Thiel’s Diabolical Deviation from his Mentor

Girardians Against Girard in The Age to Come [part 2]

Read part 1 of João & Mauricio’s series on Girard

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In a series of recent interviews, Peter Thiel remarks that, between Mother Teresa and Constantine, he harbors no doubts as to who is the greater saint – but prefers Constantine’s Christendom to Mother Teresa’s. This brief yet telling statement crystallizes the crossroads where Thiel finds himself: nothing less than the inability to choose between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

Thiel inherits from Girard a diagnosis of the contemporary world that is also a prophecy of its inherent impossibility: we live in the most mimetically charged of worlds, the realm of influencers, where undifferentiation has reached such extremes that everyone is a potential rival to everyone else; at the same time, we exist in the aftermath of the Christian revelation, which has rendered our society incapable of scapegoating as before and, consequently, unable to manage the violence that necessarily grows in this interconnected age. It is the formula for the apocalypse: accumulated resentment that can never be discharged, an escalation to extremes without possible resolution.

Thiel adds further nuance to Girard’s analysis, proposing two possible futures in his lectures delivered across various venues, all based on an unpublished text titled Nihilism Is Not Enough. On the one hand looms the threat of apocalypse, a reality made terrifyingly tangible after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, lies something equally perilous but rarely discussed: the Anti-Christ.

In Thiel’s reading, the Anti-Christ represents a totalitarian world government whose promise of peace and security is capable of delaying the apocalypse by acting as the katechon – the power that restrains, a term he borrows from biblical tradition via Carl Schmitt. But this solution merely prolongs stagnation without preventing the inevitable. For Thiel, the irreversible escalation of mimetic conflicts, lacking legitimate mechanisms for resolution, leads inexorably to collapse. Conversely, total stability achieved through absolute control – a technocratic administration of the world eradicating conflict at the cost of freedom and human spontaneity – is a remedy worse than the disease. Such stability would not be life but a kind of living death, a dysthanasia embodying the indefinite suspension of history.

How does one navigate a world suspended between extremes, incapable of either reverting to ancient sacrificial systems or fully embracing the radical demands of the Gospel? Thiel’s response remains, as always, elusive, oscillating between bold declarations and subtle ambiguities. While he flirts with the idea that the contemporary world needs to recover some form of transcendent purpose beyond bureaucratic maintenance, he avoids proposing a concrete solution, perhaps recognizing that any attempt to restore divine meaning would collide irreparably with the secular and disenchanted structures of late modernity.

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In a prescient article, author Tara Isabela Burton, who attended one of Thiel’s lectures, argues that he succumbed to the Nietzschean temptation. With undeniable intellectual acuity, Burton discerns within Thiel’s discourse an instrumentalization of Mimetic Theory. His ideology, she contends, increasingly aligns with a techno-vitalist ethos that is now dominant in both Silicon Valley and the New Right. Elon Musk emerges as the horseman of Thiel’s apocalyptic vision, the cavalier of this radical technological acceleration. According to Thiel, only through extreme innovation can humanity break free from the rigid constraints of a global order that grows ever more accommodating to the alienation of human creativity.

For Thiel, the postmodern-progressive world has become ensnared in a mentality fixated on massive doses of comfort, security, and private fetish satisfaction. This regime stifles humanity’s inclination toward the unknown, the mysterious, and the grandiose, reducing us to a collective zombified existence—a “world of torpor and indifference,” the liberal order entrenched in its decadent managerial capitalism, where nearly everything is evaluated in terms of “security” and “guarantees.” From this perspective, Thiel perceives the modern elite as ingesting any creative explosion from society, leaving individuals bereft of power and means to act independently. People are increasingly subjugated by a vast, oppressive structure with tendrils extending into every domain—media, academia, governance—conditioning them to become mere lambs of a growingly inane superstructure.

In apocalyptic terms, Thiel recognizes the presence of cosmic exhaustion, an advanced devitalization, perceives its inescapable character, and decides to accelerate its outcome via technological radicalization. Thus, his effective suggestion is that our katechon – the restraining force that holds back the apocalypse – must be removed as swiftly as possible. Only then, he argues, might we glimpse a new era of heroism, “a new triumph of human will.”

Thiel’s proposal thus becomes less obscure. What he advocates is a form of utopian apocalypticism. The sole way to break free from the current technocratic, progressive, crony-capitalist paradigm would be through absurdly intense technological acceleration – a measure so radical and comprehensive that it returns power, agency, creativity, and reformative capability to people for the creation of a new world: a world slightly more heroic, slightly more imaginative, slightly freer from existing structures – a world where things cease to be debated merely in terms of security and guarantees, and where the elite no longer stifles every creative outburst from society.

This approach leans indirectly but unmistakably toward Nietzsche, the Dionysian, as its guarantor, embodying resistance to the mediocrity of liberal-bourgeois – or progressive – life. Surprisingly, Tara Isabela Burton agrees with Thiel’s diagnosis but condemns his prescription, arguing that from a Christian perspective, it represents a temptation, “a dead end.” Girard would most likely agree. After all, Thiel’s starting point is nothing but negative, rooted in a foundational antagonism – his opposition to the new world order, which he views as the Anti-Christ – and will inevitably reiterate a “new” murder of Abel. Consequently, this path will only revert to victimizing procedures – a high-tech iteration of the ancient route of wicked men.

