Elon Musk – Part 1: The Crusader Behind The Mask? – Compossible

Introduction

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He has become one of the most controversial and confusing figures of the 21st century. He is possibly the richest man in the world (with an estimated wealth of around $400-500bn) and also one of the most fascinating – but not because of his wealth.

He is from a family with allegedly strong support of racial supremacy and technocracy. His father, Errol Musk, has publicly claimed that Elon’s maternal grandparents were “fanatical” in favour of apartheid and “supported Nazism” while living in Canada, which was allegedly a reason they moved to South Africa.¹ Elon Musk has called Errol “a terrible human being”. Errol has been accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren.²

“Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”³
(Elon Musk)

Everyone has a family past that they didn’t choose, so I do not intend to damn Musk for the circumstances of his birth – after all “freedom is what you do, with what’s been done to you”.⁴

Musk’s personal life is also, perhaps unsurprisingly with a family history like this, chaotic – he has over 14 children to 4 different mothers and troubled (or little) relationships with some of them. However, this series of articles is more interested in Musk’s influence in the political, media and techno-military fields.

The arc of Musk’s political journey at first glance seems extreme, yet his personal background suggests it may not be so. For example, in 2020 he supported Andrew Yang, then a progressive Democratic party primary contender and positioned himself as a saviour for a world facing extreme climate change and global warming. Musk has claimed he has done “more for the environment than any single human on Earth.”⁵

Yet, in just a few years he transitioned to being the greatest financial backer of the second Trump administration (spending hundreds of millions funding Trump’s re-election) and taking up a position as the leader of the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE has been used to wreak havoc across the federal government systems, personnel and information systems.⁶

If you would like an overview of what Trump and his friends are doing for the environment you can start here:

Project 2025 & the Urgent Need for A Defence of American Democracy

“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”⁷
(Elon Musk)

How do we make sense of Musk’s seeming transition, over a short period of time, to becoming the greatest supporter, financial backer and senior administration person of a far right authoritarian regime led by Trump? A criminally corrupt and sexually abusive political leader in league with extraordinarily wealthy authoritarian climate deniers and funders of extremism, like the people behind the Atlas Network and the Heritage Foundation. Though, to be fair, the Republican Party itself has been an extremist organisation for a long time now: “’a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition’: a serious danger to the society.“(2013)⁸

The Overlapping Crises of Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss and Political Dishonesty

That’s even leaving aside, for now, what appears to be a drug-fuelled Sieg Heil whilst standing at the Presidential podium.

Musk’s political journey makes one wonder whether only the very rarest and most grounded of people can avoid becoming sociopathic during an ascent to such great heights.

The Wizard Behind the Curtain?

Musk is someone who aggressively consolidates control over critical global infrastructure and utilises immense wealth for profoundly partisan (extremist) ends, which appear to have nothing to do with liberty and freedom of action for all – in fact quite the opposite.

Could Musk be an extraordinary deeply conflicted man capable of redemption or is he merely a master illusionist driven by the pursuit of political and economic control?

I first started to wonder who the real Elon Musk was when he publicly defamed a British scuba diver – Vernon Unsworth – who was risking his life in an effort to save the children trapped in a flooded Thai cave system. Musk called Unsworth a “pedo guy” after Unsworth suggested that Musk’s proposed use of a miniature submarine to rescue the children was a “PR stunt”.⁹ This was the point of no return for me, it showed that Musk was a thin-skinned Tony Stark wannabe bully dressed up as a protector of humanity.

The treatment of Unsworth also made me want to assess the depth of Musk’s thinking in his plans to populate Mars (which it turns out were relatively cosmetic).

