Thesis: Palantiri are not only dangerous things, they are also incredibly deceptive.
For the non-initiated in Tolkien, let me catch you up: In the Lord of the Rings there are these spherical seeing stones that a highly advanced race called of men, called the Numenoreans, made long before the events of the War of the Ring (the events around Frodo, Sam, and the rest of the fellowship).
These seeing stones, palantiri, allow the user (who must command some kind of command over the stone) the powers of communication and surveillance (the word palantiri comes from two elvish root words, palan ‘far’ and tir ‘to watch’ or ‘to oversee’). Users can communicate over great distances with one another and particularly power operators of the master-stone can bend the other stones to their will and utilize the whole web of palantiri as a kind of surveillance network to cast their minds across vast stretches of Middle Earth.
It is such stones that allow Sauron and Saruman to communicate with one another. It is another such stone that allows Denethor to spy on Sauron.
Here’s where things get real: ‘Palantir’ is the name that venture-capitalist-turned-apocalyptic-theologian Peter Thiel gave to his surveillance firm. And he did this intentionally. For those who don’t know him, Thiel is an interesting man: a law school graduate from Stanford, who co-founded PayPal, and was the key investor behind the monetization of Facebook, has spent much of the last few years doing lectures on the political theology of Carl Schmitt and Renee Girard focused mainly on the idea of the Antichrist.
Wild times we live in folks.
Back to today’s lesson: Thiel created his ‘Palantir’ operation precisely for the same reason Tolkien’s Numenoreans did: to build effective communication and surveillance networks in order to defend against the great enemy who would subdue the whole world in a global reign of terror. Peter Thiel is terrified of the Antichrist and his aim is to serve as a ‘katechon’ —the fancy Schmittian-Girardian word for someone who with-holds the powers of evil (which they lift from 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7). Like the men of Numenor Thiel has hope that communication and surveillance tech will serve to prevent armagedon-ish things like one-world governments and totalitarian dictators and nuclear warfare.
Cogent readers, even if you haven’t read Tolkien, will already see the first measure of irony here: the very Palantiri which the men of Numenor fashioned to limit the powers of evil ultimately served to extend those very powers. Sauron perfects the palantiri system of surveillance and control. They are dangerous things. And it seems already the case that the kind of planetary scale of Thiel’s networks are, likewise, the very kind of thing that will be perfected by the very kinds of evils he seeks to resist.
But there’s a deeper irony, for those who know the story deeper: in the end the Palantiri fail both the men of Numenor and Sauron in the same way: the very act of granting surveillance often has the long-term consequence of making the surveyor blind. For all the sight granted by the seeing stones both the Numenoreans and Sauron were overthrown by all the things their gaze was careless of. Surveillance creates vast dragnets of certain kinds information which obscures other kinds of information.
Many examples of this exist, but one will suffice for now: in all of the technological supremacy of the U.S. in Afghanistan our forces were routed by all of the things to which our surveillance was blind. We tracked all the phone calls, for instance, but ‘all the phone calls’ are difficult to sort; additionally, we were at a loss when insurgents stopped using phones. We had a perfect bird’s eye view and could piece together terrorist cells on cork-boards, but lost the kinds of relational information one can only get from sipping tea with the youngest son of a moderate imam at the wedding of an unimportant village couple.
For all Sauron’s sight he is blind to the importance of two hobbits bivouacking through Shelob’s lair. His eyes are on Aragorn —the important things.
This false sense of confidence, in the case of Sauron, or of doom, in the case of Denethor, sown by surveillance makes operators think “I’m in the know” when they are, perhaps, not actually.
All of it, from Peter Thiel to Denethor to Sauron, is animated by this simultaneous sense of terror about big things and of tedium about small things.
What the Bible, and the Lord of the Rings when read rightly, should tell us is that in reality it is often little things that mater biggest in the great scales of the world. The Biggest Thing of all, after all, became one the smallest —a zygote in the womb of a virgin in Roman-occupied Nazareth.
Scared of the future? Sure, most of us are. But that terror should drive us not to control but to faithfulness. You want to avoid the apocalypse? Love the small things of your own life. You want to subvert the rulers of this world? Shut-off your phone more often and do things that cannot be easily surveilled: go to church, take communion, teach your kids hula and to read the Scriptures in the original languages, get married, have kids, serve your neighbors, learn to read music, sing good songs in the company of others.
One final piece: Peter Thiel is very scared of the End of the World. This makes me doubt no so much his eschatology as history. The world already ended, Peter. The GodMan has vanquished Satan, a human Body sits on the Throne of Heaven, the Temple was destroyed. The oracles to which my ancestors prayed stopped speaking, the tragos of the dithyramb ceased to quell our ancient rage.
I fear that Thiel’s fear comes from the fact that for him Jesus is still only a figment —still just “a moment of a shift in human consciousness,” or some bosh like that— and not a historical fact.
Peter, thus, is very wary of hope. The eschaton is something to be avoided —don’t ‘immanentize the eschaton’ he warns. Like the dwarves at the end of C.S. Lewis’ Last Battle he is so scared of “not being taken-in” by false hopes he refuses to entertain any hopes at all, unless they are hopes that he can gain some control over circumstances. If the Resurrection of Jesus is not a historical fact on which we can reliably reckon, neither is the promise of the future Resurrection of All. And anyone who promises such things must be, according to Thiel, the Antichrist.
Don’t be like that. Be hopeful —not just lamely hopeful in a general sense, but hopeful in the God of the Resurrection. Against Thiel’s sagest advice we immanentize the eschaton every Sunday, we receive a foretaste of the Kingdom to come, we usher-in the will of God ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, we proclaim a future of victory, we declare that all the sufferings of this present age are not to be compared with the glories that await us.
More certainty is available for you in the Word of God than all the deceptive information of a palantir —both the fictional and not-so-fictional kind.