Peter Thiel has been giving a series of lectures recently about the “Antichrist.” If you look past the dramatic biblical language, however, he isn’t really talking about theology. He is outlining a political roadmap.
Thiel uses “The Antichrist” as a metaphor for a global, bureaucratic “One-World State”—a future where an obsession with safety creates a civilization that is technically alive but incapable of movement. In his view, we face a binary choice: “Armageddon” (chaos) or “The Antichrist” (totalitarian stagnation). He thinks we are drifting toward the latter.
The root of this argument is the distinction between atoms and bits. It is a common observation in Silicon Valley that while we have made massive progress in software, the physical world looks much the same as it did fifty years ago. We have iPhones, but no supersonic travel or fusion energy.
Economists usually attribute this to the “low-hanging fruit” theory: we plucked the easy inventions like electricity and internal combustion, and now physics is just harder. Thiel disagrees. He thinks the problem is cultural. He argues that we could have had those breakthroughs, but we regulated them out of existence through the EPA, the FDA, and a general culture of “safetyism.”
To fix this, Thiel essentially wants to apply “founder mode” to the government. He views modern democracy as a “zombie”—a structure that can’t move because it is paralyzed by committees and consensus. To get from zero to one—to do something truly new rather than just copying what exists—he argues we need a sovereign leader. A “National CEO.”
The idea is to have a leader who runs the country the way a founder runs a startup: ignoring the short-term whims of the electorate to force through visionary, risky progress. A dictator might be bad, the logic goes, but a bureaucracy is guaranteed to be stagnant.
There are two main problems with this.
The first is structural. A “Corporate State”—a CEO checked only by a Board of Directors—looks almost identical to the Chinese Communist Party. Thiel argues the difference is that China is a “copycat” regime that scales from 1 to n, whereas his model would foster the “weirdos” necessary for 0 to 1 invention. He may be right that China struggles with fundamental invention due to conformity, but it is not clear that a Western version of this structure would yield different results.
The deeper problem is the lack of an exit. Thiel’s theory relies heavily on the concept of competition between small city-states. If the “King” of a startup city becomes a tyrant, you leave. Competition keeps the ruler honest.
But you cannot apply this to a superpower. If the CEO of the United States becomes a tyrant, you cannot simply “exit.” There is nowhere to go. And voting with your feet is a luxury of the rich; the poor are simply trapped.
Thiel assumes the “Board of Directors”—the elites—will keep the National CEO in check. But in a corporation, the Board is aligned with the stock price, not the employees. A Board might happily fire 10,000 workers to improve efficiency. A “National Board” might view the general population as overhead to be automated away. We are betting everything on the assumption that the elites will be benevolent.
Thiel likely knows this. He is a student of Leo Strauss, who believed in “Noble Lies”—myths told to the masses to guide them. The religious language is likely a tool to rally a base against regulation. His interest in anti-aging fits here, too. It isn’t just vanity; it is a solution to the “succession problem.” Dictatorships usually fail when the founder dies and a lesser successor takes over. Thiel’s dark logic is that if the founder never dies, the regime never destabilizes.
I have some sympathy for the diagnosis. In the world of bits, we have seen what happens when you let people build things without asking for permission. It works. I would like to see more of that boldness in the physical world. I want to see technological advancement in my lifetime.
But the “National CEO” solution misses a crucial component of what makes startups work. Startups work because they are voluntary. The danger of running a country like a company is that the metrics for success change. A CEO optimizes for profit or growth. A government is supposed to optimize for the well-being of its citizens.
The terrifying question isn’t whether the National CEO can succeed. It is whether the happiness of the citizens will even be one of his KPIs.