Post #121: The Musk Factor

10 July 2024

“The best men, they say, are moulded out of faults.”

—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, V.i

The first time someone pointed Elon Musk out to me, on a big-screen TV in Lima in mid-2014, I had no idea who he was, and no particular interest in knowing more. I’ve continued to keep my distance these past ten years, and did not deliberately read or watch a single thing about him, save what passing references came to me unbid through third parties—until yesterday.

   Word reached me, without my asking for it, that he had become the world’s richest man; a little bit about Tesla and SpaceX here and there, at a great distance, and about his acquisition of Twitter. Billionaires do not fascinate me, cars and space travel leave me cold, and though I am much concerned about the erosion of free speech in our times, I would not go on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok if I were paid to do so by the hour.

Mr. Musk is, to put it bluntly, not really my type. He neither attracts me nor does he repel me; I have no fixed opinions about him and I don’t wish to develop any. He may be a good guy or he may not be; I see more to suggest the former than the latter, but I don’t feel much need to confirm my impressions, as I am not his judge. What I care about is mostly where he fits into this strange world of ours, a quarter of a century into the 21st. What does it tell us that this oddball of a man should be considered by so many nothing less than our latest redeemer in the Year of Our Lord 2024?

     For what it’s worth, I see Musk (the phenomenon, more than the human being) emerging from the confluence of a number of trends that seem to define our times—not to my taste, as the reader knows by now. He represents, first, the epochal triumph of a culture of celebrity that seems to carry everything before it; combined, second, with the nimbus of the contemporary tech-billionaire, or more precisely, of someone who has had his fingers, one by one, in so many different multi-billion dollar pies that it would be tedious even to recall them all. Third, he personifies the ultimate revenge fantasy of the inveterate nerd and sci-fi enthusiast. And fourth, he is a picture-book example of high intelligence not clearly matched by equivalent emotional development, with all the characteristic confusions of the high-achieving male at the outset of our glorious century—blending together in the strangest ways the ancient masculine imperative towards competitive work of the marathon sort, ambition on a galactic scale, and hints of a savior-complex, though considerably softened by a little-boy touch that is as endearing as it is unsettling in a man over fifty who commands resources once reserved to entire countries, and who is presented to us as man’s last, best answer to the looming problems of mankind.

     Musk claimed, at some point in a nine-month interview with Neil Strauss,* that he had been “raised by books” more than by his parents in 1970s and 80s South Africa. I see no reason to doubt that self-assessment, but with the caveat that the mental furniture he prefers does not look to me as if it owed a great deal to traditional book-learning. Yes, he will refer to Edward Gibbon, which is already something, but only in the context of using him as a bridge to Isaac Asimov. He would presumably recognize the real Homer too, but prefers, unmistakably, the ancient bard’s ironic namesake in The Simpsons, alongside South Park and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Musk is GenX to the core, in other words, thus with one foot still in the camp of old-school literacy, but with the other firmly planted on the terra incognita upon which Gens Y and Z are making their precarious intellectual living. (Neil Strauss, it might be added, was such an apt choice of interviewer because he is in a comparable position—not on account of game, which is scarcely a Muskian strength, but because Strauss’s relationship to literature is similar: he claims that he used to read Ulysses for fun every year, but his writing veers towards Pulp Fiction, not the hundred great books of world literature.)

     I am quite ready, as the reader knows by now, to respond with revulsion to celebrities and billionaires, especially in combination. I cannot say that Musk bothers me that way, or puts me off; but neither does he inspire in me any great faith that the engineers will come to the rescue of the world. I am not sure that we need saving in this manner, but if we did, it would be in no small measure because of the doings of engineers in the first place. They have contributed their bit to the making of our world,  and then some; but I certainly would not want them in charge. Like Musk himself, ironically, I would feel much safer entrusting our affairs, where collectivism is unavoidable, to “normal human beings” (Musk’s own words with a view to the presidency). And to his great credit, the man knows quite well, and will say outright, that he is not even close to normal, and that anyone tempted to admire him unduly, or harboring dreams of being him, should urgently reconsider before he meets a fairy who might grant his wish. I don’t know just how bad things get inside Elon’s mind, but I can see enough to agree with him: no, you really do not want to be in his skin, or in his brain and nervous system. If you think otherwise, it’s because you have no idea what it would actually be like.

