Notes — Peter Thiel on Political Theology

Notes on Peter Thiel in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel-political-theology/), 17 April 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? Peter Thiel sets out a political theology: a claim that the largest questions about God, history, and violence cannot safely be bracketed off from politics, contrary to the post-Westphalian, Enlightenment consensus that they should be. Working chiefly through René Girard‘s theory of scapegoating, Thiel builds a single interpretive frame that runs from his rejection of Calvinism and Bay Area rationalism, through a reading of the Old Testament as a systematic reversal of victors’ history, to Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy theory of politics, the biblical katechon and Antichrist, Shakespearean mimetic rivalry, and finally a prediction about how AI will invert Silicon Valley’s status hierarchy. The unifying enemy throughout is what Cowen calls ‘muddling through’ — the assumption that liberal societies need not examine their own foundations because they have always somehow coped.

Q2 — How is it argued? Thiel argues almost entirely by analogical juxtaposition rather than empirical evidence: Calvinism is like atheist liberalism because both scapegoat a single all-determining cause; Genesis is like Romulus-and-Remus but told from the opposite side; Claudius is to Nero as Cold War anti-communism is to the ‘new world order’; the French Revolution’s math bias is like Soviet chess veneration is like Silicon Valley meritocracy. Each analogy is offered as evidence for a single recurring mechanism — Girardian scapegoating and mimetic doubling — applied across register (theology, politics, literature, technology) rather than tested against data. When Cowen presses for an empirical or variable-based account of ‘muddling through’, Thiel explicitly declines the frame: ‘I don’t think it’s a really empirical question… if I agreed with that frame, you’ve already won half the argument.’

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The Girardian scapegoating mechanism is a real and influential anthropological theory, but Thiel’s applications of it here are asserted rather than demonstrated — the claim that Calvinism and ‘atheist liberalism’ are structurally identical acts of scapegoating is a rhetorical analogy, not an argument built from textual or historical evidence. [?] His genealogy of society’s bias toward mathematical testing, traced to the French Revolution, is offered without citation and reads as a characteristic Thiel riff rather than a sourced historical claim. [?source] His prediction that AI will solve the US Math Olympiad within three to five years is reported as something ‘people have told me’, not his own technical judgement. [?source] The claim that the Catholic Church stopped preaching end-times sermons after 1945, attributed to Girard, is reported secondhand and not independently checked here. [?source] The reading of Shakespeare as ‘proto-Girardian’ is one interpretation among several live scholarly debates about Shakespeare’s own theology and politics — compare Henry Oliver‘s explicit rejection of a Girardian frame for Measure for Measure as ‘anti-Girardian’ elsewhere in this wiki.

Q4 — What of it? The episode gives the wiki its first sustained, source-grounded treatment of political theology as a subject in its own right, and of Girardian mimetic theory as an analytic toolkit — both currently homeless in wiki/concepts/. It also supplies a direct link to Ross Douthat's later, explicit response to Thiel’s Antichrist thesis, letting the wiki carry both sides of a live disagreement between two serious religious thinkers about how apocalyptic the present moment actually is.

Glossary

Political theology — Thiel’s term (via Carl Schmitt, who took it from a phrase coined to mock the Italian nationalist Mazzini) for the attempt to integrate politics, economics, culture, and ultimate questions about God and history into a single coherent picture, against the Enlightenment tendency to treat ‘big picture’ questions as either intractable or too divisive to raise. [§ Political theology as the antidote to the pin factory]

Scapegoating (Girardian) — the anthropological mechanism, drawn from René Girard, by which a group resolves internal violence and rivalry by projecting blame onto a single victim, who is then cast out or divinised, restoring group unity without requiring self-examination. Thiel applies it to Calvinism (‘Mr. God did everything’), secular liberalism, and Schmittian politics alike. [§ Against Calvinism, against rationalism]