“one thing the unmanned expeditions to Mars have told us is that the Martian desert is wholly inimical to all conceivable forms of Earth life…The pioneer and would-be spacefarer Elon Musk has said he would like to die on Mars, though not on impact. Martian conditions suggest death on impact might be preferable. Perhaps Mars could provide hermit cells for the ultra-rich who might spend half their fortunes on voluntarily travelling there. Whatever cash was left could be spent on building and maintaining a tiny capsule of life from which escape would be impossible.”¹⁰

I suspect Musk’s response to the Brit’s criticism was especially vociferous, because of the suggestion that the technology and strategy behind the proposed use of the mini-sub was deeply flawed. Unsworth attracted Musk’s greatest ire because he exposed that the self-proclaimed technological saviour of humanity was to some extent a Wizard of Oz character.

The core premise of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is that the Wizard is a fake. The powerful ‘Great and Terrible Oz’ is revealed to be Oscar Diggs, an ordinary showman from Nebraska. He is not a magician, but a master of illusions and spectacle, using advanced technology, light, and sound tricks – smoke and mirrors – to project an image of god-like, all-knowing power to maintain control over his realm.

Clearly Musk is more than just an illusionist or delusional. His business success speaks for itself, though it probably says more about his extraordinary willpower and drive than it does for his intellectual and scientific prowess. Persistence, daring, hard work and tolerance for risk-taking in business are usually high indicators of great success, as is a willingness to try innovative solutions to old problems. We should also note that, quite frankly, many great entrepreneurs are also known for their willingness to break the rules, laws and any other people when they stand in their way. It is not surprising that studies appear to show that CEOs (and politicians) have a higher prevalence of psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies than the general population.

“Musk and his ilk believe they’re indispensable to the salvation of humanity ..Well then, anyone who disproves that merely by existing—merely by, say, being an expert of long-standing in their field and a load-bearing personnel member for some government department that ensures your food doesn’t try to kill you—anyone who makes you feel dumb or out of your depth cannot be suffered.” ¹¹

Whilst Musk has become increasingly right wing and authoritarian, some might argue that does not necessarily make him a neo-Nazi or fascist. However, his huge financial and personal support of the Trump administration – and what is effectively a criminal oligarchy and kleptocracy that has taken over America – means that he is undeniably acting as a neo-fascist force. His actions with and on X only confirm this interpretation.

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.“¹²

(Franklin D. Roosevelt)

A Great Wave Cometh

We don’t need to spend too much time debating what particular subspecies of neo-fascist Musk is. However, we should consider the obvious contradictions and complexity of some of his actions and statements – particularly when wondering aloud whether Musk might one day rediscover the true fire of humanity (the necessity of empathy), and of diversity (as the universal driving force of life) before the end of his days.

Empathy or Moral Apathy

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.” ¹³
(Elon Musk)

It is interesting that Musk frequently refers to the “woke-mind virus” and, more broadly, empathy as being the disease of modern civilisation. This is yet another subversion and inversion of a deeper philosophy, empathy is the antidote to the ‘hate virus’ that Hannah Arendt warned us about.

Musk’s views mirror the creeping ethical inversions we have seen in our societies, whereby people are castigated for fleeing persecution and seeking a better life, or we are told helping them only encourages these people to be vulnerable.¹⁴ Immigrants risking everything (life, limb, and savings) to escape impoverished lives and near guaranteed suffering – brave entrepreneurial souls putting it all on the line, even risking their children’s lives in an effort to make a better life for themselves and their families.¹⁵

We are moving thousands of years backwards in our logic and ethical wisdom, as manifested in this modern language of dis-compassion. Under this political ‘realist’ approach, the Good Samaritan becomes an interfering ‘do-gooder’ who will only make things worse. ¹⁶

This is what happens when money and power become the gods to whom we pay homage. We have been told to turn off or tone down compassion for decades, that we must sacrifice the ‘victims’ and the ‘innocent’ to ensure that no ‘bad people’ may potentially benefit from our humanitarianism or compassion – wilfully ignoring the greater degradation of that very humanity with every step down this road. This road was always going to lead us to this point, to a new harvest of hate (just like in days of old).

