0:00The truth never goes out of style and First Things relies on readers like you to keep promoting the truth in public life. For the price of one cup of coffee per month, you can access all our subscriber perks and support the important work of First Things. Visit first things.com/subscribe to gain full access to all of our articles as well as our prestigious monthly print edition. That's first things.com/subscribe. [music] Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.
0:32This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine. I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.
0:49I'm really delighted today to have with me Peter Teal, one of the co-authors of Voyages to the End of the World in the November 25 2025 issue of First Thinks magazine. Welcome to the podcast, Pet.
1:02Thanks for having me.
1:04Voyages to the end of the world. There's a kind of Dubla onandra there. Um you you've got a you've got three seafaring figures in Guliver's Travels and the New Atlantis and then in um uh and what's the one one piece is the one piece is the is it o oh oho or odo odo yeah um but it also means the end of the world as in the end of times is that
1:32fair that du [laughter] well it's a kind of a bit of a Straussian essay or should I a baconian in so far as you really it's a lot of exogesis of these four texts. Um but it does suggest a kind of underlying concern and I want to sort of explore whether this is accurate of the emergence of the cogevian universal and homogeneous state.
2:02Is that fair that that's kind of you want to implant in the reader's mind that they should be worried about this?
2:08Yes. uh you should be worried about um the totalitarian one world state. That's the way I would reframe the homogeneous one world state of Koja.
2:18Homogeneous is a is a euphemism for totalitarian. [laughter] Yes. Uh I in the piece you cite Wendell Wilkey's uh um wasn't a campaign book sort of a manifesto for a post World War II what the postworld war II world would look like. Yeah. This was uh this was after he lost uh as a Republican candidate in 1940. He gets sent on a round the world junket by FDR and travels to all these countries, China, Soviet Union, meets
2:48with Stalin a couple of times and then sort of produces this manifesto one world which again is sort of this you know globalization is both um uh necessary desire you know it's desirable and inevitable. We need to do everything we can to make globalization um and this this one world work because it's inevitable anyway.
3:10And and uh and then there's the as you say the propaganda film one world or none 1946. So this is really in the air.
3:21Yeah. And again the one world or none this is you know 46 is very different from 45 because you've had Hiroshima and Nagasaki at that point and uh you have nuclear weapons. you don't yet have thermonuclear ones, but uh something has really changed by by by by by the late 40s. and uh and uh yeah and then basically the message of the one world or none film. uh it's maybe the sort of these atomic phys um nuclear scientists that are behind it's probably a
3:48communist front group but uh but uh it's similar to the message of Oenheimer which is that uh you know uh you know uh you need world government to have peace and the alternative to peace is atomic war and so without without a a world government with real teeth that actually controls the nuclear weapons um you're going to have you're going to have world war so it's one world or none And uh and then the the sort of parallel but very
4:17alternative theological Christian theological framing I have is Antichrist or Armageddon. And uh what uh you know what Sam and I in this piece articulate is in some sense it's the exact same thing. Antichrist or Armageddon versus you know one world or none. But it it points in a very different direction because when you frame it in the sort of political philos philosophical way um you always go straight to one world
4:45that's obviously the right answer you know is is are you better read or dead your average philosophy professor or can I sign up for the communist party membership right now so the question always points at one answer uh whereas antichrist or armageddon those are both quite bad. the one world totalitarian state you know um you know the runaway catastrophes of I don't know dual use science and technology and uh and that
5:15pushes us to find some moderate narrow third path that's very very different some something to avoid you know I don't know the sila of antichrist the kbdus of Armageddon remember which one's the sea monster but anyway um and uh and that's yeah that's very that's very different uh I mean in it's you know in um the second Thessalonian St. Paul, as I'm recalling here in chapter 2, that's the passage
5:45where he mentions the lawless one and the catacon and all these things that are play such an important role in a lot of Christian thinking about end times.
5:54But his council to the Thessalonians is we should know these things, but uh beware beware um trying to know the date and the time. Um and we need to get on with our Christian life of of doing the things that we're called to do. Um so there's a kind of council of patience as well as vigilance.
6:15Yes. Uh well I I always think uh yes no no man knows the day and the hour which is the line in Matthew. Uh and the Miller writes in 1844 I believe you know they they calculated the day as something like was the day I think October 22nd 1844 was the day the world was going to come to an end. Technically they did not even violate the Matthew command because they only said the day not the day and the hour.
6:38[laughter] And uh and I'm not going to go quite that this that specific but I um I do wonder whether there's um you know some space in between let's say the excess nihilism excessive nihilism of inferring from no man knows the day and the hour to we can know nothing at all versus let's say the excessnosticism of knowing the day and the hour and can we know the century. Um what I you know what I would
7:06articulate is that in the world post 1945 um there is some sense in which we are in an objectively more apocalyptic time. Let's not talk about the antichrist but let's just talk about and this is just you know reading the newspaper or the internet or you know wherever uh you get your information.
7:24Um, something changed with 1945 with nuclear weapons. There's a question about COVID. Was that, you know, was that just a a sort of relatively innocent mistake in a food market or was there some, you know, right?
