Why did Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, Facebook and Palantir, come to Paris to give a lecture at the Institut de France on the Antichrist?
According to this German, who became an American citizen while taking New Zealand citizenship, democracy is not compatible with freedom and capitalism. And yet, for him, both are necessary for scientific and technical progress, which will one day enable mankind to free itself from the constraints of scarcity, achieve immortality and build the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Based on a highly personal reading of the Gospels, Thiel deduces that anything that stands in the way of scientific and technical progress will lead to the victory of Absolute Evil, whom he calls the Antichrist, and will ultimately impose totalitarian global governance, hostile to progress, leading to a global catastrophe, an Apocalypse.
In fact, his analysis of the concept of Antichrist is very sketchy. He caricatures both the Jewish conception of the role of Evil in History (according to which Evil is always temporary and always provokes a salutary upsurge) and the Christian conception (for whom absolute Evil, called Antichrist, is a simulacrum of Good, promising order, peace and security, while in reality destroying the main value, freedom).
For Thiel, any attempt at global governance would be a manifestation of the Antichrist, because it would be a power imitating the Good, promising salvation in exchange for submission and in reality denying human dignity. For him, as for many of his Silicon Valley peers, governments, whoever they may be, have already caused long-term scientific and technological stagnation through their interference, and we now need to get rid of them in order to develop all technologies without hindrance, especially those that will help to destroy state powers, central banks and all global, financial and ecological standards. For these people, any caution in the face of innovation, any limits on artificialization and robotization, are unacceptable.
This return of the Antichrist via California is neither folkloric nor accidental: it is the symptom of the unlimited ambition of a very powerful social group, that of GAFA and Silicon Valley. By controlling AI, biotechnologies and neurosciences with virtually unlimited financial resources, these people now believe they have the legitimacy to claim to lead a civilizational project and give meaning to the human condition. So they borrow the vocabulary of theology and speak of disruptive innovations as others would speak of Miracles; and of corporate valuations by financial markets as others would evoke manifestations of Providence. In this way, they skilfully attempt to put the return of religion to work for them.
Faced with the difficulty of simply describing their positive vision of transcendence, their Parousia, they base their theology on the denunciation of enemies, whom they present as the incarnations of negative myths: Antichrist, Apocalypse, Extinction, Final War. Hence the recuperation of the thought of René Girard, for whom the Antichrist is the one who promises peace through equal rights and living conditions, and who, on the contrary, provokes generalized violence through suicidal standardization. So they demand that we resign ourselves to all inequalities, that we give all power to scientists, manufacturers of new technologies and capitalist entrepreneurs – in other words, to themselves.
Indeed, while Silicon Valley can legitimately boast that it now controls financial and information flows, defines the perception of what is real and true, and controls a growing share of what was once national sovereignty, it cannot answer a simple question: In the name of what are we doing this? All it knows is that, for many people, “progress” no longer suffices as a moral justification, since it creates injustice and destroys nature. So, to legitimize their powers, the masters of Silicon Valley summon the end of time to their aid and call for an existential struggle against the Antichrist, a figure chosen to designate the State and its principals; when in reality, more prosaically, all this serves to do is to give a philosophical and religious veneer to their economic (regulation vs. innovation) and political (State vs. technologists) battles, and to transform, through constant transgression, a clash of powers into a civilizational struggle.
It’s not all far-fetched. And their arguments are not without merit: democracy and the market are not enough to define a project for society; they are both nothing more than institutional bricolages; they cannot provide a human ideal. And if we don’t succeed in inscribing them with much higher values, both will be swept away by the tyrannical individualism of the digitally powerful.
Particularly in Europe: if it is to survive, Europe cannot be content with technocratic rhetoric.
It must name the values it intends to defend, protect and reclaim. The market is not enough to define an ideal. Nor is democracy: the notion of republic cannot be generalized to European countries that are not republics; continental patriotism does not exist as such; Judeo-Christian civilization cannot be a sufficient value in secular countries; protection of the continent’s material and natural heritage alone cannot form an inspiring ideal. All that remains is the defense of social rights, human rights and fundamental freedoms, to which we must add a taste for risk, a refusal of fear and a frantic search for liberating sovereignty.
This must be the European ideal: neither Antichrist nor Messiah, just a kind of imperfect terrestrial Paradise, which must defend itself, repair the injustices with which it is still burdened and carry its ideal higher.
Image: The Antichrist listening to the words of Satan, by Luca Signorelli. The Acts of the Antichrist, circa 1505.