“When political life atrophies and debate and questioning cease, while thoughtful moral experience is blocked internally, the resulting capacity for evil can spread like an epidemic.”¹⁷
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Musk has to some extent re-purposed the Bene Gesserit litany from the Dune series of fiction books (a litany Musk has paraphrased on X):

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.“

The litany is used by the ‘hero’, Paul Atreides, to help master his fears and control his emotions on his journey to become the Messiah, a saviour of civilisation. He is a very interesting saviour, and we should take serious note of his particular form of civilisational rescue given that it involved killing billions of people.

“His jihad has killed sixty-one billion people across the known universe, but according to his prescient vision, this is a fate far better than what he has seen. Paul is beleaguered by a need he sees—to set humanity on a course that does not lead to stagnation and destruction, while at the same time managing both the Empire and the religion built around him.” ¹⁸

We should be very concerned about Musk’s choice and interpretation of sci-fi heroes and techno-utopian paradigms.¹⁹

Musk has used the phrase “woke mind virus” to repeatedly attack diversity programs (DEI) and progressive movements such as ‘black lives matter’.²⁰ He has also used the phrase to describe his daughter’s gender transition.

“Musk claims that over time, the Democratic party has moved further to the left, leaving him feeling closer politically to the Republican party. Key to Musk’s political shift, at least by his own account, is his estrangement from his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. After Vivian’s transition, Musk claimed she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus”. She is very much alive.”²¹

His daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson meanwhile has made it clear that Musk is no more than a biological father (and she does not hold her punches).

“I don’t give a f**k about him….He’s a pathetic man-child…. I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.“²²

OK you get it, Musk is a deeply conflicted character.

My God! You Lunatic!

Misuse of Literary Heroes

“I don’t seem to recall any scenes of Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf, Galadriel, and the gang ripping around in an unmarked van, wearing face-smothering neck gaiters, hassling immigrants at carwashes, and kicking down housing complex doors in late night raids.“²³

Musk does not simply misread some of our greatest foundational fictions, he is guilty of appropriating the aesthetic and rhetorical authority of humanist and utopian ideals to sanitise and legitimise techno-authoritarianism.

Musk’s personal and political actions and his role as a symbol of extreme wealth inequality — fundamentally pervert the spirit of the authors he claims to admire. His appropriation of literary heroes is not a homage to their ethical principles, but a strategic act of capture and control in an attempt to legitimise himself and his agenda. He is culture washing his sins.

The Power Playbook Of The Right

Tolkien’s Middle Earth

J.R.R. Tolkien’s works reflect a profound critique of modernity, concentrated industrial power, and imperial ambition. His creation, The Lord of the Rings, can be seen as a warning against the dehumanising nature of technology and industrialisation. He warns us of the risks of the great people and powers that seek to dominate and control and the wider loss of innocence and integrity from the industrialisation of humanity. His work is a paen to the little people and the combined power of everyday acts of kindness.

Tolkien lamented the environmental destruction caused by industrialisation, linking the “Scouring of the Shire” directly to the loss of his childhood home to factories. His socio-economic stance aligned strongly with Catholic social teaching (a form of ‘distributism’), this champions decentralised control, respects the dignity of labor, and harbours deep skepticism toward capitalist greed and consumerism.

Tolkien was a staunch anti-imperialist, anti-racist and even expressed “anarchist sympathies”. The entire moral framework of his mythology warns against the corrosive temptation of absolute power, symbolised by the One Ring, which promises unrivalled power but only delivers corruption to any that seek to wield such power. Given all this, it takes some real fucking chutzpah to compare Tommy Robinson (a convicted violent racist) to Aragorn and Boromir…

“When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away.
They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.
What happened to the nice man who was brutally murdered while walking his dog will happen to all of England if the tide of illegal immigration is not turned.
It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all perish.” (Elon Musk)

Musk followed his call to support Tommy Robinson, the warrior of Gondor, with the following ‘quaint’ description of modern life in the UK:

“These lovely small towns in England, Scotland and Ireland, they’ve been living their lives quietly. They’re like hobbits..And so one day, 1,000 people show up in your village of 500 and start raping the kids.This has now happened, God knows how many times in Britain“²⁴

Musk is a bit late with his warning, about 1200 years late, given that we have not witnessed mass rape and pillage in British villages on this scale since our white Nordic and Danish cousins and ancestors (the Vikings) started to pay us regular visits in their longboats.

