5 Look here, you rich people: Weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you. 2 Your wealth is rotting away, and your fine clothes are moth-eaten rags. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. The very wealth you were counting on will eat away your flesh like fire. This corroded treasure you have hoarded will testify against you on the day of judgment. 4 For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The cries of those who harvest your fields have reached the ears of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.
5 You have spent your years on earth in luxury, satisfying your every desire. You have fattened yourselves for the day of slaughter.
James 5:1-5
Bryan Johnson will never die. Neither will. Peter Thiel. Elon Musk believes in eternal life, but is farming babies so as to increase his odds. Children are another route to immortality. Kayleigh Donaldson recently wrote on how terrified billionaires are of death. She is right, of course. They construct their lives around avoiding it, they milk their sons for blood, they keep women in stables to raise their sons alone, and they disown children who will fail to pass on their genes. Lee Edelman has never been more vindicated in his assertion that conservative politics are premised on imaginary children who will one day reproduce more imaginary babies. The right wing successfully restructured the American political economy around their neuroses. Genetic testing and fertility startups are all the rage, pro-natalist couples are spotlighted in the New York Times, the right wing has successfully mainstreamed their worries about “white birth rates,” and women are being arrested for not following through on pregnancies.
These are often passed off as simple fear of death or breeding kinks. And yet, these cannot fully explain the neuroses of the rich and powerful. Musk and Thiel are self-proclaimed atheists, but “cultural Christians,” who give lectures about the Antichrist. There is some religious element there, but it is not quite a run-of-the-mill right wing evangelicalism. This is fire and brimstone, but the sulphurous smell surrounding them is not for other sinners—it is for themselves.
The tech billionaires have amassed a dragon’s hoard greater than any other seen in history, and they have achieved this tremendous feat by immiserating more people than possible at any prior point in history. They have so much wealth that they could not seriously hope to spend it all. None of them talk about passing down their wealth, none of them speak loudly about making sure their children have a better life. None of them use their wealth like a mother and father would, like you would, like any normal person would. They are also not blind to the immense human cost, the staggering death toll of the process of obtaining that wealth. They are not blind to world hunger, they see all the death and destruction and havoc that extractive industries and manufacturing entail. And they did it anyway. Elon offered to end world hunger if he was told how to do it, and then retracted the offer once a plan was created.
So, they know that their wealth was generated via human suffering. They know that hoarding their wealth only exacerbates this suffering. If it were all pointless, could they continue on, having done the things that they have? They have all caused so much death, so much destruction. Many of them spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, some participated in his crimes against children. They have committed every sin known to man or beast. Even Donald Trump doesn’t think he will get into heaven! At best, death will mean blinking out of existence sans wealth. It will mean that they committed these crimes for nothing. At worst, they are all going to Hell.
They all must have the feeling that they have done deeply wrong things in their lives. They feel the Devil breathing down the back of their necks. They wake up in a cold sweat, glad it isn’t the fires of Hades. If death is a choice between pointlessly immiserating billions and doing the same just to get a first-class ticket to Hell, then they simply cannot allow themselves to die. Bryan Johnson sucks the blood out of his son; Epstein wanted to be frozen and resuscitated; and Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos are spending untold amounts of money on doomed life-extension projects. Elon thinks AI will conquer death for us. They want to use the resources and literal blood of the people they crushed to avoid the fate they purchased. And yet they will die. We all do.
They know this of course. They are old enough now that the signs of mortality are creeping into their lives. Johnson is worried about his erections, Elon can no longer have them. Thiel and Bezos undergo expensive skin treatments. They all surely have woken up sore from a bad night’s sleep. Their bruises heal more slowly, their joints are creaking, their skin is thinner, they are greying and losing hair. They have to diversify their portfolio. Baby farms and life extension research are not enough. They need to get right with their God, whether or not they believe in Him.
Thiel is trying to do this by torturing scripture until it justifies his actions. He began a lecture series about stopping the Antichrist, who he identifies as activists and impoverished people who stand in the way of technological progress. This idea is completely without scriptural justification, of course, but that does not bother a man who has crushed the activists and impoverished of the world in pursuit of his wealth. He preaches that the Antichrist is anybody who stands up for peace, anybody who wants to be good stewards of the environment, anybody who seeks justice for the downtrodden of the world. Thiel believes, in short, that the Antichrist is anybody acting on the teachings of Jesus Christ.
His heresy does not end there, of course. Thiel has famously said in response to Matthew 24:35–36 “nobody shall know the day and the hour,” that he can guess the century. Of course divinely inspired texts are nothing to the profound religious knowledge of a drugged up billionaire. His sign of the end times is that things are progressing more slowly now than ever before. Millennials and Gen Z will be less well off than their parents, the GDP and average quality of life are slowing down and stagnating. His intuition is that research across all fields has also stagnated. Leaving the former aside, could the latter not be the obvious result of the party he funds deciding to cut much of the public funding in science? The economics are equally simple to explain; millennials and Gen Z have no money because the billionaires are hoarding it.
Thiel is not stupid. He is a well-read Stanford philosophy graduate, who was promoted to prominence by conservative kingmaker Irving Kristol. He knows that the problems of the 21st century are problems of his own making. He knows that he has a disproportionate share in the apocalypse he hopes for. He wants to bring about the end times. He believes he can create and kill an Antichrist so he can get right with God. He hopes that by killing and oppressing Jesus’ flock, he can escape Hell. He even has a bunker, like Meta's Zuckerberg and Open AI’s Altman, with which he hopes to survive the armageddon he is instantiating. This is quite literally a deal with the Devil.
Of course this may not work. They have to diversify. So, if their god disapproves of their false prophecy, if their god is displeased with murdering innocent people and destroying the Earth He gave to mankind, then the billionaires want a new god. Sam Altman, the alleged child-abuser at the helm of OpenAI believes that his company will produce a god. A related so-called “AI Safety research organization,” MIRI, has been putting out lurid press releases about AI’s godlike capabilities, its ability to immanentize the eschaton, and its apocalyptic end-times power to usher in a new earth. These two wings of the AI hype machine both agree that they are building an artificial god. Both want to try to chain down the new godhead, so it will not bring about the end times.
Leaving aside their startling belief that their god would want to strike them down, is it not just so reminiscent of the tower of Babel? Not only do they want to create divinity, they believe they can master divinity. If their AI god is to be created and mastered, it would have to be by the already-rich and already-powerful. Not only does this make them a new Christ, saving the world, but it reaches backwards into their sordid pasts applying a veneer of post-hoc justification. Much like the lightbringer Lucifer, they want to replace God, unseat Him from His throne in heaven.
It’s been long observed that this belief is a religious delusion, such as in this wonderful essay by Katherine Cross, but this religion is not motivated solely by the glamour and importance that it gives billionaires. Neither is it motivated by the vindication of their indiscretions. The stick to accompany this carrot is the knowledge that if they die before replacing God, they will go to Hell.
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