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Peter Thiel is most famous for co-founding PayPal and investing early in Facebook. He is irrefutably one of the most successful founders and venture capitalist in the United States, making him one of the most successful in the world. When he speaks, people listen. That is why his latest warnings of the “Antichrist” need some thoughtful analysis.

Peter Thiel’s “Antichrist” thesis warns that modern bureaucrats, climate regulators, artificial-intelligence safety advocates and international institutions may use the language of peace and security to construct a centralized technocratic order. Drawing partly on René Girard, Thiel’s own mentor at Stanford University, and Vladimir Solovyov, a 19th-century Russian philosopher, Thiel appears to suggest that societies driven by fear and mimetic contagion may unite against tech entrepreneurs, dissenters and the rich and powerful, transforming them into modern scapegoats.

There is a legitimate warning here. Crowds can become irrational. Moral outrage can spread through imitation (mimetic behavior) rather than evidence. People can join a campaign of denunciation because others are doing so, and a society can project complex structural problems onto a single person or group. Girard’s work on mimetics helps explain how easily collective judgment can become collective persecution. It also is a useful framework to understand cancel culture, wokeness and online tribalism in general.

But Girard’s warning can be misused. Not everyone who faces public anger is a scapegoat. Not everyone who loses power is an innocent victim. And a society that holds a ruler, monopolist, slave owner or powerful corporation accountable is not necessarily participating in mob persecution.

The Bible offers perhaps the clearest picture of the true scapegoat mechanism.

In John’s Gospel, the religious authorities fear that Jesus’s growing influence will provoke Roman intervention and destabilize their position. Caiaphas tells the council that “it is better for you that one man dies for the people than that the whole nation perish” (John 11:50).

The authorities do not confront the deeper causes of their crisis: Roman occupation, political domination, rivalry among elites, fear of rebellion and their own accommodation with imperial power. Instead, they concentrate those fears onto Jesus. One man is presented as the source of the danger, and his removal is offered as the path back to peace.

From a Girardian perspective, Christ becomes the archetypal scapegoat of the Roman imperial order. He is handed over through a convergence of mimetic forces. Authorities reinforce one another’s hostility. A crowd is swept into collective accusation. Political leaders choose expediency over justice. Pontius Pilate may symbolically wash his hands, but he still uses the machinery of the state to carry out the execution.

Jesus is treated as though he created the disorder. In reality, the crisis comes from a violent imperial system and from the institutions trying to preserve their place within it. The crucifixion temporarily unites competing groups by directing their fear and aggression toward an innocent victim.

The Gospel, however, refuses to accept the crowd’s verdict. The resurrection ultimately declares that the victim was innocent and that the supposed restoration of order was founded on political murder. This is the heart of Girard’s Christian insight: the cross exposes the scapegoat mechanism rather than endorsing it.

That distinction is important when considering Peter Thiel’s warnings about an emerging “Antichrist.” Thiel portrays this figure not as an obvious dictator but as a persuasive technocrat who promises safety, peace, global coordination, climate action, and control of dangerous technologies. In this telling, regulators, climate advocates, international institutions, and artificial-intelligence safety researchers may become the unwitting foot soldiers of a centralized and oppressive order.

Government power deserves scrutiny. Bureaucracies can become coercive, self-protective, and unaccountable. Appeals to public safety can certainly be used to restrict liberty including small business enterprise. 

But Thiel’s “antichrist” argument risks turning Girard’s defense of innocent victims into a shield for powerful interests. The people who want surveillance companies audited, artificial-intelligence systems regulated, monopolies restrained, or billionaires taxed are not necessarily a mimetic mob searching for a sacrificial victim. They may be citizens attempting to place democratic limits on concentrated power.

A slave owner cannot claim to be the true victim because enslaved people revolt. The revolt may harm the owner. It may destroy property and end a way of life. It may even contain anger, imitation, violence and excess. But the owner’s losses do not outweigh the systematic theft of liberty, bodily autonomy, family, labor and human dignity imposed upon the enslaved.

The same principle applies more broadly. A dictator removed from office is affected by the uprising against him. A monopolist constrained by regulation loses freedom of action. A wealthy individual required to pay taxes has less control over that wealth. None of those consequences automatically transforms the powerful person into a scapegoat.

Mimetic behavior explains how collective action spreads; it does not determine whether the action is just. People imitate one another in lynch mobs, but they also imitate one another in labor movements, civil-rights campaigns, anticolonial struggles and revolutions against tyranny.

The central question is not merely whether a crowd has united against someone. We must ask whether the accusations are supported by evidence, whether the target possesses real power, whether that power has caused harm and whether the proposed remedy seeks justice or merely emotional purification.

True scapegoating punishes an innocent or disproportionately blamed person so that society can avoid confronting the real system producing its problems. Legitimate resistance confronts the people and institutions actually exercising oppressive power and seeks structural change.

Girard’s mimetic theory should teach us to protect innocent victims. He should not teach us to confuse oppressors with the oppressed simply because the powerful experience resistance.

Sometimes the crowd shouts, “Crucify him” against an innocent man.

Sometimes the crowd is demanding that Pharaoh let the people go.

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Wil Franklin is the director of North Coast Small Business Development Center where he combines his teaching and entrepreneurial past to help build a connected, diverse, and equitable economic base in our region.