Alt Binaries

So Thiel is doing the Antichrist circuit now, four nights at some venue in SF, sold out, and the takes are all about how this is either some 4D chess move from the Founders Fund guy or evidence that Silicon Valley has finally lost its mind, and underneath that — the part nobody wants to engage with because engaging with it would require admitting that the categories everyone uses to understand this stuff are about forty years out of date — what Thiel is doing is a completely legible thing that has a name and a tradition and a specific ideological lineage, it’s just that the lineage runs through people most journalists covering tech don’t read.

The name is *katechon*. Second Thessalonians, the thing that restrains the lawless one until the appointed time. Schmitt picks it up in the 40s and turns it into a political-theological concept — the katechon is whatever institution holds back the apocalypse, holds back the dissolution of order, the thing that gives history time to keep happening rather than collapsing into the end. For Schmitt the Catholic Church is one, the Holy Roman Empire was one, the modern state can be one if it’s strong enough. The katechon is the restrainer. It’s the thing standing between you and the eschaton.

Now, Thiel reading Schmitt is not news, this has been documented for fifteen years, the Stanford Review crowd was passing around *Political Theology* and *The Concept of the Political* before most of them had jobs, and Thiel specifically has cited Girard (his Stanford advisor) constantly and Girard is the bridge — Girard’s whole late career was about scapegoat mechanisms and apocalyptic Christianity, and Schmitt and Girard meet in a very specific place which is: liberal modernity is running out, the Enlightenment has cashed all its checks, and the question is what restrains the chaos that comes next. So you’ve got this whole intellectual furniture sitting in Thiel’s head and has been for decades.

What’s new — and what people are missing because they’re trying to figure out if Thiel is “really” Christian or doing some kind of LARP — is that the Antichrist talks are the *application* of the framework to a specific contemporary problem, which is global governance, AI safety regimes, biosecurity infrastructure, basically the entire Davos-WHO-effective-altruism stack. In the Schmitt-Girard framework, the Antichrist functions as the figure who unites the world rather than as a guy with horns under the banner of preventing apocalypse, and in doing so brings about the conditions that *are* the apocalypse — peace and safety, then sudden destruction, the unifier-as-destroyer. The thing that promises to restrain catastrophe and IS the catastrophe wearing the costume of the katechon. This is a coherent reading of the relevant texts, you can argue with it and it holds together, and it has been kicking around fundamentalist Protestant circles since basically the Scofield Reference Bible, which by the way is why dispensationalist Christians have been suspicious of the UN since 1945 — same framework, different vocabulary.

So Thiel goes up there and tells four nights of San Francisco tech people that the One World Government coming to save them from runaway AI and engineered pandemics is, in a specific theological sense that he is borrowing from Schmitt and Girard and Revelation, the Antichrist. And the rooms sell out. And every coverage angle treats this as either weird-billionaire-content or sinister-fascist-content, when the actually interesting thing is what it tells you about who Thiel is talking to and why they’re paying attention.

Because here’s the thing — and this is where the material analysis kicks in over the ideology porn — Silicon Valley in 2025 is in a structurally specific position vis-à-vis the federal government and the international regulatory apparatus that did not exist in 2015. There’s an actually-credible AI capability buildout happening. There’s an actually-credible push to regulate it from Brussels, from the UN, from the AI safety institutes that the Biden admin set up and that the Trump admin has not entirely dismantled (Vance is, of course, a Thiel guy, this is Thiel’s investment in Vance paying out exactly as designed, on a deliberate timeline rather than by coincidence). The people in the room at the Antichrist talks are mostly founders and technical people whose entire economic future depends on the answer to one question: does AI development get nationalized into a small consortium of approved labs operating under international oversight, or does it stay distributed across a competitive ecosystem where startups can still move? And the Davos answer, the WHO-shaped answer, the EU AI Act answer, is *consortium with oversight*, and it’s being sold under the banner of preventing extinction.

Now you can be a Yudkowsky-style AI doomer and think this consortium-with-oversight thing is good and necessary and the only thing standing between us and the paperclip maximizer. Or you can be a Thiel-style accelerationist-katechon thinker and observe that “we must unite humanity under a single coordinating body to prevent extinction” is, structurally, the Antichrist move from Revelation 13, and if you’ve been reading Schmitt for thirty years you have a vocabulary for this that the Yudkowsky people don’t have access to because they’re working off Bostrom and decision theory rather than political theology. The vocabularies are talking past each other but they’re describing the same fight.

