Must We Burn Peter Thiel?

In 1955, Simone de Beauvoir published an essay with a question for a title: Faut-il brûler Sade? — Must we burn Sade? The question was never really about the Marquis. It was about what a society does when confronted with a thinker who has taken one of its own principles — in Sade's case, radical freedom — and followed it so far past the point of decency that the principle itself begins to look monstrous. Beauvoir's answer, characteristically, was neither to burn nor to celebrate, but to read him with the seriousness his danger deserved.

The phrase became a template. In French intellectual culture, Faut-il brûler X? is a formula everyone recognises: it signals that what follows will be a genuine reckoning with a genuinely threatening mind. Not a dismissal. Not a defence. A confrontation conducted at the level of ideas, because the ideas are too consequential to ignore.

On March 14, 2026, a Franciscan friar named Paolo Benanti published an essay in Le Grand Continent, the Paris-based geopolitical journal, under the title L'hérésie américaine : faut-il brûler Peter Thiel? — American heresy: must we burn Peter Thiel? A French reader would have caught the Beauvoir echo instantly, and understood the stakes it implied. In the English translation — which renders the title as "Should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?" — the allusion vanishes, replaced by a more literal invocation of the Inquisition. The translation isn't wrong, exactly. The article is about heresy, after all. But something is lost: the signal that this is a work of serious intellectual engagement with a dangerous figure, not merely a denunciation.

That distinction matters, because the essay itself is anything but a polemic. It is, arguably, the most sustained and intellectually rigorous response yet mounted against Peter Thiel's increasingly explicit project to rewrite Christian theology in the image of Silicon Valley — and it arrives at a moment when the collision between those two worlds has become impossible to ignore.

To understand why this essay exists, you need to understand what was happening in Rome in March 2026, and to understand that, you need to understand what was happening everywhere else.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against Iranian military targets. Among the dead was Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Iran's response was immediate and devastating in a way that had been theorised for decades but never tested: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps closed the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping. Not formally — there was no legal declaration of blockade — but effectively, through radio warnings, missile strikes on tankers, and the simple physical reality that no insurer on earth would cover a vessel transiting a war zone. Within days, roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply was locked behind an Iranian naval cordon. Brent crude spiked past $120 a barrel. Qatar declared force majeure on all LNG shipments. Iraq began shutting down the Rumaila oil field because tankers couldn't leave port. The global economy — the intricate, just-in-time, impossibly fragile system that everyone depends on and almost nobody thinks about — shuddered.

Le Grand Continent, the journal that would publish Benanti's essay, had already pivoted its entire operation to cover the crisis. At the top of every article on the site, a banner now reads: L'Observatoire de la bataille d'Ormuz — the Hormuz Battle Observatory. Data, maps, shipping routes, oil prices, military movements, updated daily. It's the kind of thing this publication does well. Founded in 2019 by three students at the École normale supérieure — the most elite of France's elite universities — Le Grand Continent has built itself into something unusual: a multilingual, academically serious, pro-European geopolitical journal that has attracted contributors ranging from Thomas Piketty to Henry Kissinger to Emmanuel Macron, while maintaining the restless intellectual energy of the graduate students who started it. During Covid, they ran a pandemic observatory. Now they were tracking a war.

Into this context — a world genuinely destabilised, a journal operating in crisis mode, oil tankers burning in the Persian Gulf — walked Peter Thiel.

On Sunday, March 16, two days after Benanti's essay appeared, Thiel began a four-day lecture series in Rome. The venue was the Palazzo Orsini Taverna, a Renaissance-era palace a stone's throw from Vatican City. The subject was the Antichrist. The lectures were invitation-only, closed to media, with non-disclosure agreements required of all attendees.

The event had been jointly organised by the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association — an Italian group devoted to restoring Catholicism as the cornerstone of national identity — and the Cluny Institute, a new initiative based at the Catholic University of America in Washington. At some point during the planning, the lectures were apparently going to be held at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican institution in Rome known as the Angelicum. It is best known as the place where a young American priest named Robert Prevost wrote his doctoral thesis in canon law. That priest is now Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope in history.