7:37What research was going on in the Wuhan lab and was it just, you know, was it really neutral research or was it bioweapons research? Um there's sort of the uh there are of course all these questions about AI maybe not as a some sort of weird disembodied mind but as a technology that can be coupled to other things. So you know I don't know can you create um autonomous drones where you don't have a human in the loop because the human can get jammed. And so there's sort of doesn't necessarily have to happen that way but there's a certain
8:05there's a certain logic that uh that that pushes us in in these things. So there sort of are sort of a number of these different ways where you could say um certain dimensions of science and technology have gotten extremely powerful and as they get coupled in this dual use military way um they are you know potentially apocalyptic. There's of course an environmental argument. Maybe maybe climate change is exaggerated, but there surely there are other, you know,
8:35dimensions of environmentalism where, you know, maybe maybe some serious damage can be done uh to to to the planet. And then and then the the thesis I want to articulate is um you know it's probably not quite the best thing for those of us who are on the conservative side to always just dismiss these things out of hand and say you know man you must have a psych must have psychological problems if you're scared of a nuclear war or um
9:03you know [clears throat] or you know or the climate is you know obviously it's a more people die of pneumonia in the winter than uh heat strokes in the summer and Wouldn't it be nice if it was warmer? So, I mean, there are sort of all these conservative um counterpoints we can make. Yeah. Um but I think um you know the the the argument I want to articulate is that uh you have to also think very hard to what the implicit political alternative to
9:32this is. And uh the uh the line from Thessalonians that I I always quote is not the catacon restrainer stuff from 2 Thessalonians, but it's first Thessalonians 5:3 where the slogan of the antichrist is uh peace and safety.
9:47And um and and what I what I sort of imagine is that uh you know, how do you get a one world state? How does the antichrist actually take over? It is by playing on these fears, these very legitimate fears of technology, science, you know, coupled in certain ways. And we need, you know, we need worldwide controls of one sort or another to uh to stop this. And these are the arguments of, you know, Oenheimer, Greta Thunberg
10:16in a very different context.
10:18Anthony Fouchy, Anthony Fouchy. Um and then in in a more recent context uh people like Nick Bostonramm or Alazer Yudowski were sort of in some ways the intellectuals behind the effective altruism movement where it's you know uh trying to to stop um stop the the AI technology Yudowski um sort of this [clears throat] East Bay rationalist uh um sort of started transhumanist now it's fully lit where
10:47you know you sort of the tech's going to solve all the problems we need to to we need to take all our energy to stop the tech. But the the recent book that he wrote that I think came out just this last month is um talking about AI. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. And then there are and then there are sort of all sorts of detailed technical scenarios that we can sort of debate whether they're right or wrong. They're probably exaggerated, but then there's always, you know, man, there's a chance this is right. Maybe we should be a
11:17little bit careful. You should do something on the precautionary principle. So there's sort of these very detailed and somewhat debatable technical scenarios, but then the counterpoint to them is this super vague handwavy politics where it's well I don't know what to do about them, but you have to you have to regulate it on a worldwide basis. If you have a single country where it doesn't get regulated, it will happen. Don't know what that looks like, but we'll leave that to the
11:46politicians. And um and so you can't have AI technology, you know, just in the US. You can't have it just in Singapore. There's a single country where it's allowed. That doesn't count.
11:59And so you have to And so those the soft implicit messages you need to get rid of, you know, real sovereignty of all nations in the world. You need to, you know, you need to have um global policing with with some real teeth to uh to to to make this world. And uh and I think in late modernity um the antichrist comes to power by talking about Armageddon non-stop. You know, early modernity,
12:2717th, 18th century. Uh there was sort of a way the antichrist would use science to take over the world, like a hopefulness. Could you get that in New Atlantis?
12:39It was both. It was both hopeful.
12:41There's an element of it that's terrifying. At the end of New Atlantis, they discover all these weapons that that they've built, all these, you know, I mean, the start, the start of the book is, you know, there's a storm and they crash into this mysterious island somewhere in the South Pacific that no one knows is there.
12:57By the end of the book, you realize that one of the things they control is the weather. So, you realize even the storm at the beginning of the book might have been set up by the people on the New Atlantis for for mysterious reasons. and and the you know the speculative you know part of the story that's not written you know in the old Atlantis the Plato's Plato's book uh the Tomus um the last part that's uh what's incompleted is a speech by Zeus explaining why
13:26Atlantis deserved to be destroyed so it is um the the last thing that doesn't happen is a speech on why Atlantis was destroyed in Bacon's book the thing that does not happen is an action Not not a speech by the gods, but an action by the uh the pro-science antichristic people on New Atlantis, where they're taking over the whole world, and we're showing the weapons to you. It's too late. We're ready to conquer the whole world. That's that was
13:55the optimism of 17th to 18th century science. Empiricism for Bacon leads to empire. You know, we torture nature. We figure everything out.
14:04Yes. And empire of reason.
14:06You You get Yeah. You get an empire of reason, but then you also get a a real empire, a real world empire. I was wondering in in in your uh reading, you and Sam just do a marvelous job drawing out some of the really telling details of the new Atlantis. But couldn't we read it as Bacon forboding? You read him pretty much this is this is a kind of um how-to book for
14:34future, you know, for the future world. dominators. Whereas I was more inclined to think, well, I'm not more inclined.
14:42I'm at least willing to say that maybe he was anxious about this. Like once reason gets really gets going, once technology really gets going, it takes on a life of its own. Yeah. It's I I always think it's very hard for us to put ourselves back into the 17th 18th century frame. And um and I I I wouldn't say the people were naively optimistic. Uh but they certainly were optimistic.
15:13Um there certain I you know Bacon envisioned a lot. He didn't envision things like nuclear weapons. You know I don't think he really envisioned you know AI or bioweapons that could he certainly anticipated modern medicine.
