Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Psychoanalyis, Psychology, Children, Spectrum, Trauma
In one of my weekly conversations with my reluctant son, as
we were discussing politics and the influence of Musk on Donald Trump, he noted
my lack of knowledge about Musk and offered to lend me a recent biography of him. I was intrigued and, on his next visit home,
he brought it to me. It is a long book:
more than 600 pages, but the chapters are brief – three to five pages
generally, and reading it is more like reading people magazine both in the length
of the entries and also in their generally journalistic style.
The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has written previous
biographies of historical people (Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin), but
also more contemporary folks (Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs). For this book, he was clearly invited to be
in Musk’s inner circle as he wrote the book and there are times when he enters
in as a player, letting people at Twitter, for instance, know critical information
about Musk’s thinking as the Twitter takeover is happening and everyone is scrambling
to make sense of the situation. This
could have led to the kind of hagiography that Ernest Jones employed as a devise
in his early biography of Freud – a person he knew and respected. Isaacson appears to have kept more journalistic
distance than Jones, but that is a low bar for evaluating the “objectivity” of
an observer.
Musk’s early life strikes me as beyond bleak. He was mercilessly belittled by his father
and experience significant episodes of bullying from his peers. While Isaacson acknowledges this and repeatedly
refers back to it, he does not, I don’t think, give it enough weight to it as a
contributor to Musk’s psychological make-up.
He repeatedly chronicles episodes of Musk failing to understand the
impact of his behavior on others, something that he attributes to Mush being “on
the [autism] spectrum”, as Musk himself does.
But I think his need to attend to others – to keep an eye out for what
they might do to him next, may contribute to his ability to manipulate and,
actually, read others – not by virtue of empathy, but more cognitively, mathematically,
or even as a kind of computer code – because x happened, I expect y will occur
next, and this is not the result of deep insight, but simply a predictive
algorithm based on past experience.
In so far as Musk is driven by his past traumatic
experiences, the paucity of his internal experience may be the result of the
external focus that he needs must have engaged in to ward others off. This seems to make him a psychological
brother to Donald Trump – both of them were savaged by their fathers. That said, Musk, unlike Trump, was able to be
tremendously successful in the endeavors that he has engaged in. This is attributed by Isaacson to his having
read science fiction as a kid – particularly Asimov, Heinlein and The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was an
avid reader of Asimov and Heinlein and have been curious about the Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy forever – and have now acquired a copy.
I think that the values that Musk picked up from Heinlein
and Asimov have led him to love humanity, but I don’t think they put much of a
dent in his hatred of humans – not just the particular ones who have caused him
harm, but the many who could – and still do.
Heinlein in particular, in his book Stranger in a Strange land, a book
about a human returning to earth from having been born and lived his early life
on Mars, articulated for me, as an isolated, nerdy adolescent, the yearning
that I had to be in contact with others.
It also presented a vision of that contact being able to be made through
sexual interactions with women. I think Musk has found solace in his
relationship with women (though these are often stormy and complicated as well as soothing), but perhaps even more so in his relationships with his
children. I think it possible that he
has so many children not just because of his stated concern that the declining
birth rate is the greatest threat to human kind, but because each of his
children push him towards being able to feel connected to others in a loving
way. This is perhaps most completely chronicled
in his relationship to X, his youngest son through much of the book.
Musk’s hatred of particular
people – usually expressed by firing them or firing off angry tweets at them –
is mirrored by Trump’s snide dismissal of those he denigrates, and both, from a psychodynamic point of view, could be
understood as trying to turn passive into active – becoming the aggressor
rather than being aggressed against as they try to battle the critics who
mirror their fathers’ early criticism of them.
From a slightly more sophisticated vantage point, they could also be understood
as laboring against the internalized critical voice that results from an identification
with the criticizer, and they project onto others the traits or thoughts and
feelings that they struggle against, and then attack them out there rather than attacking themselves.
From this point of view, Musk rails against the soft aspects of
corporate life and the lazy workers it attracts while rationalizing his bouts
of gaming engagement as helping him learn techniques to better manage his
companies.
This book, though, oddly calls up Bill Clinton, whose
autobiography was long on the ins and outs of the various challenges that he faced
throughout his life, but short on a description of how his mind was working
during the period of time he was facing those challenges. Clinton’s background reflected more neglect
than malice – but I don’t think any of the three – Clinton, Musk and Trump - all very bright men, two of
whom became president and one who became the richest man in the world, built
internal worlds that give them much sustenance.
