Peter Thiel: The Antichrist Lectures

How do we respond to nihilism?

Pimlico Journal was invited to attend Peter Thiel’s ‘Antichrist Lectures’, hosted by James Orr at Cambridge University over four consecutive evenings in late January 2026. These lectures have been delivered by Thiel on several occasions in the US, where Thiel has been an influential intellectual force on the right for over a decade. His interest in the Antichrist, especially when filtered through the conspiracy-laden terms in which his data management and AI firm Palantir is often discussed, has generated much intrigue - a mystique which is further cultivated by the private nature of his speeches on the topic. Especially in secular Britain, where such topics are rarely considered, many will be tempted to dismiss a conversation framed in explicitly theological terms - but to do so would be a mistake. The phenomena Thiel identifies are real, and the issues he raises are important.

Johan Gärdebo is a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and delivered one of four responses to Thiel’s lectures. His response has been adapted for this piece.

Thiel’s story of progress

Whilst almost all human cultures have had some account of the world’s origins and eventual fate, it was Christianity that gave history a direction for the first time — or so Thiel contends. The beginning and end of time were no longer eternal possibilities sitting just over the horizon of an infinite present, but features of history with unprecedented imminence. History ceased to be an endlessly repeating cycle of futility and became a linear march towards apocalypse and absolution.

It was not until the advent of early modernity, however, that this psychological revolution became a reality as science collided with capitalism, forging a positive feedback loop which rapidly transformed European society from a steady-state feudal economy into a dynamic industrial and financial superstructure. Thus, modernity came to be characterised by a particular dual-optimism: tomorrow will be different and better than today, and the future will be a domain of spiritual and technological utopia.

This disposition drove European civilisation across the globe, spreading the tendrils of capitalism and the word of revelation as it went. It drove the creation of new ways of building wealth, and new ways of waging war, unleashing a radical creative destruction that ultimately revealed the nature of reality at the atomic level and thereby the made real for the first time the prospect that humanity might bring about its own extinction, so terrible was the power it had given itself.

Caught in the heat of the cold war, that realisation took some time to sink in. The US and USSR chased each other into space, and on July 20th 1969, the former won the race to the moon in what was, and perhaps is to this day, the pinnacle achievement of man and technology combined. Less than a month later, the Woodstock festival represented the symbolic victory of the new left counter-culture, and world peace replaced the unmasking of creation as the rallying cry of our civilisation. The future became a terrifying prospect, with technology’s destructive power the key feature of every imagined dystopia.

Scientific and technological progress ground rapidly to a halt — with lingering attempts at development relegated to the realm of software and computing alone. Only 70 years separated man’s first flight from the moon landing. 70 years before, the fastest way to travel from Manchester to London was by horse and carriage. In two lifetimes, a species that could not conveniently traverse the English countryside became able to cross 400,000km of empty space. In the 70 years since, we have barely inched further — and in many cases, we have gone backwards. That is the story Thiel wishes to tell, and the problem he wishes to solve.

Is this enough?

The notion of “Antichrist” rings strange to the modern ear, as the great Josef Pieper remarked and as Thiel himself concedes. But the notion of Armageddon, for centuries so tightly bound up with it, still plays a great role in our imagination. Whilst we may not understand these things literally, as our ancestors did, reckoning with them conceptually can help to pin down the problem that increasingly plagues the west: the problem of nihilism.

We forget just how obsessed Christian societies were with the prospect of the false Messiah, but even in our post-Christian societies the word carries a strange resonance. “Antichrist” was once a powerful insult when hurled at one’s political opponents. When Ian Paisley levied that charge at the European Union, he was speaking only to that lingering quadrant of Protestant politics that is Northern Ireland (where it may still have carried weight), and was met not with shock but with incomprehension by the committee of sneers. Columbanus’ work, undone at last.

Three hundred years after the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, as empiricism morphed first into empire and then into secular modernity, we in the West eventually forgot about the Antichrist. The Christian wars of religion terminated in Prague, in 1648, outside London’s Banqueting House, in 1649, and at Fontainebleau, in 1685. Never again would public discussions of morality rest in something so incendiary as metaphysics. Was it ever otherwise? The modern mind cannot imagine so. Yet Armageddon looms large — in fact, it is the conceptual fear which has pushed the ambitions of the post-war settlement furthest, giving rise to unprecedented global regulatory and governance institutions.

Within living memory, we have witnessed myriad attempts to erect a comprehensive global governance framework, covering nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, AI, and more — not to mention organisations such as the UN, EU, NATO, etc. Whilst atomic bombs, fossil fuels, lab-grown viruses and generative computing are very much products of progressive modernity, Thiel observes how fear of such things has driven us towards ever-growing attempts at controlling progress and human ingenuity. We have seen the Western zeitgeist shift from creation to control: from producers to controllers. These systems of control rose up under the pretext of promising peace and safety for all. One world, or none, so Oppenheimer prophesied, in fear and trembling.