What’s funny — and this is where the historical rhyme gets specific — is that this is approximately the third time in the last 150 years that American Protestant apocalyptic thinking has been deployed against a globalist coordination project, and it’s worked every single time. Bryan does it against the gold standard and the international banking consortium in 1896 (the Cross of Gold speech is *literally* a crucifixion image deployed against international finance, people forget this). The dispensationalist crowd does it against the League of Nations in the 20s and against the UN in the late 40s, and the entire Birch Society / sovereignty / “get US out of UN” politics of the 60s and 70s runs on this exact theological circuitry — the one-world government as Antichrist’s vehicle, decoded out of Daniel and Revelation, deployed politically against actually-existing internationalist institutions. And it WORKED in the sense that the US never joined the League, never accepted the kind of UN supremacy that the founders of the UN actually wanted, and the entire structure of postwar American foreign policy is shaped by the fact that you can’t sell a globalist project domestically to an electorate that has been catechized in dispensationalism since their grandparents were children.

So Thiel, who is a much smarter operator than people give him credit for (the people who think he’s a sinister mastermind and the people who think he’s a clown are both wrong, he’s a guy with a specific intellectual formation deploying it strategically), looks at the AI safety / biosecurity / pandemic-preparedness coordination project and recognizes it as structurally identical to the League of Nations debate, and reaches for the same theological toolkit that worked in 1920 and 1948 and 1962. The katechon framework lets him say: I’m in favor of safety, I’m in favor of coordination, and I’m against THIS PARTICULAR FORM of coordination because it’s the bad one, the one that brings the thing it claims to prevent. Same thing Bryan said about the gold standard and the dispensationalists said about the UN. Same machine, new costume.

And the genius of doing it as a lecture series on the Antichrist, rather than as op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, is that it embeds the political argument in a religious framework that is much harder to refute on technocratic grounds. You can’t run a Brookings paper against the Antichrist. You can’t get a McKinsey deck to address eschatology. The argument lives at a level the consortium people can’t reach because they don’t have the vocabulary, they think theology is what unintelligent people do, and meanwhile Thiel is building a narrative infrastructure that will let his portfolio companies fight regulatory capture for the next ten years by appealing to a theological tradition that has more cultural depth in America than the entire AI safety movement combined.

Whether Thiel personally believes any of this in some deep sincere way is the wrong question, also unanswerable, also irrelevant — Bryan probably believed it, the Birchers definitely believed it, and Thiel may or may not, but the *deployment* works regardless of the sincerity of the deployer, that’s how political theology works, you need the rituals to keep happening more than you need the priests to believe in the right places at the right times.

The thing that’s new is that for about a hundred years this theological circuitry was a populist instrument. It was the rural-evangelical-Protestant tradition pushing UP against urban-cosmopolitan-internationalist elites. Bryan was a populist. The Birchers were petty-bourgeois. The dispensationalist resistance to the UN was coded as red-state, working-class, suspicious-of-Harvard. What Thiel is doing — and this is what makes it historically novel on top of being a repeat — is deploying the populist apocalyptic frame from INSIDE the financial-technological elite, against a different faction of the financial-technological elite. The Antichrist talks are happening at a venue in San Francisco. The audience is founders. The target is Davos. This is the apocalyptic frame being used as a weapon in an intra-elite struggle, which is something the Bryan-to-Birch tradition never quite did, because those people sat outside the elite tier required to fight intra-elite wars.

Whether that’s a stable configuration or a transient one, whether the populist energy lent to one elite faction by another elite faction can stay loyal once the regulatory fight is settled, whether the people in the room at the Antichrist talks understand they’re being conscripted into someone else’s investment thesis or whether they actually believe the eschatology — these are the open questions, and the journalists who keep writing “Peter Thiel is weird now” pieces are not going to answer them, because answering them would require reading Schmitt, and reading Schmitt would require admitting that a guy they’ve decided is a clown has been doing serious intellectual work for thirty years while they were filing 800 words on whether his vest is ironic.

The vest has never been ironic, and that’s been the problem the whole time.

—

That’s the version of the argument that gets you on a stage in San Francisco. There is another version that does not get you on any stage at all. It is the version you encounter when the katechon in question is your landlord, and the apocalypse it claims to be restraining is you, personally, having to find somewhere else to live by the end of the month. The framework is the same. The vocabulary is the same. What changes is the altitude. Once you have learned to see the shape Thiel is pointing at — once you have the word *katechon* in your head and you cannot get it out — the shape turns out to be everywhere. It is on every street. It is, specifically, on mine.

