The Katechon

I. A Dark Word

The Second Letter to the Thessalonians contains one of the most puzzling sentences in the New Testament. Before the end, it says, an adversary will appear. But for now there is something that restrains him, and someone who restrains him. In the Greek text the restraining thing is called to katechon, the restrainer ho katechon. What or who is meant, the letter does not say. And what is being restrained it calls the “mystery of lawlessness”, in Greek anomia.

For almost two thousand years theologians have puzzled over this passage. For our subject one point suffices, and it was never disputed in all that long interpretation: the katechon holds back lawlessness. It stands on the side of order.

II. Old Story

The early Church had an obvious answer. Around the year 200 Tertullian wrote that Christians prayed for the emperor and the Roman Empire because its continued existence delayed the end of the world. Of all things, the empire that persecuted the Christians was to them a dam against chaos.

In the Middle Ages the role passed to the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor was not only a ruler, he was the restrainer: as long as he existed, the world could not end. One need not believe this to understand the idea. An order, even an imperfect one, is better than none.

In the twentieth century Carl Schmitt turned this into a political concept. In The Nomos of the Earth of 1950 he calls the Christian empire of the Middle Ages a katechon, a historical power that holds back chaos. Schmitt was a brilliant jurist and a man of bad judgement: in 1933 he joined the Nazi party and supplied the regime with legal justifications. Yet for all that burden, his katechon remained a concept of order. The restrainer is the state, the empire, the law.

III. A Reader of Schmitt

Peter Thiel knows this lineage. In a 2024 conversation with the economist Tyler Cowen he said there were certain parallels between America in the 2020s and Germany in the 1920s: liberalism was exhausted, and one suspected that democracy, whatever that means, was exhausted too. He called Schmitt himself a man of “very bad judgment” who got entangled with the Nazis. He reads the thinker nonetheless.

Since autumn 2025 Thiel has been lecturing on the Antichrist, first in San Francisco and in March 2026 for four days in Rome, by invitation only and without press. What became known from the earlier lectures we described in “The Stone That Looks Back”: the Antichrist will not come as a monster but with the promise of “peace and safety”. He will set up a world government that wants to protect against artificial intelligence, climate change and war and halts progress to do so. As his legionnaires Thiel named Greta Thunberg and the AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky.

And the katechon? As the natural candidate Thiel names the American empire, yet he also regards it as a possible base of the Antichrist. On one point he is unambiguous: the adversary is an order that sets limits to technology.

IV. The Reversal

Here lies what is really new, and it is easily overlooked. In Paul the katechon holds back lawlessness. In Tertullian the empire holds back chaos. In Schmitt a political order holds back disintegration. In Thiel the restrainer holds back something else: the law. What is dangerous for him is not lawlessness but the rule that regulates too much. Not chaos, but oversight.

An everyday image makes this clear. A dyke holds back the sea. Whoever claims that the real enemy is not the sea but the dyke board that issues too many regulations has kept the word dyke and turned its meaning around. So it is with Thiel’s katechon. The word is old; the direction is new.

And something else is new. The katechon was always a public power: an empire, an emperor, a state, visible, with a name and an office. Whoever wanted to embody it had to rule and was therefore also open to attack. The katechon Thiel needs has no office. It consists of companies, funds, foundations and friends. Nobody elected it, and nobody can vote it out.

V. New Game

Whoever believes that a world order is the Antichrist needs a restrainer, and a restrainer needs equipment. Place side by side the ventures Thiel has founded or financed, and that is exactly what one sees.

He needs eyes: Palantir, the software with which intelligence services, armies and, in Germany, the police in Hesse, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia link data. He needs a sword: Anduril in America, and in Germany the drone makers Stark and Quantum Systems, in which Thiel holds stakes. He needs money that no state controls: the bank Erebor, opened in February 2026 for crypto, AI and defence, stakes in the exchange Bullish and in BitMine, a company that owns almost five per cent of all Ether. He needs power for the data centres: in summer 2026 Thiel’s own hedge fund held eight stocks, among them electricity utilities, a developer of small nuclear reactors and, as its largest position, Amazon.

And he needs people. J.D. Vance worked for Thiel’s firm Mithril; Thiel gave 15 million dollars to bring him into the Senate; today he is Vice President. Around him, since 2019, the Rockbridge Network has grown, a circle of donors, pollsters and data analysts meant to carry the movement beyond Trump, towards 2028.

The names are no accident. Palantír is the seeing stone, Andúril the sword, Erebor the mountain with the golden hoard; Valar and Mithril also come from Tolkien’s Middle-earth. An eye, a sword and a treasure. This is not a collection of holdings. It is an equipment.

VI. The Rule of the Game

How Thiel judges he explained himself in Berlin at the end of September, in conversation with Mathias Döpfner. “I think we moralize way too much,” he said. Then he asked what the opposite of good is. Morally it is evil; practically it is bad. A Ferrari is an evil car because it uses so much fuel. A Trabant is a bad car, less good than a golf cart. And whoever is evil is at least not bad.

