Peter Thiel, The Matrix, and Retrofuturism

In his widely circulated essay “The Straussian Moment” (2002), tech investor Peter Thiel draws on the thought of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and René Girard to construct an argument whose conclusion he deliberately leaves unresolved, thereby inviting a range of intriguing interpretations. The essay also anticipates many of the themes that Thiel has since promoted in lectures around the world. It has frequently been interpreted as providing an intellectual framework for contemporary techno-authoritarianism.

Thiel’s analysis relies primarily on one work by Schmitt, three by Strauss, and one by Girard. [1] He also quotes extensively from Heinrich Meier’s study of Schmitt and Strauss, [2] while opening the essay with a reflection by the French Eurosceptic political theorist Pierre Manent. His central argument begins with the claim that, since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been committed to avoiding violence. Although al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11 sought to strike at an entire civilization, the Western response was not a retaliatory campaign against Islam as such, but rather a strategy of preventing future attacks by relatively small terrorist groups. According to Thiel, the West is incapable of meeting a “religious” assault with a religious response because it no longer possesses genuine religious conviction. He describes this condition as the “intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment” (198). As he concludes, “The modern West has lost faith, which unleashed enormous commercial and creative forces, but it has also lost faith in itself” (208).

In advancing this view, Thiel aligns himself with Carl Schmitt, who argued that the West’s confidence in technology (a “religion of technicity”) has fostered an unbounded faith in “the this-worldly existence of man” (203). This Enlightenment confidence may be described as a form of futurism, which Thiel criticizes through Schmitt’s interpretation of the Antichrist. For the Catholic thinker Schmitt, the Antichrist embodies the ultimate danger of a homogenizing global universalism. He will “take over the entire world at the end of human history by seducing people with the promise of ‘peace and security’” (203). Thiel quotes Heinrich Meier: “The sinister magician recreates the world, changes the face of the earth, and subdues nature. […] Men who allow themselves to be deceived by him see only the fabulous effect; nature seems to be overcome, the age of security dawns; everything has been taken care of” (203).

Thiel explicitly compares this civilizational condition to the blue-pill state in The Matrix: “The world where everything seems to administer itself is the world of science fiction” (203). In his view, contemporary humanity finds itself trapped in precisely such an impasse: one marked by cultural relativism, intellectual nihilism, and wokeism.

The difficulty, however, is that the red-pill alternative, a return to older traditions and inherited forms of political and religious life, perhaps even an all-out civilizational war against Islam, is no longer a viable option, since it would entail an unacceptable degree of violence.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that Thiel’s line of reasoning is deeply conspiratorial in structure. One may readily concede that the Enlightenment has generated its own illusions, but introducing the Antichrist into the narrative renders the argument both unnecessarily dramatic and analytically opaque. In a characteristically conspiratorial move, it reduces the complexity of historical and political evil to the hidden agency of “the One”: a single, unnamed perpetrator. Moreover, invoking a central Christian motif is hardly decisive, since religious traditions have themselves produced no fewer illusions than the Enlightenment.

The paradox nevertheless remains: “There can be no return to the archaic world or even to the robust conception of the political envisioned by Carl Schmitt. [But] there can be no real accommodation with the Enlightenment [either], since so many of its easy bromides have become deadly falsehoods in our time” (214). According to Thiel, it is Leo Strauss, the German political philosopher who taught for a decade at the New School for Social Research, who offers a way of resolving this dilemma. Yet in the essay’s five-page discussion of Strauss, Thiel makes little effort to explain what Strauss’s proposed solution actually is. Instead, the section consists of a succession of loosely connected expositions of Straussian ideas, repeated restatements of the paradox itself, and continual reminders that Strauss wrote esoterically and therefore remains inaccessible to the uninitiated.

Along the way, Thiel offers criticisms of several political arrangements, including the American constitutional system of checks and balances, which, he argues, “prevents any single ambitious person from reconstructing the old Republic” (207). The discussion concludes with an extended quotation from Oswald Spengler (in German and Latin, taken from the closing pages of The Decline of the Occident) declaring that humanity must “do what is necessary or nothing. And a task posed by the necessity of history will be undertaken, with the individual or against him. The fates lead the willing, they drag the unwilling” (208).

