Where Is the Antichrist? (ft. Peter Thiel)

Hello, welcome to The Editor's Desk. This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine. I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things magazine, and I'm here with you today at The Editor's Desk. I'm really delighted today to have with me Peter Thiel, one of the co-authors of "Voyages to the End of the World" in the November 2025 issue of First Things magazine. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. Thanks for having me. "Voyages to the End of the World," there's a kind of double entendre there. You've got three seafaring figures in Gulliver's Travels and The New Atlantis and then in—what's the—One Piece is the—One Piece is the—is it Oda?

Oda. Yeah. But it also means the end of the world as in the end of times. Is that fair? Yes. Well, it's a kind of a bit of a Straussian essay, or should I say Baconian, insofar as you—really, it's a lot of exegesis of these four texts. But it does suggest a kind of underlying concern, and I want to sort of explore whether this is accurate, of the emergence of the Kojévian universal and homogeneous state. Is that fair, that that's kind of... You want to plant in the reader's mind that they should be worried about this.

Yes. You should be worried about the totalitarian one-world state. That's the way I would reframe the homogenous one-world state of Kojève.

Right. Homogenous is a euphemism for totalitarian. Yes. In the piece, you cite Wendell Willkie's—it wasn't a campaign book—

Sort of a manifesto for a post-World War II, what the post-World War II world would look like. Yeah, this was after he lost as a Republican candidate in 1940. He gets sent on a round-the-world junket by FDR and travels to all these countries—China, Soviet Union—meets with Stalin a couple of times, and then sort of produces this manifesto, One World, which again is sort of this... You know, globalization is both necessary, desirable—you know, it's desirable and inevitable. We need to do everything we can to make globalization and this one world work because it's inevitable anyway.

And then there's the, as you say, the propaganda film, One World or None, 1946. So this is really in the air. Yes. In the '40s.

And again, the One World or None, this is, you know, '46 is very different from '45 because you've had Hiroshima and Nagasaki at that point. And you have nuclear weapons—you don't yet have thermonuclear ones—but something has really changed by the late '40s. And—and then basically the message of the One World or None film, it's maybe the sort of atomic nuclear scientists that are behind it. It's probably a communist front group, but it's similar to the message of Oppenheimer, which is that, you know, you need world government to have peace, and the alternative to peace is atomic war. And so without a world government with real teeth that actually controls the nuclear weapons, you're going to have world war.

So it's One World or None. And then the sort of parallel but very alternative Christian theological framing I have is Antichrist or Armageddon. And what Sam and I in this piece articulate is, in some sense, it's the exact same thing: Antichrist or Armageddon versus One World or None. But it points in a very different direction because when you frame it in the sort of political, philosophical sense, way, um, you always go straight to one world. That's obviously the right answer. You know, "Are you better red or dead?" Your average philosophy professor: "Where can I sign up for the Communist Party membership right now?" So, yeah, the question always points at one answer, whereas Antichrist or Armageddon, those are both quite bad.

The one-world totalitarian state, you know, the runaway catastrophes of, I don't know, dual-use science and technology. And that pushes us to find some moderate, narrow third path that's very, very different. Something to avoid, you know, I don't know, the Scylla of Antichrist, the Charybdis of Armageddon.

I don't remember which one's the sea monster, but anyway.

And, yeah, that's very different.

I mean, in 2 Thessalonians, St. Paul, as I'm recalling here in chapter 2, that's the passage where he mentions the lawless one and the katechon and all these things that play such an important role in a lot of Christian thinking about end times. But his counsel to the Thessalonians is, we should know these things, but beware trying to know the date and the time. And we need to get along with our Christian life of doing the things that we're called to do. So there's a kind of counsel of patience as well as vigilance.

Yes. Well, I always think, yes, no man knows the day and the hour, which is the line in Matthew. And the Millerites in 1844, I believe, you know, they calculated the day as something like—it was a day, I think, October 22nd, 1844, was the day the world was going to come to an end. Technically, they did not even violate the Matthew command because they only said the day, not the day and the hour. Right. I'm not going to go quite that specific, but I do wonder whether there is some space in between, let's say, the excess of nihilism of inferring from no man knows the day and the hour to we can know nothing at all versus, let's say, the excess Gnosticism of knowing the day and the hour, and can we know the century?

What I would articulate is that in the world post-1945, there is some sense in which we are in an objectively more apocalyptic time. Let's not talk about the Antichrist, but let's just talk about—and this is just reading the newspaper or the internet or wherever you get your information. Something changed with 1945 with nuclear weapons. There's a question about COVID. Was that just a sort of relatively innocent mistake in a food market? Or was there some—what research was going on in the Wuhan lab? And was it just—was it really neutral research or was it bioweapons research? There are, of course, all these questions about AI, maybe not as some sort of weird disembodied mind, but as a technology that can be coupled to other things.

