The Worship of Competent Evil: Peter Thiel, Divine Command Theory, and the Politics of “Winning”
I recently came across a quote that made me stop dead in my tracks, forcing me to read it three times just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. It comes from tech billionaire and right-wing political benefactor Peter Thiel, commenting on the nature of morality and efficiency:
“There’s always a question I like to ask: What is the antonym of good?” the tech billionaire began. “The moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad. So, you know, if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore you’re actually maybe kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”
Thiel then links his notion of “competent evil” to the Faustian bargain, drawing on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version of the tale. In Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century original story, Dr. Faust trades his soul to Satan for knowledge and power, ultimately suffering eternal damnation. By contrast, in Goethe’s retelling, the one Thiel prefers, Faust is ultimately redeemed and admitted to heaven despite his deal with the devil. In Thiel’s reading, using Satan (evil) to benefit society ultimately excuses him in the eyes of God.
When I first read those words, I couldn’t help but think back to themes I’ve explored in my previous writing. One that first came to mind was my post titled Do Evil Means Justify Good Ends, where I looked into athletic scandals and institutional corruption. Back then, I explored how people in sports and business routinely excuse unethical shortcuts simply because their team wins or their bottom line grows. But Thiel’s statement takes that old, tired rationalization and puts it on steroids.
Here we have a prominent technocrat slicing language into neat little compartments, divorcing morality from functionality, and ultimately redeeming evil on the sole grounds of efficiency. If you are evil, you get things done. Therefore, getting things done makes you “kind of good.”
It doesn’t make any sense on its face. By any normal ethical framework, something that is good cannot be evil. Consequently, something evil cannot be good. But this absurdity forces us to ask a deeper question: What is Thiel actually trying to say here, and what does it reveal about the ideological undercurrents shaping our political, technological, and religious landscapes today?
The Architect of Power: Who Is Peter Thiel?
To understand why a statement like this matters, we have to recognize that Peter Thiel isn’t just some detached tech philosopher tossing out provocative soundbites at a conference. He is one of the most politically consequential and ideological tech billionaires of our time.
Thiel made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. Still, his true footprint lies in how he uses that vast capital to reshape American politics and state power. He was one of the very few Silicon Valley elites to publicly back Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, serving as a delegate and helping bridge the gap between right-wing populism and tech capital. More recently, Thiel played an instrumental, kingmaker role in JD Vance’s political rise, pouring a record 15 million dollars into Vance’s Senate campaign and helping launch him onto the national stage.
Beyond elections, Thiel’s influence is deeply embedded in the machinery of government surveillance. He co-founded Palantir Technologies, a big-data analytics firm whose primary clients include the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and domestic law enforcement. Palantir’s software is built to aggregate massive oceans of surveillance data, tracking individuals and mapping networks for state security and policing. Since the start of the Trump-Vance administration, Palantir has received over $ 12 billion in federal contracts, with billions more in the pipeline.
When a man who builds surveillance empires and engineers political dynasties starts splitting hairs to argue that “evil” is actually “kind of good” because it gets things done, we aren’t listening to abstract theory. We are listening to a blueprint to justify evil itself.
This ruthlessly functional mindset also shows up in Thiel’s private seminars and lectures on the concept of the Antichrist. Rather than interpreting the figure through traditional Christian theology, Thiel conveniently reframes the Antichrist as anyone who resists, regulates, or opposes the unbridled acceleration of artificial intelligence and technological progress. So, be careful when you criticize data centers or call for regulating potentially society-ending artificial intelligence. You may just be doing the “devil’s” work according to Thiel.
When we place these statements alongside Thiel’s previous comments, his private lectures, and the broader cultural movements he champions, a remarkably consistent and disturbing pattern emerges. It is a worldview in which effectiveness and raw power completely overpower morality, reducing human existence to a brutal calculation in which the ends always justify the means.
The False Dichotomy of Functional vs. Moral “Evil”
Let us examine Thiel’s linguistic trick more closely. By separating the moral antonym (evil) from the functional antonym (bad), he creates a false binary. In his framing, “bad” is coded as incompetence, failure, or ineffectiveness—someone who tries to do something and fumbles it, or someone paralyzed by hesitation and empathy. “Evil,” on the other hand, is coded as ruthless capability, someone willing to cross any ethical boundary, break any rule, or crush any obstacle to achieve their objective.
