in a room?

Completely different value systems: the millionaire thinks you’re supposed to make money; the priest thinks you should

be virtuous and pure; the general thinks you should get a gun and go fight. What they had in common was that they

were anti-communist, and all the important differences got faded in that.

My formative political idea—junior high school, late 1970s—was anti-communism. It wasn’t lame libertarian

abstractions. And what was powerful about anti-communism was that you had a lot of freedom; you did not have to be a

totally goody-two-shoes person. You could do some pretty bad stuff because the communists were so much worse.

So, I’ll concede it had the Christianity of Constantine; it’s not entirely the Christianity of Mother Teresa. It’s still strange in

my mind how the Cold War ever ended as successfully as it did. I’ll concede there was something nearly miraculous

about what happened in ’89. When I was about 20—undergraduate at Stanford in the late ’80s—a group of us got

dinner with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. He worked at Los Alamos, a Jewish Hungarian refugee, very anti-

communist. It was bracing: the 80-year-old Teller told us that if you put him in charge, he would roll the tanks into

Hungary right away. He was not intimidated by nuclear weapons; he was not scared. I didn’t know all that Dr. Strange

love was sort of based on him; I didn’t quite know that. There were ways in which Teller was somewhat marginal, but

not totally. That was part of the mix too; fortunately it didn’t dominate. But without someone like that, maybe it wouldn’t

have quite worked.

You know, the RAND Corporation, Southern California—this Herman Khan, a not-really-Christian, futuristic writer—

wrote On Thermonuclear War (1960), a follow-up on Clausewitz’s On War, which basically said: we need to plan how to

win a nuclear war. Maybe 50 of the biggest U.S. cities would be destroyed, but we’d still figure out a way to win.

Dr. Strange was also modeled on him. I don’t know how important it was. It’s fortunate that didn’t dominate, but it was

part of the mix too, surely. At some point, all of this was too much for Gorbachev, I think.

We don’t have anything like that in the mix today. The RAND Corporation is run by Jason, an effective altruist, and what

they’re pushing for is not a strategy to win a nuclear war—it’s global compute governance. So it’s Bostrom, Kurzweil,

the one-world state to control time. We’re in a very, very different zone from the ’70s and ’80s. But you can’t do history

twice. It was some combination of all these things that came together.

PETER ROBINSON

All right, I'll come back to you on that, but only after lecture three. At this moment, I am under orders to turn over the

floor to Sam Wolfe, who, however, is under orders after a few questions to turn it back to me.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[START OF AUDIENCE Q&A]

SAM WOLFE

Okay, we'll start with a question from Josh. Mark 12:17 says, give what is Caesar's to Caesar, give what is God's to

God. What is your interpretation of this verse with respect to the Antichrist and Catecon? Have we become too passive

with regards to the state?

PETER THIEL

Yeah, this is like the Romans verse I quoted, where there’s a way to read it as: you should just be happy to pay all your

taxes. But there’s also a Straussian, coded, subversive way I’m tempted to read Christ: you have to ask what is

Caesar’s and what is God’s—and maybe it’s not for Caesar to decide what is Caesar’s and what is God’s. It suggests

you’re not simply aligned with Caesar. Certainly the Roman emperors didn’t believe Christianity was pro-empire in every

form. And you have to read it in a context that wasn’t an Enlightenment society where everyone could say what they

thought. So there’s one interpretation of “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” as “okay, pay all the taxes,” and

another that’s quite anti-Caesarist. I’d lean into the latter.

SAM WOLFE

Question from Julia. Rene Girard's thesis is that Jesus presents the model for breaking the regular process of memetic

ritual sacrifice. Girard and Jesus are concerned with a humanity that can be redeemed here on earth. The Book of

Revelation is concerned with our future if we are not redeemed. How can we understand Girard in light of this? Hav

you, Peter, moved against your old teacher?

PETER THIEL

I don’t think—it’s not that I want to go through all the ways I mostly agree with Gerard. I think, you know, Gerard’s catch-

all answer was always: if you ask the political question of what should be done, he would deflect and say, “You should

go to church.” That was some kind of answer like that. And it didn’t mean he was completely indifferent to politics. He

had a lot of thoughts about it: he liked De Gaul, kind of liked Reagan, and was skeptical of Bush 43. So there was a way

in which it wasn’t what he chose to focus on, but he definitely thought about all these different things.

