Two Gods That Failed

Jul 30, 2026 min read

When your economic doctrine fails, you don’t revise it. You theologize it. And then you find some heretics.

Peter Thiel sold out four private lectures about the Antichrist. In San Francisco. In 2025. By invitation only. No recordings allowed. Eight hours of lectures delivered to paying guests in a room full of people who make their living building surveillance software and betting on algorithmic futures.

That’s not a punchline. It’s a diagnosis.

Jatin Modi’s recent piece on the phenomenon is worth reading in full. He tracks the genealogy of “Antichrist” as political technology: civilizations under stress reaching for apocalyptic language to name the enemy that must be destroyed before time itself runs out. The Turk at the gates of Constantinople. Luther fusing the Pope and the Sultan into one monster wearing two faces. The word as the ultimate escalation, turning a political opponent into a cosmic threat.

What Modi doesn’t quite land on is the economic diagnosis underneath it. Why is a libertarian venture capitalist, of all people, giving theological lectures? What’s driving this moment to produce this response, in this particular intellectual and political class?

Here’s the thing: Thiel isn’t an outlier. He’s a symptom. And the disease runs through both doctrines with equal virulence.

The short version of what follows: capitalism got worse after it won. That’s not an accident, and understanding why explains a great deal about the moment we’re in.

Both Doctrines Are Enlightenment Children

To understand why we’re here, you have to go back to where capitalism and socialism actually came from. Not the bogeyman versions. The real intellectual lineage.

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were secular humanists working in the Enlightenment tradition. Not secular humanism as an organized movement with membership cards, but the epistemic commitment underneath it: that questions about how humans should live get answered through reason, observation, and evidence rather than revelation. That’s not a rhetorical flourish about Smith and Marx. It’s literally true.

John Gray made a version of this argument in Black Mass, tracing both communism and free-market utopianism back to Christian eschatology. He’s right about the shared origin. What I want to push on is the mechanism: what specifically happens at the moment a doctrine fails, and why that moment reliably produces authoritarians.

Smith built his moral and economic framework on David Hume’s sentimentalist philosophy, the argument that ethics emerge from human empathy, social experience, and observable utility rather than divine revelation. When Smith talks about the “invisible hand,” he’s describing what he believed was an observable, naturalistic mechanism by which human self-interest aggregates into collective well-being. He thought he was doing science. He was trying to answer the same question religion had always owned: how do we achieve universal human flourishing? Just without God.

Marx was doing the same thing from the other direction. He stripped Judeo-Christian teleology from human history and replaced it with historical materialism. The working class as the engine of history. The revolution as judgment day. The classless society as the kingdom of heaven on earth. Marx was explicitly and aggressively anti-religious. “Religion is the opium of the people” is not a casual line. It’s a foundational commitment to answering the salvation question through purely secular, material terms.

John Locke started them both down this path. The individual as the moral unit. Labor as the source of value. Political authority grounded in consent rather than divine right. When Locke shifted the locus of authority from revelation to human reason and experience, he didn’t just change political theory. He created a vacuum that economics stepped into. The question of how human beings should organize their material lives became, in the absence of divine prescription, the most urgent question civilization faced.

Smith said: free markets and self-interest, harmonized by natural forces.

Marx said: collective ownership and shared labor, liberated from exploitation.

Both were using empirical methods (or what passed for empirical methods in the 18th and 19th centuries) to build frameworks for human salvation. Neither was writing theology. Both were writing secular humanism.

When the Promise Breaks

Neither model delivers.

Pure market capitalism defaults to monopoly, wealth concentration, environmental destruction, and the erosion of everything markets can’t price. Not occasionally. Systematically. The evidence spans 150 years and multiple continents.

Pure socialism defaults to bureaucratic paralysis, chronic inefficiency, and eventually the authoritarian suppression of anyone who notices. Same length of record. Same consistency.

