The Antichrist Today: Russian Conservative and Techno-Enlightenment Versions

Antichrist riding Leviathan, from Liber Floridus by Lambert de Saint-Omer, c. 1120

The current global moment is marked by a fundamental shift in temporal orientation, where belief in progress (primarily social and political) is losing its legitimacy in both mass consciousness and the ideological orientation of elites. The progressive mindset is being replaced not only by a reactionary one (i.e., a mindset associated with various forms of “going back”), but also by an apocalyptic one, based on the idea of the approaching end of the world, which needs to be prevented in one way or another through radical changes in the forms of national and global politics. However, it is not only forms of “restraint” that are central to such views, but also the very image of the “end of the world” itself, as well as certain ideas about its roots and driving forces. 

In this sense, various conceptualizations of the force that “restrains” the world from succumbing to the kingdom of the Antichrist—fundamental to both the pro-Trump “Dark Enlightenment” in the US, and to official Kremlin ideology—no longer represent marginal worldviews, but seek to occupy the mainstream in the context of the crisis of liberal progressivism. In this essay, I will address the parallels and differences between these two views of the coming Antichrist and the restraining force.

First of all, it is worth briefly recalling the significance of the image of the Antichrist in the conservative intellectual tradition of modernity, on which contemporary neo-reactionary thought relies in various ways. Since the nineteenth century, the figure of the Antichrist has been gradually transformed into a description of the dominant social trends inherent in the secular world (i.e., the world of the Enlightenment). The Antichrist is a dystopian image of a homogenized society where true human purposes are lost and subordinated to impersonal mechanisms, a realm of total control and calculation where the whole determines all the embedded elements. By promising the fulfillment of universal freedom, the Antichrist actually establishes a system of absolute slavery, where human beings are deprived of true inner freedom—that is, the choice between good and evil.

In Putin’s Russia, this interpretation of the Antichrist, which dates back to religious thought of the late nineteenth century (including Vladimir Solovyov), has gained the status of official doctrine in recent years and has been expressed repeatedly by Patriarch Kirill and, to some extent, by Putin himself. The Antichrist refers to the liberal West, promoting false universalism, striving for the totalitarian unity of a “rules-based world,” blurring the boundary between good and evil, and thus destroying the very essence of humanity. Patriarch Kirill has also spoken many times about the danger of “transhumanism”—“a surrogate of a man capable of replacing a real man.”1 This danger is associated not only with the false idea of social progress, but also with the progress of technologies that are beyond human control and acquire independent agency, indifferent to morality. The need to subordinate technology to Christian morality largely coincides with the politics of “digital sovereignty”—restricting the internet in the interest of national security. 

One recent example of such conservative apocalyptic anti-accelerationism is presented in a novel by RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, In the Beginning Was the Word, in the End Will Be the Number. The novel is set after a global catastrophe, where all survivors live under the totalitarian rule of artificial intelligence. In this new world, nation-states and nations as such have been abolished, as well as the Russian language, which is completely banned as incompatible with the logic of the algorithm and containing structures that cannot be rationalized. The only weak hope for spiritual salvation in the novel is tied to the surviving remains of the Solovetsky Monastery. 

In this approach, the standardization and uniformity of human beings is opposed by particularistic differences that cannot be reduced to total unity and thus preserve the possibility of individual moral choice. Thus, the idea of a “multipolar world” is directly linked to the “preservation” of moral ambivalence (and, therefore, individual freedom). This combination is key to the synthesis of cultural particularism and Christian messianism in Putin’s ideology. From this point of view, Russia is not just a self-sufficient “civilization-state” with its own unique “traditional values,” but also bears a gospel for the rest of the world, liberating it from impending anti-Christian totalitarianism and opening an era of the coexistence of diverse civilizations, none of which claims global domination or the possession of universal truth.

This understanding of the “restraining force” (katechon)—combining the disciplining power of the Russian authoritarian state with the moral “complexity” of the individual—dates back to one of the most original Russian conservatives of the nineteenth century, Konstantin Leontiev (1831–91). One of the early proponents of the concept of multiple civilizations, Leontiev presented in his writings (primarily in his book Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1875) a combination of philosophical vitalism and the idea of katechonic restraint against the Antichrist.