There is a building two streets from my flat that has been six months from completion for the last four years. It is a residential development. It says so on the hoarding, in a font selected by a graphic designer who is still trying to cover their student loads. The hoarding shows a couple drinking espresso on a balcony that does not exist yet, with a child whose face has been generated by software that learned to draw children by looking at other software’s drawings of children, and the child is laughing because he has been told the joke that lives in the part of the latent space marked LAUGHING CHILD. Behind the hoarding there is a hole. The hole has been there since 2021. Sometimes there are men in it. Sometimes the men are doing things. Often they are not. Last March I watched two of them, in hi-vis, sit on an overturned bucket for the entire duration of a phone call I made to a Czech immigration lawyer, which lasted forty-three minutes, during which they did not move except to alternately sip what I am almost certain was lukewarm Lucozade. The lawyer told me that no, I could not, and the men nodded sympathetically, and the hole did not get any deeper.

The thing about the hole is that everyone has decided it is fine. Council planning notices come and go, Tesco runs out of ginger and gets it back, the bus route is rerouted twice, a couple I knew slightly gets divorced and the husband moves into a flat across the road from the hole and starts buying cigarettes again, the new prime minister of Sweden is sworn in, the old prime minister of Sweden writes a memoir, the cherry tree on the corner blooms and is killed by an unseasonable frost and replaced by a sapling that will, in turn, bloom and be killed by another frost in another April that none of us can quite remember, and the hole stays. It is exactly the same hole. The same depth, the same lining of mildewed plywood, the same blue tarp held down with the same yellow plastic chain that has, over the years, become a slightly grimmer yellow. There is presumably a developer somewhere with a Maltese passport and a Cayman Islands company and a wife who collects equestrian sculpture, and there are presumably reasons — financial, legal, a covenant on the deed concerning Roman remains, a dispute with the council about parking, a son in rehab — and these reasons are presumably perfectly comprehensible to anyone with a stake in them, but from my window the hole is the only thing in my life that does not change. It is the most stable feature of the visible world. My grandmother died, I changed jobs twice, I broke my left hand on a radiator pipe, the cat got cancer and was given to a man in Walthamstow who wanted to nurse her into death, and the hole was there throughout, indifferent, conserved.

I have a particular feeling about the hole that is not exactly hatred and not exactly affection but something more like the feeling I imagine medieval villagers had about a goitre on the neighbour’s neck. It is what’s there. It is what you live with. You stop seeing it and then occasionally you remember it and you have a kind of agnostic nausea about the structure of the universe that permits goitres, and then you see the neighbour at the bus stop and you both nod and say morning and the goitre comes too, slung along on its tendon, sociable, included. The hole is included now. It came to my friend’s leaving drinks last summer in the form of the joke we made about not being able to walk down Acre Lane without remembering it. It came to Christmas in the form of my father, who had visited once and asked, in his way, whether we were sure we had bought the right flat. It is a member of my household now. The hi-vis men with the bucket are godparents, in some sense, to my anxiety about the future.

The hoarding has, in the last six months, started to peel. The corner near the bus stop has lifted in a long curl, like the lip of a roasted parsnip, and beneath the laughing child you can see a fragment of an earlier hoarding for an earlier development by an earlier company that said, in a stencil from approximately the late 1990s, BIG BUILD COMING — I cannot quite see what was coming, only that it was big, and that it was coming, and that it never got here. The hole has had at least one earlier hole inside it.

But lately I have been thinking about a man called Tertullian.

—

Tertullian was a Berber lawyer, born in Carthage around the year 155, who became a Christian in his middle age and turned out to be too clever about it for everyone’s comfort. He invented half the Latin theological vocabulary anyone is now allowed to use, including the word *trinity*, which he forced into existence by main rhetorical strength because the Greek formulations weren’t doing what he wanted in Latin. He wrote in a prose style that has, until last week when I started rereading him, seemed to me a kind of vinegar — bracing, cleansing, mostly used to dissolve the throats of opponents. Around 197, in a pamphlet called the *Apologeticum*, addressed to the magistrates of the Roman provinces who were at that point intermittently feeding his coreligionists to dogs, Tertullian mounted what looked, on first inspection, like a routine plea for tolerance. The Christians are loyal subjects, the Christians do not foment rebellion, the Christians pay their taxes. And then in chapter 32, in a sentence that nobody in 197 quite knew how to read and that nobody in 2026 quite knows how to read either, he says something extraordinary. He says: we Christians, we pray for the emperor, we pray for the imperial house, we pray for the legions. We pray for Rome. We pray for Rome because the end of Rome is the end of the world. The empire is the *vis magna* — the tremendous force — that holds back the catastrophe. If Rome falls, the antichrist comes, and the dead rise, and the sky tears open, and everything ends.

