Everyone is focused on Donald Trump and his election victory, but I’m thinking about Elon Musk. The richest man in the world poured a small fortune and his personal reputation into Donald Trump’s campaign. To hear Donald, Elon Musk is his new best friend.
Whether or not this is sufficient evidence of oligarchy, history will decide. It sure looks like the billionaire elite have thrown their lot in with Donnie. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and who knows what dark money, put it all on Red. God knows Black was a risky bet in this election.
While I admire its lofty sentiments, the Democratic Party doesn’t have its feet on Planet Earth. The Democratic Party lives in heaven, that perfect place of decency, harmony, and peace that we all long for. The aspirations are grand, but for most Americans Grandiose.
This was not an election about policy, leadership skills, experience, or even liability, but emotions. And the primary emotion was greed: greediness for things, greediness for authority, greediness for recognition, greediness for power.
At a primal level, power is about staying ahead of death, fending it off for as long as possible. Despite our powers of intelligence, reasoning, and our ability to articulate high ideals, fear drives us. The hooting and the hollering of this past election, the sloganeering, pandering, gutter talk, name-calling, and posturing are akin to primate outbursts; watch a video of a troop of wild chimpanzees and you’ll hear the same kind of noise.
How people are is largely about coping with very old stuff, stuff about hunger, deprivation, grasping, and power over others and nature. The Survival Instinct always Trumps reason, to make a bad joke. So what now? The resistance, of course!
America is always in a state of dynamic tension. You may remember Charles Atlas, the bodybuilder who transformed boys from a skinny weakling getting camp sand kicked in their faces at the beach to a musclebound hunk, an irresistible “chick magnet.” The principle of isometric dynamic tension is what Charles Atlas credited with his fine physique, and dynamic tension can be credited with America’s fine physique. It is the isometric push and pull within society that makes America contentious but also strong.
These battles between the irresistible force that meets an immovable object, what we call politics, have thus far sustained America; we’ve endured. Is our government about protecting private property or the common good? Choose your side, pick a team; controlling the ball of power is the objective and how the game is won. Ask Elon, he can explain it to you.
Emphasizing dynamic tension risks promoting Neo-Darwinist social policy, however: to the survivors go the spoils. Fighting for survival is a war against death; the prospect of losing it all – wealth, position, reputation, influence, power – is like dying. Thus greed kicks in.
So this is what we must resist: Austerity measures (the richest man on Earth wants to cut $2 Trillion from the discretionary spending budget) to “realign society;” increased government intervention in personal health decisions made by women; abandoning greenhouse gas emission reductions and encouraging fossil fuel use (not sure how All Electric Elon feels about that); rounding up millions of illegal immigrants and placing them in detention camps. Maybe Elon owns a tent company or will contribute barbed wire.
Elon Musk is so rich he can buy and sell two dozen Donald Trumps. And now, Elon is the President.
Very well said Larry.
Indeed. Indeed. My focus for awhile will be preparing my soul to live the rest of my life in the beginnings of a dark age. I can’t convince myself my fears are not real but despair does no good. Helpful phrases that come to mind are: tragic joy (from some French philosopher – those guys are everywhere!), the dying life (Catholic monasticism) or “we must praise the mutilated earth” (a quote of a Russian poet in the song All My Favorite People by Over the Rhine).
I have no idea what will happen with Mush or anything else ahead. I don’t even know it will be bad. But the odds are poor. We’ve our lives in the most peaceful and prosperous age in history and lived it the most prosperous counties. Bad luck is catching up.