So, you know, I don't know, can you create autonomous drones where you don't have a human in the loop because the human can get jammed? And so there's sort of—doesn't necessarily have to happen that way, but there's a certain logic that pushes us in these things. So there's sort of—there are sort of a number of these different ways where you could say certain dimensions of science and technology have gotten extremely powerful. And as they get coupled in this dual-use military way, they are potentially apocalyptic. There's, of course, an environmental argument. Maybe climate change is exaggerated, but surely there are other dimensions of environmentalism where maybe some serious damage can be done to the planet.

And then the thesis I want to articulate is it's probably not quite the best thing for those of us who are on the conservative side to always just dismiss these things out of hand and say, you know, "Man, you must have psychological problems if you're scared of a nuclear war," or, you know, "Or the climate is, you know, obviously it's more people die of pneumonia in the winter than heat strokes in the summer. And so wouldn't it be nice if it was warmer?" So, I mean, there are sort of all these conservative counterpoints we can make. But I think the argument I want to articulate is that you have to also think very hard as to what the implicit political alternative to this is. And the line from Thessalonians that I always quote is,

not the catechon, restrainer stuff from 2 Thessalonians, but it's 1 Thessalonians 5.3, where the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And what I sort of imagine is that, you know, how do you get a one world state? How does the Antichrist actually take over? It is by playing on these fears, these very legitimate fears of technology, science, you know, coupled in certain ways. And we need, you know, we need worldwide controls of one sort or another to, uh, to stop this. And these are the arguments of, you know, Oppenheimer, Greta Thunberg in a very different context, Anthony Fauci, um, and then in, in a more recent context, uh, People like Nick Bostrom or Eliezer Yudkowsky are sort of, in some ways, the intellectuals behind the effective altruism movement where it's trying to stop the AI technology.

Yudkowsky, sort of this East Bay rationalist. Um, so he started transhumanist. Now it's fully Luddite where, you know, you sort of, the tech's going to solve all the problems. We need to, to, we need to take all our energy to stop the tech. But the recent book that he wrote that I think came out just this last month is, um, talking about AI: 'If anyone builds it, everyone dies.' And then there are, and then there are sort of all sorts of detailed technical scenarios that we can sort of debate whether they're right or wrong. Yeah. They probably exaggerate it, but then there's always, you know, man, there's a chance this is right. Maybe we should be a little bit careful. You should do something on the precautionary principle.

So there's sort of these very detailed and somewhat debatable technical scenarios, but then the counterpoint to them is this super vague, hand-wavy politics where it's, 'Well, I don't know what to do about them, but you have to regulate it on a worldwide basis. If you have a single country where it doesn't get regulated, it will happen. Don't know what that looks like, but we'll leave that to the politicians.' And so you can't have AI technology just in the U.S. You can't have it just in Singapore. If there's a single country where it's allowed, that doesn't count. And so the soft, implicit message is you need to get rid of any real sovereignty of all nations in the world, you need to have global policing with some real teeth to make this work.

And I think in late modernity, the Antichrist comes to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop. You know, early modernity, 17th, 18th century, there was sort of a way the Antichrist would use science to take over the world.

Like a hopefulness. Because you get that in New Atlantis.

It was both hopeful. There's an element of it that's terrifying. At the end of New Atlantis, they discover all these weapons. That they built all these, you know, I mean, the start of the book is, you know, there's a storm and they crash into this mysterious island somewhere in the South Pacific that no one knows is there. By the end of the book, you realize that one of the things they control is the weather. So you realize even the storm at the beginning of the book might have been set up by the people on the New Atlantis for mysterious reasons. And, and the speculative part of the story that's not written. In the old Atlantis, Plato's book, the Timaeus, the last part that's incomplete is a speech by Zeus explaining why Atlantis deserved to be destroyed.

So the last thing that doesn't happen is a speech on why Atlantis was destroyed. In Bacon's book, the thing that does not happen is an action, not a speech by the gods, but an action by the pro-science, Antichristic people on New Atlantis where they're taking over the whole world. And we're showing the weapons to you. It's too late. We're ready to conquer the whole world. That was the optimism of 17th, 18th century science. Empiricism for Bacon leads to empire. You know, we torture nature, we figure everything out. Yes, get an empire of reason. Yeah, you get an empire of reason, but then you also get a real empire, a real world empire.

I was wondering, in your reading, you and Sam just do a marvelous job drawing out some of the really telling details of the New Atlantis. But couldn't we read it as Bacon's foreboding? You read him pretty much—this is a kind of how-to book for the future world dominators. Whereas I was more inclined to think, well, not more inclined, I'm at least willing to say that maybe he was anxious about this. Once reason really gets going, once technology really gets going, it takes on a life of its own.

Yeah, it's—I always think it's very hard for us to put ourselves back into the 17th-, 18th-century frame. And I wouldn't say that people were naively optimistic about—but they certainly were optimistic. You know, Bacon envisioned a lot. He didn't envision things like nuclear weapons. I don't think he really envisioned, you know, AI or bioweapons that could.

He certainly anticipated modern medicine.

But that's sort of, again, that's sort of a more positive version of this. And so, yeah, if you have medicine that can cure all diseases, do you have something that's one toggle switch away that's a bioweapon that can, you know, target and kill, you know, all sorts of people? But I don't think that was envisioned by Bacon.

