Greta Thunberg, Antichrist
A common nightmare I had as a child was of our home being invaded by unmarked government swat teams. I was afraid of this because my dad was afraid of it; the nightmares of the child reveal the paranoid delusions of the parent. My gun-loving Christian dad often spoke of the end times, the mark of the beast, the rapture, and the antichrist.
Babylon, or the whore of Babylon more particularly, was the biblical name of this evil empire, the dreaded one world government; most exemplified by of the Clinton administration’s attack on Christian values—not to mention gun rights (the right to kill with impunity). After Ruby Ridge and while we watched the David Koresh compound burn on TV, my dad lead me to fear that the Christians would soon be arrested and exterminated in the preliminary stages of the apocalypse, just as so many believers had been martyred for the faith by the imperial Roman state. Here my dad is falling back on paranoid victimhood, the last best defense of Christianity; Christ demands nothing less. Never mind that it is usually the Christian who produce the most victims, (whether heretics, women, indigenous, infidels etc).
As it turns out this once niche apocalyptic-paranoid worldview, beloved of fascist talk-radio and QAnon 4chan threads alike, has gone mainstream and is now the norm, found at the highest levels of government no less than the crystal citadels of silicon valley. This seems to be a confirmation of that old schizo-analysis claim that in the future everyone will be insane.
One such prominent billionaire tech-lord,—who will remain nameless—a catholic, who is “religious but not spiritual,” and has funded the current administration’s rise to power, had long feared the one world government with its attendant anti-Christian, anti-business policies. The dismantling of the federal government and the collapse of global trade networks, that we are watching in real time, is a win for his brand of techno-feudalism and the return to the barbarisms of the true catholic faith; it’s like a contemporary replay of the collapsing tower of Babel.
Curiously enough, according to this tech-lord’s vision of the end-times, there is an antichrist and it’s Greta Thunberg.
The amount of hate that Greta Thunberg’s plain-spoke climate activism inspires in certain corporate broheme white-men, has always struck me as, well, amusing; clearly these men have tender buttons, and Greta Thunberg knows how to push them. This hot antagonism, between on the one hand, an autistic young woman speaking truth to power, and on the other hand, extremely wealthy elites clinging to profit margins at the expense of the planet, seems like a cypher for the grand and absurd dilemma of our time. By raising the rhetoric to the level of the Christian apocalypse and naming Greta Thunberg the antichrist, the Christian tech-lord is expressing something true: a united global front fighting for the life of planet is antithetical to the interests of techncapital that knows only how to enslave, pillage and burn. If Christ is pointing up to heaven and beyond, the antichrist points down to the body of the dying earth.
The trajectory of western man, going from the earth to the sky, is here made obvious in all of its grotesque nihilism. “The Biosphere? Where we’re going we won’t need a biosphere.” McKenna said it back in the 90s: we can either live in a toxic wasteland ruled by nazis, or we join with the planet. This is like pascal’s wager in reverse: they will make planet earth a living hell to fund their fantasies of an off-world heaven. It is the same old dumb millenarianism that has been enshrined in Christianity from its beginnings now wrapped up in transhumanism and the glittering promises of AI. The ever greater consumption of energy and dwindling resources that power these fantasies is precisely the point. The point is to produce more victims.
The fact that these same Christians advocate for the production of more babies, into a world where their lives are at ever greater risk (together with Florida’s recent attempt to repeal child labor laws) makes it seem almost as if the modern Christian religion was reverting to child sacrifice…?