15:27Uh but that's that's sort of again that's sort of a more again that's a more positive version of this. And um and so yeah, if you have a if you have medicine that can cure all diseases, um do you have something that's one toggle switch away that's a boweapon that uh can you know target and kill you know all sorts of all sorts of people?
15:47Even the I don't think that was envisioned by Bacon.
15:50But even the positive side as you say say I agree with you. Um in retrospect it's it is somewhat creepy to us. So I I would I would agree that when we look at it from the lens of 2025, it's you know how how could you not find this disturbing?
16:05Uh your reference to first Thessalonians 5:3 I think is very I I also think that's important. I mean the promise here is peace and safety, peace and security.
16:17The if we take peace as much you know health uh wealth um and well-being, right? Let's say peace is more than just absence of war. Then you could see that that the positive side of science and technology is also very seductive for a world government. Like hey if you just give if you if you give your will to me I will make sure that well you never die. Uh that is a seduction as opposed
16:46to you need to give all your um sovereignty to me otherwise you're going to die in conflict. So, it's kind of both and it's it's it's some of those though in in in in my telling, this is always where I, you know, quibble with the the anti-tech social conservatives, um, is that we have not made that much progress in recent years on the you will not die. We've not made any progress on dementia. We've made very limited
17:14progress on things like like cancer. We've Yeah, we've made progress on certain types of controls in the financial system. Ah, but maybe we just haven't gone far enough. I mean, often times I find there's a kind of progressive sensibility. Oh, you're right, Peter. We haven't made much progress, but that's only because we haven't kind of given given, you know, gone all in on this project, whatever it might be, multiaceted project.
17:40It's like in the political realm, like we could just break through to a genuinely inclusive and multicultural society, we would we would get beyond this populist moment. There's a kind of accelerationist element on the left. We got to accelerate these engines of progress in order to break through.
17:57There's I I agree there's an accelerationist element on the politics. I'm not sure how strong it still is on the science and the technology. And of course, it's very confusing because there are people we can point to that are that still believe this. Someone like, I don't know, Richard Dawkins is a is someone who still believes in science and in atheism as a political project and believes they're deeply compatible.
18:24But um but I would submit that all he shows is that he's a fossil from 1780 from the Enlightenment when people believed in this. Eleazar Yudkowski, the person I called out earlier, uh when I I I funded this person. I I apologize publicly for funding it, [laughter] but back in 2004, it was really optimistic.
18:44Now it is really blackpilled and uh yeah, it was transhumanism and the AI will help us live forever to the AI is going to kill all of us and we can just do drugs at Burning Man and uh we're going to fight it even though we're probably going to lose. [sighs] [laughter] I I agree with you on Richard Dawkins being a fossil. Uh years ago. I don't want to fixate too much on someone like Greta, but I would say uh yeah, people like
19:12Do you think she's more of a telling figure Oenheimer's more zeitgeist than Edward Teller? I met I met Edward Teller once as a kid in the undergraduate in the late ' 80s. It was a bracing thing.
19:24It was like we need a roll back strategy for communism, not containment. This is 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall comes down. um you know if you put me in charge teller an 80 something teller uh [snorts] was telling us uh you know um I would not be scared of using nuclear weapons and so I'm not in favor of Dr.
19:45Strange Love. It was scary to us that this 80-year-old man had way more testosterone than [laughter] you know the undergraduates from the college Republican club at Stanford. But with 2020 hindsight, uh what I what I remember about talking to Teller is, man, he was completely outside the debate. Nobody was listening to him. We didn't need to be worried about him. He was talking to me. He was talking to, you know, a handful of college Republicans. That's all that he had left.
20:12Right. Right. I do in the 90s when I was teaching I to kind of underline your observation, we're we live in a time of fear, not hope. And my students I came to see were were very anxious about the future. I mean good times or bad times economically. Every year that went by it seemed like the anxiety about career and job ratcheted up. Um and so there's a
20:40impulse to try to find some safe place. I could see that even in the 90s and late 90s in my in my students. And I mean it seems to me that's only gotten more Yes. pronounced in the last couple decades.