Imagine being told this in 197. Imagine being a magistrate in Lugdunum, with a stack of arrest warrants on your desk and a centurion in your antechamber, and a small leather pamphlet arrives from Carthage telling you that the man you are about to feed to a panther is sustaining the cosmos by virtue of his prayers for your emperor. The text was meant to be a defence of the persecuted; it became, immediately and forever, the founding document of a particular kind of imperial self-conception, in which the empire is not a contingent political fact but the necessary brake on apocalypse. Tertullian, who hated the empire, accidentally wrote its theology. The Berber lawyer with vinegar in his prose handed Rome a metaphysical justification it had never thought to ask for: the empire as the world’s last firewall.

The word he was elaborating, although he did not use it directly in chapter 32, comes from a notoriously slippery passage in the second letter to the Thessalonians. Paul, writing perhaps in the early 50s, is trying to talk a panicky community out of the conviction that the end is happening *right now* — there have been letters, there have been rumours, people have stopped going to work — and he tells them, no, calm down, the apocalypse cannot happen yet because there is a thing, *to katechon*, that is holding it back, and you know what it is, I told you what it is when I was there. He never says what it is. He just refers to it like an inside joke. Whatever told the Thessalonians what *to katechon* meant has not survived, and so what has come down to us is a Greek participle — neuter, then masculine — meaning *the thing that holds back* and then *the one who holds back*, hovering in the text like a redaction.

The verb behind it, *katechō*, is the kind of word that makes Greek lexicons unhappy. It does not have a meaning. It has a constellation of meanings that the lexicographers list with audible frustration: to hold down, to restrain, to keep in check, to put off, to delay, to cover, to conceal, to wrap, to have control over, to seize possession of, to occupy, to confine in prison. To hold the way a dam holds water. To hold the way a cell holds a prisoner. To hold the way a husband holds his wife when she has tried to leave him. To hold the way a colonial administration holds territory. The word in the Pauline text is so under-determined that you could legitimately translate it, in defiance of seventeen centuries of theology, as *the occupier* or *the jailer* or *the one with the suppressing hand*. The thing that has been holding back the antichrist is, lexically and indistinguishably, the thing that has been pressing his face into the wall.

This is the word Tertullian fed to Rome. This is what, in a fit of casuistry that he probably enjoyed at the time, he handed his persecutors as a metaphysical insurance policy. And what is staggering about this — what is genuinely the most useful thing I have ever read about the structure of any political order — is that the policy worked. Rome accepted the theology. The empire absorbed the apocalyptic logic that the Christian sect had brought along like a foreign virus, and made it its own immune system. We are the thing standing between the world and its end. Our continued existence is what continued existence is.

You can find this idea in every successor regime that ever inherited any fragment of the Roman name. The Holy Roman Empire was, by its own lights, the katechon — the literal heir. The Tsar, in the Third Rome theology, was the katechon. The Habsburgs were the katechon. The Spanish Habsburgs in particular spent the sixteenth century burning Anabaptists in the conviction that the burning was holding back the end. Schmitt — and we will get to Schmitt — has a diary entry from December 19th, 1947, sitting in his house in Plettenberg with the war lost and his career destroyed and his Nazi past ineradicable, and he writes: I believe in the Katechon. It is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful. The Katechon needs to be named for every epoch of the past 1948 years. The place was never unoccupied; otherwise we would no longer be present.

Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.

I do not mean that we are Christians waiting for Christ. I mean that the structure of the political claim — *we are the thing holding back the end* — has become the only legitimate justification for power that liberal democracies are still able to articulate. Listen to anyone, on any major question of state, in any major outlet, in any major capital, and you will hear it. Listen for it once and you cannot un-hear it. Without us, what comes next is worse. Without us, the deluge. Without American power, the Pacific is a Chinese lake. Without NATO, Europe is in flames. Without Israel, the Middle East is a caliphate. Without the IMF, sub-Saharan Africa starves. Without Silicon Valley, China gets to AGI first and the future belongs to the surveillance state. Without the universities, public discourse degenerates into algorithmic sludge. Without the algorithmic sludge, public discourse degenerates into something even worse, which we cannot quite name but assume to be tribal. Without the federal bureaucracy, fascism. Without the Republican Party, communism. Without the Democratic Party, fascism again. Every institution in the country, on the day it is challenged, advances exactly one defence: the thing on the other side of us is the thing that ends the world. We are *to katechon*. The place was never unoccupied; otherwise we would no longer be present.