But even the positive side, as you say, I agree with you. In retrospect, it is somewhat creepy to us.

So I would agree that when we look at it from the lens of 2025, it's, you know, how could you not find this disturbing?

Your reference to 1 Thessalonians 5.3, I also think that's important. I mean, the promise here is peace and safety, peace and security. If we take peace as much health, wealth, and well-being, let's say peace is more than just absence of war. then you could see that the positive side of science and technology is also very seductive for world government. Like, hey, if you just give your will to me, I will make sure that, well, you never die. That is a seduction as opposed to you need to give all your sovereignty to me, otherwise you're going to die in conflict. So it's kind of both and.

It's some of those, though, and in my telling, this is always where I quibble with the anti-tech social conservatives, is that we have not made that much progress in recent years on the 'you will not die.' We've not made any progress on dementia. We've made very limited progress on things like cancer. We've made progress on... certain types of controls in the financial system.

But maybe we just haven't gone far enough. I mean, oftentimes I find there's a kind of progressive sensibility: 'Oh, you're right, Peter. We haven't made much progress, but that's only because we haven't kind of given up, given, you know, gone all in on this project, whatever it might be, multifaceted project.' So like in the political realm, like, 'We could just break through to a genuinely inclusive and multicultural society. We would get beyond this populist moment.' There's a kind of accelerationist element on the left: 'We got to accelerate these engines of progress in order to break through.'

I agree there's an accelerationist element on the politics. I'm not sure how strong it still is on the science and technology. And of course, it's very confusing because there are people we can point to that still believe this. Someone like, I don't know, Richard Dawkins is someone who still believes in science. Yeah. Yeah. But back in 2004, it was really optimistic. Now it is really blackpilled. And yeah, it was transhumanism and 'the AI will help us live forever' to 'the AI is going to kill all of us and we can just do drugs at Burning Man. And we're going to fight it even though we're probably going to lose.'

I agree with you on Richard Dawkins being a fossil years ago.

I don't want to fixate too much on someone like Greta, but I would say, yeah, people like Oppenheimer. Do you think she's more of a telling figure? Oppenheimer is more in our zeitgeist than Edward Teller. I met Edward Teller once as a kid in the—undergraduate in the late '80s. It was a bracing thing. It was like, we need a rollback strategy for communism, not containment. This is 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall comes down. You know, if you put me in charge, Teller, an 80-something Teller was telling us, 'You know, I would not be scared of using nuclear weapons.' And so I'm not in favor of Dr. Strangelove. It was scary to us that this 80-year-old man had way more testosterone than the undergraduates from the College Republican Club at Stanford.

But with 20/20 hindsight, what I remember about talking to Teller is, man, he was completely outside the debate. Nobody was listening to him. We didn't even worry about him. He was talking to, you know, a handful of College Republicans. That's all that he had left.

Right, right. I do, in the '90s when I was teaching, I—to kind of underline your observation, we live in a time of fear, not hope. And my students, I came to see, were very anxious about the future. I mean, good times or bad times economically, every year that went by, it seemed like the anxiety about career and job ratcheted up. And so there's an impulse to try to find some safe place. I could see that even in the '90s and late '90s in my students. And, I mean, it seems to me that's only gotten more pronounced in the last couple decades.

Yes. Yes. And again, the nuance I want to add is I want to frame anxiety not just in this sort of Jordan Peterson psychobabble New Age category. Mm-hmm. And, um, and so people are anxious about something real. And, you know, when, when FDR says, 'You have nothing to fear but fear itself,' it wasn't some abstract New Age fear. It was the fear that there was not enough gold in the banks. And that's why you need to have runs on the banks. It was a very concrete thing people were scared of. And, and I think, um, I think there are dimensions of the anxieties that are, are quite, are quite legitimate. And we have to find some way to talk about them without, you know, going all the way into, you know, the Kojève, the Kojève one-world state.

One of the interesting things, by the way, that we, this guy Rimbaud in France in the last year wrote these books on Kojève. Kojève had a certain theological view on what he was doing. And he had done his PhD in the 1920s. One of his two PhDs was on Solovyov, who's an Eastern Orthodox writer who in 1900 had written a short story of the Antichrist.

Which I recommend to listeners. It's fantastic.

And that he is going to be the conscience of Stalin, sort of like the false prophet figure. And, you know, because the Caesaropapist fusion, you have the Caesar with a sort of religious ideological undercurrent. And in 1940, he sends a 1,000-page manuscript to Moscow where he's sort of, you know, trying to get them to hire him as the, you know, somehow, fortunately for Kojève, probably it somehow never works its way through the bureaucracy and he gets to stay ensconced in Paris.

Right, and then winds up being a consigliere for the development of the European Union.