When Italian media began reporting that Peter Thiel would be giving "secret lectures on the Antichrist" at the Pope's alma mater, the Angelicum moved fast. "We would like to clarify that this event is not organised by the University, will not take place at the Angelicum, and is not part of any of our institutional initiatives," it said in a public statement. The Catholic University of America followed: "The Catholic University of America is not sponsoring or hosting an event featuring Peter Thiel this month in Rome. The Cluny Project is an independent initiative incubated at the university." Two institutions, both scrambling to put distance between themselves and their own guest.

The Vatican's own newspaper ran an article calling Thiel "the dark side of technology." Protesters gathered outside Italy's defence ministry with signs in English and Italian: Peter Thiel out of Rome. Father Antonio Spadaro, the prominent Jesuit theologian who published a book of dialogues with Martin Scorsese, offered a blunt assessment: Thiel's practical conclusion is that any attempt to regulate artificial intelligence, to establish global governing bodies, or to slow technological development becomes "a preparation for the reign of the Antichrist." The Gospel, Spadaro said, was being turned into a tool for geopolitical analysis.

This is the climate in which Paolo Benanti's essay appeared — not after the lectures, but before them, like a theological early-warning system.

The Rome event was not Thiel's first outing on the Antichrist circuit. He had given a similar four-part series in San Francisco the previous September, to a paying audience of about two hundred Silicon Valley futurists, conservative intellectuals, and the tech industry's growing contingent of Christians. Attendees signed non-disclosure agreements; no details were made public. He had spoken in Paris too. The talks were strange enough, and well-enough known, that South Park satirised them in an episode that went viral — depicting Thiel as a bizarre authority on biblical prophecy entangled in the show's political plots. The Rome lectures were described in their invitation as "anchored on science and technology," with Thiel drawing on Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt, and John Henry Newman. Bloomberg reported that this iteration was even more exclusive than San Francisco — invitation-only, no tickets for sale. Whatever Thiel was building, he was building it in concentric circles of increasing intimacy and influence, and Rome was the innermost ring.

Who, then, is Paolo Benanti?

He was born in Rome in 1973, the son of an engineer. He studied engineering himself at the Sapienza University, getting within a year of his degree before he left — along with, as he tells it, his girlfriend — to join the Franciscan order. He eventually earned a doctorate in moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where he now teaches. He lives in a monastery in central Rome with five other friars. The eldest is 101. The youngest is 25.

His daily life — early prayers, community, the rhythms of a medieval religious order — might seem impossibly remote from the world of AI governance and tech ethics. In fact, he inhabits both worlds simultaneously, and this is precisely what makes him unusual. He sits on the United Nations Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. He heads an Italian government commission on protecting journalism from AI-generated disinformation. He was one of the architects of the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a nonbinding interreligious agreement signed by IBM, Microsoft, and more than fifty other organisations. Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, has called him someone who brings "one of the most fascinating combinations in the world" to the AI debate.

Benanti himself is careful to downplay the "papal advisor" framing that follows him through the press. "The idea of me advising the Pope is a misunderstanding by the media," he has said. "I'm only a consultant. A consultant is a special role in the Vatican where the Pope appoints someone, usually a professor, to help work on some topics. I'm not someone who whispers into the Pope's ear."

Maybe not. But he is the person the Vatican calls when the questions get technical, and when the intersection of technology and theology needs to be navigated by someone who understands both languages. When Pope Francis met with Brad Smith to discuss AI, Benanti was in the room. When the Italian Prime Minister met with Bill Gates, Benanti was in the room. He is, for all his humility, the Catholic Church's most institutionally connected voice on AI — and therefore the person with the most at stake when a tech billionaire arrives in Rome arguing that AI regulation is the work of the Antichrist.

Thiel's argument, stripped to its essentials, goes like this: the Antichrist is not a horned devil. He is a comforting administrator — a figure who promises safety, order, and the elimination of existential risk, and who uses those promises to consolidate total control over society. Anyone who calls for regulating AI, slowing technological progress, or strengthening global institutions is, in this framework, either consciously or unconsciously preparing the ground for the Antichrist's reign. Thiel has reportedly described climate activists like Greta Thunberg as potential "legionnaires of the Antichrist." He has expressed concern that J.D. Vance — whose early political career Thiel funded — might become "too close to the pope."