I find this rhetoric disgusting in its apparent ubiquity, and I find it disgusting in the specific cases in which it is being deployed at the moment of writing, and I would like very much to say that it is wrong; but the truthful answer is that it is mostly true. This is the depressing thing. The katechontic claim is mostly true. If American power evaporated tomorrow, a great many places would, in fact, become considerably worse. The dollar’s status as global reserve is in fact propping up something. The Federal Reserve in fact prevents at least some of the catastrophes it claims to prevent. NATO, for all its overreach and atrocity-vending, is in fact the only reason the Baltic states are sleeping in their own beds. The state of Israel — and here I have to be careful because I have a cousin in Tel Aviv and another cousin who is, at this moment, a soldier near Khan Younis, and one of the cousins occasionally retweets the other and does not understand why this fills me with the kind of nauseous fury that makes you have to stop the car and put your head between your knees — the state of Israel does, in fact, function as a kind of demographic reservoir for a population that twice in the twentieth century discovered that nowhere on earth would have it. Take any of these claims and they all pass the engineering test. Pull the brick out and the wall does fall.

But pull on the claim itself and you discover that it has the strange property of being unfalsifiable forwards. It can never be wrong about the future. It can only be wrong about the past, and only retrospectively, after the institution it justifies has been destroyed by something else and the catastrophe it predicted either arrived or didn’t, by which point the question is academic. While the katechon stands, the katechon is right. Schmitt understood this perfectly, which is why he loved the concept; the political claim that refuses to be empirically tested is the political claim that survives. *Otherwise we would no longer be present*. The proof that I am holding back the end is that the end has not happened. The proof that the end has not happened is that I am here.

This, by the way, is also the structure of every abusive relationship. *You don’t know how lucky you are. Without me, who would have you. Without me, look what you’d do to yourself.* A reader who has been there will recognize the rhythm immediately. The katechon is the framework an empire uses to talk to its subjects the way a husband who beats his wife talks to his wife when she comes back from the kitchen with the lasagne. *I am not the worst thing that could happen to you. The worst thing that could happen to you is what would happen if I weren’t here.* And the wife knows, in her stomach, that he is right; that the world outside the front door, for a woman of her age, with her qualifications, with her two children and her sciatica, is in fact statistically more dangerous than her husband, and that on the question of pure expected-utility-of-survival the husband is the better bet. And so she stays, and serves the lasagne, and the lasagne is excellent, and he tells her so, and the kids eat, and the cycle continues, and the next time he does it the kids are slightly older. The empire holds back the end, all right. The empire is also the end. The grammar that says *I prevent the catastrophe* and the grammar that says *I am the catastrophe* are the same grammar; the lexical instability of *katechō* is not an accident of Greek but a structural feature of any agent powerful enough to claim either function. To restrain the antichrist and to be the antichrist are exactly equally well-attested meanings of the verb.

Carl Schmitt, the most distinguished legal philosopher of the twentieth century who was also, and not coincidentally, a Nazi who never recanted, wrote that the *Nomos* of the earth — the underlying spatial-legal order that makes any politics possible at all — has historically required a katechon to anchor it. There must be a power somewhere that says *here, this far, no further*; there must be a force that fixes the world in place, otherwise the world dissolves. He developed this argument in *Der Nomos der Erde*, published in 1950, and the argument is, on its surface, a long meditation on the public law of Europe and the role of Christian political theology in stabilizing what would otherwise be the war of all against all. Underneath the argument, of course, was a project. Schmitt was looking for somebody to take seriously his claim that the German Reich had been, in some legitimate sense, the latest occupant of the place that was never unoccupied. He didn’t quite say that the Third Reich was the katechon, because by 1950 that was a sentence even Schmitt understood you couldn’t write down, but the entire architecture of the book was an argument designed to make a reader, fifty years later, think it for him. He was constructing, in the elegant and slightly seasick prose he had refined in the 1920s, an alibi for the regime that had hanged his friends and exiled his other friends and, briefly, made him a Crown Jurist before deciding he was insufficiently antisemitic. In that book he wanted you, the reader, to sense that Hitler had been doing what Constantine had been doing and what Justinian had been doing and what the Habsburgs had been doing, which was holding the world together against an enemy whose nature you and Schmitt did not need to specify because, like Paul writing to the Thessalonians, the inside joke survived without explanation.