According to Leontiev, Europe is moving toward death, as its commitment to democratic progress means a desire for simplification and uniformity. Leontiev describes this trend not only in religious and eschatological terms, but also in medical ones, comparing the development of civilization to the state of a living organism. The supreme point of development in any organism is the highest degree of complexity, polarity, and unpredictability of its processes. Disease, on the other hand, is the striving from complexity toward simple unity, the homogeneity of all internal processes of the body. Leontiev argues that death is the final return from complexity to homogeneity, from the diverse to the similar. This principle applies equally to individual organisms and to society. 

“The European revolution is a universal mixture, a desire to equalize and depersonalize people into a type of average, harmless, and hardworking but godless and personless human being—a bit of an Epicurean and a bit of a Stoic.”2 To overcome this death drive, time must be turned away from linear movement (towards death) and towards the reproduction of complexity through repetition. On a social and political level, this means not only the preservation of absolute monarchy, but of all forms of estates-based society and cultural differences (“flourishing complexity”). At the individual level, it implies the absence of a unified norm for a mentally balanced person. The polarity of raging passions and emotions constantly escaping the mind’s control must be restrained by the brutality of a despotic state and the asceticism of the Church. It is precisely this restraint and preservation of unpredictability and inequality that Leontiev views as the purpose of the state, which opposes the liberal-progressive Antichrist. In a sense, for Leontiev, the true katechon is not even the state or the feudal social structure, but the very preservation of nonidentity and conflict between the forces of life and moral demands, the tension between aesthetics and ethics, which leaves room for diversity in the world. 

It seems to me that it is precisely in this struggle against standardizing equality and for the protection of moral ambivalence and unpredictability that the key parallel between Putinism and the American “Dark Enlightenment” can be found. 

In his manifesto “The Dark Enlightenment,” Nick Land argued that “people are not equal, they do not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its systematic negation.”3 This reality of inequality is masked by a total system of false consciousness and the institutions based on it, which the Dark Enlightenment thinkers call “the Cathedral.” This system is like a pseudo-church, as it claims a monopoly on morality and justice, which is related to the repressive equality of the strong and the weak. Its goal is also to create an average person who is manageable and predictable. In this sense, the Cathedral appears to be a restraining force, as it attempts to restrain, through the institutions of democratic politics, the acceleration of the capitalist economy, which embodies the true reality of vital energy. 

While the line of right-wing accelerationists is quite consistent with the vitalist perspective described by Leontiev, a series of recent lectures and interviews by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, devoted to the Antichrist, come closer to his reactionary-religious perspective.

For instance, in a recent lecture delivered in San Francisco, Thiel defines the Antichrist as an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears at the end times.4 The path of the Antichrist, Thiel argues, begins with the proclamation by this anti-messiah of the coming end of the world, which could only be prevented by stopping all conflicts and creating a “one-world state.” (It is worth noting that Thiel directly refers here to Vladimir Solovyov, who in his “Three Conversations” also describes the appearance of the Antichrist offering to save the world from annihilation).5 According to Thiel, it is the cultivation of the “fear of existential threats” that is the main strategy of the Antichrist. The Antichrist, then, comes not just as a false messiah, but as a false katechon, calling for the restraining of the world from climate catastrophe or the escalation of military conflicts by halting technological growth and restricting national sovereignty through international law.

If in the past the Antichrist spoke in the name of progress, today his language is one of a new “barbarism”—opposition to science and technology. This is how the modern Antichrist, according to Thiel, mimics the katechon and presents himself not as a force for development but as a force for restraint. The Antichrist today means the absolute end of development: the last philosophy, the last individual, the last ruler. Late modernity—the era the Antichrist proposes to abandon—was by contrast based on openness to unpredictability, the constant emergence of new unresolved questions and challenges. In other words, according to Thiel, the development of technology today multiplies the complexity of the world and thus restrains the Luddite Antichrist, with his project of a one-world state.  

It is worth adding that Thiel’s theological model is fully consistent with the logic of venture capitalism. As Benjamin Shestakofsky demonstrates in his recent book Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, the only basis for investment in start-ups is the promise of dramatic growth and expansion, rather than expected profits. As Shestakofsky notes, “Venture capital firms’ investment decisions are thus informed by ‘fictional expectations’—imaginaries that allow them to organize their profit-seeking activities amid conditions of uncertainty, in which the outcomes of their actions are unpredictable and ultimately incalculable.”6

In sum, both ideas of the Antichrist—the Russian conservative-civilizational (techno-pessimistic) one and the techno-optimistic Dark Enlightenment one—converge on this main point: the escalation of unpredictability and the non-calculability of the future, restraining the Apocalypse.