When asked if he would “prefer the human race to endure” by podcaster Ross Douthat, billionaire Peter Thiel stumbles and hesitates, viscerally conflicted on a straightforward question. “Uh- well I- I don’t know, I would- I would, um” it takes Thiel around 19 seconds just to spit out a yes, and he quickly shifts the topic of discussion thereafter. So, is this another egotistical billionaire who believes he is superior to the plebian human race? While seemingly affirmative on the surface, a deeper examination of Thiel’s esoteric ideologies—when paired with his immense wealth—reveals their capacity to influence millions.
Who is Peter Thiel?
Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, partner of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm with a notable portfolio including SpaceX, OpenAI, and hundreds of other companies, and the primary source of funding for Vice President JD Vance’s campaign, Peter Thiel’s power oscillates across many sectors. While the wealth he has amassed from these investments has given him a platform that guarantees an audience for his views, it’s often those very views that generate even more attention.
Over the last year, Thiel has orchestrated a series of private lectures in San Francisco where he discusses the antichrist and inevitability of Armageddon. In short, he believes that an antichrist figure (modeled after philosophers who believe in policing and restricting technology) will enact extreme regulations on AI, as well as fearmonger the public with threats of nuclear war, climate change, and the possibility of World War III to consolidate supreme power. He goes on to note that an antichrist figure, under the façade of peace and safety, will actually act as a totalitarian, one-world state. Thiel believes this antichrist is “focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.”
However, his views are inherently contradictory. Thiel is actively using Palantir to build defense and surveillance infrastructure for the government, funding the very tools that facilitate the possibility of a one-world regime that his own ideology warns about. Once a government relies on a single tech stack like Palantir for its security apparatus, that stack gains massive structural power. So, by steadily deepening its role within government technology, Palantir expands what any government could do if they ever chose to centralize power.
Furthermore, the original vision for Thiel’s PayPal was to wholly replace government-controlled currency like the US dollar, with the ultimate goal of making it the main, independent source of money for all citizens. In a Stanford center for professional development lecture in 2014, Thiel stated,
“If you’re a startup [like PayPal], you want to get to monopoly. You’re starting a new company, you want to get to monopoly.”
Because this monopoly directly contradicts the competition that drives free-market principles, it becomes increasingly clear that if the future were to be a totalitarian one world state with a central, supreme leader in charge of all sectors, Peter Thiel would be the antichrist.
And yet, this contradiction is indeed very strategic because theology with talks of an antichrist and Thiel’s background as a “small-o orthodox Christian” provides a moral cover. It reframes opposing viewpoints as evil and sacrilegious. With this antichrist narrative, Thiel characterizes those who believe in policing and restricting technology as enemies of God, utilizing religious justification to suppress them.
But then, this would not be the first time that religion was manipulated for justification. Recently in my English class, we have been studying Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and that got me thinking about the parallels between Peter Thiel and Victor Frankenstein.
Widely regarded as a literary classic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides one of the earliest and most enduring frameworks for understanding technocratic ambition and esoteric ideologies. Written in the early 19th century amid scientific experimentation rooted in Enlightenment principles, the novel reflects progress and its consequences. Victor Frankenstein’s pursuit of forbidden knowledge mirrors emerging technocratic impulses that prefer innovation over ethical restraint. As such, Frankenstein functions not merely as a Gothic cautionary tale, but as a foundational text for examining how power and technological aspiration intertwine to produce unintended, and often destructive, outcomes.
Peter Thiel and Frankenstein on Transhumanism
Thiel: “A critique of the trans people in a sexual context, or a transvestite, is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses […] but we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s so pathetically little. We want more than cross-dressing or changing our sex organs, we want you to be able to change your heart, and change your mind, and change your whole body.”
Where Peter Thiel wants humankind to customize their preexisting bodies, Victor Frankenstein’s creature was the very product of this customization, and we saw the negative effects that this had on the creature, the creator, and the world around them. Victor hand-picked “limbs in proportion, and […] had selected [the creature’s] features as beautiful” (vol I, ch. IV, pg. 38). Frankenstein taught us that customization pulled us away from the characteristics that made us human, and by eradicating flaws with technological advancement, we lost the wabi-sabi that defined humanism in the first place. So, while Thiel’s bold statement of “changing your whole body” could just be futile technocrat jargon, or all bark and no bite, we saw the results of the unrestricted technology that Thiel advocates for in Frankenstein, and transhumanists like Thiel most certainly have the wealth, power, and connections to turn this fictional story into a utopian reality.
Peter Thiel and Frankenstein on Defying Nature
A couple minutes later in the same interview, Douthat facilitates a discussion tying religion, nature, and technology together, asking Peter Thiel how each piece of the puzzle fits.
Ross Douthat: “The promise of Christianity in the end is the perfected body and the perfected soul through god’s grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.”
Thiel: “I think the word ‘nature’ does not occur once in the Old Testament, and the way I understand the Judeo-Christian inspiration, is [that] it is about transcending nature.”
While he is correct that the word ‘nature’ does not appear in the Old Testament, allusions to the physical world and all real things go hand in hand with God’s creation, and therefore intrinsically link nature to the Old Testament.
But then, let us look at transcending nature from a more universal perspective, one that is not hinged on religion where messages are entirely different based on where you are in the world and what family you are born into.