The secular humanist response is obvious. Update the model. Keep what works, ditch what doesn’t, treat both frameworks as tools rather than scripture.

That’s not what happened.

The first instinct, in both camps, is to try harder.

Just Socialism harder.

The Soviet Union proved the point with its own collapse. When the system faltered, the answer was more: more central planning, tighter control, stricter enforcement. The edifice fell anyway, in 1991. What followed wasn’t reform. Russia tried market shock therapy under Yeltsin, watched it produce oligarchic looting and mass impoverishment, and did what failing doctrines reliably do next. It found a strongman. Putin isn’t an ideology. He’s a dominance assertion. The strong deserve to win. He is the proof.

Just Capitalism harder.

The United States proved the same point, more slowly, and in a way almost nobody talks about.

During the Cold War, the need to outperform Soviet socialism created a genuine pragmatic incentive: make capitalism work for ordinary people, or lose the argument. Labor protections, the welfare state, the Great Society: competitive necessity, not ideology. The competition kept the doctrine honest, because the doctrine had something to prove.

Then it won. And with nothing left to prove, the doctrine stopped having to work. Deregulation. Tax cuts for capital. Labor protections unwound. When the market still failed to deliver for most people, the doctrine evolved into something uglier: prosperity gospel. Winning isn’t just an outcome. It’s proof of divine favor. Trump didn’t invent this. He just stopped pretending it was economics.

The doctrine failed. So it became religion.

It always does. Russia found its priest in the form of a strongman. America found its in a prosperity gospel billionaire. Different aesthetics. Same move. When you can’t fix the belief system, you consecrate it. Build a priesthood. Find some heretics.

That’s the retreat.

The Theological Retreat

Both camps made this move. At roughly the same time. In ways that are structurally almost identical.

When markets produce outcomes that embarrass the doctrine, the dogmatic capitalist immune system activates. The market didn’t fail. The market was betrayed. By regulators. By environmental activists. By global governance bodies. By anyone who dared to suggest that a price mechanism might not be the correct tool for every single human outcome. These people are not mistaken. They are enemies of the natural order. They are, in Thiel’s framing, the Antichrist.

Notice what that move accomplishes. It doesn’t require engaging with evidence. If your opponent is cosmically evil rather than empirically wrong, their arguments don’t need to be answered. They need to be defeated. The regulatory framework isn’t bad policy to be revised through democratic deliberation; it’s a Satanic collectivism that must be resisted with the full force of sovereign individual will. Greta Thunberg isn’t a teenager with concerns about atmospheric physics; she’s a “legionnaire of the Antichrist.” Eliezer Yudkowsky isn’t an AI safety researcher with a model worth examining; he’s part of the apparatus of world tyranny.

The dogmatic socialist version is structurally identical, even if the aesthetics are different. When socialism fails to produce the promised utopia, the standard theological moves deploy: the true revolution hasn’t happened yet, the failures were caused by imperialist interference or internal betrayal, the working class is not yet conscious enough to fulfill its historical destiny. Revolutionary leaders become infallible. Dissent becomes heresy. Environmental or systemic apocalypse becomes the mechanism for demanding absolute compliance with the party line.

Both retreats produce the same political outcome: a world in which practical, pragmatic discussion about resource allocation becomes impossible, because every disagreement is now a holy war between the righteous and the heretics.

Why Theology Produces Authoritarianism

This is the part that matters most for where we actually are right now.

When you frame political and economic opponents as heretics rather than as people with whom you have honest disagreement, you eliminate the possibility of negotiated compromise. You can’t split the difference with the Antichrist. You can’t offer the forces of world tyranny a reasonable regulatory accommodation. You can’t share power with the class enemies of history.

The theological frame doesn’t just describe authoritarianism. It demands it. If the stakes are genuinely existential, if the fate of freedom or justice or humanity itself hangs in the balance, then ordinary democratic constraints look like luxuries you can’t afford. The authoritarian populist or theocratic leader isn’t abusing the system. In the internal logic of the theology, they’re protecting it.

