A common fear 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. 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 the Clinton administration and their attack on Christian values. After Ruby Ridge and while we watched the David Koresh compound burn on TV, my dad feared that the Christians would soon be persecuted 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 Christians who produce the most victims.

As it turns out this once niche apocalyptic-paranoid worldview beloved of Christian grandparents, right-wing 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 lends credibility to that old schizo-analysis claim that in the future everyone will be insane.

One such prominent billionaire tech-lord, a catholic who is “religious but not spiritual,” and has funded the current administration’s rise to power, has long feared the one world government with its attendant anti-Christian, anti-business policies. The current dismantling of the federal government and the collapse of global trade networks 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-spoken climate activism inspires in certain corporate white-dudes, has always struck me as amusing; clearly these brohemes 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, the sycophants of extremely wealthy elites clinging to profit margins at the expense of the planet, is 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 tech-lord expresses something true: a united global front fighting for the life of planet is antithetical to the interests of technocapital that knows only how to enslave, pillage and burn. If Christ is pointing up to the 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. This hatred of nature has been inscribed in Christianity since its beginnings. Now the whole world is paying for 1600 years of the Christian doctrine of the fallen earth and the promise of a new one. This same old dumb millenarianism is repackaged as transhumanism, effective altruism and the glittering promises of AI. This is like Pascal’s wager in reverse: make planet earth a living hell now to fund the fantasies of an off-world heaven tomorrow.

In the Schreber case Freud interprets fantasies of the end of the world as the projection of an internal catastrophe. I should like to point out the obvious, that while Judge Schreber is paranoid he is first and foremost a Christian and paranoid. He is indulging in a pathology that is woven in to the very fabric of Christianity; the promise of the end-times is what gives Christianity its great appeal. A certain kind of Christian desires the apocalypse because they are already suffering from an internal apocalypse. Having is wanting.

Perhaps Greta Thunberg is so alarming to so many because she represents the end of the apocalypse, standing for a time without climax, a time that merely continues.