SAM WOLFE

Okay, here are a couple I'll read in succession. Sebastian asks, is space exploration and building civilizations on the

moon or Mars an alternative to the one world state? And relatedly, Pavel asks, is Elon's anti-Katecon? And if so, how

should we expect it to play out?

PETER THIEL

What I have on, you know, Elon’s shift from science and tech to politics in the last few years—where somehow that

Demis line seeped in. And Mars: part of the Mars project is scientific and technological, but the political part, you know,

is—Is it really an alternative, or will the woke AI or the socialist U.S. government follow you to Mars? There’s some level

where I think Elon gave up on Mars as a political project in the last few years. That’s the way I would understand what

he did.

SAM WOLFE

Somewhat relatedly, we had several questions. I'll just choose Lucas is here. UFO or UAP disclosures, a post-modern

common enemy or how would you understand them in your framework

PETER THIEL

I think they’re so fake. Right? It’s always my econ-one placeholder that, you know, um—well, if you have ideas that are

really dangerous and can’t be articulated, my shorthand is those are probably true. If you have ideas that sound

controversial but no one ever gets in trouble for them, you should be very skeptical. And so, if you imagine a Joe Rogan

who talks about UFOs and a Joe Rogan who does not, the one who talks about UFOs will always get more ratings in a

way that’s pretty safe—you’ll never get deplatformed. It’s a completely safe thing to talk about because, um, the aliens

probably don’t exist. If they exist, they’re probably inert; they don’t interact with us.

You know, it’s—uh, I don’t know—Roswell was 1946; that’s 79 years ago. 47—78 years ago. It’s not been a very… and

you want to go into fields where there’s progress, where there are new discoveries. And so, even if the UFOs are real,

the cloaking technology or whatever it is must be extraordinarily good: they can cloak themselves, or they can scramble

people’s brains, or people are so scared they censor themselves. But on some level, I don’t think it’s likely to be an area

that’s scientifically generative—although it works for, um, getting clicks on podcasts. And so, you know, it’s something

that’s perfectly safe; you’ll never get burned. You know, the game all these people play is that you’re always supposed

to go right up to the line. If you cross the line, you get in trouble. If you are too far from the line, it’s really not interesting.

You’re supposed to go right up to the line, right up to the fire, almost get burned—and the UFOs are this, yeah, perfectly

safe topic, which tells you that people are spending way too much time on them, and they’re fake—and right there.

SAM WOLFE

We had several questions about AI and LLMs. I'll read Patricia's here. Can you please elaborate on your view of the

Gutenberg press and reading it reading the Bible in the vernacular as good for its time but not all time. LLMs in the

hands of the masses feel like a Gutenberg moment, decimally deranging. How does this moment relate to the Katechon

concept?

PETER THIEL

I said you can understand the Catholic Church’s desire not to translate the Bible into the vernacular in the Middle Ages.

Once people started reading it, you got this crazy Reformation; within 20 years of Martin Luther, you got the Anabaptist

at Monster. It sort of gets crazier and crazier. And so there is a way that, if you can stop it, it’s okay. But once the

Gutenberg press is invented, it doesn’t work anymore, and history has moved on.

There’s a version of this with the internet; there’s a version of this with AI. Maybe these things are good or bad—

stopping them seems far, far worse. If the internet or AI deranges some people and we shut it down altogether, that

feels like out of the frying pan into the fire—far worse than the disease. The internet deranged people; it polarized

things; there are all these anti-internet arguments one can make. I don’t know how you could have stopped it. And the

counterfactual is: with the mainstream media, it would have gotten even more deranged if it hadn’t been for the internet.

Stagnation isn’t neutral; the default is that things maybe get a lot worse.

So you have to have a counterfactual view on AI. It’s a form of progress—it’s very uneven. It’s a very uneven way to

grow the economy. Maybe some people go crazy. There are all sorts of good and bad things. But if we shut it down and

don’t do it, and you become, I don’t know, like Europe—redoing Groundhog Day—that’s going to be even less pleasant.

SAM WOLFE

Before I turn it back to Peter Robinson, I'll have a compound question to answer. The first part is from Will. What do

most people get wrong about the enlightenment? And the second part is from Maron. What model of Christianity are

you trying to return to? When you say we have 377 years to catch up, when was Christianity in a form that you would be

satisfied by?

