Did Peter Thiel Fool Us?
- Celio Murat
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
Katechon: the contradiction is clear
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For learning, the most important thing is to have a method, to follow a rule. Only once one has achieved full mastery of a subject can that rule be broken, altered, or even ignored. Learn the art and then put it aside, people used to say, back when wisdom was embedded in a people's customs and traditions. Beneath this seemingly banal principle lies a deep awareness of some of the fundamental mechanisms of human beings. One of them suggests that man grows stronger under external constraint, that difficulty stimulates his development. Modern society may have softened the adversities nature once imposed upon us, but it has found an equally effective scourge in the imposition of social rules.
Social norms, however, demand one particular virtue: obedience. Within a civil society, everyone must always obey someone. What matters is understanding whom we obey, remembering that no one can serve two masters without leaving at least one of them dissatisfied. The man who has never had to obey anyone is not the hero that a certain kind of cheap propaganda would have us believe, but a good-for-nothing, a man who does not know the value of sacrifice and frustration and who, consequently, has never been able to shape himself through the exercise of discipline.
Discipline is, in essence, the key to the entire mechanism. If we had to describe it, we might call it a contrary force, one that comes into conflict with our most chaotic instincts. A restraining force that requires the exercise of will. Discipline is as much a prerogative of the human being as free will, of which it is, in truth, the armed wing. Freedom without discipline could not exist, because there would be no alternative to instinct and we would end up enslaved by it.
In eschatological studies there is a concept that has become rather fashionable lately, thanks to the eccentric interests of certain Silicon Valley magnates: the katechon. Literally, “that which restrains” — to katechon. The expression first appears in Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, 2:6–7, where reference is made to something or someone that contains — restrains, and therefore holds back — evil.
The katechon is an enigma that has haunted philosophers for generations and harbors an irresolvable paradox. On the one hand, its function would be precisely to restrain hostile forces, the dissolutive energies that would allow evil to triumph and plunge the world into anomie. At the same time, however, this restraining action also prevents the ultimate triumph of good, because that triumph can only come as the final consequence of the unchecked raging of the forces of evil. Only then, at the lowest and darkest point in human history, can the Redeemer return.
An apparent and temporary defeat is necessary to arrive at definitive salvation. Why, then, must the — temporary — triumph of evil be restrained, if it is the prelude to the ultimate and consequent triumph of good? At this point the issue seems to descend into sophistry.
For some, the katechon, in its most classical conception as a “restraining force,” risks acquiring another, paradoxical value: by delaying the triumph of evil, it would also stand in the way of Christ’s second and definitive coming. From this perspective, slowing evil down would actually be playing evil’s own game, acting as a kind of instinct for self-preservation. This malign prudence prevents evil itself from reaching its final defeat. The goal would be a perpetual stasis, a mire from which escape would become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
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The subject would require a depth of analysis that cannot be attempted here, and a speaker far more qualified than I am. What is interesting, however, is trying to understand why some of today’s great entrepreneurs are so fond of invoking these notions and attempting to bend them to their own advantage.
In this regard, you may have heard about the meetings Peter Thiel, chairman of the highly influential high-tech company Palantir, held behind closed doors in Rome a few months ago, devoted precisely to the Antichrist and the exegesis of apocalyptic texts.
Well, I was there.
I saw what these meetings actually consisted of and what theories the great magnate had to offer. Do not worry: the whole affair is far less serious than it appears from a distance. The conferences on the Antichrist were rather disappointing, closer to the school paper of an enthusiastic high-school student than to the theorizing of a genuine scholar. But power dulls and banalizes, and the thoughts of those who inhabit the centers of power are always, inevitably, somewhat unoriginal. Originality, after all, tends to isolate, whereas power demands centrality, and therefore the obvious.
There is, however, also marketing, that confused discipline which promises to sell everything, including one’s own image — especially one’s own image. When Musk plays the part of the mad autistic genius, that is marketing; when he says we will be on Mars in five years, that is marketing. When Berlusconi used to say the crisis was over — when in reality we had barely reached the edge of the abyss of recession — that was marketing.
And so Thiel, too, by promoting a series of pseudo-secret meetings — in reality accessible to anyone, even someone like me — has staged an extremely effective marketing campaign. It promotes a somewhat comic-book, novelistic, yet undeniably effective image of the great magnate fascinated by esotericism, the powerful man drawn to the occult. This unpredictable, eccentric figure might at any moment pull some extraordinary ace from his sleeve.
It is only marketing.
Thiel has a rather limited knowledge of the concepts of the katechon and the Antichrist, mostly derived from Girard, his teacher at Stanford, who presumably gave him a few private lessons at a reasonable price.
In his thesis, Thiel insists on identifying stasis — economic and technological — as the enemy, the true Antichristic force. In contrast, the katechon, the restraining force that ought to oppose the advance of evil, becomes creative energy, proactivity. Transposed into the present, Thiel argues that outside the development of artificial intelligence there is only stasis, and that AI therefore represents, to continue using eschatological language, not an Antichristic force but a katechontic one: a restraining force, an opposition to the malign stasis that dominates our age.
Essentially, in his theories — let us call them that for the sake of simplicity — the meanings are reversed. The Antichrist becomes a restraining force in the most literal sense, a force of stasis, while the katechon becomes vital energy.
To be frank, the whole thing is perplexing, and one gets the impression that someone is doing everything possible to make the numbers come out the way he wants. After all, no one would particularly enjoy admitting that they were developing Antichristic technologies. It would be a very concrete example of bad marketing.
But if we return to Scripture, the Antichristic force is described as energeitai — that is, active, energetic. This is probably why the katechon serves to temper it, to restrain an end that would otherwise arrive too precipitously, too rapidly, with consequences that might prove excessively dramatic.
Another interpretation is also possible: to understand the katechon as a psychological force, an act of commitment, an effort of will. Considered within the mental sphere, it could be represented as a form of discipline, a force that restrains instincts and our wildest impulses. A force that carries no positive or negative sign in itself, but acquires one according to circumstance, pushing now in one direction and now in another — or rather, restraining one direction or the other.
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From this perspective, the katechon is, each time, the force that mediates, that mitigates; in a word, it is the katà metron, the sense of measure. In the classical tradition, metron is a fundamental principle, one that allowed man to elevate and ennoble himself, and it is not unreasonable to imagine that Saint Paul, having grown up within that cultural environment, may have had a similar concept in mind when speaking of the katechon.
Whatever one’s judgment on the philological question, Thiel’s operation remains interesting. In the end, his ambitions concern us far more than his thought.
Thiel seems intent on seizing the most prestigious prize of all: that of culture and religion, the thing we have heard invoked for years as though it were some pale and insubstantial ghost, yet which for centuries made the crowns and scepters of half the world tremble — spiritual power.
At first glance, spiritual power appears to have vanished. In reality, it remains very much alive, feared more than anything else by those who hold temporal power, because they know that it alone can truly threaten them. Temporal power fears it. It has done everything possible to discredit it to the point of ridicule, tried to harness it, imprison it, exorcise it, and now, in one final assault, it is attempting to appropriate it altogether.
By disguising it, Thiel wants to capture those who feel nostalgic for that power. He wants to seduce those who sense a void, those who long to entrust themselves to something higher, something ancient.
In short, Thiel, like all the great tycoons of our age, aspires to become God. And like any self-respecting god, he wants to create his own religion.
Did Peter Thiel Fool Us?
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