But yes, I think there is a Kojève version where it was sort of a pro-Antichrist thing. And then the Strauss, you know, Strauss has this debate with Kojève on tyranny. And the question one would have to—I haven't reread that book carefully, but if you reread On Tyranny, it would be, how much did Strauss know that Kojève thought of himself as secretly working for the Antichrist? And you do have all this language on the Strauss side where he constantly is accusing Kojève of bringing in religious assumptions, and he's this religious fanatic. And then— And then you have the final and universal tyrant is the sort of political philosophy description of what's wrong with the Kojève project. It leads to the final and universal tyrant.

And, you know, yeah, maybe that's God or Christ, but given what we now know about Kojève, perhaps it was the Antichrist.

To your point about anxiety, I mean, it seems to me that optimism or pessimism, if you want to put it in those terms, the devil preys upon us whatever our disposition might be. So in an age of progressive confidence, the devil can distort and pervert that. In an age of fitting anxiety and concern, the devil can also manipulate and exploit that. So part of what I read at the end of the piece is you and Sam are counseling us to sort of—again, this goes back to 2 Thessalonians and what St. Paul is urging the Thessalonians to—stick to your knitting. I mean, don't— Although I always think of Matthew 13, Matthew 13 and Mark 13, which is the Olivet Discourse in the Gospel of Mark. It ends with a series of verses where the word watch is repeated six or seven times.

So we need to be watchful and vigilant without getting carried away by our anxiety and fear.

But then I would say watchfulness and vigilance. Again, maybe this is just my reading into it. Maybe there's also something we can do, that we can be agentic. And if we're too optimistic or too pessimistic, you end up not being agentic. I agree. 'It's going to carry us on. Nothing you can do. You just need to watch the movie of the future unfold and eat your popcorn.' This is, you know—yes, Kurzweil. And then, or it's, 'Everyone's going to get killed,' Eliezer. But extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, they always converge to sloth. Right. To doing nothing. I agree. And so, yeah, if you have to have one, it's somewhere, it's, it's, it's, it's probably somewhere, it's somewhere in between. But, you know, one, one thing where I, I, I don't, I don't think it's supposed to be just merely pessimism.

Watchful in some, you know, yeah, passive sense, in some passive, uh, mental interior space sense. And, uh, the, the passage that I always like to quote as a bit of a counterpoint is, um, First Corinthians 13:13: 'And these three remain: faith, hope, and love. Greatest is love.' And, um, and the, um—but if something like, and what I take that passage to mean, let's talk about the faith and hope parts, is that these go together. They're not opposites, but they're somehow, they go together. And maybe you need faith for prayer, and you need, let's say you need some amount of hope, and you need some amount of hope for politics or for business. Mm-hmm. And if faith fails, hope fails. If hope fails, faith fails. It's the exact opposite of the way atheists always think about it, where these things are anti-correlated and you have faith only when you have no hope or something like that.

That's an atheist framing. I think the true framing is they're positively correlated, you know? Is it okay for someone, as a Christian, should you be praying or should you be working on J.D. Vance's presidential campaign? Don't think they're negatively correlated, but certainly from J.D.'s point of view, maybe you don't want to have someone work on your campaign who's not willing to pray. It's the Thucydides—even in, let's go to something non-Judeo-Christian, the Thucydides account of the Syracuse expedition. In the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians are hopeful, they're praying. And then at the end, as the battle's gone against them, they get angry at the gods and they curse the gods. So when hope fails, faith fails.

And these things are, they're deeply correlated.

Hope affects our practical syllogisms. Obviously, if you don't believe in eternal life, life after death, then your practical syllogisms about what to do in a particularly threatening situation will change. And faith provides, if you will, the major premise in those practical syllogisms. And love pertains to the will. It pertains to the objects of our desires and purposes.

I'm open to the notion that once we're in Heaven, we won't need hope or faith anymore. Right. And that's why love remains when you're in Heaven. And it's maybe the most durable. But yeah, to the extent we're still far from Heaven, we're in this world where I think we in some ways need all three.

Throughout, I mean, Zero to One, your book—your book of philosophy masquerading as a business book—it's a leitmotif in the things that you say and have written, which is a profound concern about preserving agency in our age. That there are lots of ways in which the sense that my agency matters or the agency of others matters seems to be eclipsed by all kinds of ideological and scientific and technological trends.

Yeah, there's sort of a lot of... a lot of different dimensions on this. I mean, I always like to say that the virtue in shortest supply is something like courage. And there's the kind of version that you probably come across a lot at First Things in the sort of intellectual world where people do not have the courage to speak out or they sort of agree with you, but... you know, for all sorts of subtle social...

I always tell young people that are reticent, I say, "You're going to die sooner than you think, so you might as well say what you want."

And yeah, so there are all these kinds of, you know, all these kinds of dimensions to it. And then, yeah, there are... there probably are anti-agentic things that can be motivational. So there's probably a lot of New Age stuff that's sort of, it's just if you think you're going to succeed, you will succeed. But even if one toggle switch away, you get black-pilled. You realize you didn't study for the test. You're going to get an F, and then you think you're going to get an F, and then you get an F. Yeah.

But even the sort of default metaphysics of our time is a kind of reductive materialism where things go on in your head. That's a biological phenomenon. So, you know, in other words, I think that, as I say, the sort of default metaphysics is very anti-agential, or whatever the right word is.

