| Elon Musk |
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| A short piece inspired by an article written by David Aaronovitch which appeared in Prospect magazine January 22, 2025 Sam Harris, the philosopher and neuroscientist, is a leading figure in the New Atheist movement. He is opposed to what he refers to as dogmatic belief, and says that "Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a betrayal of science – and yet it is the lifeblood of religion." He also used to be a friend of Elon Musk. In January this year, he explained how they fell out. In January 2020, Musk had tweeted about his ambition of sending one million people to Mars within 30 years. And then came the pandemic. But Musk was in no mood to be interrupted in his grand planning. In early March, when thousands were dying, with northern Italy in lockdown and the United States destined shortly to follow, Musk tweeted “the coronavirus panic is dumb”. Harris privately took issue with his friend. “You have an enormous platform,” he reminded Musk, “Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we don’t get our act together, we’re going to look just like Italy very soon.” Musk allegedly replied: “Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.” The exchange culminated in a friendly wager about whether the US would reach 35,000 cases. Musk was confident that it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, when cases stood at well over half a million and deaths had reached 35,000, Harris reminded Musk of their bet. Musk never replied, and their friendship never resumed. At around the same time Twitter, Musk’s favourite platform, suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed almost 100,000 tweets. This was between January 2020 and September 2022 and was in order to remove misinformation about Covid and the anti-Covid vaccines. It seems that Musk regarded this as a massive infringement of peoples’ rights of free expression. So then if you’re a billionaire and if the platform you regard as your unmediated connection with the world in effect disowns one of your cherished beliefs, what do you do? You buy that platform, and you use it to get your views out to tens of millions of people on absolutely anything you think is important - at the moment you think it. Obviously narcissists like Musk believe that their views matter. And they think that those who are intelligent enough or have that thing called ‘common sense’ will agree with them. The others? Well, any disagreement is met with insult rather than counter-argument. This, despite the fact that, other than in the field of engineering, he obviously knows no more than anyone-else. But it goes further - quite clearly, the little he knows, for instance about other countries, he assumes to be all that needs to be known. He considers himself to in full possession of all relevant knowledge and to have made a correct judgement in the light of that (very limited) knowledge. So then, when right-wing louts were attacking asylum hostels in the UK he told us that civil war would shortly break out and made clear his support for Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson), the great supporter of direct action against Muslims. He has endorsed the far-right ‘Alternative for Germany’ despite not showing any obvious sign that he knows much about them. Musk’s grasp of facts regarding what is happening in other countries is, at best, minimal. Let’s hope that the engineering going into his cars and rockets goes through more checking processes... It seems that Musk was bullied at school, and it may be that becoming so incredibly successful has now enabled him to engage in the vindictiveness that we can see is such a major part of his personality. However, what we are now also learning is that his main motivation currently is actually his hatred of what he calls the “woke mind virus”. In an interview with his new best friend the philosopher and ‘public intellectual’ Jordan Peterson, he said that, during the pandemic, he had been tricked into agreeing to the administration of puberty blockers for one of his children. And now, as far as he was concerned, that child was “dead”, murdered by the woke mind virus. This “virus” was now the number one enemy, not just for him, but the world. Who had allowed that loss of his child to happen? Who had encouraged it? In his view, ‘the Liberals’ – those promoting the idea of LGBTQ+, the very people who had tried to shut down “debate” about the pandemic and the vaccines; the people from whom he ultimately wrested Twitter. At the moment he is embarked on Trump’s plan to eviscerate government in the USA. He and his ‘super-intelligent’ tech acolytes have got hold of the keys to the Treasury and are doing their best to remake its software in their own image. He is trying to prevent all foreign aid payments, despite the fact that they are mandated by Congress and the Senate which means that the President has no power over them. Various groups are fighting back in the courts and so far have received the sort of interim judgements anyone with any knowledge of and respect for the constitution would expect. It is though difficult to see the two super-egos of Trump and Musk continuing to co-exist. If the courts put a stop to what Musk is doing, then it’s difficult to see what further use Trump would have for him. Maybe that’s when it all implodes? Paul Buckingham 9 February 2025 |
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