Clinton comes the closest of all three to experiencing gratitude for all
that he has witnessed and been able to engage in, but his is more of the gee
shucks variety – how could I be here at Camp David negotiating Middle East peace
treaties when I am just a kid from Arkansas – while neither Trump nor Musk
appears to be any less hungry at this point in their lives - still searching for whatever it is that will make them happy.
Musk’s professional accomplishments are tremendous. I had a patient refer to him last week as an
Einstein – but I think Thomas Edison or Henry Ford are better models. They were engineers and tinkerers and Musk is
certainly both of those. They were also
the models for Tom Swift, a fictional inventor about whom over 100 short novels
– much like the Hardy Boys series – have been written. Tom Swift invented stuff of fantasy and
vanquished all sorts of enemies – just as Musk has done, in fact, and in his
mind.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the book, though, was
how badly I had misperceived Musk through my connection with him through the media
– and I think this is why the reluctant son recommended the book to me. For instance – I have been appalled that Musk
sided with the Russians by cutting off the Ukrainian’s access to Starlink, his satellite-based
internet connection system. I was
appalled that a private citizen could make a decision about something with such
important international implications with no governmental oversight.
What I didn’t know was that Musk had largely donated the Starlink
system to the Ukrainians – with some financial aid from various countries, but
his share in the creation of the system, according to the book, was 60 million
dollars. And Starlink was critical to their early survival of the Russian invasion. Musk was, in fact, fighting against the
Russians throughout, but turned off the Starlink system just around Crimea when the
Ukrainians were planning to deploy drone submarines guided by Srarlink to attack the Russian Navy. He severed that connection because he feared that if the Ukrainians had been successful, that could have
led to an escalation in the war so that the Russians would have felt justified
in using nuclear weapons.
My concern about a private citizen – especially one whose
knowledge of war tactics comes largely from gaming and reading histories
of warfare and whose diplomatic skills are negligible when he is not negotiating
from a position of having the upper hand against an opponent – making decisions
about the kinds of tactical resources our allies can have access to during war
continues to be valid, I believe. I also
believe that Musk’s interests lie in a science-fiction-based conception of what
human well being looks like. He does not
have a good sense of the value of human lives that are not, in his estimation,
productive and focused on the current threats to human life.
His idea of what is most important to preserve, and thus the centrality of his drive to populate Mars, is human consciousness. He believes that it is, based on our observations, unique in the universe. Human Consciousness is something that I have increasingly come to focus on in my History of Psychology course as it has evolved over the years that I have taught it. Recently a friend who is a philosophy professor clarified that one of the positions I take with my students was first proposed by Epicurus. The position is that death will not be a traumatic experience, because all of the faculties that we use to experience the world and the pain that results from that interface will cease to exist. Indeed, the universe itself exists, to me, only in so far as I percieve it. When I die, it does, too. From this perspective we could understand Musk's central driving factor as being a fear not of humanity ceasing to exist, but as a fear of his own death.
Musk disdain for human beings the governments they create belie his being born on third base and believing he
hit a triple. No, he did not inherit
wealth in the way that Trump did, but we live in an incredibly interdependent world. Thousands of people working together result
in our being able to eat bacon and eggs every morning. Musk’s decisions about building cars and
rocket ships are carried out by engineers who were trained in elementary
schools, junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities – and they
would not have been able to carry out the visions that he mapped out without
the background that was supported by a dizzyingly complex social system that
certainly has inefficiencies in it, but, while his engineering mantra of you
haven’t cut enough if you don’t have to add something back in works on an
assembly line with a clearly defined product – the assembly line of education
is a much more haphazard undertaking whose output – the kind of workforce that
he can tap into – is not one that can or should be dominated by capitalistic
ideals, even if that is the system it is feeding (and supported by).
After reading this book, I have a better sense of Musk. I admire him more – but continue to mistrust
his ability to generalize his belief that he can improve everything he puts his
hands on. Isaacson is more caught up in
what could be seen as cult-like worship, though he appears on the surface to
have retained journalistic objectivity.
I don’t fault him for being part fanboy. I
could not objectively evaluate the outcome of a treatment that I have conducted: I am too closely allied with the subject of
the investigation. Fortunately others –
consultants in my case, the reader in the case of Isaacson, can put what we
hear into perspective. We can worry about Musk and the gaggle of other billionaires who exert outsized influence on this government that is, in theory, by and for the people; and we can experience that anxiety regardless of which party is in office.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
No comments:
Post a Comment