20:52Yes. And um again the nuance I I want to tell is I I I want to frame anxiety not just in this sort of Jordan Peterson psycho babble new age category and um and so people are anxious about something real. You know when when FDR says you have nothing to fear but fear itself it wasn't some abstract new age fear. there was a fear that there was not enough gold in the banks and that's why you need to have
21:21her on the banks. It was a very concrete thing people were scared of and and I think um I think there are dimensions of the anxieties that are are quite are quite legitimate and we have to find some way to talk about them without you know going all the way into you know the cov one world state. One of the interesting things by the way that we uh um we Rambo in uh France has uh in the last
21:51year wrote these books on KJV. Um Kojv um had a certain theological view on what he was doing. Um and uh he um he had uh he' done his PhD in the 1920s. uh one of his two PhDs was on Salavia who's an eastern Orthodox writer who in 1900 had written a short story of the antichrist and in some sense which I recommend to listeners it's the best it's the best it's the best of that
22:19whole genre of um of of antichrist fiction books but cobb does his PhD on salabb and in some sense it's like a nichian revaluation of the values he still believes in the antichrist just comes to think it's a good thing he thinks the antichrist is Stalin and that he is going to be the conscience of Stalin. Sort of like the false prophet figure in uh you know is because the Caesar opus fusion you have the the Caesar with a sort of religious
22:47ideological undercurrent. And in 1940 he sends a 1,000page manuscript to Moscow where he sort of you know trying to get them to hire him as the uh and they you know somehow fortunately for Kojv probably it somehow never [laughter] never works its way through the bureaucracy and he gets to stay in sconc in Paris right and then winds up being a a consiglari for the development of the European Union. Uh but uh but yes I think I think there is a cogev version
23:15where where um it was sort of a pro- Antichrist thing and then the the the Strauss you know Strauss has this debate with cov in on tyranny and the the question one would have to I haven't reread that book carefully but if you reread on tyranny it would be how much did Strauss know that KJV thought of himself as secretly working for the antichrist and you do have all this language on the on the Strauss side where he constantly is accusing Kojv of
23:44bringing in religious assumptions and he's somehow this this religious fanatic. [clears throat] Um and then um and then um and then the the and then you have the um the final and universal tyrant is the sort of political philosophy description of what's wrong with the KJV project. who leads to the final and universal tyrant and uh you know yeah maybe that's God or Christ but
24:12uh if we given that we what we now know about KJV perhaps it was the antichrist the to your point about anxiety I mean it seems to me that optimism or pessimism if you want to put it in those terms there the devil prays upon us um whatever our disposition might be so in an age of uh in an age of uh you know progressive uh confidence you know
24:41the devil can can distort and pervert that in an age of fitting anxiety and concern the devil can also manipulate and exploit that. So part of our part of it's what I read at the end of the piece is you're you and Sam are counseling us to um uh uh sort of again this goes back to 2 Thessalonians and what St. Paul's urging the Thessalonians to uh stick to your knitting. I mean don't although I
25:11always think of Matthew 13 Matthew 13 and Mark 13 which is the you know discourse in in the in the Gospel of Mark. It ends with a um series of verses that where the word watch is repeated six or seven times. Yes. So we have we need to be watchful and vigilant. Yes.
25:30Without getting carried away by our anxiety and fear.
25:33But then I would say I would say uh watchful and vigilance. Again, maybe this is just my reading into it. It's um maybe there's also something we can do that we can be agentic and we if we're too optimistic or too pessimistic because then nothing you can do. You just need to watch the movie of the future unfold and eat your popcorn. This is you know Curtzswhile and then or everyone's going to get killed Eleaser.
25:59But extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, they always converge to sloth to doing nothing. I agree. And so yeah, if you have to have one, it's somewhere it's it's uh it's it's probably somewhere it's somewhere in between. But you know, one one thing where um I I I don't I don't think it's supposed to be just merely watchful in some, you know, passive sense in some passive uh mental interior space
26:28sense. And uh uh the the passage that I always like to quote as a bit of a counterpoint is um first Corinthians 13:13. And these three remain faith, hope, and love. The greatest is love. And um and the um if if something like and what what I take that passage to mean let's talk about the the faith and hope parts is that these go together.
27:02They're they don't they're not opposites but they're somehow they go together. Um and um maybe you need faith for prayer and you need let's say you need some amount of hope not and you need some amount of hope for politics or for um business and they they and and if if faith fails hope fails. If hope fails faith fails. It's the exact opposite of the way atheists always think about it
27:30where these things are anti-correlated and you are you know you have faith only when you have no hope or something like that. That that's an atheist framing. I think the true framing is they are they're they're positively correlated.
27:45You know is is it is it okay for someone should you be as a Christian should you be praying or should you be working on JD Vance's presidential campaign? don't think they're um negatively correlated, but certainly from JD's point of view, maybe you don't want to have someone work on your campaign who's not willing to pray. You know, it's the uh it's the Thusidities uh even in I don't know, let's go to something nonJudeo-Christian, the Thusidities account of the Syracuse expedition in
28:14the Pelpeneisian War, when the Athenians are hopeful, they're praying.
28:19And then at the end, as the battle's gone against them, they get angry at the gods and they curse the gods. So when hope fails, faith fails, you know, and and these things are they're they're deeply correlated. You know hope is I mean hope affects our practical syllogisms you know so that if we I mean obviously if if you don't believe in eternal life if life after death then your your practical syllogisms about what to do in a in a particularly threatening situation will
28:47change. Um and faith pro provides the if you will the the you know the the the major premise in those practical syllogisms. Um, and love pertains to the will. Um, it's a virtue, you know, it it pertains to the the objects of our of our desires and purposes.
29:07I'm I'm I'm open to the notion that, you know, once we're in heaven, we won't need hope or faith anymore, right? And that's why love remains when when you're in heaven.
29:17Um, and it's it's maybe the most durable. But um but yeah to to the extent we are still far from heaven um we're in this world where I think we um we uh we we in some ways need all three throughout I mean uh 0ero to one your book on your your book of philosophy masquerading as a business book uh it's a light motif in the things that you say and and have written which is a profound
29:47concern about preserving agency in our age that there are lots of ways in which the sense that my agency matters or the agency of others matters seems to be eclipsed by all kinds of ideological and scientific and technological um trends. Uh yeah, there are sort of a lot of lot of different dimensions on this. I mean I always I and I always like to say that the virtue in shortest
30:17supply is something like courage and there's and there's the kind of version that you probably come across a lot at first things in the sort of intellectual world where people do not have the courage to speak out or they they sort of agree with you but um you know they they for all sorts of subtle social I always tell young people that are reticent I say you're going to die sooner than you think so you might as well tell you what you want.
30:43And yeah, so there all these kinds of, you know, all these all these kinds of um dimensions to it. And then um and then yeah, there are, you know, there there probably are anti-agentic things that can be motivational. So there's probably a lot of new age stuff that's sort of um but it's just if you think you're going to succeed, you will succeed. even
31:12it's one toggle switch away. You get blackpilled. You you realize you didn't study for the test and you're going to get an F and then you think you're going to get an F and then you get an F.