     When Elon speaks of having sometimes worked 22-hour days, detractors may hear an insufferable braggart; admirers, a man of iron and a shining hero of labor and leadership. But if you listen to him properly, it is very clear that he knows better: he will follow up his report by saying, word for word, that no human being should ever work like that. He is under no illusions, because he can feel in his aching brain and heart (he has said on camera) just how unhealthy, even pathological it is, not only in the medical but in the emotional sense. It may bring dividends no matter how unwholesome its provenance, but it’s still a symptom of severe imbalance and a very bad idea.

     What sets Musk so far above Donald Trump, to pick out just one salient point of comparison, is not only a much higher level of intelligence and apparent cognitive intake, but also an incomparably greater capacity for self-recognition (even assuming that Trump’s is not zero, as he pretends in public, and granting that he may, in private, be a very different being from the public persona he affects—I hope so for everyone’s sake). Musk not only knows full-well just how much he craves love, how much he dreads being alone or not getting enough attention, he has put it on record for all to see; and with such a disarming admission in full view, who would not make ample allowances for his more lopsided features? (Can you imagine Trump saying, ever, as Musk did to Strauss, that he “expects to lose” on important things, or that he would put his chances of success on major undertakings at no more than five to ten percent? This might be boasting coming from someone else, as if to say, look at me, what odds I can pull off without missing a beat; but no, that is not Musk; he means it all right.)

     To understand such a complicated individual properly would require far more research and access than mine, and perhaps a different caliber of mind than I can bring to the task. Whether I qualify, in my turn, as a strictly normal human being is not for me to say; but I am unafraid of the label (#111) and not only far closer to normal than Musk, but grateful for it. Extraordinary individuals have, throughout history, made enormous contributions that we should all be grateful for. What Newton said of himself is true for all of us: we stand, everyone, on the shoulders of giants. They deserve our respect and gratitude; but whether we should therefore make them our exemplars and heroes to emulate is another matter altogether. I would not trade places with Musk, not because my life is better than his by any objective measure, but because I would not, for all that he has contributed, inhabit his mind, or his heart, or his world. Which I am saying not in judgment but in compassion.

     My place is down here, on Earth, with my feet planted as firmly as possible on the sifted soil of carefully considered traditions preserved, for the most part, in our older books. Alas, the fertile layers are everywhere rather thin on our planet, and the tectonic plates below have been rumbling fiercely of late. To hear the menacing sounds does not, however, make me want to escape into space or the ether with dreams of starting over where the air is so thin and the ground so barren—these are nothing but nightmare visions to me. Not for me these pernicious fantasies of wiping the slate clean (I know, I know: Plato was on the other side of this one), or Musk’s equally dangerous flirtations with the possibility that we may be living in a simulation (this in conversation with Joe Rogan, who had the common sense to remind him, repeatedly, that surely we are not there yet, and a good thing too).

     I am aware of how much students of epistemology have racked their brains over how to ascertain whether the world is real, not just a figment of our (or perhaps even some other entity’s) vivid imagination (thus Berkeleian idealism and all that). I can only respond to these high philosophical acrobatics by saying that I do not, for my part, require much by way of reassurance. No one troubled himself more over this point than David Hume, carrying his worries to the very verge of despair (in the conclusion to book I of his Treatise of Human Understanding). As he rightly pointed out himself, however, nature provides a ready cure for this type of hyper-skeptical melancholy and delirium (his words). A simple game of backgammon may suffice, he wrote, for obliterating such chimeras of the mind—or else a conversation, a walk, or a dinner with friends, or whatever other kind of merriment catches one’s fancy. Return from your human pastimes to your airy speculations, Hume concluded, and they will appear so cold and strained, nay, so ridiculous, that you will scarcely find it in your heart to enter into them any further. So it looked to one of the greatest and wisest minds that ever lived, and, at a much lower altitude, so it looks to me.**

