is MrBeast the antichrist?

the problem of more and more and more and more and more and more and more

1.

Nearly a decade ago, before the money came and the empire was built, an eighteen-year-old Jimmy Donaldson filmed himself counting to 100,000. The video is nearly 24 hours long, but sped up because the actual footage took 40 hours. He sits in a chair, stares at the camera, and counts. And counts. And counts. Here is a screenshot:

Two years ago, on Reddit’s /r/mrbeast, a user with a since-deleted account asked the community what they’d think of them trying to recreate this same feat on a day off work:

Skeptics like /u/GenghisKhanKingofCum do not understand that counting to 100,000 is an essentially spiritual exercise in building “power of will.” Pointlessness is the point: this is about willing for willing’s sake, uncorrupted by a will to do anything in particular.

Almost every MrBeast challenge revolves around “power of will.” Usually, this is expressed through endurance across a long timespan — “last to leave the circle,” “last to leave the Tesla keeps it,” and so on. People do not win money in his videos for proving themselves strong, virtuous, smart, capable, or worthy. They win it because they want it more; they — like MrBeast — have mastered themselves into optimized willing machines.

2.

Speaking to his demon army in Book I of John Milton’s Paradise Lost following the defeat of his rebellion against God and fall from heaven, Satan says:

“… What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield…

What makes me think of MrBeast here is the fiendish invocation of “unconquerable will” as a virtue and reason for continued war against Heaven. Satan never fought to win “in dubious battle on the plains of heaven” because he never could. Rather, as he reasons here (and doubts elsewhere in the poem) the mere proposition that his “unconquerable will” existed, that he had free will in the first place, was a type of victory. Satan’s rebellion was a demonstration of that will—an existential gambit rather than a strategic campaign.

MrBeast operates according to this Satanic logic: the point is in the fiendish demonstration of a free will, the fact of living and being by your own terms in your own self-creating manner. Milton’s Satan is the sigma hustle grindset, the optimizer — devilish, in part, because of his love for will itself rather than for anything which will may attain to.

3.

The discourse around MrBeast being the antichrist really kicked off after he healed a thousand blind people. The issue was not that he healed the blind, or seemed to recreate one of Christ’s miracles — few would disagree with the course of action — but that you got the distinct sense, watching the video, that in a hypothetical world where he could get a million views by blinding a thousand people rather than curing their blindness, he would just as enthusiastically do that.

MrBeast shoots and treats the people in his videos as if they are objects, landscape. There is neither tenderness nor cruelty in this approach. They are simply an opportunity to demonstrate his own pharaonic power. He bestows blessings, demands sacrifices, and dictates terms. In return for agreeing to his terms, the people in his videos are allowed to play these games that demonstrate the power of their own will, and reward it — all framed within the overarching structure of MrBeast’s own willing.

In this way, MrBeast’s games re-enact the shape of actual games we play every day in neoliberal modernity with the companies and institutions that employ us, sell to us, and determine the order of our lives. MrBeast is to the people in his games what YouTube is to creators. The framers of the game create the artificial arenas through which we are meant to will ourselves into something, holding faith in two propositions: first, the house always wins, which is unfair but not wrong, because it is legitimated by the fact that, second, we can become a part of the house if we want and work hard enough.

That to some degree this is all a lie is a truth most of us come to understand in the course of life experience, but some never do.

4.

MrBeast is not special because of anything God gave him. He is not handsome, strong, funny, smart, or particularly charismatic. His appeal lies in the fact that what he possesses seems to be entirely his own, a product of the unique conjunction of MrBeast’s unconquerable will and an infrastructure — YouTube, and the internet more broadly — which allowed for random people to get famous and rich simply by posting enough.

He really did work for it. MrBeast is not a nepo baby. MrBeast sat alone in his room for hours, posting videos nobody watched, methodically playing the algorithm the way a hacking program figures out a password by the brute force of guessing over and over again.

His early videos are things that anybody else could do, if they could endure it. His recent videos are all about things money can do, if you had enough of it. The only reason why MrBeast is MrBeast and you are not is that MrBeast made the choice to become MrBeast. He decided not to have a life other than this one, which could be entirely his own.

You could make that same choice, but you don’t. That’s the appeal of MrBeast: he is normal in every respect save for the power of his will. And so he offers us, in our weakness and desolation, a tempting myth of pure self-creation and self-reliance.

5.

A morality emerges from MrBeast’s games which is essentially Effective Altruist. The ends of philanthropy justify the means of making money. And the best way to do philanthropy is to go around structures of collective accountability and authority, doing it instead according to calculations of efficiency and your own enlightened will.

MrBeast’s defense of the “healing the blind” episode centered around the effectiveness of his intervention, just like SBF’s defense of his crypto grift. For them, because the world is a set of discrete technical problems waiting for facts and funding to resolve them, morality can be measured like internet virality: because you do more and you do smarter, you don’t have to think about doing right.