The most chilling thing about Schmitt is that he was not insane. The argument is not the argument of a madman. The argument is the argument of a man who had thought, with great care and over many years, about what justifies a regime in the eyes of its own subjects. He had arrived at an answer. The answer was: the regime is justified if and only if it can plausibly claim to be holding off something worse. And in the period after 1945, when every observer with eyes could see that the Reich had not in fact been holding off something worse but had been being the worse thing, Schmitt did not abandon the answer. He kept it. He retreated to Plettenberg with his books and his daughter and his catechontic theology, and for forty years he sat in a Sauerland farmhouse and wrote, in his journals, that the place was never unoccupied. He was wrong about who had been occupying it. He was not wrong about the structure of the claim.

This is the thing that haunts the conversation. The katechontic argument is right about everything except whether it is right about itself, and the only way to discover whether it is right about itself is to dissolve the institution making the claim and see what happens, and dissolving the institution to find out is precisely what the claim is designed to prevent. The justification has a form, and the form has a name, and the name is *to katechon*, and Schmitt — who had read more of the Church Fathers than any twentieth-century lawyer not named Erik Peterson, who had written his way into the inner court of a regime that was happy to use his vocabulary while privately considering him a romantic Catholic embarrassment, who lost his university chair and his licence to practice and most of his social world in 1945 and never quite stopped being a clever man with a vinegary pen — gave the structure its enduring formulation. He named the place. He could not, in the end, name the right occupant. Nobody can.

I keep coming back to the hole.

This is, I think, the actual content of the disgust that the contemporary katechontic rhetoric produces in the people who have not yet been won over by it. It isn’t that the rhetoric is wrong; the rhetoric is mostly right. It’s that the rhetoric is *unanswerable*. You cannot reply to it. There is no move available to the person who wants the institution dismantled, because the institution’s only argument is that the alternative is worse, and the only test of the argument is the dismantlement, and the dismantlement is exactly what cannot be permitted. Every conversation about Israel, every conversation about American power, every conversation about Silicon Valley or the Federal Reserve or the European Union or the police, ends in this same logical place. There is something that is being held off. The thing being held off would be bad. The institution doing the holding is, on average and over time, also bad, but less bad. The institution is in fact the *only* candidate for the job. The alternative is to abolish the institution and see what comes. Nobody wants to see what comes. The hole on Acre Lane would be filled with something other than a hole, and the something would not be paradise, but it would not be the antichrist either, and the men in hi-vis would still be the men in hi-vis and they would still be sitting on overturned buckets, only the bucket would be inside a slightly different building.

I have, lately, started to think that the most interesting katechons are the small ones. That my landlord is, in some petty and verifiable sense, the katechon of my flat — he holds it back from being mine, he restrains the apocalyptic event of my actually owning where I live, and the rent that I pay him every month is the tribute I owe to the *vis magna* that is the only thing standing between me and the catastrophe of housing-market exposure. That my employer, similarly, is a small katechon: between me and starvation stands a logo on a payslip, and I am required, in some quiet way, to pray for the logo’s continued health, because the alternative to the logo is a darker hole than the one on Acre Lane. That the National Health Service, which I love with the embarrassing love a Brit has for the one institution his country has not yet fully ruined, is a katechon: between me and the medieval death of my mother stood, very specifically, a Filipina nurse called Anabel who came into the room every six hours and changed the morphine driver and asked my mother whether the pain was a five or a six, and my mother, who had been a lawyer, would consider the question seriously and rate the pain a five and a half, and Anabel would write down five and a half, and the bureaucratic gesture of writing it down was the small katechontic miracle by which the modern world holds the antichrist of unmedicated pain at the threshold of the room. And I am, I assume, somebody else’s katechon. There are people in my life who have to make the calculation about me — about whether the catastrophe of losing me is greater than the catastrophe of keeping me — and the fact that I am still in their lives is, on Schmitt’s logic, the proof that I am holding something off for them. I would like to know what.

Here is, at any rate, the part of the essay where I have to admit that I have been distracted.