It is through this lens that we can understand Thiel’s conception of the Antichrist. Inspired by Girard, he describes the Antichrist as a great individual. He will be the philosopher to end all philosophers, the individual to end all individuals, and the man to end all men. The Antichrist is a political figure, who takes control not just of a country but of the world entire, establishing dominion of the globe under the banner of peace and safety. His understanding is specific, historical — not timeless and spiritual — yet the Antichrist does not arise from nothing. The tendency towards his ends must pave the way.

We no longer speak about the Antichrist, Thiel contends, because the Antichristians won. Their eschatology — that another world is possible — is paradoxically predicated on a mistrust against anything innovative. Since creativity and destruction are kindred spirits, the promethean human must again be bound. This is what it means to be at the end of history. That is to say, at the end of linear Christian history. And so we see - here at the end of time — with nothing to do but enjoy our peace and safety, an extinction of purpose and meaning which precludes not just any answer to what we, as a society, should do — what we are here for — but any basis on which we might even ask the question.

What would it take in our present day and age to keep the human spirit going? What is strong enough to withhold the coming of Antichrist? This is Thiel’s question and, in it, his revolt against the modern world. One need not accept the theological framing of this question to engage with it, or to recognise its importance. Standing against eschatology, against the Eschaton, demands according to Thiel that we once again seek the Katechon (that which holds back apocalypse). It is in this demand that Thiel’s framing calls us to consider the problem of nihilism — the end of history — and what might hold it back.

Is this all a little much? Do we need to talk in these terms? Is it too esoteric? Too nihilistic? Perhaps all talk of the Antichrist can best be dismissed as the crazed rants of a rich, bored man? To levy this critique is to miss the point. Doing so reflects the very nihilism that refutes the possibility of a specific civilisational challenge to which there could be a specific civilisational response — conceiving of political ends only in the most mundane, general terms. Whilst it would be a mistake to take the literalism entirely out of Thiel’s words, there is a purpose to speaking in these terms. The suggestion, perhaps only implied, is that the notion of the Antichrist itself, and more importantly the struggle against it, could itself serve as the new Katechon, and that in constructing a metaphysical evil, we might begin to consider what a metaphysical good could look like.

Nevertheless, whilst this criticism may not hold on its own terms, it reveals the real concern with Thiel’s project: the Antichrist is not enough. Not esoteric enough. Not nihilistic enough. That we cannot believe shows this to be the case. It is not enough for life, which Thiel pronounces with so much spittle that italics seem appropriate. After all, the Antichrist was not enough for Nietzsche, who spent a lifetime looking for meaning Beyond Good & Evil, trying to imagine the ‘New Artists’ who might walk those unlit mountains. So, in his own way, did Goethe.

And so, the only way out of nihilism, I hold, is to affirm it. If we play affirmative, acknowledging the desert of meaning that is our present world, we may swifter arrive at a new starting point from which action, not ideas, gives us meaning again. The novelty and strangeness of this period in time comes from not having a language that can yet articulate this new meaning. But perhaps new ways of being cannot be imagined, before they are lived. For the lack of the Word, as Faust remarked, ‘in the beginning was the Deed’.

The Antichrist accelerates but does not arrive

When Thiel describes the Antichrist it is as a force gaining velocity, but never arriving. Acceleration and alarm, but no rupture in the world’s fabric. The end is near, but never here. Why is this?

While the Western man of today is by and large secular, when he thinks of the Antichrist he does so as a Christian would. Or as they say in England, as a small-c conservative would. To that Christian or conservative mind, the take-away message is to keep the world from ending, like staving off the bursting of a real-estate bubble — because beyond it there is only the Abyss, into which he does not dare plunge.

Thiel is no small-c conservative. We might do better if we understand him as a small-k katechon. Or at least, Thiel’s great fortune gives him this katechontic power. But Thiel’s katechontic power is not enough to avert the Antichrist — indeed, in the end, no Katechon can ultimately keep the world from ending; they can only hold it back for a time. What must be done instead, then, is that those with the power to hold off the end of history prepare for what is coming. The Katechon of the 21st century does not seek to forever avert apocalypse, but to prepare for it. In secular terms, they prepare for war.

What might that war look like? Or, if we stay within the language of Christian theology, what does the Antichrist look like? Recall Thiel’s Girard-inspired description:

The Antichrist will be a great individual. He will be the philosopher to end all philosophers, the individual to end all individuals, and the man to end all men.

This is the closest Thiel gets to describing the coming of the end times. What does it mean to predict the coming of such a person? Again, Girard is the lens through which we must understand Thiel’s thought. Pre-Christian societies excised their terrors through scapegoating — the application of blame to an individual and the ritual sacrifice of that individual to absolve the community. Such a man as described above could never have arisen to the heights expected of the Antichrist in that kind of world without finding himself deemed blameworthy for any manner of disaster. The logic of Christian History, however, has abolished scapegoating — allowing the Antichrist to rise to power under the cover of darkness. In less esoteric language, it has removed our ability to assign blame and excise the cause. Christianity has taken our eye off the kettle; now it might finally boil.