17th, 18th century. There's a lot that's residual to that, but a lot of it's also gone in a very anti-material direction. We landed on the moon in July of '69, and Woodstock starts three weeks later, and that's when we move from outer space to inner space, and it's psychedelic drugs and meditation and yoga and video games and falling into the Matrix, and, you know, I don't know, navel-gazing identity politics. They're, you know, in a sense, I don't know if we call that materialist or... I'd say it's bad metaphysics. But it's sort of... I sometimes think that... even the reductionist libertarianism or Marxism would be better than, um, than, uh, than let's say some of the identity politics. You at least think about something like the economy, and that's not everything.

It's not maybe the most important thing, but, uh, it's, um... Well, what is it?

It's more than they are able to think about. There seems to be a—because initially in '68, these kinds of moves were born out of a feeling that you were just a cog in the system. And so you go to the commune in order to recover a sense of agency, recover a sense of actually having a self that is in possession of its own destiny. But as you point out, that very quickly winds up getting co-opted in all kinds of ways. And it slides into its own kind of solipsism that has no place to go and nothing to do.

Well, I think there were a lot of... different dimensions to what was going on. Even the history is always hard to reconstruct. You know, I was born in 1967, so both of us were probably just, you know... Yeah, I was born in 1959. But still... But yeah, I mean... Kind of in the aftermath. Very much in the aftermath. In the aftermath of '68. There was probably... I know there's a part that was probably, you know, extremely exciting and optimistic. There was... But then there was also some part where, you know, yeah, there was very rapid economic growth. There was... seemingly very rapid progress on civil rights. And then there was also a very rapid building out of, you know, nuclear weapons. And at some point, you know, at some point, this sort of accelerationism transforms in the 1970s where, you know, we're just going to hit pause and... Preppy Handbook.

Yeah, by... By the late '70s, it's sort of the Whole Earth Catalog, let's say, where it's probably not all bad, but it's sort of more in the, we're going to go slow. And I don't know, when Charles Manson was on LSD and killing people, what did he see? And maybe he saw that nuclear war was inevitable and that he could be like a Raskolnikov character from Dostoevsky and that therefore everything was permitted. So, you know, these things I think were sort of entangled in these really weird, complicated ways like this.

The One Piece that's mostly wrong, by the way. The One Piece, the Oda, what is it? It's a suite of different multimedia things. I mean, it's a comic book, yes? Or an online graphic, ongoing serial graphic novel?

Yes, ongoing, of the sort that there are quite a number in Japan. I believe it is the most successful one of these. It's been... serialized since 1997, so it's going on almost three decades. It's set on an alternate sort of watery world where it's mostly water, a few smaller land masses. So it's like this parallel Earth. And there are a lot of different dimensions to it. But one sort of question is who runs the world? And it's a one-world government. And then, you know, the gradual reveal over, you know, decades of this manga series is that it's—it's, you know, it's kind of heavy-handed, totalitarian. There's, you know, one person who runs it, Nerona Imu, like Nero, the Beast from the Sea.

And so it has these, and it has like a little horn, like in Daniel, looks like sort of this somewhat demonic kind of figure. No one sees him. No one even knows that there's this... one person running the world. And then a big part of what it does is suppress dangerous technologies. And you've had this one-world state in place for 800 years. And so in a way, it's the opposite of the One World or None, of the Watchmen, of, of the other side of it, where we are five minutes before midnight. We're looking at Armageddon. Armageddon's five minutes away. We need to do everything we can to stop it. That's the One World or None vibe. The anti-argument, if you want to do the... weird Christian Japanese manga anti, um, argument is you look at the world not five minutes before Armageddon, you look at it 800 years after the Antichrist, and the Antichrist has been running the world for 800 years. Um, there's a scientist who's like Einstein who comes up with nuclear power, he immediately gets killed, and you know, and then there was

There was a bygone age that looked like our 20th, 21st century, where there was a lot more stuff that actually worked. And then that's, you know, it's not an argument for Armageddon. It's not an argument for Dr. Strangelove. But that is also, you know, if we're going to talk about existential risks and precautionary principles, one of the things we need to weigh more heavily is the risk of the sort of one-world totalitarian state. What's very difficult about it is, I think you always need to think of totalitarianism not as some sort of abstract Platonic form, but in a more historical way. There's incipient totalitarianism, where it's just getting started. You have full-blown totalitarianism, where there's nothing you can do.

Maybe at some point it decays, like it did in the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc in the '80s. Not so sure this happens if it's worldwide, or maybe it requires... Or people get used to it. Yeah, maybe it would require a real miracle if those days were not shortened and would survive, not even the elect. But they're shortened, but only by God, once it's full-blown. And then it's very important to do something when we're early in this. And that's, of course, hard to say. I know this is an overwrought analogy, but... You know, in 1923, the judge let Hitler off with an 18-month sentence because he looked preposterous.

The mustache was ridiculous.