I started writing this thinking it was going to be about empire, in the way that other people’s essays about the katechon are about empire, and I have written what I take to be the empire essay, more or less, and it is fine, I think, as far as it goes. But somewhere around the lasagne paragraph I realised that the essay I am actually writing is the smaller one. The one about the building site. The one about the hole. The political theology of *to katechon* is interesting at the scale of empires, but it is operating at the scale of my street. The rhetoric of *without us, the deluge* is being produced not only in Washington and Beijing and Brussels but in my landlord’s email, in the planning notice on the hoarding, in the voicemail from the Czech immigration lawyer, in the tone my father uses when he asks whether we are sure we bought the right flat. The *vis magna* is the boring fact that some entity, somewhere, is holding the world I have to live in slightly clear of the world I am terrified of falling into, and the entity is charging me for the service, and the service is real, and I am paying.

What I cannot quite work out — what I have not been able to work out, in three years of looking at the hole — is whether the developer is the katechon of the building, or whether the building is the katechon of the developer. Whether the unfinished structure is the thing holding back the catastrophe of the finished structure (because once it is finished, the rents start, and the rents are double what I pay, and they will be advertised on the same hoarding with the same generated child, and the small Acre Lane neighbourhood that I love will be permanently and irreversibly worse), or whether it is the other way around. Maybe the building wants to exist. Maybe the hole is where the building has been imprisoned, with a yellow plastic chain, by the developer. Maybe the developer is not stalling; maybe the developer is restraining. Maybe the building, fully realized, would be a worse thing than the hole. Maybe the developer has been, all this time, the small katechon of Acre Lane, and the hi-vis men with the bucket are not skiving off but standing watch, and what they are waiting for is the day the planning permission lapses and the building finally cannot be built, and the hole stays a hole forever, and I will continue to be able to walk down Acre Lane and remember my friend’s leaving drinks and my grandmother’s death and the cherry tree’s annual frost, and the laughing child on the hoarding will never have to be born, and the catastrophe will be averted because the catastrophe is, in fact, the building.

I think this might be true. I’m not sure. I am about half sure.

What I am certain of is that the prayer Tertullian made in 197 — *we pray for the emperor because the end of the emperor is the end of the world* — is the prayer that is being made, in some grammar, every day, by every person who has anything to lose. It is being made by me about my landlord. It is being made by my American friends about their constitution. It is being made by my Israeli cousin about his army. It is being made, presumably, by people in Beijing about the Politburo and people in Moscow about the FSB and people in Tehran about the Guardian Council, and the prayer in each case is grammatically identical, and most of the prayers are partly correct, and all of the prayers exclude the future. They have to. That is what the prayer is for. The prayer’s job is to make the thing prayed for indispensable, and the prayer succeeds, and the thing prayed for becomes indispensable, and the indispensability becomes the air you breathe, and the alternative becomes inarticulable, and the building site stays a building site, and the empire stays an empire, and the marriage stays a marriage, and the planet warms, and the species that rendered the laughing child on the hoarding goes about its business of holding back the end of the world by holding the world exactly where it stands, slightly off vertical, with the chimney drawing to the left, for another year.

There is a story I read once, in a book whose author I cannot now remember and have not been able to locate again, about a small town somewhere on the Adriatic — perhaps Dalmatian, perhaps Italian, perhaps invented — where for several centuries the inhabitants believed that the world was held in place by an old man who lived in a tower on the headland. The old man’s job was to stand at the window of the tower, every night, and watch the sea, and not blink. If he blinked the sea would rise. If he slept the sea would come over the headland and take the town. The townspeople fed him. They sent him bread and olives every evening, brought up the tower in a basket on a rope, and the basket came back down empty, and the old man kept watching, and the sea did not rise. The post was inherited; when one old man died the next moved in, and the cycle continued, and nobody could remember a time when there had not been an old man in the tower, and the town was poor but safe, and the children grew up knowing the silhouette in the window the way they knew the silhouette of the church.

One year a boy in the town — fourteen or so, the age at which boys decide they are smarter than their fathers — climbed the tower. He had decided that he was going to find out what was in the basket of bread. He had decided that the old man was going to talk to him. He climbed at night, in a thunderstorm, and he reached the top, and he found the door unlocked, and he went in, and the old man was sitting at the window with his back to the door, and the boy said: I know your secret. I know there is no sea. I know nothing is happening. I know you are a fraud. And the old man did not turn around. The old man kept looking at the sea. And after a long while, without turning, the old man said: yes. There is no sea. There never was. There is nothing in the bay but a calm cove and some fishing boats. I have been watching nothing for sixty years. My father watched it before me, and his father before that, and his father before that. There is nothing out there. We have been guarding nothing. We have always been guarding nothing.

And the boy was triumphant. He turned to leave, to go down the tower, to wake the town, to tell everyone that there was no old man’s job, that the basket of bread had been a fraud for centuries, that they could pull down the tower and use the stones for a school. He had his hand on the door. And then the old man said, without turning: but you understand, of course, that if I stop watching, the sea will rise.