This is the main take-away from Thiel’s lecture. It suggests a future most will fear, because if Christian History abolished scapegoating, it follows that we find ourselves in a novel, strange situation where neither Pagan sacrifice nor Christian forgiveness works to absolve us of our faults and contradictions, enabling us to move past our traumas as a result. Recent European memory reflects this impasse. The generations that grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War were less likely to ask “what would Jesus do?”, because they were too focused on the question “what would Hitler do?”

Unable to move past that disaster, Christian democracies reduced fundamental questions about the good life to a sort of social programming: de-Nazification, anti-racism, and rejection of any form of expression of national sentiment or sense of communal belonging for fear that any hint of shared identity risks a return to the gas chambers. Trapped by obsession with avoiding the tragedies of the past, we were left with no positive account of who we are and what that means. Unable to move forward, this trauma has left our civilisation stripped of vitality, unable to conceive of the present other than in terms of the past, and incapable of imagining any kind of future.

To the secular Christian, “being good” and “being not evil” may sound similar. In reality, it is the difference between living life with or without spirit. As it turns out, the generations growing up now no longer ask themselves, “What would Hitler do?”. That history, and its katechontic power (to the extent it ever had any), has run its course. It has run out. The new generations are hungry for spirit.

The quest for something holy

However much our sense of ourselves has been transformed by what we have lost, we are still human. We still desire to belong, to define ourselves in relation to others in a way which gives meaning to our lives, because it is meaning that makes sacrifice possible. That desire still fuels rivalries and conflicts. But in a godless world, where neither scapegoating nor forgiveness has the power to regulate these identities, where does that desire to belong drive us?

It drives us towards what we are left with, that great modern creation: the self. We replace group-level identities, driving group-level sacrifice for group-level endeavours, with individual identities, driving individual sacrifices. We come to desire our own suffering; to sacrifice ourselves, because only that sacrifice can create meaning. We ended the war of all against one, only to end up with wars of one against anything. This desire comes both before and beyond believing. It is about the desire to feel something. Why else would Nietzsche call himself the Antichrist? To be anything at all, without the binds of group identity, one must affirm one’s individual existence in the strongest possible terms.

Another way of understanding this state of mind is what is sometimes described as ‘Nordic courage’. You act recklessly so as to achieve a sense of immortality. Men have always wanted immortality. But to attain it through the machinations of the self, its queer innerness, and rampant action, is definitively modern. There would be nothing Periclean in this new bid to be remembered. Going Berserk was not about being ‘expressive’ or engaging in some form of self-realisation. Berserks are bound to Odin through the ritual that is frenzied recklessness. Violence to these warriors is religious, like the sex of Corinthian prostitutes. Victory to the gods.

If one wishes still to describe this as ‘nihilistic’, it is at least of a very different kind to our own ironic nihilism — the kind that leaves you puzzled as to why someone might act so recklessly, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, stripping his own skin to prove he does not desire according to algorithm. A recent confused fascination has proliferated with the penguin from Werner Herzog’s ‘Encounters at the End of the World’, running off into the hinterland, towards the abyss. We are left with a tormenting question: is that Penguin the Übermensch, or the Last Man?

I ask this because I do not believe that the aim of the Katechon of our age — nor, truly, the aim of Thiel himself — is the restoration of Christianity, but rather the discovery of something new; the revision of our understanding and self-conception at the most fundamental level. We can draw on Christian language as a way of discussing these deeper questions, but we can draw equally upon older traditions too. Our intellectual landscape has long been built in Christian fashions, but it exists even now on Pagan foundations.

An Apocalypse of a kind — the end of one world, and the beginning of a new — is indeed on the horizon. As the structure of the world in which we have grown up crumbles, new conflicts arise, not just in the East but also within the West. In the decades to come, there will be new leaders who can imagine what replaces our current forms, beyond the current political event horizon, beyond liberal democracy. To the Boomers, this does sound like the End Times. Peace and Safety is no longer our future. It’s easy to understand how, in the face of that eschatology, one might go looking for a Katechon.

But this is a quest for older generations — those with much to lose. To the young nihilist European, I wonder, is there not more to be gained from the twilight of the old gods? Materially speaking, the young of today have less reason than ever to uphold the world as it currently exists. No home ownership. No children. No job that defines you, and little hope of maintaining what prospects you have in the face of AI. I do not hope to avert that future, but it is worth spelling out its implications: Generation Alpha will have the largest proportion of idle members in World History. What would a 21st century Katechon look like to them? What will be holy to them?

The Young European that I see coming of age is more likely to long for a battlefield to die on. Like the riders of Rohan at the Fields of Pelennor, “for ruin, and the world’s ending”. The question, then, is whether, with nothing to die for, will it be possible to die for nothing? When there is no reason to call a crusade, can a crusade be called because there is no reason not to? The challenge facing a Katechon of the early 21st century is whether this nihilistic spirit can be directed to productive ends. Regardless of our modern assumptions, the world still fights holy wars — and the West wants something holy.

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This article was written by Johan Gärdebo, in collaboration with Pimlico Journal. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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