31:19[laughter] The but even the sort of default uh metaphysics of our time is a is a kind of reductive materialism where you know uh things going on in your head those are you know that's a biological phenomenon. Um so you know in other words the I think that that as I say the sort of default metaphysics is very anti- uh essential or whatever equivalent on whether it's always materialist I think I think it was
31:49materialist in the 17th 18th century there's a lot that's residual to that but uh a lot of it's also gone in a very anti-materialist direction you know we landed on the moon in July of ' 69 and Woodstock starts 3 weeks later and that's when we move from outer space to inner space and it's psychedelic drugs and meditation and yoga and video games and falling into the matrix and you know I don't know naval gazing identity politics there you know in a
32:18sense uh I don't know if we call that materialist or I I'd say it's bad metaphysics but um it's sort of uh it's it's it's uh I I sometimes think that um even the reductionist libertarianism or Marxism would better than um than uh than let's say some of the identity politics. You at least think about something like the economy and that's not everything. It's not maybe not the most important thing but uh
32:46it's um well what is it about it's more than they are able to think about. There seems to be a uh um cuz initially in ' 68 these kinds of moves were born out of a feeling that you were just a cog in the system. And so you go to the commune in order to recover a sense of agency, recover a sense of actually having a self that is in possession of its own destiny. But as you point out that very very quickly winds up getting co-opted in all kinds
33:15of ways and it slides into its own own kind of solopsism that has no place to go and nothing to do.
33:23Well, I think there were a lot of different dimensions to what was going on. This the history it's even the history is always hard to reconstruct. M you know I was born in 1967 so both of us were probably just you know yeah I was born in 1959 but still but yeah I mean kind of in the aftermath after very much in the after in the aftermath of of of of 68 and there was probably I don't know there's a part that was probably you know extremely exciting and optimistic
33:49um there was um but then there was also some part where um you know yeah there was very rapid economic growth there seemingly very rapid progress on civil rights. Uh and then there was also a very rapid building out of you know nuclear weapons and at some point you know at some point this sort of accelerationism transforms in the 1970s where you know
34:18we're just going to hit pause and uh and handbook and by [laughter] yeah by by by the late '7s it's sort of the whole earth catalog say where it's uh it's probably not all bad but you It's it's sort of more in the go we're going to go slow. Um and uh I don't know when Charles Manson was on LSD and killing people um what did he see? And maybe maybe he saw that the saw that the
34:47nuclear war was inevitable and that he could be like a Russ Colnikov character from DSvski and that therefore everything was permitted. So you know these things I think were sort of entangled in these really weird complicated ways like this. the one piece the mostly wrong by the way.
35:03Uh the one piece the odo um what is it?
35:07It's a it's a kind of it's a suite of different multimedia things. I mean it's a it's a comic book. Yes. Or online an online graphic ongoing serial graphic novel. Is that ongoing I mean of of the sort that there are quite a number in Japan. I believe it is the most successful one of these.
35:26um has been u serialized for uh since 1997. So it's going on almost three decades. Um it's set on an alternate sort of watery world where it's mostly water, a few few major land few smaller land masses. So it's like this parallel earth and there yeah there are a lot of different dimensions to it. But uh uh one sort of question is who who runs the
35:54world and it uh it um it's a one world government and then you know the gradual reveal over you know decades of this manga series is that it's it's um you know it's kind of um heavy-handed totalitarian um there's you know one person who runs it Nurona emu like uh Nero the beast from the seam Um, and so it has these and he has like a little horn like uh
36:23like in Daniel looks like sort of this somewhat demonic kind of figure. No one no one sees him. No one even knows that there's this one person um uh running the world and then um a big part of what it does is suppress dangerous technologies. There's um and that you've had this one world state in place for 800 years, right? And so it's in a way it's the opposite of the one world or none of the watchmen of of um the other side of it
36:51where we are 5 minutes before midnight. We are looking at Armageddon.
36:56Armageddon's 5 minutes away. We need to do everything we can to stop it. That's the one world or none vibe. The the anti-argument if you want to do the weird Christian Japanese manga anti- um argument is you look at the world not five minutes before Armageddon. You look at it 800 years after the antichrist and the antichrist has been running the world for 800 years. Um there's a scientist who's like Einstein who comes up with nuclear power. He immediately
37:25gets killed and you know and then there was there was a you know there was a bygone age that looked like our 20th 21st century where there was a lot more stuff that actually worked and uh and then that's you know it's it's it's not an argument for Armageddon. It's not an argument for Dr. Strange Love, but uh that is also, you know, if we're going to talk about existential risks and precautionary principles, one of the things we need to weigh more heavily is the is the risk of the sort of one world
37:54totalitarian state. What's very difficult about it is I think you always need to think of totalitarianism not as some sort of abstract platonic form, but in in a more historical way.
38:06There's incipient totalitarianism where it's just getting started. You have full-blown totalitarianism where there's nothing you can do. Maybe at some point it decays like it did in the Soviet Union Eastern block in the 80s. Not so sure this happens if it's worldwide or maybe it requires a real Yeah, maybe it would require a real miracle if those days were not shortened and would survive, not even the elect. So it but it's some they're shortened but only by God once it's full-blown. And uh and then it's very
38:35important to do something when we're when we're early in this. And that's of course, you know, that's of course hard to say. And this is I know this is an overroought analogy, but you know, in 1923, the judge let Hitler off with an 18-month sentence because he looked preposterous. The the mustache was ridiculous. Everything about him was ridiculous. He was never going to get a following. And then at some point it snowballs and it's too late. And um but um but yeah, I would I would like to
39:03take the uh incipient totalitarianism that we see more seriously. It's it's it's overdone when people like us say that it's Stalinist because they're not yet killing millions of people. They'd like to, but they're not there yet.
