Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote? An investigation. - Ars Technica

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I’m not suggesting that a man like Pope Leo—the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome, the Servant of the Servants of God—would stoop to anything quite so base as “trolling” the onetime PayPal co-founder and current Antichrist alarmist Peter Thiel. But I’m also not not suggesting it, if you see what I mean.

How else to explain the novel appearance of Gandalf—yes, the pipe-smoking wizard!—in the pages of one of Catholicism’s most important documents, a major papal encyclical about AI and technology? Perhaps Leo, who was born and raised in Chicago before spending decades in Peru, is simply a big J.R.R. Tolkien buff who can’t get enough of magic rings, Eldar lore, and tricksy little hobbitses. Or perhaps Leo is sending a message.

In his new encyclical, released yesterday, Leo quotes one literary character in the entire 40,000-word document. It’s Gandalf, doling out some of his wisdom in a scene from Return of the King: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

Leo connects this speech with the “civilization of love” that he calls for in the document, stressing (as Tolkien did) the importance of “small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.”

The Gandalf quote, innocuous on its own, feels more pointed when you realize how Tolkien is valorized (Valar-ized?) in conservative tech circles today. Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful people in such circles—and he is a Tolkien fanboy in the worst way.

Fellowship of the bling

As far back as 2012, people were running articles on how “Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, is a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of fantasy books.”

Business Insider noted that “Thiel’s inner circle seems well aware of his fondness for Tolkien’s world of elves and magic. One source who claims to be close to Thiel says there’s an in-joke about his venture-capital firm, the Founders Fund, being nicknamed ‘The Precious.’”

Thiel has named many of his companies after Tolkien’s world. He co-founded the AI-focused Palantir. He launched Mithril Capital Management. He co-founded the fintech venture capital firm Valar Ventures. He has other companies named Rivendell One and Lembas LLC.

Thiel protégés include current US Vice President J.D. Vance, who has called Tolkien his favorite author and who once founded a venture capital firm called Narya (one of the Elvish rings of power).

Palmer Luckey, who launched his own Tolkien-themed tech/defense startup called Anduril, is also “launching a new digital bank with backing from Peter Thiel,” Fortune reported last year. The bank’s name? Erebor, naturally, another name for the Lonely Mountain, where Smaug slept atop piles of gold in The Hobbit.

Thiel and his circle like a good fantasy story. So what? According to The New York Times, even the current leader of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, used to cosplay Tolkien characters and attend “Hobbit Camps,” where she “sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.”

But Thiel isn’t just one more investor with a Tolkien fetish. He has also been proclaiming a fairly idiosyncratic version of Christianity for years. His message has recently taken the form of a multi-night, four-lecture series about the looming dangers of “the Antichrist,” a figure drawn from the Book of Revelation who opposes everything Jesus stood for.

And he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the Pope.

The Antichrist loves peace and safety

Thiel’s Antichrist tour has taken him around the world, including Rome, where earlier this year the Associated Press said that Thiel’s “invitation-only conference” became “so controversial that the Catholic universities initially associated with it have all denied official involvement.”

While the lectures have been private, recordings of them have leaked. The Guardian has a nice write-up on them, saying that Thiel’s “beliefs are diffuse, meandering, and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the Antichrist.”

Thiel worries especially about a “woke American pope” making common cause with a “woke American president,” which could lead to the world domination he...