     But where, a critic might wonder, does my easy dismissal of skepticism regarding the reality of our experiences (or of the world we seem to be inhabiting) leave what I have said previously (with the Buddhists, #5, #103) about the world being mind-made (or in Schopenhauer’s terms, a mental projection)? How is what I am imagining so different from a simulation? Quite different, I would say: to speak in the former terms is to introduce a sense of unreality that is foreign to my purposes; a mind-made world is not therefore unreal or arbitrary; it is just not, at all levels, what it appears to be when we are operating in our default everyday mode, which is not so much unreal as narrowly selective. I have said my bit about what one might perhaps see from other angles (#55 and 56, especially, but also #103 and a few others). Those musings may not count for much; what I am much more sure of is that I would not, in our current climate of fantasies spinning out of control in all kinds of menacing directions, wish to say anything that could feed paranoid fantasies about a manipulator whose “matrix” we need to escape if we would not be its slaves.***

     What I am suggesting, ever so tentatively, has nothing to do with anyone imprisoning us in a false sense of reality; how we see things  is a function of how we evolved, not of some devious design. Yet if you think of the world we inhabit experientially as a kind of multidimensional sound-space in which highly elaborate symphonies (or maybe cacophonies) are engulfing us with their elaborate patterns, then it seems pretty obvious to me that the decisive thing, for us, is not the CD or the laser or the audio equipment, but the music—with the complication that the sound-making parts are all alive, continuously changing, and inextricably interdependent. How all this unfolds over time depends not on any puppet master’s string-pulling, but on an unimaginably intricate web of causal conditions that respond to our wills (or intentions: Buddhist karma understood as volitional action, not so much its consequences, as the term is too often taken),† and in which even subjects and objects may not ultimately be separable (thus Schopenhauer).

     All this is so far beyond my modest powers of comprehension that I am reluctant to say anything more; but as a matter of belief only, with no claim to understanding proper, I would add that it seems possible to me to look through our projections and see something more true, more good, and more beautiful: not a higher master or devious controller, but something, or rather no-thing, that is beyond all words and descriptions (which is why the Buddhists discuss it only negatively, in terms of what it is not), but that, once witnessed, has the power to relieve us of the burdens of our narrow existences. The illusion that makes us imagine ourselves so much more separate than we are (#109) was not (I would say as a matter of faith more than knowledge) created by anyone to deceive (or entertain) us, as a simulation presumably would be; it is a function of our limited conceptual apparatus, which has evolved not to help us solve high mysteries, but to keep us alive and procreating. To give the liberating revelation a name and yelp about it (as Meister Eckhart put it), or to pretend that we can fully comprehend and explain it, let alone to marshal it for our purposes, does not seem very helpful or attractive to me, to say the least.

*I read Strauss’s piece, published in November 2017 in Rolling Stone (“Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow”) this morning, to supplement the two or three hours of YouTube research I did yesterday, with a certain reluctance, but no regrets given that what I saw was, for the most part, much less annoying or disturbing than I would have expected. The Bill Maher interview I found positively charming, I must admit. If the subject were a preoccupation of mine, I would read Walter Isaacson’s biography next; as it is, I contented myself with watching the author talk about it for half an hour. That is all quite enough for me: I get the idea, and I wish Mr. Musk all the best, quite sincerely. It’s not a direction I wish to go in, but if we must, it might as well be Elon leading the charge.