39:16Uh Captain Luffy, so he's the character that he's the Christlike character, my prophet. I mean, he's the pirate running around. But it seems like in Odo's vision, you actually have a conflict um within the technological era, so to speak. I mean, doesn't Captain Luffy have his own, if you will, technology visav the the one world state? He's a kind of insurgent. Uh
39:44yes. Well, there are um Yeah. Well, there are um is it is it daring and dash that get that that he lives on or is it something else?
39:56There's there's some Yeah, there these um these devil fruits that give you the these powers. Um and um and so it's I'm not quite sure I'd call that technology or you know maybe maybe there's something Yes.
40:11something in nature. Um but it's it's it's basically um yeah know it's look it's a complicated multiaceted story. I would say the the um the the compare and contrast to Bacon that I would that I would stress the through line I would stress is that um you know yes there are ways the world state uses technology to control people. There are ways it tries to censor information there you know there's certain vectors
40:39you know where you you use technology as a control mechanism but then one of the main things you have to control and very different from the baconian intuition or it's much more marginal and bacon is you need the technology to control technology itself right and um and uh it needs to be centralized and you can't have this sort of you know um these libertarian pirates running around Um, Aristotle uh, he he thought there should be no
41:08innovation in the city aside from military technology.
41:12Because he saw it was disruptive to the regime.
41:16Uh, sure. But the exception, you know, it swallows the rule.
41:21Yes, of course it does.
41:22And then, you know, [laughter] we have this in late in modernity like early late modernity. How could people not see this coming for a long time? It's a Samuel Colt who invents the cult revol rif um revolver in uh 1830 comes up with an advertising jingle. Um God created men and Colonel Colt made them equal and so you know so it's all going to serve the great American ideal and you know and to some extent
41:50and in some ways in some ways it worked.
41:52Um, in some ways, uh, there there's a, yeah, there's a logic to it where it's a lot trickier when we get to the second half of the 20th, first half of the 21st century. the I mean I was uh um you know back uh uh rereading the book of Daniel um after reading your essay and in chapter 11 it's a kind of complicated sort of endless military conflict kind of global military conflict within the
42:19confines of the the world of Daniel. Um, and I thought, well, in the medieval world, there's certain kind of endless um, conflicts over honor. And I'm wondering whether our age is well, modernity is kind of ideologies in conflict, you know, liberalism, fascism, um, communism.
42:41Um, are we living in a time when, uh, it's ultimately conflicts of technologies?
42:48Well, again these are these are conflicts among human beings. So that's just the medium in which the uh the the conflict manifests itself. Not to say that the technologies are conflicting that meure um there's always a way that I want to there's a way these things could be timeless and eternal. We always have interpersonal rivalry. We have ideological conflicts. In some ways, these are not great things, but in some ways, maybe they they at least prevent the the easy formation of a of a one
43:18world state. Uh, and then you, you know, what I imagine would happen if you actually were to get a one world state would be, um, it would, it would be under the veneer where there are no ideological conflicts. And maybe it's an ideology in disguise. Everyone's a liberal internationalist. that's simply the truth, right?
43:40Or um or um the human actors would be less significant. You don't want sort of a even a colorful politician like uh President Trump because it's too much of a real human being and he might make decisions and it's sort of it's it's somehow too agentic and I often think of the EU as sort of as colorless. It's like that's what an AI looks like in government. there are no humans involved. It's just these rules that can
44:09be executed by by a by a by a computer code.
44:13Um and then yeah and then there's sort of a question in this sort of world of Shakespearean drama and conflict and ideology how how can can such a system you know some somehow arise um the uh you know there were there were these various medieval writings on the antichrist. There's a uh Ludus anti Christo is a sort of play from around 1160. It's not that great, but um but
44:40the one interesting literary idea in this play on the antichrist from the middle ages is you have the 10 kings from Daniel that the antichrist, you know, and he sort of takes over all their kingdoms and and the 10 kings are shown as they're sort of having all these fights with each other. my my I'm the king who you know has the longest lineage in the past or I have this claim because of this land and um you know I'm the greatest in this dimension and
45:10there's sort of these fights they have about the past and then the antichrist sneaks in and he thinks about the present and the future and so yeah so to the extent we're caught up in these fights about the past um we're we're not going to pay attention and the your and your point that you made earlier which I think is really important that that um the technological the Baconian project as it's matured and and taken on a life of its own it raises
45:39the stakes it raises the stakes as you say nuclear weapons raises the stakes of everything and so we're we begin to worry that maybe we can't afford these old we can't afford to live in a world where because inevitably if if we have an a world that gives priv gives priority to kind of personality and agency you're going to have conflict given human nature. Uh you know hopefully you can moderate the conflict but there's a tremendous temptation to sort of well no we need this is basically hobbs you got
46:08to design a system in which people are so fearful that they will they won't uh enter into conflict instead they'll submit to the one world government.
46:17Yeah. Or there are, you know, there's there probably complicated versions of this with the US history post 1945 where you could say the president became this semi- divine being who could start a nuclear war. This was very agentic. It was also very scary and very dangerous.
46:33And then in some ways um a lot of that not all of it got offramped after Watergate where um you know um yeah we don't want someone as crazy as Nixon anymore but um if you no long if a president can no longer uh no longer really has control of the nuclear weapons and has somehow shifted to this um you know bureaucratic uh deep state.