Everything about him was ridiculous. He was never going to get a following. And then at some point, it snowballs and it's too late. But yeah, I would like to take the incipient totalitarianism that we see more seriously. It's overdone when people like us say that it's Stalinist because they're not yet killing millions of people. They'd like to, but they're not there yet.

Captain Luffy. So he's the character that... He's the Christ-like character, am I telling? He's the prophet. I mean, he's the pirate running around. But it seems like in Oda's vision, you actually have a conflict within the technological era, so to speak. I mean, doesn't Captain Luffy have his own, if you will, technology vis-a-vis the One World State? He's a kind of insurgent...

Yes, well, there are, yeah, well, there are.

Is it daring and dash that he lives on or is it something else?

There's some... Yeah, there are these Devil Fruits that give you these powers. And so it's... I'm not quite sure I'd call that technology or maybe there's something in nature. But it's basically... Look, it's a complicated, multifaceted story. I would say the compare and contrast to Bacon that I would stress, the through line I would stress is that, yes, there are ways the World State uses technology to control people. There are ways it tries to censor information. There are certain vectors where... You use technology as a control mechanism, but then one of the main things you have to control, and very different from the Baconian intuition, or it's much more marginal in Bacon, is you need the technology to control technology itself.

And it needs to be centralized, and you can't have this sort of, you know, these libertarian pirates. Right.

Running around. Aristotle, he thought there should be no innovation in the city, aside from military technology. Because he saw it was disruptive to the regime.

Sure, but the exception, you know, it swallows the rule. Yes, of course it does. In modernity, like early, late modernity, how could people not see this coming for a long time? It's Samuel Colt. That's the Colt revolver in 1830. Comes up with an advertising jingle: God created men, and Colonel Colt made them equal.

It's all going to serve the great American ideal. To some extent, it does.

In some ways, it works. In some ways, there's a logic to it where it's a lot trickier when we get to the second half of the 20th, first half of the 21st century.

I mean, I was, you know, back rereading the Book of Daniel after reading your essay. And in Chapter 11, it's a kind of complicated, sort of endless military conflict, kind of global military conflict within the confines of the world of Daniel. Yeah. And I thought, well, in the medieval world, there's certain kind of endless conflicts over honor. And I'm wondering whether our age is, well, modernity is kind of ideologies in conflict, you know, liberalism, fascism, communism. Are we living in a time when it's ultimately conflicts of technologies, right? Again, these are conflicts among human beings. So that's just the medium in which the conflict manifests itself. Not to say that the technologies are conflicting.

It's the milieu.

There's always a way that I want to – there's a way these things could be timeless and eternal. We always have interpersonal rivalry. We have ideological conflicts. Right. In some ways, these are not great things, but in some ways, maybe they at least prevent the easy formation of a one-world state. And then what I imagine would happen if you actually were to get a one-world state would be – it would be under the veneer where there are no ideological conflicts. Maybe it's an ideology in disguise. Everyone's a liberal internationalist. That's simply the truth. Or the human actors would be less significant. You don't want sort of even a colorful politician like President Trump because it's too much of a real human being and he might make decisions.

And it's sort of – it's somehow too agentic. And I often think of the EU as sort of... As colorless as possible. That's what an AI looks like in government. There are no humans involved. It's just these rules that can be executed by a computer code. And then there's sort of a question: in this sort of world of Shakespearean drama and conflict and ideology, how can such a system, you know, somehow arise? You know, there were these various medieval writings on the Antichrist. There's a Ludus Antichristus, a sort of play from around 1160. It's not that great, but the one interesting literary idea in this play on the Antichrist from the Middle Ages is you have the 10 kings from Daniel that the Antichrist, you know, and he sort of takes over all their kingdoms.

And the 10 kings are shown as they're sort of having all these fights with each other. I'm the king who has the longest lineage in the past, or I have this claim because of this land, and I'm the greatest in this dimension. And there's sort of these fights they have about the past. And then the Antichrist sneaks in and he thinks about the present and the future. And so, yeah, so to the extent we're caught up in these fights about the past, we're not going to pay attention.

And your point that you made earlier, which I think is really important, that the technological, the Baconian project, as it's matured and taken on a life of its own, it raises the stakes. It raises the stakes. As you say, nuclear weapons raises the stakes of everything. And so we begin to worry that maybe we can't afford these old... We can't afford to live in a world where – because inevitably if we have a world that gives priority to kind of personality and agency, you're going to have conflict given human nature. Hopefully you can moderate the conflict, but there's a tremendous temptation to sort of – well, no, we need – I mean, this is basically Hobbes. You got to design a system in which people are so fearful that they will – they won't enter into conflict.

Instead, they'll submit to the one-world government.

Yeah, or there are, you know, there's probably complicated versions of this with the U.S. history post-1945, where you could say the president became the semi-divine being who would start a nuclear war. This was very agentic. It was also very scary and very dangerous. And then in some ways, a lot of that, not all of it, got off-ramped after Watergate, where... Yeah, we don't want someone as crazy as Nixon anymore, but if a president no longer really has control of the nuclear weapons and has somehow shifted to this bureaucratic deep state, is that really a conservation of agency towards democracy, these, um, unelected agents, the deep state, or is it sort of just sort of a world where, you know, a lot, a lot less can be done? So, yeah, I think there are these very, um, you know, partial solutions we've, we've tried to come up with. And then, you know, in my telling, you know, yeah, if you, if you steelman the deep state, you know, a lot of it was about detecting nuclear weapons, seeing who was developing them.