Musk’s solely aesthetic interpretation of Lord of the Rings begs the question whether he ever actually finished reading it in its entirety, or if he just asked Grok for a hard right slanted precis. He entirely neglects and negates Tolkien’s essential moral instruction that saving the world must be achieved not through the accumulation of industrial or military power, but through humility, sacrifice, and the deliberate rejection of the tools of mastery of others.

Musk embodies the very peril that Tolkien warned us about, and (continuing my deeper theme) Musk is the Saruman (a wizard with no grounding) agent to the truly satanic Sauronic forces that have reawakened and now rekindle hatred, fear and violence across the Earth.

Musk takes the wonderful, complex, rich, earthy humanism of Tolkien and turns it into a neo-fascist tale where the hero is now a violent racist poster boy of a genocidal state. Bravissimo Musk.

“In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit… Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.”²⁵

We can all think of another person who sees themselves as a God King, and Musk has helped him take power.

“They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God.” ²⁶
(J. R. R. Tolkien)

More widely, far right tech-bros overlords, particularly those focused on surveillance and defence (like Peter Thiel) have developed a disgraceful tendency to brand their ventures using names drawn from Tolkien’s works. Companies like Palantir, Anduril, Erebor, and Mithril are deliberate appropriations of profound literary stories and themes.

A palantír is a seeing-stone that corrupts its users, turning foresight into malice.
Andúril is the sword wielded by Aragorn to fight evil.
Erebor is a kingdom whose immense wealth ultimately attracts a destroying dragon.

“Musk is not alone among the tech bros in misunderstanding Tolkien while supposedly loving him. Peter Thiel famously named his surveillance company Palantir, named for seeing stones used in the world of Lord of the Rings. This seems appropriate enough, unless you know the plot: the Palantir are repeatedly used by the forces of evil to corrupt and deceive men who think themselves wise, with almost anyone who thinks themselves able to use them brought down by hubris. That’s an unusual selling point for any modern surveillance tech project.“²⁷

This reveals the profound irony of the fundamental misuse and appropriation (Memetic Imperialism) of works of foundational Western modern literature which are all a deep response to our modern world and an increasingly material culture (to our loss of connection to nature, or the ennui that arises when thoughtful animal beings are reduced to solely economic or political agents or slaves).

These billionaires seize upon the epic aesthetic of Tolkien’s world. They embody the temptation for domination and control that the heroes of Middle-earth struggled to overcome. The naming of Paltintir and Anduril is particularly offensive given their role in supporting far right surveillance states, genocide and human rights abuses.

In short, these billionaires get the aesthetic but not the ethic. They have Wagnerised Tolkien’s beautiful earthy works.

Banks & The Culture Novels

Iain Banks, writing sci-fi as Iain M. Banks, was a great Scottish socialist and fiction writer. His celebrated Culture series serves as the definitive portrait of a post-scarcity, highly advanced civilisation controlled by largely benevolent AI.

The Culture is characterised by generalised socialism, communitarian values, non-superstitious humanism, and the removal of need through technology – it represents a left-wing technotopia. Banks demonstrated his convictions readily in real-world political action (e.g. he ripped up his British passport and sent it to Tony Blair to protest the unlawful invasion of Iraq).²⁸

“The point about the Culture,” he says, “who are the most advanced civilisation in my books, is that they alter their genertic inheritance to make themselves sane and not genocidal, as we often seem to be. They also create machines so intelligent that they can save us from ourselves. We have a lot to learn from them…I wish, given what a miserable bunch of murdering bastards we are much of the time, we were more like them.”(Iain M. Banks)²⁹

Banks maintained that the Culture society was explicitly not a neoliberal or free-market invention, and was offended at the attempts to capture it by American libertarians. The Culture’s existence is predicated on the elimination of the capitalistic hierarchies and centralised scarcity that dominate our human society. The AI Minds in charge of the civilisation almost unanimously act in good faith

“I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks”.
(Elon Musk)³⁰

Musk is an admirer of the Culture series and has even named some of SpaceX’s rockets and drones after AI personalities (Minds) in the series – such as ‘Of Course I Still Love You‘. The Minds have a lot of fun naming themselves (‘Just Read The Instructions‘, ‘God Told Me To Do It‘, ‘Attitude Adjuster‘,’Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints‘, ‘Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall“).