46:57Is that really a conservation of agency towards these um unelected agents in the deep state or is it sort of just sort of a world where you know a lot a lot less can be done? So yeah, I think there are these very um you know partial solutions we've we've tried to come up with and then you know in my telling you know yeah if you if you stealman the deep state you know a lot of it was about detecting nuclear weapons seeing who was developing them who you know there were
47:26a lot of things they were doing but this was the this was the really important thing you know whenever another country got nukes this was very dangerous for the US Soviets get them in 49 we get the Korean War a year later China 64 Vietnam starts a year later when you Yet when a when a hostile country gets nuclear weapons, we get a massive regional war because you can't retaliate to the Soviet Union or China for their support of uh Korea and North Korea and North Vietnam respectively. Um and um and so yeah, it was somehow very important to
47:56do this and then of course it came with you know it came with this uh deep state that you know I in my telling from the history was originally pretty good. You know, I think of, you know, I think of James Bond as more on our side politically, right of center at this point. At this point, if it's a USAD person, uh, whose, uh, work consists of going to climate change conferences, it's probably a different sociology from
48:25James Bond. the when I was in DC last spring, you know, meeting with this sort of young crowd, conservative kids, kids I say, 20s and 30s, they I got to say they were so thrilled because really basically they had begun to fear that nothing was really possible. You couldn't really do anything. And the administration, current administration, whatever you think of the particular things it's done, has has um, you know,
48:52has, you know, been very activist. Uh, and that seemed to encourage people at at a kind of deep existential level. It was just abstracting from what's being done, just that anything could be done because they were beginning to suspect that we're just frozen with a certain system.
49:07Well, it's frozen or even worse, we are we're on a certain track. Yeah. I mean, this was, you know, in some sense, this was the this was the Obama argument, the Hillary Clinton argument. They gave it a sort of a positive spin, but it was, you know, it was just, you know, there's a certain arc to history. It's it's it's just going in a certain way. You may like it, you may not like it. It's probably more good than bad, but it's, you know,
49:36there all these things that that can't can't really can't really be changed.
49:41And I I think um yeah I think there's you know there's some way you know you need to you need to try to restore a little bit more of a sense of freedom. I mean, you know, a place where I disagree with, let's say, the overly deterministic premillennial evangelicals who think, you know, these these prophecies tell us the Antichrist is inevitable and this will happen and that there's no room for
50:10human agency to prevent this. I I I always think these um it's maybe healthier, maybe better to read read these as as warnings. This this is what will happen without a without a miracle.
50:24This is what will happen if you know if people don't you know convert don't um change their minds don't act. It's it's Jonah going to Nineveh the Old Testament the city will be destroyed in 40 days and then but then there's a miracle people repent. Now maybe Nineveh gets destroyed you know a century later but uh but there is you know there is there's room for us to do something in the time that's given to us.
50:52The uh certainly that it strikes me as as as as you're right there's a there is a there is a fitting kind of um there's a fitting sense of one's finite agency.
51:05We can't save the world and and interestingly we we can't really destroy it either. It's funny, you know, we could we could, you know, nuclear war would not bring the world to an end. It would it would bring to an end almost everything we think of as part of the human world perhaps. Uh but it wouldn't bring the world to an end. So I think it's useful to to remember.
51:26Yeah. But I I wouldn't again I would not go the way of explaining away nuclear war. It's just that metaphysically there's a way of a way in which if you take a more realistic I mean the stakes are extremely high but you become I think you become easily manipulated by by demonic forces if you can't things up beyond what their reality or you discount let me throw this one on for you as a sort of a um
51:55Christed Gethsemane the day before he gets you know the hours before he gets arrested crucified. He tells the disciples, "You need to pray."
52:05And and then they fall asleep. And then he wakes them up. No, it's really important. You need to pray. And then they fall asleep again. Now, I don't know what would have happened if they stayed awake and prayed. Um, but I I'm tempted to say that even at that late an hour, things could have gone differently. And uh and maybe you know maybe it was some complicated interplay between God and them but uh you know um
52:33we we should not do the equivalent of what the disciples did and just hit the snooze button.
52:38No, I'm with you on that. I mean my reading of that would be they need to pray to prepare their souls for the trial that they're going to endure cuz they they all flee. I mean every every last one except for John at the foot of the cross. Um, so as opposed to forestalling the event that the father and the son, you know, that this is this cosmic drama that's going to unfold one way or the other. But be that as it may, I I do take exactly what you're saying
53:06and I agree with you completely that uh there is a temptation. Um there's quietism which is uh I think uh the wrong approach to take um as well as um a certain kind of vain glorious activism uh as if we can usher in the kingdom of god you know from which a great deal of harm has been done imminentizing the escaton as Eric Fogland put it. Um so we have to find the right we have to find
53:33the right sense of uh and we could certainly unlike the disciples stay awake and pray. You kind of end with that.
53:45I mean I I I take the ending is that we need to we need to choose sides and we can't pretend that we we can't pretend that we can't we don't have to make a decision about which side we're on. Um yeah, that that's that's that's certainly something like that truly is true. Um the the more modest thing I I would start with is um we've have to find some way to talk about these things and and think about them. And you know
54:11um and you know there's always you know I I there there are ways I've been thinking about this antichrist topic for 30 years or so and uh I've only started talking about it the last three four years that um you know there were ways in which it was um it's not a it's not a intellectually respectable topic. It's kind of down marketed not very down market. It's probably also, you know, if you're, I know, the CEO of
54:41PayPal or, you know, a tech a public tech company, um, the board might not approve of you talking about about this.
