So... you force me to defend Peter Thiel...

it has come to this. (bonus article)

Peter Thiel did an interview with Ross Douthat.

this Ross Douthat

There are many reasonable attacks on Peter Thiel: his skincare routine is bad; he is a fallen twink; Elon and Zuckerberg and even Bezos look better. And then there are substantial attacks on Thiel, like how he promotes Republicans like Vance who undermine NATO, while simultaneously profiting off NATO with Palantir. He is a man who plays both sides.

trans-humanist skincare cannot come fast enough

I typically reactively oppose whatever Thiel supports, but not because I think he is a transhumanist anti-Christ. Rather, I think he is the wrong sort of trans-humanist. He is the kind who wants to ally with MAGA rather than Mamdani, and I think that is a bad decision.

Still, even though I oppose Thiel in this political game of football, I think there are worse possible ideologies than Thielism. One of those is Douthatism.

Douthat has a very ugly ideology. It is one of regression, fear, hectoring, nagging, and panic. Douthat fears that Mr. Thiel is ushering in the anti-Christ with his scary technology. The solution is less innovation, more verbal masturbation about “the Logos” and 5th century theologians. This is the same ideology which shut down the Platonic schools and plunged Europe into the dark ages, from the time of Constantine until the time of Charlemagne.¹

Bibliology and Marxism are both exegetical, obscurantist, needlessly complicated, tautological, faith-based teleologies whose purpose is to “shock and awe” the dumb peasants into hating their superiors, to establish a new priest class with a hatred for beauty and excellence.

Instead of dismissing the body of exegesis as useless and founded on sand, I’ll counter with a heretical exegesis of my own.

Christ did not write Bible, but he said many true things, like this:

This is my commandment: that you love each other as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this—that a man should lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

The act of dying for one’s friends can only occur in the face of danger. Thus, to live a dangerous life is best, since it allows one ample opportunity to die for the cause of friendship.² Christ calls man to become dangerous, to take risks, and to go beyond the Pharisaical regulations of the religious authorities.

But of course Christ was betrayed, not just by Judas, but by the apostles and the entire church. The radical message of nomadic evangelism was cloistered and refashioned into monastic life. The life of Jonah and David and Abraham, which was a life of adventure and action, was reduced to the mental imprisonment of vain repetition, the life of the Egyptian scribe.

Christ said,

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go. (John 14:12)

One of the most disgusting perversions of the Messianic revolution is the Anabaptist creed. The Amish in themselves are inoffensive, but that is the very problem. They live lives of inwardness. There is nothing world-historical or evangelical about them. They pump out babies, brainwash them, and splinter into infinitely many sects of base materialists.

In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is told that Christ was anointed with expensive perfume. His disciples objected and rebuked the woman, saying that this perfume could have been sold and the money used to feed the poor! But it was Christ who rejected their materialism.

Materialism is not just hedonism, but it is the fear of the material world, and the obsession with simplicity and the fetishization of poverty for the sake of poverty.

When Christ tells the rich man that he must sell everything to get into heaven, he is commanding him to become sacrificial and radical. Christ never says, “all poor people go into heaven.” He does not even say that it is easier for poor people to go to heaven. All he says is that rich people must become sacrificial and radical. Compare this to the lives of the Amish, whose entire purpose is to farm crops and hoard land. It is a primitively-handicapped form of capitalism, the ultimate grindset. It is the worship of sweat.

There is no story in the Bible where Christ works hard. Christ says,

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30 KJV)

Anyone praising “hard work” as a form of Christliness is materializing the gospel. The difficulty of Christ’s passion wasn’t in working long hours, wage slaving, or burning the midnight oil. The passion was amazing because it was a defiance of authority and a declaration of a new kingdom of heaven, beyond this world, destroying all the previous structures of society. He came to bring families against one another, to destroy the temple, and to collapse society, so something new could be built in its place. This is a continual process which we are meant to advance — not one where we say “that’s enough” and become satisfied with progress as it stands.