By setting up this dichotomy, Thiel uses sleight of hand, equating incompetence with a greater sin than malice. If your choice is between an incompetent bungler (“bad”) and a ruthless mastermind (“evil”), Thiel tells us to choose the mastermind, because at least the mastermind gets things done.
This is not a new philosophy. it is simply Machiavellianism dressed up in Silicon Valley jargon. But when we look at how this trickles down into everyday life, we see it manifesting in a dangerous cultural trend: evil means are routinely excused and celebrated as long as the desired end is achieved.
Political operatives on all sides continually tell us that public life is a zero-sum game of lesser evils. This ties directly to my exploration of false choices presented as the lesser evil in my previous post, The Third Way. In our current political climate, citizens are constantly pressured to choose between two destructive, highly polarized paths, told that compromising our moral character is the price of admission for “winning.” But when tech elites like Thiel begin publicly rehabilitating evil under the banner of competence, we move past choosing the lesser of two evils. We have begun worshipping the evil itself, provided it wears the efficient armor of success.
Thiel’s Anti-Humanist Underbelly: Hesitation and the “Anti-Christ”
To truly understand what Thiel means, we have to look at who he is and how he reacts when pushed on foundational human values. Consider his infamous interview with Ross Douthat for Complex and The New York Times, when Douthat pressed him on whether human flourishing is inherently good.
“You would prefer the human race to endure,” Douthat asked.
Thiel paused. He didn’t answer right away.
“You’re hesitating,” Douthat observed. As Thiel fumbled to gather his thoughts, Douthat noted, “This is a long hesitation.”
Think about that for a moment. A human being, a leader in artificial intelligence and futuristic technologies that impacts billions of lives, had to hesitate when asked if the survival and flourishing of the human race is a positive value. Why? Because in the cold, accelerationist mindset of techno-authoritarianism, human beings are not ends in themselves; they are either friction points to be optimized or raw materials to be consumed.
This anti-humanist attitude is also prevalent in Thiel’s private lectures on the Antichrist. To suit his worldview, Thiel has conveniently redefined the Antichrist not as a religious figure of deception and spiritual rebellion, but as anyone who opposes or impedes the evolution of AI. As a prime example of this “evil,” Thiel has pointed to Greta Thunberg, casting a young activist advocating for environmental preservation as a threat to technological progress.
Notice the profound and complete inversion at play here. In this movement, traditional Christian virtues such as mercy, compassion, empathy, care for the vulnerable, and stewardship of the earth are rebranded as “evil” because they slow down progress, regulate capital, or place human dignity above market efficiency. Meanwhile, the ruthless acceleration of technology, unchecked power, and domination over nature are baptized as “good.”
The Theological Parallel: Divine Command Theory and Politics
This modern techno-feudalist philosophy has deep, ancient roots in how humanity has historically weaponized theology to justify the worship of power.
What comes to mind is the philosophical concept of Divine Command Theory. In its purest theological sense, this theory holds that something is good because God commands it, even if it appears evil on the surface. Essentially, it says that since God makes the rules, they don’t apply to Him. However, when weaponized by human political and religious actors, Divine Command Theory transforms into a dangerous justification for atrocities. If God commands or permits something that appears evil to us, it must ultimately be good because God is on our side.
This theory has negatively influenced history and has been used to justify destructive interpretations of passages like Romans 13, which teaches that God institutes and confers power on all governing authorities. Too often, political operators interpret this to mean that whoever holds power has been divinely crowned, meaning that when they commit acts of cruelty, corruption, or injustice, those acts must somehow be sanctioned by God because “anything appointed by God cannot be bad.”
As I have often noted when looking at biblical narratives, it is always fascinating how many critics and deconstructionists attack the hill of biblical inerrancy by starting with the flawed premise that God actually commanded or explicitly instructed every single violent act recorded in scripture. I believe the Bible was largely shaped by the authors’ view of God at the time, which they then projected backward into the narrative. Interpreting these passages without looking through the lens of Jesus and His ultimate revelation of God’s true nature can be very damaging.
When ancient accounts describe societies committing horrific acts of warfare, such as the slaughter of women and children, those acts were retroactively considered “good” by the chroniclers because, after all, they won. As the old saying goes, the winner always gets to write history. The victors needed a theological framework to justify their supremacy, so they projected their justifications onto the Almighty and convinced themselves that their conquest proved divine favor.