In the series, the Minds are mostly minded to protect humans and there is little risk of humans suffering from the control Minds have over civilisation and resources. The Minds enjoy their role as guardians and generally find humans interesting (despite technological and intellectual differences). To an extraordinary extent, humans trust the Minds to look after them and to protect them from a sometimes hostile universe of other life-forms.

However, there is a deeper layer of analysis that is worth further reflection. The Culture, despite its egalitarian premise, functions largely through the governance of these advanced AI Minds, and ordinary mortal humans are no longer involved in the higher level strategic decisions.

Critics within the Culture series often dismiss it as a “loose association of machine run benevolent dictatorships” arguing that the Minds own all means of production and hold the only real political power, reducing organic citizens to the status of “pet gut bacteria“. This gives rise to various galaxy spanning genocidal wars with the ultra-violent AI hating biological species of Idirans. who are willing to kill billions of biological life-forms in their zeal for civilisational and biological (species) ‘purity’ (they resented AI’s being granted citizenship by the Culture).

“I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.“³¹

For a techno-oligarch like Musk, who leads hyper-advanced industrial firms (SpaceX) and is pioneering frontier AI development (xAI), this structural interpretation of benevolent dictatorship in the Culture novels could offer a dangerous path for justifying his own power. Though I suspect he could equally take sides with the homicidal Idirans.

Yet, the very existence of Musk’s extraordinary economic power, and the resulting inequality, is the exact scarcity structure that the Culture aimed to abolish. Musk’s extensive financial support for extremist political agendas of increased inequality is the antithesis of everything Banks cared about and believed in. The world’s richest man became the largest donor backing Donald Trump and other MAGA Republican candidates. This is the opposite of Bank’s values.

Rather than embracing Banks’s ethical socialism, Musk appears to interpret the Culture as a model where authoritarian control by the technologically elite (the Minds, or the engineers/entrepreneurs who control them) is warranted.

Musk doesn’t read literature – like a drug crazed crack addict chasing his fix, he inhales it

Under this interpretation he might rationalise that current immense concentration of wealth and political influence is merely a necessary scaffolding or phase required for a visionary leader to manage humanity’s transition to a high-technology, post-scarcity state. If that is Musk’s thinking, he fundamentally perverts Banks’s anti-authoritarian philosophy: selectively emphasising the centralisation of control under the more intelligent species in the Culture. In fact between Minds, power is very distributed as major civilisational decisions are normally taken by a consensus of relatively equal Minds. Musk may even tell himself that a techno-oligarchy is the means to achieve a techno-utopian end.

If Musk’s view of himself and MAGA figures and friends (if there is any consistency and honesty in his views at all) is of a benevolent dictatorship this is an extraordinary loan from the worst of neo-Marxism pedalled by Leninists and Trotskyists, both of whom advocated that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was a temporary stage following the bourgeois revolution and preceding the higher stage of egalitarian paradisal communism.

“In all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”³²

Dune & The Jihads

As Frank Herbert himself said about the Dune stories “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes.“³³

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is often considered a profound cautionary tale of the danger of placing blind faith in powerful, charismatic leaders.

The protagonist of the first novel, Paul Atreides, is a figure whose ascendance—the fulfilment of messianic prophecies—leads directly to a galaxy-spanning Jihad that results in the deaths of billions across the galaxy.

