In October 2025, Le Monde featured a column by its San Francisco correspondent, Corine Lesnes, in which she expressed her doubts about the sanity of a prominent figure in finance and a Silicon Valley luminary, nearly as famous as Elon Musk, with whom he partnered to create Paypal decades ago. That person is Peter Thiel. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently described Thiel as possibly “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years.” 

Lesnes offers a somewhat different account of the man Douthat finds so admirable. Her column begins with this more focused description of the influencer: “A libertarian US tech billionaire, Peter Thiel is also a Bible enthusiast who hunts for the modern Antichrist figure.” In other words, the French reporter prefers to characterize Douthat’s “influential right-wing intellectual” as an “enthusiast” (a synonym for fan) and a hunter, or a man who “hunts.”

Those contrasting descriptions of the same public personality may serve to highlight a fundamental difference between US and French intellectual culture. Nearly four hundred years ago, French philosopher René Descartes asserted that thinking was the key to existing (cogito ergo sum). Anyone serious intellectual capable of concluding that “I think, therefore I am” will inevitably embark on thinking critically and logically in the quest to construct a complex understanding of reality. That thinking may, of course, lead in different directions and create structures of thought more or less deeply consistent with observed and observable reality, but the driving force for such intellectuals is the act of thinking. The result, following Descartes’s lead, is the past three centuries of European philosophy representing a wide variety of contrasting ways to interpret the world.

In her brief description of Thiel, Lesnes, the European, points to a different trend active at the core of the US intellectual tradition, especially when it seeks to differentiate itself from the European tradition. Thiel is an “enthusiast” who “hunts.” In that attribution of motive, she correctly identifies hunting (for survival) — which can mean aggressively dominating the environment — and the fostering of enthusiasm (adopting and conducting a mission) as factors that provide the driving force in much of US intellectual endeavor. Both point towards a taste for conquest as the key to security, complemented by the sense of being justified by some kind of providential force. Other intellectual traditions exist, but these forces largely absent from the European tradition are clearly discernible as constants, especially among the right-wing intellectual class Douthat and Thiel identify with.

The great philosophical divide

In the wake of Descartes, Europe set about producing what historians have dubbed the “Enlightenment” (“Lumières,” or lights in its native French version). Through the eighteenth century the French set the tone for all European thinking, characterized by its willingness to embrace empirical science and accompany its theoretical development. During that same period, an expanding group of English colonies was spreading up and down the North America’s Atlantic coast on their way to becoming a new independent secular republic before the end of the 18th century. The North American elite received and echoed much of the intellectual energy produced by contemporary European sources. But collectively they were less focused on ideas than on survival and security based on territorial conquest. The particular contribution of Anglo-American culture, in contrast with the idea of enlightenment (focused on reason alone), appeared in the form of a series of “Great Awakenings,” moments of religious enthusiasm. The first emerged around 1730, but waves of “great awakenings” have continued even to this day.

The metaphor of “awakening” deserves to be taken seriously. It means that to an exceptional extent, US culture has crafted itself as a process of perceiving the world at an unstable moment of cognitive transition, that fleeting instant that marks the threshold between the chaos of id-driven dreams and the awareness of emerging as an ego in the real world and having to interact with concrete reality. Many European thinkers have sought to articulate in rational terms the relationship between reason, faith and belief. In the American tradition, marked by its propensity to encourage enthusiasm, the bulk of the effort has focused on predicting which of the contestants, thanks to their strength, will be the winner. As often as not, reason, belief and faith become bundled together in unexpected combinations.

By 1648, Europe desperately needed to cultivate a new brand of rational, empiricist-oriented philosophy in the hope of establishing a stable cultural order after a period of extremely violent disorder that lasted nearly a century and a half. The continent was stunned and in many places devastated by its repeated wars of religion. Beginning in the early 16th century Protestants and Catholics battled for political control of the emerging entities that could not yet be called nations. 

On the other side of the Atlantic it was a different story. The newly disembarked British colonists in North America in the mid-17th century had little time for philosophizing, nor did they feel any pressing need to engage in it. They spent most of their energy hunting to ensure survival, claiming the territory in which they might feel secure and being “enthusiastic” in the service of an ideology that saw their destiny as a people and a race in the role the providential conquerors of a land they conceived of as the “New Jerusalem.”