Critics often call this kind of thinking a cynical excuse for greed, and undoubtedly that’s a piece of it. But the effective altruists are terrifyingly sincere, and so is MrBeast. His philanthropy is about getting views (everything he does is about that) but it’s also a desperate gambit to make the getting of views (and the cost incurred in their getting) meaningful.

MrBeast’s philanthropy, like that of the effective altruist movement and of Gilded Age oligarch Andrew Carnegie (arguably the forefather of all this) is an attempt to impose a progress narrative onto history using money.¹ The terrifying truth, which these movements serve to repress, is that if it wasn’t Carnegie or the tech oligarchs, someone else would’ve consolidated the steel business or monetized the social internet — if it wasn’t MrBeast, someone else would have hacked the YouTube algorithm. The dynamics of the system they operated within created these men and the inequality that gave them such power.

There is no redemption or meaning within the system’s confines. There is only profit and power. It all rolls on without need for any coherent motive besides its own being. It racks up subscribers and views, the number goes up, the money flows in. It fills the oceans with garbage and the air with smoke because, like algae blooming in a reservoir or cancer in a bone, its only imperative is to grow. Billionaires and MrBeast exist less through their own talents, but because there is always a new stunt, a new sucker, and a new niche to capitalize. Narratives of willpower, hard work, and philanthropy are a form of retrospective cope to deal with a savage order that you lack the courage and imagination to meaningfully challenge.

This is the source of the vacuum behind MrBeast’s eyes, the empty, toothy smile that rises to his lips not because he is happy, but because the A/B test has demanded it for the thumbnail. There is nothing but more, and he wishes there was.

6.

Vincent Miller and Eddy Hogg, in a paper called “If you press this, I’ll pay’: MrBeast, YouTube, and the mobilisation of the audience commodity in the name of charity” write,

[MrBeast’s viewers] are knowingly generating charitable income through their own self-exploitation as a valuable audience commodity which creates revenue for others.

The popularity of late-period, pharaonically-wealthy MrBeast rests on a contract between MrBeast and his viewers. He will transform your engagement, likes, comments, and seconds spent viewing his videos into a form of moral action. It will no longer be time wasted, because your seven minutes of leisure, added to everyone else’s millions of minutes, will help MrBeast cure the blind. He promises to make it meaningful, rather than just more.

The audience here are not brain-rotted dupes seduced by an algorithm and a Satanic puppet master, but people using him as a means to wield collective power. In a sense, this is true of all influencers — an audience grants them clout, and in return they testify to a point of view, perform a function in a community, offer themselves as a public avatar for the private feelings of a mass.

Through MrBeast, viewers can feel they are wielding power within a political order that leaves them powerless. In the absence of other ways to address the suffering of fellow humans, or stop the slaughter and immiseration that is so common in our world, they turn to MrBeast. The issue is that, like the Biblical antichrist’s offer to humanity, this form of salvation is a mirage. The antichrist is “of the world,” fallen and flawed, operating by its rules and systems rather than by the principles of actual grace, love, and redemption.

7.

In 2023, MrBeast buried himself alive underground in a coffin for a full week. A minute into the video, he dangled the bottle he used to store his pee in front of the camera and his millions of viewers. He explained that he was doing this challenge because the last time he did it, he only did it for fifty hours and it was the “hardest” and “scariest” thing he’d ever done. Most people would take that as a reason not to do a thing.

This is a type of performance art that would make Marina Abramovic jealous. This is like one of the stylites of early Christianity, who would sit on top of marble pillars in the desert for years, never leaving, fed by the faithful who lifted food up to them by pulleys and long sticks. And what is he doing it for, what spiritual principle is he illustrating?

The power of will.

the thumbnail — of course his mouth is kinda open

Four days into the challenge, with MrBeast “in mental agony,” his posse of white boy sidekicks dig a tunnel to access the coffin and, to raise his morale, tell him he’s about to reach the landmark number of 200 million subscribers on YouTube. Then MrBeast reads an ad for Verizon 5G home internet, which gave him a signal ten feet underground. The channel crosses the threshold over to 200 million subscribers as the boys and MrBeast talk about all they did to get there — the trials and humiliations back when they’d post videos and get zero views

Afterwards we see MrBeast alone in the coffin, weeping, saying “I’m doing this thing where I’m crying, and I’m not 100% sure why I’m crying.” The next morning, MrBeast looks into the camera, morose, and says: “I’m doing my best to talk to you guys for content, but to be honest, I have zero desire to speak.”

Hard cut to one of the boys: “Yeah, he’s losing his mind.”

And then, despite it all, MrBeast made it the full week and on the seventh day was resurrected, his apostles surrounding him with brotherly embraces, and the subscriber count ticking ever-upward, ever-higher, more and more and more and more.

1. Disclosing here that I am currently employed by a philanthropic institution that was endowed by Andrew Carnegie in 1910.