The Future and the End
CrowdSource 7.14.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Armageddon and antichrist, the old and the new.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
What the Future Holds
Business leaders and media scribblers, politicians and philosophers, are all in search of a new narrative arc for history, a grand purpose to the human story.
For a while, CrowdSource has been tracking future-oriented discourse: here, here, here and here.
A few updates to this discourse:
History Can Be A Distraction when you’re looking for a new image of the future, argue
and in a new essay:
Historical analogies are also less susceptible to groupthink than ideologies or theories. … The challenge of the current moment in this sense is not to land on the “right” analogy. The problem is to understand how contrasting analogies hold sway and influence and affect decision-making. It is to put analogies “on the couch” and through them to make sense of our prospective political possibilities.
“The Old and the New.” A poignant recent piece by the Italian philosopher
(via Google Translate):
Only the possible is truly new: if it were already current and effective, it would always be already deciduous and outdated. And the possible does not come from the future; it is, in the past, what has not been, what perhaps will never be, but what could have been and therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only if we are able to grasp the possibility that the past — that is, the only thing we have — offers us for a moment before disappearing forever. This is how we must relate to Western culture, which is unraveling and dissolving everywhere around us today.
“Stealing the Future.” Yesterday, tech muckraker
published an excerpt from a work in progress: “The techno-utopians seem unaware that these [utopian] whispers have been heard many times, always to end in overreach and tragedy.”
Which Future Should We Fear?
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel talked about Armageddon and the antichrist — suggesting that these theological ideas have a bearing on the near future of the human race.
“One World or None.” Thiel argues there’s an atheistic way to imagine the future, as well as a Christian way, but that both end up in the same place:
The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
Theological Terminology. What’s Thiel talking about?
Antichrist is a biblical word for the force or forces opposing the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. The antichrist tries to fulfill Christ’s promises of eternal life and ultimate justice here on Earth, without recourse to God.
Armageddon is a term that appears in the Book of Revelation, AKA the Apocalypse — the last book of the Christian bible. But the same concept — a final battle between the forces of good and evil — also appears in the Torah and the Koran.
We Should Fear the Antichrist More Than Armageddon. Why? Because according to tradition, the Antichrist comes first. Thiel: “The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop …” Thiel fears Antichrist would set up a one world totalitarian state.
Apart from what Thiel explicitly said, there’s speculation.
What About Trump?
speculates whether Thiel believes that Trump is a katechon, or restrainer of the antichrist mentioned by St. Paul: “Is [Trump] a katechon? … the growing realization of how deeply woke-thinking has penetrated the administrative state has only increased Thiel’s confidence in Trump.”What About Thiel Himself?
wonders whether Peter Thiel might actually be the antichrist.
Theological Background
Where do Thiel’s theological ideas come from?
“Mystery of Iniquity.” Though Thiel is not a Catholic, the Catholic Catechism is a useful source for the basic Christian beliefs about the antichrist that Thiel is riffing on:
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
Thiel-ology. Here’s a primer on Thiel’s theological beliefs, from an earlier edition of CrowdSource.
Why is Wisdom of Crowds Obsessed With the End of the World?
asked, and answered:
From the Crowd
In these apocalypse-preoccupied times, it’s not a surprise that many people are once again talking about the great, near future-dystopian movie, Children of Men.
Is Children of Men a Religious Film? Last week, Wisdom of Crowds contributor
argued that it is not. But Italian-American filmmaker isn’t so sure:
I’m not sure I fully understand the point
is making about Children of Men, nor am I convinced I agree with it. If one claims there’s a flaw in the adaptation from book to film, it’s not enough to just state it. One should also be able to explain the semiotic reasons behind it.
Through its cinematic language, the film invites us to glimpse the transcendent. For instance, in a scene where sound gives way to silence and Lubezki’s handheld camera lingers in a long, patient take, we are drawn beyond the visible, “like grace made flesh in image and light.”
By the way, you can watch Simonetta’s latest film, Unguarded — a documentary about a very unique Brazilian prison — on Prime and PBS.
Children of Men is a Christmas Movie. Or at least, a Christian movie. Argues
:
Theo means God, who dies to achieve the redemption/salvation . . . at the discovery of the pregnancy, two different characters blurt out, “Jesus Christ” . . . the rescue ship is named Tomorrow (which never arrives in the material world) . . . the cease fire scene mirrors the entry into the world by Christ, and the world's resumption of its “rebellion against God” . . . the leap of faith is narrated in the scene: “Human project? Real?” “It better be.” . . . the film is packed with Christian resonance.
Final Scene. Recent Wisdom of Crowds podcast guest
agrees: “ … I will say that gorgeous final scene in the movie is, if anything, more explicitly Christological than the equivalent in the book.”An Important Clarification by
: “ … I don’t dispute that it makes use of religious imagery — I just think that the film’s larger ethos cannot ultimately make sense of them.”
See you next week!
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I didn’t watch the full YT clip of Santi on the podcast, but I think I agree with Santi: we actually are really talking about our first things when we are talking about last things.
In my view, first and last things ought to go hand in hand. In some ways, a person’s means, to me, shows me their ends. To what end is the means of one’s life? How does a person prove to me their belief in any sort of apocalypse? It’d be their lived response to it.