This is not a marginal eccentricity. This is the co-founder of Palantir — a company whose data-mining technology is currently being used by the Trump administration's immigration enforcement apparatus and by the US military — using theological language to delegitimise the entire project of democratic governance over technology. If you believe that regulating AI is doing the Antichrist's work, then the people trying to regulate AI — the UN, the EU, the Vatican itself — are not merely wrong. They are spiritually dangerous. And the people building the technology — Thiel, his allies, the companies of the PayPal Mafia — are not merely innovators. They are defenders of civilisation against an eschatological threat.

This is what Benanti calls l'hérésie — heresy. And to understand why he reaches for that word, you have to read his essay carefully, because he does something quite precise with it.

Before engaging with Thiel's ideas at all, Benanti pauses to recover the word "heresy" from its common meaning of blasphemy or doctrinal error. The Greek root, hairesis, means simply a choice — the act of grasping a part and separating it from the whole. Heresy, in its original philosophical sense, is not the denial of truth. It is the isolation of a partial truth, torn from the relational fabric of the whole, and elevated to the status of an absolute. A fragment mistaken for the totality. An insight about human nature or social life that, deprived of the counterweights that reality imposes, becomes totalising — and, eventually, tyrannical.

This is not a casual rhetorical move. It is the key to the entire essay, and it allows Benanti to do something that a simpler polemic could not: take Thiel seriously. The heretic is not a fool. The heretic has seen something real. The danger is not that he is entirely wrong, but that he is partially right — and has mistaken that partial rightness for the whole truth.

So what has Thiel seen? According to Benanti, he has seen something that is genuinely there: the mimetic theory of René Girard.

The essay traces Thiel's intellectual formation at Stanford in the 1980s, where as a philosophy student he encountered Girard's anthropology of desire. Girard's core insight — that human desire is not autonomous but mimetic, that we want what others want because they want it, and that this convergence of desire is the engine of both social cohesion and social violence — became the interpretive lens through which Thiel would understand everything that followed. Business competition is mimetic violence. Monopoly is the escape from it. Facebook is a machine for producing and monetising mimetic desire at planetary scale. The "Like" button is Girard's theory made algorithm.

Benanti does not dismiss any of this. He acknowledges that Thiel's reading of Girard is serious, that it has proven operationally powerful, and that it illuminates real dynamics of the digital world. He notes that Thiel reportedly explained Girard's theories directly to Mark Zuckerberg, persuading him to scale Facebook with a formula that captures the whole enterprise: qui possède une machine à produire du désir possède le monde — whoever owns a machine for producing desire owns the world. The "Like" button, in this account, was not merely a clever feature. It was the algorithmic implementation of mimetic desire — a device for amplifying and monetising the most fundamental human impulse at planetary scale.

The essay reconstructs the PayPal Mafia not as a loose network of wealthy alumni but as something closer to an ideological formation. Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, the founders of YouTube, David Sacks (now Trump's "AI and crypto czar"), Marc Andreessen — these figures did not merely share offices at a startup. They developed, Benanti argues, a common culture rooted in mutual trust, technocratic ambition, and a Girardian management philosophy that Thiel had worked out at PayPal itself: assign each person such sharply distinct responsibilities that they hold a near-monopoly on their task, neutralising the mimetic rivalry that would otherwise tear a team apart. Extreme individualism inside a highly coordinated structure. It became the organisational signature of every company that emerged from the group.

When PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, the members did not scatter. They stayed interconnected, financing each other's ventures, advising, recruiting. Their network functioned as what Benanti calls a "power multiplier": the success of one fed the capital — financial and relational — of the next. Thiel funded Facebook. He encouraged Hoffman to build LinkedIn. He backed Musk's space ambitions. A small group of men, bound by strong ties and a shared philosophical framework, exercising disproportionate influence over the entire system.

The point is not that Thiel was wrong about any of this. The PayPal Mafia understood, earlier than almost anyone, that in the digital age power resides not in the control of production but in the control of imitation and connection.