This is why authoritarian populism and rigid doctrinal conformity are not accidents. They are predictable consequences. When your economic system stops working and your response is to theologize rather than revise, the people who question the theology become enemies. And enemies must be managed. Contained. Silenced. The logic is internally consistent, even as it destroys the democratic institutions that secular humanism built.

Thiel’s lectures are the most theatrical expression of this: eight hours of invitation-only theology about who the real enemies of civilization are. But the same refusal to engage evidence plays out in far more mundane settings, with far more direct costs.

Healthcare is the canonical example. The evidence that market dynamics produce perverse outcomes in healthcare is overwhelming and decades old. Countries with mixed systems and strong collective intervention consistently outperform pure market approaches on nearly every measurable health outcome, at lower cost (Commonwealth Fund, Mirror Mirror 2024). The dogmatic capitalist response is not to engage this evidence. It’s to defend the sanctity of market pricing as though acknowledging a single domain where markets fail would bring the entire theology crashing down. Which, if you’ve elevated markets from tool to doctrine, it would. You can’t have exceptions to gospel.

People die. The doctrine holds.

In a monarchy or dictatorship, the people can at least claim they had no choice. In a free, open democratic society, that excuse isn’t available. Authoritarian populism in a democracy doesn’t impose itself. It gets voted in. The theological comfort is genuinely appealing: a clear enemy, a righteous cause, a leader who will protect the sacred order from the heretics. It resolves the anxiety of complexity in ways that honest empirical governance never can. But in a system where you have the freedom to choose otherwise, choosing the theology is not just a mistake. It’s a moral abdication.

The governed bear their share of what follows.

The Way Out

Not a third ideology. There’s no doctrine of “pragmatic centrism” that resolves this. The problem isn’t where you position yourself on the spectrum between capitalism and socialism. The problem is treating the spectrum as the question.

Smith and Marx were both trying to answer the same thing: how do human beings organize their material lives to actually make them better? That’s the whole question. Economic outcomes and human welfare aren’t two different things to balance against each other. They’re the same thing. An economy that doesn’t make human lives better isn’t a good economy. It’s just a doctrine being defended.

We have something Smith and Marx didn’t: more than a century of actual evidence. Mixed economies that combine markets with strong collective institutions have consistently outperformed the pure poles on almost every measure that matters. That’s not ideology. That’s the record.

Markets are real. They generate genuine information about preferences and allocate resources with an efficiency no central planner can match. Use them where they work.

Collective action is also real. Markets fail at public goods, externalities, and anything with a time horizon longer than individual self-interest will price. Use collective action where it works.

Measure outcomes against whether human lives are actually getting better. Not against doctrinal purity. Update the model when the evidence says update.

This is not a comfortable position. It offers no tribe, no existential stakes, no clear enemy to defeat. It requires sitting with genuine uncertainty and being willing to say “this is working and this isn’t, let’s figure out why.” In a moment organized around religious certainty and the demonization of opponents, that’s a hard sell.

It is, however, the only honest one.

Thiel’s lectures are not an accident of faith. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s reaching for the most powerful rhetorical technology Western civilization ever built: name the enemy the Antichrist, and you don’t have to argue with them anymore. The threat becomes existential. The debate is over.

The original use of that technology was to protect a city. To hold the wall until rescue arrived. To buy time for something worth saving.

The wall worth defending isn’t a market.

It isn’t a revolution.

It’s the commitment to asking hard questions with evidence rather than faith. To measuring outcomes against whether people’s lives are actually going better. To updating the model when the record demands it.

In a democracy, that wall doesn’t hold itself. Authoritarian theology doesn’t impose itself either. It gets invited in.

Which means it can also be refused.

The Antichrist, if there is one, is the person who tells you that’s no longer allowed.

Informed by Jatin Modi’s essay “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist”.

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