     In one of the clips I saw, Musk expressed some political discomforts and quoted William F. Buckley on the relative merits of being governed by lawmakers selected at random from the telephone book—rather than the faculty at Harvard, he said; rather than by elections, I would say. It’s a thought about which I was once going to write a book for a notable Canadian university press, complete with an advance contract and all. The run-up to Obama’s election convinced me, alas, that there was no hope whatsoever of making people acknowledge the full horror of the electoral process, not just in this place or that, but in principle—because I became convinced that the main thing about these wretched proceedings is to make the masses feel important by giving them the vote at the expense of good government. What people appreciate about the suffrage is not (or at least not primarily) its superior results, but rather the way it forces members of the political class to abase themselves before the plebs, like dancing bears to be prodded with sticks at a safe distance and compelled to spew forth a steady flow of flattery directed often enough at their social and cognitive inferiors. (The average politician is no genius, but he or she is certainly above the societal average in education, IQ, professional standing, and the like. Let it be only 110:100, the gap would still be considerable.)

     Far be it from me to glamorize the average man and woman. I would gladly opt for a legislative assembly selected at random (with a few minimum requirements for membership, perhaps, or a mechanism for self-nomination that would deter the obviously unqualified) over one that is elected, not because the individuals it would draw out of the hat would be, in the main, more attractive, but because I believe that elections are sure to bring out the worst in everyone, candidates and voters alike. A citizens’ assembly of the sort I have in mind would be a microcosm of society at large and would in that sense reflect the voting public, but with a signal difference: the legislators would not be let off the hook, as voters are after they have cast their ballots: they would have to give an account of themselves, and I believe that although many of them would not be as qualified on paper as most of our current legislators, their incentives would be far healthier, and they could be trusted to contract out responsibly the main business of government to a capable executive team that they would then monitor and scrutinize, but not run. I would, probably, reserve the right of legislative initiative to the executive, and I would not, as a result of the recasting, expect a political golden age to dawn on us. What I would hope for is not a miracle, but only quieter and more competent government—no small matter considering how much I would give to be rid of the incessant drama, constant distortion, and ubiquitous derangement that is such a staple of modern electoral democracy, so-called.

     I am fully aware that no such thing will ever come to pass, and perhaps that is just as well, since I am also no great believer in radical political experiments. Let it stand, then, as more of my usual thinking out loud, such as I am committed to in my series of texts. Since Buckley has come up, let me close with his other most well-known pronouncement, not because I think so highly of the man, but because I find the quotation rather topical—the one about standing athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so or to have much patience with those who so urge it…

**In my Penguin paperback (edited by Ernest C. Mossner), this last chapter of Hume’s book I appears on pp. 311–321, and the passage that I am quoting, on p. 316. To match anyone who nominates Musk as the champion of our age, I would put up the towering intellect of Hume, who was able to combine it with as wise a heart as anyone could wish for. If the same is true of Musk, not by my or your superficial impressions, but by higher and more far-seeing judges than any contemporary can be, then all the better for him, and for us.

***The reader will not be surprised to hear that I have irreconcilable differences, on a number of levels, with the wretched Wachowskis and the cultural turn they represent.

†I continue to be puzzled, and sometimes troubled, by the question of what freedom really is, in the more existential sense that could generate karmic trails via our volition (add no-self and I am truly nonplussed, see #30). My suspicion is that our notion of causation is quite adequate for making judgments around human actions, that is to say, in a context where we never see the entire picture and where full determinism, all the way down the causal chain in its finest threads, is therefore an intellectual construct rather than an observable fact. When we step away, however, from our earth-bound moral intuitions and conventions (full of gaping holes, as I have said, #76), towards trying to understand the deeper cosmic realities (the world as it is in itself, rather than as it is for us, to put it in crude Kantian terms), I don’t think we really know what we are talking about. Causation as we understand it is as valid for us as Newtonian physics is in everyday life; but our causal notions are only valid at the level of human reality, not cosmic truth. Quantum mechanics is not very helpful for rescuing existential freedom as we might understand it (and perhaps the rescue operation is anyway quite unnecessary), but I take it to demonstrate unanswerably that the way we must understand causation to make sense of our lives is altogether a different thing from what causation looks like from more abstract perspectives, of which there are perhaps many more than quantum weirdness, which is unsettling enough.