This is the partial truth. And the essay's argument is that Thiel has taken this partial truth — about mimetic desire, about the violence latent in democratic competition, about the power of platforms — and absolutised it. Separated from the counterweights of democratic theory, from the Catholic social tradition, from any account of human dignity that is not reducible to competitive dynamics, the Girardian insight becomes something monstrous: a justification for replacing democratic self-governance with technocratic control.

Benanti traces this trajectory through The Sovereign Individual, the 1997 book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson (prefaced by Thiel in the 2020 edition) that is revered in Silicon Valley as something close to scripture. It prophesies the dissolution of the nation-state under the pressure of digital technology and cryptocurrency: violence would cease to be profitable, capital would become fluid and stateless, and a new cognitive aristocracy of "sovereign individuals" would emerge — an elite detached from geography, operating in a cyberspace beyond jurisdiction, leaving behind a mass of people rendered superfluous. Thiel adopts this vision not merely as analysis but as programme, financing technologies that accelerate the dissolution while simultaneously building the instruments to control its effects.

Through the TESCREAL movement — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism — whose adherents, Benanti notes, transform capital accumulation into a moral imperative aimed at "saving the future," even at the cost of ignoring present injustice. Dustin Moskovitz and others promote a vision in which the concentration of wealth is not merely acceptable but ethically necessary: a hypothetical future good for humanity justifies a relative disregard for the inequalities of the present.

Through the creation of Palantir itself, which Benanti reads as the culmination of the entire intellectual arc. Thiel's recent theological essay, co-authored with Sam Wolfe, reinterprets Francis Bacon's New Atlantis — and its vision of the "House of Solomon," a secret institution dedicated to omniscient knowledge capable of "achieving all things possible" — as the archetype of what Palantir aspires to be. Founded with seed funding from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir introduced the logic of data analysis into the heart of Western intelligence and military operations. In Benanti's reading, it is the operational expression of every strand of Thiel's thought: a Girardian machine for identifying threats before mimetic violence erupts, a Baconian instrument of total knowledge, and a tool that, when adopted by liberal democracies, imports an ideology along with the software — an ideology that views transparency as an obstacle and public debate as a luxury that has become unsustainable.

This is the paradox Benanti identifies at the heart of Thiel's project. He operates, the essay argues, on two registers simultaneously: financing the centrifugal forces that erode the nation-state (cryptocurrency, seasteading, The Sovereign Individual's dissolution prophecy) while arming that same state for panoptic control (Palantir's contracts with ICE, with the military, with intelligence agencies). The heresy is not incoherent. It is perfectly coherent — but only if you accept the premise that democratic self-governance is already dead, and that the only remaining question is who manages the corpse.

And finally, through Thiel's theological turn — the essay co-authored with Sam Wolfe, the lecture series that preceded the Rome talks — where all of this converges into what Benanti considers the most dangerous move of all: the recasting of the democratic impulse to regulate technology as a form of spiritual evil.

The essay's most striking section concerns Thiel's conception of time. Benanti argues that despite Thiel's Christian vocabulary — Antichrist, Armageddon, apocalypse — his actual worldview is not Christian at all. Christian eschatology is linear: history moves toward a final redemption, the parousia, an event that interrupts the cycle of violence and redeems it from outside. Thiel's apocalypse, Benanti argues, is not the end of time (la fin du temps) but merely the end of a time (la fin d'un temps) — a destruction necessary to purge the system and relaunch what Benanti calls l'éternel retour de la violence fondatrice, the eternal return of founding violence. From the chaos, a new scapegoat will emerge. A new order will form around it. That order too will collapse. The cycle repeats.

This is, Benanti writes, "tragiquement cyclique — et donc païenne" — tragically cyclical, and therefore pagan. The word "pagan" here is not an insult. It is a precise theological classification. Thiel's system, despite its Christian furniture, is structurally pre-Christian: it has no mechanism for redemption, no exit from the cycle, no event that could interrupt the eternal return of violence. The best it can offer is management — the Ozymandias option from Watchmen, a technocratic world government that imposes order through surveillance and control. In this reading, Palantir is not a company. It is a machine girardienne — a Girardian machine — designed to identify and neutralise threats before mimetic violence can erupt. A planetary scapegoat-management system.