There were a lot of things they were doing, but this was the really important thing. Whenever another country got nukes, this was very dangerous for the U.S. The Soviets get them in '49. We get the Korean War a year later. China, '64. Vietnam starts a year later. When a hostile country gets nuclear weapons, we get a massive regional war because you can't retaliate to the Soviet Union or China for their support of North Korea and North Vietnam, respectively. And so, yeah, it was somehow very important to do this. And then, of course, it came with, you know, it came with this deep state that, you know, in my telling from the history, was originally pretty good. You know, I think of, you know, I think of James Bond as more on our side politically.

Well, Bill Donovan, an actually existing figure.

At this point, if it's a USAID person whose work consists of going to climate change conferences, it's probably a different sociology from James Bond.

When I was in D.C. last spring, you know, meeting with this sort of young crowd of conservative kids—kids, I say, 20s and 30s—they, I got to say, they were so thrilled because really, basically, they had begun to fear that nothing was really possible. You couldn't really do anything. And the administration, current administration, whatever you think of the particular things it's done, has, you know, been very activist. And that seemed to encourage people at a kind of deep existential level. It was just, abstracting from what's being done, just that anything could be done, because they were beginning to suspect, 'And we're just frozen with a certain system.'

Well, it's frozen or, even worse, we're on a certain track. Yeah. I mean, this was, you know, in some sense, this was the Obama argument, the Hillary Clinton argument. They gave us sort of a positive spin, but it was, you know, it was just, you know, there's a certain arc to history. It's just going in a certain way. You may like it, you may not like it. It's probably more good than bad, but it's, you know... there are all these things that can't really be changed. And I think there's some way you need to try to restore a little bit more of a sense of freedom, a place where I disagree with, let's say, the overly deterministic premillennial evangelicals who think these prophecies tell us the Antichrist is inevitable and this will happen and that there's no room for human agency to prevent this.

I always think it's maybe healthier, maybe better to read these as warnings: 'This is what will happen.' Without a miracle, this will happen if people don't convert, don't change their minds, don't act. It's Jonah going to Nineveh, the Old Testament: 'The city will be destroyed in 40 days.' But then there's a miracle. People repent. Now, maybe Nineveh gets destroyed a century later. But there is room for us to do something in the time that's given to us.

Certainly, that strikes me as—you're right. There is a fitting sense of one's finite agency. We can't save the world. And interestingly, we can't really destroy it either. It's funny. Nuclear war would not bring the world to an end. It would bring to an end almost everything we think of as part of the human world, perhaps. But it wouldn't bring the world to an end. So I think it's useful to remember.

Yeah, but I wouldn't—again, I would not go the way of explaining away nuclear war. No, I'm not going to explain away.

It's just that metaphysically, there's a way in which if you take a more realistic—I mean, the stakes are extremely high. But I think you become easily manipulated by demonic forces if you amp things up beyond their reality.

Or you discount them. Let me throw this one on for you as a sort of a Christ at Gethsemane, the day before he gets—you know, the hours before he gets arrested and crucified. He tells the disciples, you need to pray. And then they fall asleep and then he wakes them up. No, it's really important. You need to pray. And then they fall asleep again. Now, I don't know what would have happened if they stayed awake and prayed. But I'm tempted to say that even at that late an hour, things could have gone differently. And maybe it was some complicated interplay between God and—but, you know, we should not do the equivalent of what the disciples did and just hit the snooze button.

No, I'm with you on that. I mean, my reading of that would be they need to pray to prepare their souls for the trial that they're going to endure, because they all flee. I mean, every last one, except for John at the foot of the cross. So, as opposed to forestalling the event that the Father and the Son—you know, that this is this cosmic drama that's going to unfold one way or the other. But be that as it may, I do take exactly what you're saying, and I agree with you completely that there is a temptation. There's quietism, which is, I think, the wrong approach to take, as well as a certain kind of vainglorious activism, as if we can usher in the Kingdom of God, from which a great deal of harm has been done, immanentizing the eschaton, as Eric Voegelin put it.

Yeah. So we have to find the right sense of—and we could certainly, unlike the disciples, stay awake and pray. You kind of end with that. I take the ending as that we need to choose sides, and we can't pretend that we don't have to make a decision about which side we're on.

Yeah, that's certainly—something like that truly is true. The more modest thing I would start with is we have to find some way to talk about these things and think about them. And, you know, there's always—there are ways I've been thinking about this Antichrist topic for 30 years or so. And I've only started talking about it the last three, four years. There were ways in which it's not an intellectually respectable topic. It's kind of down market. Oh, indeed. Very down market. Yeah. It's probably also, you know, if you're, I don't know, the CEO of PayPal or, you know, a tech, a public tech company, the board might not approve of you talking about this. So you have to do it in a sort of coded, esoteric, Straussian way, even though the problem with doing that is it's too confusing and nobody knows what you're really talking about.