The boy stopped at the door.

The old man said: I have been watching nothing for sixty years, and the nothing has been a calm cove. My father watched nothing for forty years before that, and the nothing was a calm cove. My grandfather watched nothing for thirty years, and so on, all the way back. And every year that we watched nothing, the nothing remained a calm cove, and the town was safe, and the children grew up. We have no evidence that the watching is what keeps the cove calm. We have no evidence that the watching is not what keeps the cove calm. We have only the fact that we have been watching, and the cove has been calm. If you go downstairs and tell the town what I have told you, and the town pulls down the tower, perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps the cove will stay a calm cove. Perhaps the town will get a school. But if the town pulls down the tower, and the cove rises, and the town is taken, there will be no one left to know whether the watching was the reason. It is a matter, you see, that admits of no proof, in either direction, and the only way to know would be to stop, and the cost of finding out by stopping would be very high if it turned out the watching had been the reason after all, and so for sixty years I have not stopped, and my father did not stop, and his father did not stop, and the bread comes up in the basket, and the basket goes back down empty, and the cove is calm. You have come to tell me this is a fraud. I am telling you that I do not know whether it is a fraud. I am telling you that nobody can know. I am telling you that the question cannot be answered, and that whichever of us is right, the answer is the same: keep watching.

The boy went back down the tower. He did not say anything to anybody. He grew up. He had children. He inherited his father’s boat. When the old man died, the boy — by then a man — moved into the tower. He sent for bread and olives every evening. The basket came back down empty. He sat at the window and watched the cove, and the cove stayed calm, and his eldest son would, one day, when the time came, take his place. And every night, alone in the dark, he watched the nothing in the bay, and the nothing watched him back, and at no point in any of the remaining forty years of his life did he ever, once, blink.

I think about him often. I think about him on the bus, on the way to the doctor, on the way to my mother’s grave, on the way past the hole on Acre Lane. He is the man who knows there is no sea and watches it anyway. He is the man whom Schmitt, if Schmitt had been a different kind of man, might have been. He is everyone in any institution anywhere who has understood that the institution’s foundational claim about itself is unverifiable and probably specious, and who has decided, with a kind of bleak professional dignity, that the unverifiable specious claim is the only claim it has, and that the only honourable thing to do is to keep making it. He is an Anabel changing a morphine driver. He is a Federal Reserve governor at 3 AM with the markets in Tokyo about to open. He is an Israeli reservist, and he is the man who refuses to be an Israeli reservist, and they are both watching the same cove. He is my landlord. He is, I am sorry to say, also me, when I am being honest about what I do for the people who depend on me, which is to say I sit at a window and watch a thing that may or may not be happening, and I do not blink, and I send down the empty basket, and at the level of evidence the cove is calm.

Here is a small thing that happened the other day that I have not yet found a way to put in this essay, so I am going to put it here, where it is least appropriate. I was walking past the hole and one of the hi-vis men — the one with the slightly damp moustache, who I now think of as Andrei although I have no evidence for this — was sitting on the bucket, eating a sandwich. He saw me looking. He nodded. I nodded back. He said, in an accent I could not place: still here, eh? And I said, like an idiot, like the fourteen-year-old boy at the door of the tower, *yes, still here*. And he said: it’ll be done one day. And then he laughed, in a way that was extremely complicated, and bit into his sandwich, and I went home.

He didn’t believe it any more than I did. We were both watching the same cove. The hole on Acre Lane is calm, and will remain calm, and the calm is being maintained by the fact that nothing is happening in it. The minute something starts to happen in it, the calm will end, and the building will go up, and the rents will be advertised, and the laughing child will be born into the world, and the neighbourhood will be, in some specific and irreversible way, dead. The tower is not protecting us from a sea that isn’t there. The tower is protecting us from the ocean of completed buildings, finished projects, realized intentions, fully-rendered children, that is in fact the catastrophe. Andrei sits on the bucket eating his sandwich and the catastrophe does not arrive. Tertullian prayed for the emperor and the emperor held the antichrist at bay by being the antichrist on a slow setting. Schmitt wrote his diaries in Plettenberg and the place was never unoccupied. My mother lay in the bed and Anabel wrote down five and a half. The hi-vis man finishes the sandwich. The yellow chain has gone a slightly grimmer yellow. There is no sea. There is no sea. There is no sea, and the watcher does not blink.