... Douthat: ... I’m
just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to
permanent authoritarian rule.
Thiel:
Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But
is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the
stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace
and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the
Antichrist is “peace and safety.” And
we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S.
but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers
to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates
nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular
nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the
Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S. And
so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of
stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is
that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the
cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some
transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or
it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of
government that got changed into this stagnationist thing. Nuclear
power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow
has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.
Douthat:
So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the
Antichrist, in that telling. ...
Here in The New York Times.
It's truly precious to see a gay man's warnings about cultural decadence, and Christianity, taken seriously by a purportedly Christian interlocutor for a purportedly serious newspaper.
As Rod Dreher likes to say . . .