But, but, one of the reflections I've had is that even though probably not enough people are thinking about this, perhaps more people have thought about this than wanted to publicly talk about it, just like myself. I have a thesis that Pope Benedict thought about this quite a bit and didn't talk about it. But I... But then there were also a few people who talked about it and where they've simply been censored by the historians. And the one that I want to submit to, that's a very interesting figure in this zone, is someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who's the Lutheran anti-Hitler theologian who's part of the Confessing true Christian church. Um, and he was sort of involved in the 1944 assassination plot on Hitler.

And it's always sort of a very troubling character for, uh, for Christians because he somehow got the right answer, but then it all feels sort of existentialist and it's Kierkegaardian and Barthian and sort of vaguely ungrounded in, in anything looking sort of reasonable. And, uh, and then, of course, it's also this incredible mishmash of politics and faith that we're supposed to be really allergic to. And I don't know if this is a full corrective to Bonhoeffer, but one of the things that we found in reviewing Bonhoeffer is he spends a lot of time talking about the Antichrist, and Hitler is the Antichrist. And the Führer, leader, can be a Verführer. So the word sounds similar in German. Verführer means deceiver.

The leader can be a deceiver. And be the great deceiver. And then there's a long discussion on the... In 1943, when he writes his Ethics book in prison, there's a long discussion on Solovyov's account of the Antichrist, where the signal... the key division between the true Christian church of the Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, is they maintain that Jesus is the Christ. And then the false church of the Antichrist replaces Jesus with the Antichrist leader, which is in some sense what the Nazi church was doing with Hitler. So, no, I would, contra the historians on Bonhoeffer, I would say that Bonhoeffer had a far more systematic, far more rational account of what he was doing than, um, than we've given him credit for.

Um, you know, maybe Hitler was not precisely the final Antichrist. He was certainly a type of the Antichrist and, um, and, you know, and, and it was, and somehow it's, it's good for us to, yeah, think about what happened then, but also think about more what's going on today.

Yeah, the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel that Pope Francis encouraged people to say after Mass is a petition that Michael would defend them against the wickedness and snares of the devil and to cast into hell Satan. The evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. So having an active sense that there are demonic powers abroad and that one has to see that technological phenomenon, economic phenomenon, political phenomenon, that you have to open up the accordion and see it as more than just the immanent thing that appears at first glance or the way the New York Times analyzes it.

Although it, of course... It also, in some ways, appears in a human form.

So you think the Antichrist, to keep that in mind in your moral imagination, is helpful?

It's a type, it's a system, it's a person. There were many types of Christ. There were many forerunners to Christ in the time before Christ, in the time after Christ, there will be many forerunners to the Antichrist. So there are, you know, and in some ways, it's a way we can say things about Christ. If Christ was radically one of a kind, then, you know, but he's a type of prophet, he's a type of man. He's a type of defense lawyer. You know, there's sort of all kinds of ways we can sort of—type of king, a type of scapegoat. There's sort of all these different ways we can understand who Christ is. And then there's something like that that I would say with the Antichrist. And then, yeah, it's

There's sort of an unholy trinity in the Book of Revelation where it's Satan, it's the dragon, and then the Antichrist, the political leader is the beast from the sea, and then the false prophet. So it's like God the Father, Christ, the Holy Spirit; the false prophet, sort of the religious ideological leader, the beast from the land. And it's this sort of unholy trinity that works together. But I sort of wonder, in sort of a rough analogy to the Trinity, where we know the most about Christ, if we're strictly monotheistic like Judaism and Islam, you don't know that much about Yahweh and Allah because they're too unitary. If you're Trinitarian, you know something about the relationship of the three, but a lot of it you know through what you can know about Christ.

You can have belief in Yahweh, you can have belief in Allah. The thing where Christianity differs, you can have much more knowledge. And then the sort of, I don't know, the demonic analogy I wonder is, you know, how much can we know about Satan as just a unitary, you know, sort of counterpart to Yahweh or Allah? Because it's just the Devil has many disguises. He will be who he will be. It's almost sort of somehow too, I don't know. It doesn't have any natural categories. It's too nominalist. There's no nature of the Devil. It's very problematic in all those kinds of ways. And then maybe Antichrist. There's a type of Antichrist. And this is even a way that we can... Yeah, so there's a way you can talk about the Antichrist in terms of the Devil.

He gets possessed by the devil, things like that. But maybe this is also a more rational way for us to talk about Satan and the devil.

Well, thanks for being on the podcast. I really appreciate the essay. And I agree that the Antichrist as a figure, it's very much denied, but it nevertheless has an immediate salience to people when you discuss it, a frightening salience.

Well, it's, you know, people not discussing it in most times in Christian history would have itself been seen as a sign of the end times. You know, the watched kettle doesn't boil. It does not follow that the unwatched kettle will not boil.