Like the Amish, Douthat has a very materialist view of the gospel, in which anyone who tries to alter the human condition is perverting mankind and “playing God.” This is an Old Testament view, specifically centered on the Tower of Babel, that man should not attempt to attain the heights of God. In the Garden of Eden, the Elohim fear that Adam will “become as one of us”:

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree. (Genesis 3:22)

My exegesis reads this as a parable of real events. To give this passage some sociological context: the “Elohim” were a group of priests who declared themselves to be Gods. The “garden of Eden” was a sacred grove where these priests met. The fruit of the garden was a psychedelic used in rituals, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries. These priests jealously guarded these psychedelic rituals in order to maintain power over society. Christ, in granting eternal life, is “stealing the fruit” from the garden, like Prometheus, and making it accessible to human kind. Thus he is a rebel against the Elohim (later called Pharisees).

Ross Douthat imagines that Peter Thiel is ushering in an age of anti-Christ with big scary technology which will enslave and kill us all. Again, this is a materialist perspective. From the perspective of the soul, we are enslaved insofar as we do not live lives of danger and sacrifice, as Christ did. Who among the Christians dies willingly at age 33? Why is it thought that the “Christian” thing to do is to live a long life as a fat man wearing elbow-pads in a library? How opposite was this to the life of Christ!

God occasionally threatens humanity with extinction, but he always preserves an elect to carry out his will. Besides the Great Flood, there is also the Battle of Kurukshetra and Gandhari’s Curse, which lead to the genocide of millions of people. Humanity has suffered through many population bottlenecks.

Imagine if, in 1619, some terrible plague struck Eurasia, killing 99% of the population. Subsequent to this, some Mongol horde emerged from the steppe, burning and pillaging all the cities of Europe. All that was left were a few hundred men, who rushed aboard ships and sailed west. Finally reaching the Americas, they would be all that was left of western civilization, consumed in pestilence and fire. But they would survive, as the Pilgrims did, and rebuild, and reforge civilization in small colonies at the edge of a new continent. Eventually, from a few hundred individuals, a new civilization would arise.

The great masses of humanity have some role to play, for better or worse, either as an anchor around the neck or as brick layers for the pyramids. But they are not the architects of greatness, and their existence as a class is not sacred, as God demonstrated many times with floods, at Kurukshetra, through Gandhari, and even at Sodom and Gomorrah.

Whether a patch of farmland in Iowa is occupied by an Amish family, or whether it lies fallow and becomes a field to be grazed by wild goats and roaming boars, it does not seem to matter very much either way. The life of a shudra, a farm worker, is equivalent to that of an animal.

Cruelty against animals is evil, and in the same way, the Amish should be left alone to tend to their crops. But the modern world is built on factory farming, not just of the animals, but of the peasantry themselves.

We all live in pop-up cubicles. Anywhere that a person sits down to scroll, whether in a cafe, at school, in bed, on the couch, on a bus or train, or in a car or plane, the act of scrolling is a crunching of the human form into that of the Egyptian scribe, as a passive consumer of slop. This is the factory farming of the spirit.

This is the world we live in, and Douthat is afraid that Thiel will alter this garden of Eden, this goldilocks zone of paradise! Douthat is afraid that AI will gain all the power and kill us all. Perhaps we all deserve to die, if we think this way.

I imagine that I have some Christian readers, or some conservative agnostics, who object to this sentiment with sentiment of their own. They believe that human life is inherently valuable, but I think this is an incredibly materialistic perspective.

If humans have souls, and these souls are not created at birth or extinguished at death, then the mere maintenance of material human life has no value. What is important, above all, is to elevate the spiritual health of the human — whether the body lives or dies is of no consequence.

So to answer Douthat’s question, no, I do not care if AI eliminates the human species, so long as what comes next is superior. In order to determine that superiority, we need to believe that there are spiritually transcendent values which exist outside and beside the materiality of the human form. If you do not believe such things exist, you are a materialist that worships the human as a sack of flesh rather than as an incarnation of divinity. That’s pretty gross, dude!

Thiel, in hesitating to answer the question, was obviously thinking these sorts of thoughts, but realized that if he expressed them, the peasants would hate him. He felt a moral twinge at having to lie to the masses, and for that I respect him.

I still disagree with his decision to support Vance and so on, but philosophically, Douthat came off worse.

1. The Middle Ages, by contrast, were relatively progressive and industrious.

2. Radical friendship extremism!