Mimetic rivalry / mimetic entanglement — Girard’s account of conflict as arising from imitation of desire rather than from genuinely divergent interests: rivals fight most intensely over what they have in common, not what separates them (Thiel’s example is the Capulets and Montagues, ‘alike in dignity’). Thiel also applies the term to his own biography, describing a mid-20s crisis as a need to escape ‘the worst mimetic entanglements’. [§ Shakespeare, mimetic rivalry, and political violence]

Katechon — from 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7: the mysterious force that ‘restrains’ the Antichrist’s rise and the end of the present age. Schmitt and Thiel both use it as a name for whatever historically holds back total, one-world rule (Thiel’s examples: the Roman emperor Claudius restraining Nero; Cold War anti-communism restraining Soviet communism). Thiel’s own gloss adds the Girardian risk that a katechon and what it restrains become mimetic doubles of one another. [§ The katechon, the Antichrist, and the case against muddling through]

Antichrist (as political category) — in Thiel’s usage, not primarily a supernatural figure but a coming one-world totalitarian government, whose defining political slogan — on his reading of 1 Thessalonians 5:3 — is ‘peace and safety’, the language in which calls for unified global governance over catastrophic risk (climate, AI, bioweapons) are typically made. [§ The katechon, the Antichrist, and the case against muddling through]

Muddling through — Cowen’s own working assumption, which the episode is structured around interrogating: that liberal societies do not need an explicit political theology because they reliably cope with crises without one. Thiel treats confidence in muddling through as itself a symptom of the anti-intellectualism he also attributes to Calvinism and rationalism. [§ The katechon, the Antichrist, and the case against muddling through]

Wordcels — internet slang, used by Cowen in his question, for people whose skill and status rest on verbal and rhetorical facility (writers, pundits) as against ‘math people’; the term frames Thiel’s prediction that AI will hurt mathematical, not verbal, status first. [§ AI, wordcels, and the coming reversal of status]

Key claims by section

Political theology as the antidote to the pin factory [§ Political theology as the antidote to the pin factory]

Late modernity’s hyper-specialisation — ‘Adam Smith’s pin factory on steroids’ — leaves people unable to think about the whole; political theology and political philosophy are Thiel’s name for the corrective effort.
The Enlightenment shelved these questions for two reasons: they seemed intractable, and — after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia — reopening religious debate seemed too dangerous and divisive.
Thiel’s claim is temporal, not absolute: that trade-off may have suited the 18th century, but by the 21st, refusing to ask the largest questions has become the more dangerous choice.

Against Calvinism, against rationalism [§ Against Calvinism, against rationalism]

Anthropological objection: Calvinism’s all-determining God is an extreme form of Girardian scapegoating — ‘Mr. God did everything’ — structurally identical to ‘atheist liberalism’s’ habit of blaming a single cause for everything.
Intellectual objection: Calvinist total depravity would make reasoned conversation pointless, so a consistent Calvinist could not be having this conversation at all.
Thiel extends the charge to effective altruists and Bay Area rationalists, calling them a secular mirror of Calvinism: outwardly rational and pure, inwardly certain that no one can ever be fully right, ‘just a little bit less wrong’.
Asked why not Catholicism or Mormonism instead, Thiel cites Lutheranism’s historical decentralisation — a Reformation that ‘had to come from the outside’ of a centralised Church — as aligned with a libertarian political instinct.

Girard, scapegoating, and the Old Testament’s reversal of perspective [§ Girard, scapegoating, and the Old Testament’s reversal of perspective]

Archaic religion resolves communal violence by scapegoating a victim who is then divinised; Thiel reads the Bible as inverting this pattern by telling stories from the victim’s side.
Genesis’s Cain and Abel is the ‘parallel but opposite’ story to Rome’s Romulus-and-Remus founding myth — Rome is narrated from the victor’s side, Genesis from the victim’s.
Against a ‘woke’ reading that concludes ‘history is bad, therefore side with the woke’, Thiel argues the distinctively Christian move is to hold the badness of history together with forgiveness — more tenable, in his view, than either forgetting the forgiveness (a woke version) or forgetting the history (a Nietzschean, ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ version).

Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction, and the Reagan coalition [§ Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction, and the Reagan coalition]

Schmitt’s core insight: politics is founded on dividing friends from enemies, prior to any shared substantive programme.
Illustrated by the 1980s Reagan coalition — libertarians, defence hawks, and social conservatives, who had almost nothing in common beyond a shared enemy, communism — a coalition that dissolved once that enemy disappeared in 1989.
Schmitt’s flaw, on Thiel’s account, was assuming that naming the friend-enemy mechanism explicitly would strengthen politics; exposing the scapegoating ‘sausage-making’ instead tends to accelerate its collapse.

The katechon, the Antichrist, and the case against muddling through [§ The katechon, the Antichrist, and the case against muddling through]

The katechon (2 Thessalonians) is Thiel’s substitute for Cowen’s ‘muddling through’ — a mysterious restraining force holding back the Antichrist’s one-world rule, which cannot be pinned to any single institution and is always at risk of becoming mimetically entangled with what it restrains.
Historical examples: Claudius restrained Nero, but both were Roman emperors; Cold War anti-communism restrained Soviet communism, but after 1989 mutated into an expansive ‘new world order’.
Thiel adds a one-world totalitarian government to the standard list of existential risks (nuclear, climate, AI, bioweapons), arguing it is at least as dangerous — because the Antichrist’s political slogan, on 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is ‘peace and safety’, the exact register in which calls for unified global risk governance are made.

Shakespeare, mimetic rivalry, and political violence [§ Shakespeare, mimetic rivalry, and political violence]

Against a Marxist account of conflict as arising from genuinely divergent material interests, Thiel reads Shakespeare as ‘proto-Girardian’: conflict is most intense between parties who do not differ, as with the Capulets and Montagues, ‘two houses alike in dignity’.
Julius Caesar is read as the pessimistic scenario of Thiel’s own worldview — no katechon, no muddling through, only assassination followed by unending civil war — with a chain of historical re-enactment running from Brutus through John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln.
Thiel connects the frame to his own biography: a mid-20s crisis after Stanford, law school, and a Manhattan law firm, resolved by learning to avoid ‘the worst mimetic entanglements’.

AI, wordcels, and the coming reversal of status [§ AI, wordcels, and the coming reversal of status]

Against the expectation that AI most threatens ‘wordcels’, Thiel predicts the opposite: near-term models will master mathematical competition (the US Math Olympiad, within three to five years) before matching genuine verbal subtlety.
He traces the modern bias toward testing mathematical ability to the French Revolution, on the theory that verbal ability seemed hereditary while mathematical talent looked more evenly, meritocratically distributed — a logic he sees continued, more cynically, in Soviet veneration of chess grandmasters and in Silicon Valley’s own math-coded meritocracy.
He expects AI to force a ‘long-overdue rebalancing’ toward verbal and practical skill, comparing it to how chess computers dissolved status built on chess ability after 1997.

Centralisation, decentralisation, and the Q&A [§ Centralisation, decentralisation, and the Q&A]

Thiel worries that AI becoming ‘the only technology that matters’ is itself ‘a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation we should be trying to get out of’ — technology once meant computers, medicines, and agriculture together; today it risks narrowing to large language models trained in a handful of labs.
He revisits The Sovereign Individual’s 1997 decentralisation thesis as contingent rather than settled: it looked correct through the late 1990s, wrong again by the late 2010s, and remains, in his view, something people can push one way or the other rather than pure technological destiny.
Audience questions cover Bitcoin’s ambiguous relation to the ‘one-world-order’ Thiel fears; his hostility to DEI as Marxist-adjacent corporate distraction (with Walmart as the ‘proto-woke’ template); FDA regulatory stranglehold on biotech; and Miami’s success as an anti–New York decentralisation story.