PETER THIEL

It was a sort of specialization—the pin factory in Adam Smith—where people got more and more specialized. In some

ways it got narrowed. Perhaps it was a strategic retreat of sorts that was right for the 18th century, because if people

talked too much about the Antichrist, the Catholics and Protestants would just kill each other, and this wasn’t productive.

But I think, yeah, at some point the lobotomies are just too much.

And, you know, I keep thinking there is a way that we have these sort of fake debates in a super-narrow Overton

window. Maybe that’s too political a way to put it, but I think you have a sort of zombie gerontocracy—zombie liberalism.

I don’t think we’re going to find solutions to our political, cultural, and social problems inside this incredibly narrow

Overton window. I want to go back and explore the much bigger questions: how does it all fit together? What does it

mean? And, yeah, in my telling it’s been a very, very long time since we’ve even tried to do this.

SAM WOLFE

Peter Robinson.

PETER ROBINSON

You just set up lecture three in which you'll be talking about Benedict the 16th and the Regensburg address. So anyone

who finds this question interesting, stay tuned for next week. Two final questions for you.

And the first begins with two different views of what must be done. Here's Rene, Rene Girard. "The apocalypse is not

some invention. Either we're going to love each other or we're going to die. Here's Carl Schmitt. I believe in the

Catecon, it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful."

As I understand it, Rene calls us to look inside ourselves, it's an interior conversion that he was principally concerned

with. similar to the point you made just a moment ago. Schmidt calls us to participate in the great drama of the rise and

fall of empires of restraint and and delay. He wants us to look outside ourselves to social or political structures. Now, the

summons are by no means mutually exclusive, but I take it that it is the second summons, the effort to reconstruct a

Katechon that is your principal concern.

PETER THIEL

I think it’s, um, I mean, there are all sorts of caveats: some version is necessary, it’s not sufficient, it has a time-decay

function attached to it. There were things Schmidt did that he thought were restraining and turned out to be

accelerations. So the stuff is non-trivial to get right. But I also think Girard, you know, did not think that you should

jettison everything, you know, and he said it’s nuanced and complicated. You could say that, you know, the family

contains a lot of badness in it, and you can also say the family is actually pretty weak. So the patriarchal family,

according to Gerard, was already ridiculous at the time when Freud wrote about it in the 1900s. This notion that you had

some sort of tyrannical father who scared everybody was a preposterous myth, according to Girard. But then, you know,

he also had some sort of conservative instincts—that you’re not going to find, you know, liberation just in madness and

murder.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on Girard’s turn from academia to Catholicism in the 1980s and 1990s, and I think there was

some sense where he was maybe on the anti-political-correctness, anti-woke debates in the college context. He didn’t

necessarily care about all the particular issues, but he knew that in a world where everything was politicized, there

would be no place for him. Someone like him, who got a tenured position at Stanford in ’79, by 1989 would never have

been hired. And on some level, you know, there was—yeah—some way that, you know, he…and this was what was so

powerful: it was systematic, trying to integrate, you know, all these different things.

PETER ROBINSON

Last question. To anticipate just slightly lectures three and four. My suggestion about the Cold War that Christianity

played a central role. If that's right, then does it follow that after what we've been through since the end of the Cold War,

it would be useful, I'm using useful now, not right, not just useful in reconstructing the Catecon to reassert some aspect

or element of Christianity in American public life. And is something like that what we just saw at Charlie Kirk's funeral?

That people were responding to the Christian message in some sense as people have responded to it for 2,000 years,

it's compelling.

There are those of us who believe it's true. But they were also responding as Americans. They felt a need for Marco

Rubio and JD Vance and Erica Kirk to say what they said. Is there something to that?

PETER THIEL

Man, this is so far above my pay grade and I don't know what it all is.

PETER ROBINSON

It isn't about your pay grade.

PETER THIEL

I think, um—what to say—I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the Katechon pagan Christianity versus the

Eschaton—the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife

saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of

Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump—

I don’t know—I forget the language exactly—but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He

doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view.

And the problem—the naive view—is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you

concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine—between forgiving the murderer

and delighting in punishing your enemies? Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that

maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.

[END OF AUDIENCE Q&A]