The essay's final image is deliberately bleak: "La démocratie entendue comme autogouvernement de citoyens égaux est déjà morte — et il ne reste plus que, dans l'obscurité d'un data center, la gestion clinique de son cadavre." Democracy, understood as the self-government of equal citizens, is already dead — and all that remains, in the darkness of a data centre, is the clinical management of its corpse.

There is a generational argument woven through the essay, too — one that doesn't get enough attention. Benanti frames the Silicon Valley project, and Thiel's role within it, as a specifically Generation X phenomenon: a cohort squeezed between the institutional dominance of the boomers and the digital nativism of millennials, who responded not by reforming the old institutions but by making them obsolete. PayPal against the banks. Amazon against retail. Google against the media's monopoly on knowledge. Tesla against the fossil-fuel automotive industry. The Silicon Valley startup saga, Benanti writes, was this generation's equivalent of May '68 — a revolution waged not in the streets but with servers and lines of code, driven not by ideology but by pragmatism, its heretical rebellion rejecting old conventions not on principle but in the name of efficiency.

It's a provocative framing, and it cuts against the usual narratives in an interesting way. The tech titans are neither the libertarian cowboys of their own mythology nor the cartoon villains of progressive critique. They are, in Benanti's account, something more historically specific: a generation that discovered it could route around power rather than confront it, and that in doing so, accumulated a new kind of power — le pouvoir computationnel, computational power — that the old institutions were not equipped to recognise, let alone regulate.

The question the essay leaves hanging is whether this new power can be reintegrated into democratic structures at all — or whether those structures are destined to be "liquidated as obsolete relics, rather than defended as a conquest of civilisation."

What gives Benanti's essay its force is not just the quality of the argument but the specificity of the moment. This is not an academic exercise. It was published two days before Thiel began his Rome lectures, in a journal that was simultaneously tracking a war in real time. Its opening line — "we live in strange times: the Strait of Hormuz is blocked; a Silicon Valley billionaire is seeking to write the Pope's next encyclical" — yokes together two crises that might seem unrelated but that the essay insists are part of the same story: the story of what happens when the technological and financial power concentrated in a small number of hands begins to assert itself not just economically, not just politically, but theologically. When the people who control the algorithms begin to claim they also understand the will of God.

Benanti's response is not to condemn technology, which he has spent his career working to govern ethically. It is not to dismiss Girard, whose insights he clearly respects. It is to insist on the distinction between a partial truth and the whole truth — and to argue that the absolutisation of a partial truth, however brilliant, is the oldest intellectual temptation there is.

There is an irony in all of this that Benanti does not belabour but that hangs over the essay like a second text. Thiel is a man of extraordinary intellectual sophistication who has built a worldview from Girard, Bacon, Carl Schmitt, Soloviev's Short Story of the Antichrist, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and even the manga One Piece — and who has arrived, through this elaborate architecture, at a conclusion that is essentially simple: trust the technologists, fear the regulators, and understand that anyone who disagrees is either naive or working for the Antichrist. Benanti, by contrast, is a man in a brown robe who lives in a monastery with a 101-year-old friar and a 25-year-old novice, who advises the UN and the Pope and the head of Microsoft, and whose conclusion is more demanding: that the complexity of reality requires holding multiple truths in tension, that no single insight — however powerful — can substitute for the hard, slow, imperfect work of democratic governance, and that the reduction of all human life to a mimetic competition managed by algorithms is not wisdom but heresy in its most precise and original sense. The isolation of a fragment. The absolutisation of a part. A choice — hairesis — that mistakes itself for the whole.

The Greeks had a word for it. The Church has spent two millennia arguing about it. And a Franciscan friar in a Roman monastery, who almost became an engineer and who now advises popes and presidents on artificial intelligence, has decided that the moment has come to say it plainly: what Peter Thiel is preaching is not Christianity. It is heresy. And the question — the Beauvoir question, echoing beneath the surface of the title — is not whether to burn him, but whether to read him with the seriousness his danger deserves, and to answer.