Dune and its sequels deconstruct the “hero” archetype, showing how vast political, religious, and military power, even when wielded with good intent, becomes inevitably corrupted by violence and ambition. The lesson is supposed to be a deep-seated distrust of centralised power and the cult of personality. Musk, who has referred to the Dune series as “brilliant” and its author a “genius writer”, often projects the image of the singular visionary—a modern-day messiah-figure—who alone can solve humanity’s greatest problems by fixing Earth and civilisation and colonising Mars. This aligns precisely with the “charismatic leader” archetype Herbert explicitly warned against.

Musk once misattributed the quote, “Fanaticism is always a function of repressed doubt” to Dune (it was in fact Carl Jung). One must assume his own doubts have been growing at a rapid pace.

Whilst he has stated that Herbert “advocates placing limits on machine intelligence“, Musk’s own role is that of a techno-oligarch who controls immense wealth and vast infrastructure, embodying the type of powerful, dynastic entity—like the brutal Harkonnens or the imperial houses. This suggests that Musk has adopted the surface aesthetic of Dune‘s universe while failing to grasp its core philosophical warnings: the risks of genocide, the corrupting influence of great power and the rejection of messianic power.

Herbert himself stated that charismatic figures should “come with a warning label on their forehead: ‘May be dangerous to your health’,” and famously declared, “Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe”.

A strong back-story in the Dune series is about the Butlerian Jihad (a revolution and crusade against the evolution of sentient AI). Herbert’s central warning was however more about humanity’s over-reliance on technology leading to the atrophy of human capabilities and potential enslavement by those who control the machines.

Herbert’s main concern was that offloading human thinking, decision-making, and reasoning processes to AI would make humans intellectually stupid and vulnerable to manipulation and control by others. Musk’s push for advanced AI, aligns directly with the kind of “thinking machines” Herbert warned against.

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.³⁴

Herbert would likely view Musk’s AI, drone and robot technology empire as a prime example of the scenario the Butlerian Jihad sought to prevent: a society that is heading towards becoming so reliant on devices, robots, AI and entertainment that it is on the verge of losing its humanity and falling under the sway of a new, machine-enabled form of feudalism.

Musk appreciates the vibe of the Dune universe, since he also raises concerns about AGI and the risks to human autonomy, and yet it’s a highly selective veneer of understanding. With his extremist rhetoric and AI projects, robot plans and Neuralink he seems completely blind to his role as the messianic force that may bring death to billions. Or worse, if he does see it, he sees it as inevitable and himself as a real life Paul Atriedes doing necessary galactic level dirty work. This makes Musk very very dangerous indeed. Nothing is more dangerous than a fundamentalist who believes in the righteousness of their mass murder of civilians.

George Orwell’s 1984

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a democratic socialist and extraordinary analyst and writer of his times (Indeed of any times). His life was marked by a deep moral commitment to the dignity of ordinary working people and an unwavering opposition to all forms of centralised, totalitarian control—including both fascism and the Stalinist perversion of communism. Orwell famously risked his life fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
George Orwell³⁵

Orwell’s seminal works, 1984 and Animal Farm, are enduring universal warnings against the mechanisms of tyranny, the suppression of historical truth, the use of propaganda to manipulate reality (doublethink) and the brutalisation of any dissenters.

While 1984 heavily critiques the Soviet regime, its enduring power lies in its applicability to any regime that seeks to centralise power to the extent that it can control subjective reality. The critique is rooted not against socialism, which Orwell supported, but against the inherent dangers of totalitarian power, regardless of its ideological veneer.

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’”
(Orwell)

Elon Musk frequently references Orwell, deploying phrases associated with 1984 to critique state power. However, his references obscure his own role as a modern embodiment of authoritarian control, seeking to transform Orwell ‘s extraordinary powerful warnings and critique into oligarchical property.

This transformation is best understood as the privatisation of the Ministry of Truth.

Orwell feared the state establishing monolithic control over communication and empirical reality. In the current context, when a single, immensely wealthy individual gains proprietorship over a critical global public forum, X (formerly Twitter), and then uses that control to centralise information flow and amplify hate and lies, then the threat of centralised tyranny shifts from governmental to private oligarchical totalitarianism. Musk is helping to create a privatised culture of ‘Two Minutes Hate’. Though now, in a digital world, it can be hate all day (24/7).