This is a sentence worth taking seriously. It means: effect beats morality. Döpfner related that in 2016 Thiel had explained his support for Trump in a similar way. How good or bad Trump was hardly mattered; what counted was that he moved something.

Where this rule leads is shown by a case from the files. In November 2014, six years after Jeffrey Epstein’s conviction in Florida, Thiel asked him by e-mail to put ten to twenty million dollars into his fund Valar Ventures. Epstein eventually gave 40 million. The stake is now worth about 170 million and is the largest remaining asset of his estate. Valar stated that Epstein was then regarded as a well-known adviser to governments and universities. None of this was unlawful. It was simply effect before morality.

VII. The Closed Room

In 2006 Thiel and Auren Hoffman founded an association called Dialog. For twenty years there was no public membership list, no public agenda, no press. Once a year politicians, military officers, investors and chief executives meet there. That more is known today is owed to no oversight body but to a data leak. In June 2026 a hacker found data in the website’s source code, and WIRED published the registration list for the August meeting near Dublin: 222 names, among them NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the US Treasury Secretary and senators. Two sessions were called “Navigating WWIII” and “Build-a-Cult”.

One German attended five times: Jens Spahn, in 2018 and 2019 still as health minister. He says he never met Thiel there and paid the participation fee himself. There is nothing unlawful about this. It is merely remarkable that a federal minister could attend for years a meeting of which the public knew nothing until someone read the source code. This is not the first time Spahn has appeared in our essays, for instance in “The Long March through the Party” and “The Revolt of the Voting Cattle of the Voting Cattle Is Being Rehearsed”. He is no villain but a node where several networks cross.

In “Whom Can You Trust?” we showed with the Hanning case what happens when an order learns only by chance what goes on inside it. Dialog follows the same pattern. The room was closed, and what opened it was not a control body but a flaw in the code.

VIII. The Game in Germany

One might take all this for American affairs. It is in the middle of Germany. The Bundeswehr has concluded a framework contract with Stark worth up to 2.9 billion euros for loitering munitions; the first call-off of about 275 million is intended for the brigade in Lithuania. Thiel holds a small stake; defence minister Pistorius obtained a written assurance that he has no insight into operations. Millions of Germans keep their money with N26, Trade Republic or Bitpanda, and Thiel’s funds hold stakes in all three. And on 24 September the Axel Springer publishing house honoured Thiel as “probably by far the most influential German of our time”.

Each single piece is lawful and explicable on its own. The Bundeswehr needs drones, the police software, savers good apps. What was said about autonomous weapons in “Who Opens the Box” applies here too: the problem is not the single device but that nobody keeps the whole in view. Each body checks its own piece. Nobody checks the map.

IX. The Rehearsal before the World

On 22 September 2026, two days before the prize in Berlin, Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly. More than twenty mostly European states had called for binding safety rules for artificial intelligence. Trump declared that the United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a “globalist” scheme to control AI. The very same people who had said we would all be dead in twelve years because of global warming were now saying that AI would kill us all.

Nobody needs to claim that Thiel wrote this speech. But it voices his picture: climate activists and AI critics as the same people, a worldwide order as the danger, no brake on technology. What Thiel had delivered as theology in closed rooms now stood as government policy at the world’s largest lectern. And Vice President Vance said in a podcast at the beginning of September that he would not be shocked if the Antichrist were already walking among us.

X. What Speaks for Thiel

A fair text must make the other side strong. Thiel’s concern is not absurd. A world order that regulates everything in the name of safety would be dangerous, and the literature of the twentieth century, from Huxley to Orwell, is full of such orders. International institutions are often hard to control, and their officials are not elected. And Thiel’s diagnosis of stagnation, that the West has for decades produced less that is new than it could, is shared by many who can make nothing of his theology.

Rearmament too has its reasons. Russia is waging war in Europe, and a country that wants to defend itself needs drones and software. That they come from companies in which a controversial investor holds a stake does not make them worse.

XI. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: Thiel’s theology is a private matter, his companies are business. Whoever connects the two constructs a plan where there are only investments. That would be a strong objection if Thiel did not draw the connection himself. He speaks publicly about the Antichrist, world government and technology, and his holdings fit this picture down to their names.

The second objection: the other side has a network too. Foundations, lobby groups and international organisations pursue their aims just as much. That is true, and the same question applies to them: who checks them? But no other network combines intelligence software, weapons, banks, a vice president and an eschatology to this extent.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the parts of this map are decided independently of one another, without a common direction, and that there is a body that supervises them as a whole.

XII. Who Restrains the Restrainer?

The old katechon was a public power; it held back lawlessness, and one could see it. The new one is a network without office; it holds back oversight, and one sees it only when someone finds a flaw in the source code.

Thiel asks who will protect the world from an order that controls everything. The question is legitimate. But it has a reverse side that he does not raise.

The question is not whether the world needs a restrainer, but who restrains the restrainer.