Elon Musk is in the news again. He always seems to be. Musk has crossed that fine line that separates making news, reporting news, providing a platform for dissemination of the news – and being the news. Musk is the news almost every day. He is a curious feller, probably a dangerous feller.
If becoming supremely wealthy – making money – is the sole purpose of our existence, then Musk is the greatest living human being (and Singapore is the greatest gift the god of Abraham’s children gave the world), no questions asked, and nothing immoral, unethical or odious that occurred ex ante is unimportant.
Musk gets away with a lot. He has many people who would defend him to the death (see comments below) never mind his most egregious policies and practices. (See here and here).
Among other views, Musk is someone “whose cosmic ambition is matched only by his base puerility,” which sums up how “when rich people convince themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart – instead of lucky and ruthless – they misapply their talents to areas beyond their expertise”. To the aristocracy, oligarchy and the prostrate at his altar, he is a hero, and “The Greatest Leader on Earth”.
He is, nevertheless, Nietzsche’s superman, who has become who he really is and simultaneously the man who would save humanity – and place us all on Mars, away from Earth, in Plato’s ideal society of perfect people in a world of their own. These are the things about Musk that are disturbing.
His membership of the elite, his aspiration to becoming/or his being the most powerful man on Earth parsed with becoming what he really is, has him leaning into eugenics and a crude (and misguided) Darwinist manipulation of society.
The latter, according to Bloomberg, ties him to the anti-Semitic “great replacement theory” movement of the far right in the US. The good people of this movement are the ones who marched in line in Charlottesville, telling us that “the Jews will replace us” – a trope that has been quite consistent over most of the 20th century among eugenicists and racial purists in the US and Britain, the two countries where eugenics was actually promoted.
For instance, Harry Laughlin, “workhorse of the American Eugenics movement”, argued for compulsory sterilisation in the US based on the principles of eugenics. His 1922 book, Eugenical Sterilisation in the United States, acquired biblical status in the eugenics movement in that country. This movement’s main focus was to alter the genetic makeup of the population by “regulating immigration and sterilisation, and by discouraging interracial procreation, then called miscegenation”.
Between 1920 and 1924 Laughlin gave testimony to the US Congress, drawing on his work on the book that would help shape the US Immigration Act of 1924. (See the 2015 report by Rachel Gur-Ari of Arizona State University).
Breeding smart people
This association of Musk with the pseudoscience of racial superiority and eugenics seems like a great leap. Bear in mind, however, that you don’t have to see a woman being beaten up on every street corner to understand that patriarchy or misogyny exists… Musk’s views have been recorded and analysed; his prenatal nonsense and selective altruism have been removed to conceal deep-seated racism and racist pseudoscience.
Thus concluded Mother Jones:
“Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising ‘awareness’ in a thread last year [2023].”
Musk has been open in the past about his concern that “smart” people aren’t reproducing quickly enough. Speaking to Ashlee Vance for his 2015 biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk observed that “wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of a low birth rate”, but that “if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad”.
He clarified that he doesn’t want other people to stop having kids; he simply wants “smart” people to have more, and echoing “a quasi-eugenic concern that those he deems superior are being further outnumbered by those he deems inferior”.
His views are consistent with other super-wealthy folk in the US.
For instance, as Jacobin Magazine reports, William Shockley, who was dubbed the “founding father of Silicon Valley [who] spent the latter part of his life pushing a racist eugenics agenda, while Musk’s former business partner, Peter Thiel, has praised apartheid South Africa and expressed interest in injecting himself with the blood of the young to extend his own life”.
And Jacobin reminds us that lest we forget, “the most obscene of the rich eugenicists is the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who dreamed of ‘seed[ing] the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch’ – a project made possible by his great wealth and connections with the global elite”.
Enter utopia of artificial intelligence
A new wave of eugenics, with which Musk may be associated, is much more subtle, but no less insidious. It is legitimised, as it were, by the race for superior logic in artificial intelligence (AI) which conceals utopian ideals (without answering the question: utopia for whom?) and a veneer of scientific credibility and authority in order to make their ideas and work, their “progress” (everybody likes progress, eh) more palatable to docile bodies that accept the world as it is.
That first wave of eugenicists – from the US to Nazi Germany – were rightfully considered to be just nasty, cruel and bigoted people. It is now repackaged as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a most advanced system of intelligence promoted by Silicon Valley elites.
Wrote Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres: “The normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (eg racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalised groups and centralise power, while using the language of ‘safety’ and ‘benefiting humanity’ to evade accountability.”
This AGI research, Gebru and Torres explained, is another attempt at diverting resources and attention away from potentially useful research directions “and causing harm in the process of trying to achieve a techno-utopian ideal crafted by self-appointed ‘vanguards’ of humanity.”
They stand and wave flags on the bandwagon of “transhumanism” that includes genetic control, technological augmentation, artificial wombs, behavioural conditioning, life extension and, of course, terraforming Mars so Musk can take us to Plato’s utopia.
Nick Bostrom provides a useful introduction to transhumanism, and includes the warning or caveat that “the poor track record of centrally planned efforts to create better people (from the eugenics movement in the US to Soviet totalitarianism, to which I would add Nazism) shows that we need to be wary of collective decision-making in the field of human modification”.
It should be placed on the record that Bostrom has previously been crudely racist, and argued that white people were more intelligent than black people. (Also see here). We would be urged to accept that that was in 1996, and that we should “move on”. (See here for an essay on scientific racism and “eugenics on steroids”).
Altogether, these good people believe that human nature, and nature itself, operates best under scientific management and control. Then there are those people, political and religious leaders, who would imagine that they represent the vanguard of humanity. Recall the words of the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, who said his people represented the vanguard of civilisation.
The first victim of transhumanism, wrote Francis Fukuyama in 2004 (under the rubric of “The World’s Most Dangerous Idea”), will be equality:
“Transhumanism’s advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being, and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural beings they see around them in favour of something better… If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?” Fukuyama asked.
Herein we see the ties to early US eugenicists, to Winston Churchill’s racism and questionable beliefs; propositions by people like Marie Stopes to sterilise the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased”, Bostrom’s “science” and Musk’s beliefs, and those of his friends in Silicon Valley in either creating superior beings or taking smart people, people who have “inherited” their smarts, to Mars.
It all starts, it seems, with Musk’s belief in limiting social and political access and participation by barren women. “The childless,” he said, “have little stake in the future.”
It would appear that Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is not an outlier in the broadside on women who decide to not have children.
(For a defence of Churchill, see this document which, on page 16 makes the Zille/Steenhuisen argument that Churchill did not see skin colour.)
Support for eugenics never really went away – Musk’s stature as the world’s wealthiest man has given his form of eugenics legitimacy. It has taken on various new guises.
It has re-emerged in US policies on poverty and immigration (hysterectomies), with the state offering sterilisation (vasectomies) for reduced prison sentences to prevent people released from prisons from reproducing. DM