I’ll confine myself to the final three paragraphs of this ‘analysis’ – its unfortunate that the Age of Freud is long past? Though too rarified a form of Psycho-Analysis for this ‘news magazine’ still moored in 1843?
A political given might be that the Self-Made Man is irksome to the Oxbridger conformist mentality? Yet both the Oxbridger and The Self-Made Man share a certain insufferable arrogance – sparks fly when they encounter each other? I’ll highlight some of the most telling …
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Most troubling is the messiah complex. From Tesla and SpaceX to artificial intelligence (ai), Mr Musk acts as if he is on a mission to save humanity, by preventing climate catastrophe, providing an exit route via interplanetary travel, stopping machines from out-thinking man, or averting nuclear Armageddon (last year he stymied Ukraine’s efforts to strike back against Russia by refusing to extend its access to his Starlink satellites to Russian-occupied territory, on the grounds that such an attack might lead Vladimir Putin to retaliate with nukes). At times he sounds like a capricious Greek god who believes he holds the fate of the world in his hands. “Finally the future will look like the future,” he bragged when launching Tesla’s Cybertruck pickup on November 30th.
Saving humanity is in vogue right now. It is a dangerous fetish. Last month a charter to protect the world from the dangers of rogue ai almost destroyed Openai, maker of Chatgpt. A year ago Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted fraudster, claimed that the disastrous risks he took with his ftx crypto-exchange were in service of humanity. Such missionary zeal is not new in business. It pushed Henry Ford, inventor of the Model t, to raise workers’ living standards. But his saviour complex got the better of him and he ended up spewing antisemitic bile.
Mr Musk’s hubris, too, may end badly. For all the futuristic twaddle about the Cybertruck, drivers struggled to find its door handles. Yet in the grand scheme of things, his technical accomplishments will probably outweigh his all-too-human imperfections. For pioneering electric cars and reusable rockets, he has earned his place in history. Future generations will probably judge him the way today’s judges Ford: a handful will decry his flawed character; most will remember the majesty of his creations.
Those highlights demonstrate that The Economist can’t quite resist kissing Capitalist Ass, while warning of the danger of Musk, as a quixotic, indeed a toxic political actor. Would that the Oxbridgers might apply that standard to themselves:
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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