54:48So, you have to do it in the sort of coded esoteric Straussian way, even though the problem with doing that is it's too confusing and nobody knows what you're really talking about. Um um but um but you know one of the one of the reflections I've had is that um you know even though probably not enough people are thinking about this perhaps more people have thought about this than wanted to publicly talk about it just like myself and um you know we've I have
55:17a thesis that Pope Benedict you know thought about this quite a bit and didn't talk about it. Uh but I um but I but um but then then there were also a few people who talked about it and uh where they've simply been censored by the historians.
55:37Um, and the uh the one that I want to submit to that's a very interesting figure in this in this zone is someone like Dietrich Bonhaofer who's the uh Lutheran anti-Hitler theologian was part of the confessing true Christian church. Um, and he was sort of involved in the 1944 assassination plot on Hitler. And it's always sort of a very troubling character for uh for Christians because he somehow got the right answer but then
56:06it all feels sort of existentialist and it's Kirkagardian and Barthean and sort of vaguely ungrounded in in anything looking sort of reasonable. And uh and then of course it's also this incredible mish mash of politics and faith that we're we're supposed to be really allergic to. And I I don't know if this is a full corrective to Bonhaofer, but one of the things that uh we found in reviewing Bonhaofer is he spends a lot
56:35of time talking about the antichrist and Hitler is the antichrist and the f the furer leader can be a fur.
56:44So the word sounds similar in German fafur means deceiver. The leader can be a deceiver and be great. And there's a there's a long discussion on the sal in 1943 when he writes his ethics book in present there's a long discussion on Salavia's account of the antichrist where the signal the key division between the true Christian church whether Catholic evangelical orthodox is they maintain that Jesus is the Christ
57:13and then the false church of the antichrist replaces Jesus with the antichrist leader which is in some sense what the Nazi church was doing with Hitler. So, so uh no, I would the contra the historians on Bonhaofer, I would say that Bonhaofer had a far more systematic, far more rational account of what he was doing than um than we've given him credit for. Um you know, maybe Hitler was not precisely the
57:41final antichrist. He was certainly a type of the antichrist. and um and you know and and it was and somehow we it's it's good for us to yeah think about what happened then but also think about more what's going on today.
57:56Yeah. The prayer of uh for St. Michael the Archangel that Po Pope Francis encouraged people to say after mass is a it's a petition that uh Michael would uh uh um defend them against the wickedness and snares of the devil and to cast into hell Satan uh the evil spirits that prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. So the having an active sense that there are demonic powers abroad and
58:22that uh you one has to see that um uh technological phenomena, economic phenomena, political phenomena that you have to open up the accordion and see it as more than just um the imminent thing that appears at first glance or what the way the New York Times and analyzes it.
58:39Although it's of course it also in some ways appears as a human form and so there was you know oh I so you think the antichrist as a to keep that in mind in your moral imagination is helpful system it's a person right you know it's there were there were many types of Christ there were many forerunners to Christ in the time before Christ and the time after Christ there will be many forerunners to the antichrist so there are you know and and in some ways it's a way
59:08we say things about Christ. If Christ was radically one of a kind, then you but he's a type of prophet, he's a type of man, he's a type of defense lawyer, you know, there's sort of all kinds of ways we can sort of type of king, a type of scapegoat. There's sort of all these different ways um we can um we can understand that who Christ is. And then there's some something like that that I would say with with Antichrist. And then yes, it's you know there's there's sort
59:36of a unholy trinity in the book of Revelation where it's it's Satan, it's the dragon, and then the antichrist, the political leader is the beast from the sea, and then um the false prophet. So it's like God the Father, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the false prophet is sort of the religious ideological leader, the beast from the land. And it's this sort of unholy trinity that works together.
1:00:02But uh there's I sort of wonder whether in in sort of an rough analogy to the the Trinity where you know we know the most about Christ. If we're strictly monotheistic like Judaism and Islam, you don't know that much about Yahweh and Allah because they're too unitary. If you're trinitarian, you know something about the relationship of the three. But uh uh a lot of it you know through through through uh what
1:00:32what you can know about Christ. You can have belief in Yahweh. You can have belief in Allah. Um the thing where Christianity differs it. You can have more much more knowledge. And then the sort of I don't know the demonic analogy, right? I wonder is um you know how much can we know about Satan as just a unitary um you know sort of counterpart to Yahweh or Allah because it's just
1:01:01the devil has many disguises. He will be who he will be. It's it's uh it's almost sort of somehow too um [clears throat] I don't know um uh it doesn't have any natural categories.
1:01:16It's too nominalist. There's no nature of the devil. It's sort of very problematic in all all those kinds of ways. And then maybe maybe Antichrist, there's a type of antichrist. And this is this is even a way that we can Yeah. It's it Yeah. So there's there's a way you can talk about the antichrist in terms of the devil. he gets possessed by the devil, things like that. But maybe this is also a more rational way for us to talk about Satan and the devil.
1:01:42Well, thanks for being on the podcast. I really appreciate the essay and I agree that uh people people the antichrist as a uh as a as a figure um it it's it's very much denied but it nevertheless has an immediate salience to people when when you when you discuss it a frightening salience well it's it's uh you know people not discussing it and most times in Christian history would
1:02:12have itself seen as a sign of the end times. You know, the uh the watched kettle doesn't boil. [music] It does not follow that the unwatched kettle will not boil. [laughter]