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What if we must live within this temptation? What if it constitutes the new stage of an apocalypse that has been unfolding for two millennia?

Peter Thiel, deeply versed in Girard’s work, recognizes the stakes involved here. His divergences from Girard – his “detour” and “temptation” – are not accidental but conscious and deliberate. Between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the only real choices facing humanity in the postmodern apocalypse, Thiel appears to choose the latter, aligning himself with Francis Bacon’s vision of a techno-scientific superman. Yet he knows full well that his master, Girard, viscerally chose Dostoevsky. To imitate Christ, according to Girard, is to escape the “mimetic whirlpool: no longer imitate in order to no longer be imitated”. It is through such withdrawal that transcendence can be re-established, resisting the seductive allure of worldly ambition.

Christian theology emerges in Girard as a theology of abandonment – an embrace of the desert. Only by stepping away from the vortex of rivalry can we liberate ourselves from its grip. Girard argues that “the Incarnation was the only means available to humanity to face God’s very salubrious silence: Christ questioned that silence on the cross, and then he himself imitated his Father’s withdrawal by joining him on the morning of his Resurrection”. By breaking His solar scepter, Christ withdraws at the very moment He could dominate, compelling humanity to experience the “peril of divine absence, the modern experience par excellence”. To imitate Christ is to refuse imposing oneself as a model and to always efface oneself before others. It is to avoid being imitated altogether, disrupting the cycle of mimetic rivalry.

The purpose of the Incarnation was to dismantle all religions, whose sacrificial crutches had grown ineffective: “the death of the gods, which so frightens Nietzsche, is simply the same thing as an essential withdrawal in which Christ asks us to see the new face of the divine”. The death of the gods is parallel with the silence of God. On the Cross, Christ feels this silence; on the road to Emmaus, the disciples encounter the Son’s departure to join His Father. And the “more God’s silence grows, the more dangerous violence becomes, as the vacuum is filled by purely human means though now devoid of the sacrificial mechanism. And, by the same token, the more holiness emerges as a distance from the divine”.

Girard’s proposal is simple: sanctity. But is sanctity merely a reiteration of the nihilism Thiel denounces? Thiel is an entrepreneur, a world-builder. The nihilism he wants us to evade is not merely the absence of belief but the inability to act decisively, surrendering to contemporary entrapment in a slow, meaningless societal drift. Deep down, Thiel feels that the choice of the saint – Girard’s choice – to withdraw from the world perpetuates this same nihilism. Hence the implicit heroes of his text are figures like Bacon: builders of new worlds who articulate a progressive vision of the future, one in which humanity’s mastery over reality expands rapidly, rejecting the bureaucratized and risk-averse structures that stifle transformative discovery.

Thiel subtly suggests that his choice is neither arbitrary nor aimless but grounded in method and purpose. We should expect nothing less from the German-American tycoon. Action, for Thiel, precedes reflection in the order of great achievements. Unlike Girard, he sees himself as a man of action, a builder of empires rather than a reflective monk. In many respects, Girard resembled a patristic father out of time, while Thiel views himself as someone at the vanguard of his own era. Like the Japanese and Prussians of old, Thiel seeks to inaugurate a new historical force, desiring a fresh geopolitical dispensation antagonistic to what he deems as the current global order. One can only hope the consequences will prove less tragic than those wrought by earlier imperialisms.

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Peter Thiel takes something that, according to Girard himself, serves precisely to help one escape the world’s temptations – the Christian revelation – and seeks instead to instrumentalize it for his own purposes. Through his wealth, technology, influence, and power, Thiel sees himself as an obstacle blocking the State and progressive bureaucracy from becoming avatars of the apocalypse. This, however, reveals a deeper temptation – one far more insidious than Nietzsche’s.

By instrumentalizing the Christian revelation to accelerate humanity’s supposed escape from nihilism, Thiel inadvertently echoes Judas rather than Nietzsche. Like Judas, who betrayed Jesus not out of greed but misplaced zeal, Thiel seeks to hasten redemption through domination, believing that forcing Christ’s hand – be it through technological advancement, power, or influence – will compel divine action. He lacks faith. Deep down, he shares Judas’ error: he desires to impose his will upon events unfolding according to divine providence, hoping to compel transformation through mastery. Like Adam and Eve, Judas sought to seize divinity prematurely, accelerating what was not in his hands. But some things cannot be compelled, only received.

Contrary to Girard, Thiel is incapable of truly understanding that “Christianity will be victorious, but only in defeat”. That is the great paradox of the cross, the great mystery of Christ: that “those who humble themselves will be exalted” – the sternest rebuke to the powers and principalities of this world. One cannot escape nihilism by running faster from it, let alone by accelerating what’s propelling it in the first place.

Just as the 17th century bore the indelible mark of Descartes’ rationalism, the 18th carried Voltaire’s spirit of critique, and the 19th was shaped by Hegel’s dialectics, so too may the 21st become Girard’s. Yet if Girard’s century has only just begun, its future belongs not to him but to the Girardians – who may wield his insights for purposes far darker than he ever intended.