Next, French anthropologist René Girard is summoned because he shares Thiel’s conviction that “human violence has been whitewashed away by the Enlightenment.” Humanity has thus, in Thiel’s account, swallowed the blue pill. Yet Girard’s alternative is not a Hobbesian war of all against all but rather the collective violence of all against one. As he correctly observes, for Girard “All against One” constitutes “the secret origin of all religious and political institutions” as well as of mythology (210). Peace is achieved only through the sacrifice of a single victim. Such an act, moreover, may inaugurate not merely social order but an entirely new civilization or even a new religion.

Thiel appropriates Girard’s well-known scapegoat theory for his own purposes. Taken together Thiel’s synthesis of Strauss and Girard suggests a more specific formula than simply “All against One”: it amounts to the Antichrist against the One. This follows both from his fusion of their ideas and from the conspiratorial logic that structures Thiel’s argument. If the Antichrist is conceived as a singular historical agent, then only another singular figure can confront and defeat him. In concrete political terms, however, the Antichrist is not an individual but an entire civilizational order: the world of cultural relativism, techno-skepticism, and liberal democracy.

Does the ‘All against One’ solve the paradox? Girard, too, recognizes that we cannot move forward into a mythical future because myths have been discredited. Going into a mythical future would mean to go simply back into the past. But embracing Enlightenment is impossible, too (according to Thiel and Strauss). Again, it remains unclear what solution Thiel intends to draw from Girard in this respect. Quite unexpectedly, the author moves to musings about liberals and conservatives in the contemporary world, which makes things clearer:

“One may define a ‘liberal’ as someone who knows nothing of the past and of this history of violence, and still holds to the Enlightenment view of the natural goodness of humanity” (212).

Let’s call this person a futurist.

“And one may define a ‘conservative’ as someone who knows nothing of the future and of the global world that is destined to be, and therefore still believes that the nation-state or other institutions rooted in sacred violence can contain unlimited human violence” (212).

Since Thiel refuses to identify with either camp, the implied resolution of the paradox emerges as a form of retrofuturism. Retrofuturism means that the past will be enacted not as a past, but as a futurist past in the future. The future was a future in the past, and we will re-live this past in the future. Such a move promises access to the symbolic power of myths and religion without requiring a literal return to traditional forms of life. As Leslie observes, Thiel’s thought is characterized by a “nostalgic invocation of an idealistic past”: “For Thiel, the absence of technological marvels like undersea cities or flying cars offers another rationale for the radical political changes he’s increasingly advocating.” [3]

Yet retrofuturism also requires a figure capable of embodying this convergence of past, present, and future. It is here that the logic of All against One acquires its political significance. The One may be imagined as a distinctly Thielian figure: a technologically ambitious anti-Luddite who simultaneously incarnates the most conservative moral and political values. Only such an individual can lead humanity forward by returning it to an imagined past. And because this movement unfolds through conflict rather than consensus, the One may ultimately have to assume the role of the sacrificial victim.

Neither the red pill nor the blue pill, then, but retrofuturism. In retrofuturism the blue pill can give you red pill visions without throwing you back into the red-pill-real-world. The question is whether this Silicon Valley entrepreneur envisions leading humanity into a mythical future disguised as modernity. Does Thiel see himself as the One? His writings and public lectures, with their meandering reflections on historical legends, superstitions, and other archaic themes, certainly invite such a reading. Leslie arrives at a similar conclusion: “He sees himself as part of the exceptional generation that has learned the truth of human history for the first time—and as one of the even more exceptional fraction of that exceptional group—actually the only one—who is going to do something about it” (2025).

Carla Ibled argues that Thiel (much like Elon Musk) cultivates the image of an enlightened and triumphant founder while simultaneously exhibiting a deep undercurrent of paranoia and anxiety. As she writes, the godlike entrepreneur is “fantasized as an object of intense hatred, perpetually threatened.” [4] Ibled further suggests that, following Freud and Lacan, the figures of the god and the victim are structurally intertwined. The leader who promises salvation is therefore also imagined as the one destined for sacrifice.

Notes:

1. Carl Schmitt. 1996. The Concept of the Political. University of Chicago Press. Leo Strauss. 1953. Natural Right and History. University of Chicago Press. Leo Strauss. 1952. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Leo Strauss. 1958. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. René Girard. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Stanford University Press.

2. Heinrich Meier. 1995. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. University of Chicago Press.

3. Paul Leslie. 2025. “From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and the American Right” in Samalgundi 226-227.

4. Carla Ibled. 2025. “‘Founder as Victim, Founder as God’: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the two bodies of the entrepreneur” in Journal of Cultural Economy Volume 18: 5, 629-649. Quotation from abstract.