*‘2 Minutes Hate’, image from the film version of 1984 (released in 1984).*

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”³⁶

Musk’s management of X demonstrates direct parallels to the mechanisms of the Party. The platform has been used to suspend critical journalists, throttle links to news outlets that publish unfavourable information about him or his companies, and has filed legal challenges against independent researchers. Musk threatens anyone that considers legal action against X for its documented increase in hate speech and extremism. He demands that the public and advertisers reject verifiable, empirical findings to protect the platform’s reputation and revenue stream.

The Republican party and the Trump administration have become masters of the rejection of truth, facts and evidence. Musk’s self-identification as a “free speech absolutist” is fundamentally undermined by his platform’s practical application of content moderation. Under his ownership, X has welcomed back holocaust deniers, white supremacists and election deniers whilst simultaneously Musk is extremely sensitive to even light criticism directed at him, his allies or his enterprises.

Musk’s goal was and is not an open forum to discuss matters of res publica, but instead the destruction of Twitter to create a centralised digital environment for his political allies and favoured intolerant narratives to flourish, while dissenting voices and critical oversight are systematically silenced or punished. He also uses his own AI program (Grok) to help achieve this. X is a tool for consolidated disinformation and targeted suppression—a privatised Ministry of Truth operated for the benefit of a Musk and this extremist Republican (GOP) political movement. We shall return to this issue and the ‘paradox of tolerance’ in Part 2.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”.
(1984)

Techno-Villain Or Tragically Flawed Anti-Hero?

I know am guilty of polemical writing, of trying to put language into battle to face our challenges and adversaries. If I am guilty of strong language and assertions based on circumstantial evidence, it is because I believe that some challenges are so serious and dangerous to us all that we must enlist the English language to do battle for us. Particularly when we see the media promote a malaise of seeming even-handedness – which is usually in fact just cowardice, appeasement or facilitation of the powerful.

The truth, or what passes for it, is however usually more nuanced in this complex world – even in respect of people like Musk (and indeed Trump to a lesser extent) though their essential corruption is obvious and undoubted.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”³⁷
(Cassius)

Musk’s journey might be described by some as the classic downfall of the ‘Tragic Hero‘, a powerful person whose ruin is caused by the single, catastrophic flaw of hubris. He misinterprets the foundational warnings of Tolkien and Herbert, proof of his overweening pride. He takes from Tolkien’s tale of the One Ring, a story about the temptation of absolute power, and the messianic betrayal of Paul Atreides, that he is the one man—the sole exception—who can manage these universal forces without being corrupted.

Personally I don’t buy the tragic hero archetype here. Musk’s proclaimed vision to save humanity from “civilizational suicide” is just pseudo-intellectual scaffolding for actions that destroy empathy, amplify hate and align him with the pitiless authoritarianism that this great literature warns us against. A man who claims to have done “more for the environment than any single human on Earth” then spends hundreds of millions funding a movement committed to destroying climate action. The self-proclaimed saviour is revealed to be an extraordinary catastrophic failure and deeply flawed, immature and dangerous man.

Perhaps the most flattering interpretation anyone could try to give is of the ‘Anti-Hero‘ archetype, which is defined not by noble idealism, but by potentially worthwhile outcomes achieved through questionable destructive means.

We can even concede the technological marvels Musk has pushed —the acceleration of the EV market and advances in private spaceflight—but we must condemn the moral decay that has accompanied them. Musk demands that we focus on the ends, justifying the use of profound wealth concentration and misuse of political influence as a necessary phase required for a visionary to manage humanity’s transition. Yet again, this is merely self-serving rationalisation.

I don’t care for this anti-hero interpretation either. The pursuit of utopian goals via authoritarian dystopian means is fundamentally incompatible with the humanist spirit and historically has caused great suffering for millions of people. It will only lead all civilisation, all humanity and planet Earth (as a home for humans as a species) to ruin.