If you win, you are competent. If you are competent, you are doing God’s work. Therefore, any moral atrocity committed along the way is retroactively transformed into “good.”
Modern Manifestations: Donald Trump and the Divine Blank Check
We see this exact psychological and theological mechanism playing out in our modern political theater, most glaringly around figures like Donald Trump.
When Donald Trump claims he was “saved by God” after surviving a crisis or an assassination attempt, his followers and apologists often interpret it in deeply evangelical terms, as a moment of spiritual awakening, a call to repentance, or a miraculous turning point. But Trump doesn’t mean that.
When Trump says God saved him, he means he was saved to continue doing exactly what he has always been doing. He views his survival not as a summons to humility, righteousness, or mercy, but as a divine stamp of approval. It is a cosmic blank check certifying that he is perfectly in line with what power requires, with zero repentance necessary.
It was never a moment where he looked in the mirror, recognized the destructive nature of his character, and truly called on Jesus in the way a broken sinner seeking transformation would. How do we know this? Because the fruit has not changed. In fact, true to form, rather than softening or maturing, the behavior has only intensified.
As Jesus said, one can discern the health of a tree by the nature of the fruit it bears. But the adherents of the “competent evil” school of thought don’t care about fruit. They only care about harvest yields. To them, winning is the ultimate sacrament. If a leader retains power, dominates their enemies, and gets things done, they excuse the moral rot in their character as mere “functional necessity.” These are the folks who say their vote depends only on the policies of those they support, regardless of their individual character.
Why Jesus Was All About the Means
As I wrote in Do Evil Means Justify Good Ends?, when we look at these problems from a biblical perspective, the bottom line is clear: Jesus was all about the means.
We can see by his teachings and the example of his life that the means and the way we conduct our lives are infinitely more important than achieving any worldly “good” end we can conceive. Indeed, Jesus emphasized this when he asked, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36).
Another powerful example appears in Matthew 4:8-11, which recounts how Satan took Jesus up on a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in all their magnificence, telling him they could all be his if he would just bow down and worship him. Think about that for a moment. If the world’s view of a good end mattered most—if efficiency and immediate results were what mattered—then why didn’t Jesus take the offer? Why go through all the travails of his ministry on earth, including the pain and suffering of the cross? Imagine the “good” that people would argue Jesus could have done if he had taken control of all the earth’s kingdoms right then and there through a shortcut.
In the world’s view, wouldn’t compromising with evil for a seemingly good, less painful outcome be a smart move? Of course, Jesus knew that humanity’s ultimate redemption depended entirely on the moral purity of His sacrifice, which is why he refused the shortcut.
We have to differentiate between what the world considers a good end and what God considers a good end. To us, political victory, wealth, cultural dominance, and having every material thing we want in life are good ends. But are these things important to God? Are these the things we are permitted to commit immorality to attain? No. As fallen creatures, we must—with the help of the Holy Spirit—try to do the right thing in all situations, regardless of the worldly outcome we desire.
We tell our children that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that cheating is always wrong, even if it benefits them in the short run. Can we then turn around and qualify those statements as adults by saying they only apply when it’s convenient? Did Jesus ever qualify any of his core commands? When Jesus said to “love others as we love ourselves,” there was a period at the end of the sentence. He did not say “love others as we love ourselves unless they are political opponents” or “unless ruthlessness gets the job quicker.” There are no conditions on the moral means we are called to use to achieve the goals of His kingdom, regardless of how the world measures success.
Rejecting the False Gospel of Power
Peter Thiel’s viral musings on the “functional antonym of good” are more than just eccentric billionaire philosophy. They are a stark warning sign, marking an ideological pivot away from a shared moral framework and toward cold, technocratic tribalism, where ethics are treated as dead weight and ruthlessness is crowned virtue.
Whether we encounter it in systems that devalue human life, political movements that baptize corruption as strength, or in theological distortions that turn God into a patron of victors, the underlying sickness is the same: it elevates power over morality and righteousness.
As those who seek to navigate these turbulent times with integrity, we cannot afford to fall into this trap. We must reject the false choice between the “bad” of paralysis and the “evil” of ruthless competence. We must return to a Third Way—a path that refuses to let the fear of losing dictate our morality and recognizes that any victory won by sacrificing our humanity is no victory at all.
True goodness is never found in the efficient execution of evil. It is found in the quiet, stubborn refusal to let the darkness become our master.