Once the new republic was fully established in 1787, two contending intellectual traditions persisted and intermingled. On one side, the citizens of the new federal assembly of rapidly united “states” (13 in total) inherited an increasingly bourgeois, secular but still broadly Christian tradition of philosophical, political and scientific thinking from Europe. The exceptionally literate and innovative Founders of a radically anti-monarchic political system drew freely on that tradition. They fell quite naturally into the role of a ruling elite. In contrast to Europe’s militant rationality, however, the background culture of the newly created nation maintained its tradition of fighting for survival and reliance on the Puritanical quest to understand the world through a series of awakenings. The War of Independence, still referred to in the US as “the American Revolution,” reflects that penchant for enthusiasm.

The two traditions — European enlightenment and North American religious enthusiasm — have persisted and are still visible today. On the east and west coast (New York and California), a dominant hard-nosed “modern” enlightenment reflected in finance and technology sits alongside a heartland whose culture is heavily influenced by the enthusiasm-generating local churches and megachurches that not only persist in the tradition of “the New Jerusalem” and the “shining city on the hill,” they have more recently taken to identifying their new one with the old Jerusalem in Israel. I’m, of course, referring to the 30 to 50 million Christian Zionists who have increasingly influenced US foreign policy and never as directly as in the current Trump administration’s war of aggression conducted in tandem with Israel against Iran.

For the most part, those two contrasting worldviews, one inherited from Europe and the other native to North America, developed and evolved with minimal interpenetration between them. Broadly speaking, Americans who identify as Democrats see their mission in continuity with the European rational tradition. Republicans are to this day more likely to rely on a feeling of “enthusiasm.” But even Democrats, as former US President Joe Biden regularly insisted, embraced the idea of American exceptionalism as “the indispensable nation.”

Will Thiel deliver and convict the Antichrist?

So, given this cultural and intellectual divide, where does Thiel fit in? His career is closely linked to both Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That should put him in the rationalist European and Democrat camp. But not only is he a Republican who endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican convention and has remained close to him ever since, he is, as Lesne tells us, both a libertarian and a “Bible enthusiast” besides being a tech billionaire.

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what it means to be a libertarian in US political and economic culture. And everyone knows what a billionaire is. On that score, Le Monde is misleading because Thiel is not only a multi-billionaire (his fortune is estimated as upwards of $23 billion), he belongs to the specific class of Silicon Valley billionaires who use their financial clout not just to influence but to twist, politically and financially, US culture into a shape that pleases them.

I nevertheless found Lesne’s description of Thiel as a “Bible enthusiast” bemusing. Religious Christians of most denominations regard the Bible as the source of their theology. What could it mean to be a fan of the Bible? In the Muslim world, where scripture is deemed the source of law and morality, it would make no sense to call someone a Qur’an enthusiast. That language is more appropriate when applied to movies or pop groups.

Lesne’s description may be right. Thiel isn’t a typical believer. He’s a man with a mission and a talent. It consists of lifting from the Bible valuable nuggets whose meaning he alone, among all mortals, can understand and apply infallibly to today’s political world. Even if the scripture he’s relying on was penned two thousand years ago.

Thiel now lectures about the Antichrist, most recently in Rome, in the shadow of the Vatican. His reading contains no original historical evidence and directly conflicts with the Catholic and indeed every other serious Christian exegetical tradition. It does however coincidentally correlate with his own business interests. Thiel speaks about the need for a “restraining force” in the world — usually in the form of a strong state or a “sovereign” leader — to prevent the world from sliding into total, violent chaos before humanity invents the technology to escape it. Thiel and Palantir, a company he co-founded alongside Alex Karp, appear dedicated to providing some of the quintessential “preventive” technology.

Thiel describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian.” He is not a Roman Catholic.  It stands to reason that he would pay no attention to the opinion of the two most recent popes, who have expressed their view on artificial intelligence and, more generally,  new generations of technology. “Popes Francis and Leo XIV stress it must serve the common good, not private profit or power accumulation.” Thiel appears committed to a clearly uncommon good that he alone, as an inspired enthusiastic reader of the Bible, can understand and share with selected (paying) audiences.

It’s interesting to note that a cofounder of Palantir, whose technology potentially permits the clandestine surveillance of every citizen, appears to have direct knowledge of what Paul of Tarsus meant by “ὁ κατέχων (ho katechōn),” usually translated as “restraining force.” Perhaps Thiel has managed to get that same surveillance technology to time travel, allowing him to record and analyze some of St. Paul’s ancient WhatsApp messages. How else could a “katechon” designate actual people living today, such as Greta Thunberg? All this demonstrates Thiel’s undeniable gift for “enthusiasm,” but it happens to be a form of enthusiasm this Devil’s Advocate clearly finds suspect.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.