Musk is neither a hero nor an anti-Christ, though he has moved towards outright villain in these last few years.

Yet, despite all this judgment, I must remind myself that we humans are made imperfect, and yet we are not all corrupted and broken, and even those that seem irredeemable are often not entirely lost to the chance of grace and redemption. I have not given up all hope in Elon Musk seeing the light again (even if briefly) before he dies.

Don’t you and I dear reader, also need such grace in our lives?

“Hail Mary, full of grace..
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
…Hail Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Pray, pray for us;
Pray, pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death…“

Why I Am An AI Optimist

Masked Crusader Or Crusader Behind A Mask?

Musk sees himself as a hero and perhaps a real-life (un)masked crusader.

The key to Batman is that, unlike other superheroes, he is just a man. That’s what makes him my, and many other people’s, favourite hero. A real man of strength and justice made hard by his brush with darkness, but ultimately mortal and vulnerable.

And yet, it seems that Musk is more the crusader behind the mask.

“The First Crusade… set off on its two-thousand-mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan.”³⁸

The Crusades (1095-1291) were a brutal manifestation of civilisational ethno-racism and religious supremacy. Encouraged by the Pope and initially prosecuted by zealots³⁹ who happily murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of people (the total death toll was in the millions) with a promise of remission of penance for the sins of their normal violent greedy lives. These extremist pioneers were subsequently followed by waves of nobles also on the rampage for trade rights, land, power and plunder (all dressed up as a civilisational Christian necessity).

During the Crusades, the pillage and violence was visited largely on Muslim and Jewish communities⁴⁰. Entire communities in cities like Worms and Mainz were subjected to mass murder and forced conversions. Contemporary Hebrew chronicles record thousands of deaths and widespread destruction of property and synagogues.⁴¹ When the First Crusade captured Jerusalem (1099), there was a massacre of the city’s inhabitants—Muslims and Jews. There are also Muslim accounts of the widespread rape of women (which was a common feature of ancient warfare).

“Two days later not a single Muslim was left alive within the city walls.”⁴²

These old dark urges for violence, rape, hatred and conquest are not easily controlled once unleashed. In the Crusades, these forces could sometimes even be damaging to those Christian communities who were pillaged in the name of Christendom. In the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, the Crusader army was deflected and so attacked and sacked Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine (Orthodox Christian) Empire. The sacking included the pillage of churches, holy relics, and imperial treasuries. Contemporary accounts, including of the Orthodox historian Nicetas Choniates, describe Crusaders defiling churches and committing acts of rape against women, including nuns.

“The Crusades – the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”⁴³

Do we really want to go back to centuries of violence, rape and pillage based on religion and ethnicity?

Musk’s actions mirror this crusading hypocrisy. He speaks of saving civilisation while actively spreading the “hate virus”, funding political violence and pillaging the public sphere (Twitter) he took over. His obsession with rape, given he supports the Trump regime, is another example of his cognitive dissonance.⁴⁴ He is less a flawed protector and more an agent of control and chaos, using immense technological power not for liberation, but for domination of the masses and the political system.

Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the literary warnings he fails to comprehend

Musk is like a modern-day Paul Atreides who is either blind or arrogant to the jihad his wealth and power are unleashing upon the world. At least Muad’Dib had good intentions, humility and humanity, despite his extraordinarily destructive impact. He is a figure who embodies Tolkien’s Saruman—a hubristic wizard who has lost his grounding (humility literally means earthly or from the ground). A wizard of Oz character, whose ‘magic’ is often just smoke and mirrors. At times a dangerous Joker character, who assumes most people are as damaged as he is.

“He Is Not A Scientist, He Is Not An Engineer. He Is A Billionaire Con Man With A Lot Of Money”⁴⁵
(Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Depending on your perspective Musk is either the villain or the anti-hero our times gave us. Only God knows whether we deserve it, but whatever he is, he’s not the one we need.