In Frankenstein, nature famously retaliates when Victor pushes the boundaries, with Mary Shelley incorporating the sublime setting to suggest that the scientist is consistently outmatched by natural power. Gloomy weather and hostile landscapes mirror Victor’s loss of control, and as he approaches the creation’s completion, the world outside his laboratory is anything but bright. Instead, this ‘achievement’ takes place “on a dreary night of November” where “the rain patter[s] dismally against the panes” (vol I, ch. IV, pg. 37-38). This miserable setting foreshadows Victor’s lifelong misfortune, where the creation triggers his manic, depressive spiral that lasts until the end of the novel. It also signals a larger theme where any attempt to violate nature sets off consequences that no human mind can contain. The novel’s final setting in the brutal Arctic cold further underscores nature’s ultimate authority. Victor, still convinced he can overpower the natural world, instead collapses under the weight of his ego and dies in the ice. His fate teaches us that attempts to defy nature’s boundaries inevitably collapse under forces far greater than human will.
It is worth noting that Shelley uses mother nature, something traditionally referred to in a feminine context due to its life-giving and nurturing qualities, to highlight male arrogance. Victor himself characterizes the Alps as female, a clear reflection of omnipotent fertility, and on his wedding day, Victor admires “the beautiful Mont Blanc, and the assemblage of snowy mountains that in vain endeavor to emulate her” (vol. III, ch. V, pg. 145).
Peter Thiel and Frankenstein on Gender Roles
However, when it comes to Frankenstein and Peter Thiel, opinions on gender roles fly a little under the radar because neither party truly hates women at all. In fact, in a 2016 Bloomberg interview Thiel acknowledges gender disparities in tech, where “only 2 out of 150 [Silicon Valley startups] had woman cofounders, and if you’re 148 to 2, that’s a crazy lack of balance”. While many journalists paint Thiel as a pure misogynist, what they fail to understand is that women don’t follow his libertarian agenda, and Peter Thiel, a man who desperately works to control every single sector, takes issue with this. In Peter Thiel’s essay, The Education of a Libertarian, he states, “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the [voting] franchise to women — [are] two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians.” So, this push for gender inequality stems from a lack of control.
As I mentioned earlier, because Frankenstein cannot control mother nature, something with nurturing, feminine qualities, he instead feels the need to rape her and “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places” (vol. I, ch. II, pg. 31). Victor’s irrational fear of building a female creation also stems from a lack of control. According to him, this woman could become “ten thousand times more malignant than her mate” or “turn with disgust from [the male creature] to the superior beauty of man; [leaving him] deserted by one of his own species” (vol. III, ch. III, pg. 124-125). This female creature would have independent free will, along with autonomous opinions and beliefs that could not be controlled by him nor his male creature.
“Terrified of female sexuality and the power of human reproduction it enables, both he and the patriarchal society he represents use the technologies of science and the laws of the polis to manipulate, control, and repress women.” -Anne K. Mellor, Professor of English Literature and Women’s Studies at UCLA
And the even crazier part? Both Victor Frankenstein and Peter Thiel prefer other men as romantic and sexual partners. This preference reinforces a desire for relationships they can idealize and control, in contrast to the autonomy they both fear in women. Both Thiel and Frankenstein desire absolute authority, whether in the natural world or the social one. In this framework, women emerge as forces that resist their power, refusing to align with their overarching agenda.
Peter Thiel and Frankenstein on Technological Stagnation
Thiel: “It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed. […] So, yes, I think broadly we’re in this world that’s still pretty stuck, but it’s not absolutely stuck.” Hans Jochen Scholl, Professor at University of Washington carefully dissects Thiel’s stance:
“At the core of Thiel’s narrative lies a romantic expectation that innovation should appear as discrete, dramatic breakthroughs—visible, monumental, and physical. Yet history and philosophy suggest otherwise.”
History does, in fact, suggest otherwise. Victor Frankenstein often felt “discontented and unsatisfied” with modern philosophy of the time, and much preferred the ancient, occult philosophical texts of Agrippa and Paracelsus that focused on magical systems and other imaginative ideas relatively ahead of their time (vol. I ch. I. pg. 25). In fact, Paracelsus effectively served as the blueprint for contemporary transhumanists like Frankenstein and Thiel, and “looked beyond the limits of the human condition, even going so far as to give detailed instructions about how to create a homunculus” (Bjork, 24). To Victor, scientific innovation of the 1800s looked stationary and “promise[d] very little,” clearly diverging from Paracelsus’ dramatic breakthroughs with the potential for monumental impact (vol. I, ch. II, pg. 31). This stagnant characterization aligns with Thiel’s, who also believes that technological advancement is exclusive to big, inspiring events like the Concorde and Apollo missions he mentions in the interview.
What I find particularly ironic is how the comparison between Peter Thiel and Victor Frankenstein fundamentally debunks each man’s argument. Where Thiel highlights peak innovation from 1750 to 1970, Frankenstein believed that innovation during this exact timeframe felt boring, stagnant, and uninspiring. With this logic, a future technocrat in another couple hundred years might find their modern technological progress particularly stagnant and look to the glory days of the 21st century. Because stagnation is a concept built on perspective, and relative to the eye of its beholder, it becomes a manufactured narrative that these men use to justify their ideologies, rather than a factual trend worth analyzing.
References
Bjork, R. E. (n.d.). Beasts, humans, and transhumans (Vol. 45). Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Shelley, M. (2012). Frankenstein (3rd ed., Norton Critical Edition). W. W. Norton & Company.
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