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Tuesday
Unlike our titular president, our actual president (i.e., Elon Musk) is a reader. Or at least he has informed us which books are amongst his favorites. (I’ve already written about his love for Lord of the Rings.) Because favorite books can tell us a lot about someone—apparently the only book Trump’s first wife ever saw him read was a collection of Hitler’s speeches—I examine what Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide of the Galaxy, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot tell us about the man who has set his goons upon our governmental agencies, firing people willy nilly while sucking up private information.
Oh, and did I mention steering governmental contracts into his own pockets?
Atlas Shrugged is predictably to be found on the list, as it is on the list of many who think they are too smart for the rest of the world. It’s worth noting that the novel has been paired with Lord of the Rings in a memorable blog comment by one John Rogers:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
In Atlas Shrugged, various corporation heads, including millionaire John Galt, are at war with the regulatory state. Feeling victimized, they shrug off social responsibilities and go on strike. Without their entrepreneurial spirit, society collapses, at which point the billionaires return to build a new world on the ruins. The work is an exercise in libertarian thinking that indulges in such infantile grievances as that they are not properly appreciated, and that the world will miss them when they’re gone.
Musk is currently busy making sure there are plenty of ruins to build on. Actually, the dynamic of his destruction is probably more like that described by activist Naomi Klein in her work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. As she describes it, the “disaster capitalism complex” exploits moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies. Where the current situation is slightly different is that Musk is actually creating a crisis where there weren’t crises before. You can be sure, however, that he’ll take full advantage of the mayhem he is creating.
The other fantasy in Ayn Rand’s novels is of the self-made man who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. Of course, as the son of wealthy South Africans Musk had plenty of help along the way, including from the United States government. In his search for “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government, he reminds me of the father of Major Major in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, who is a farmer paid for not growing alfalfa:
Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.
“The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we could grab with both of them,” he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in the front of the A&P as he waited for the bad-tempered gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty look. “If the Lord didn’t want us to take as much as we could get,” he preached, “He wouldn’t have given us two good hands to take it with.” And the others murmured, “Amen.”
Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will . . .
Ayn Rand’s novels empower people like Musk to run roughshod over others. From reading them, libertarian billionaires can imagine themselves as protagonists in an heroic drama.
I’m not intimately acquainted with those works from the so-called “golden age of science fiction” mentioned by Musk—The Foundation Trilogy and Stranger in a Strange Land—but I’m not surprised that they would have attracted him. Foundation is about a galactic empire falling apart and about one man’s attempt to save the future. One can see how it would feed into Musk’s megalomania.
Stranger, meanwhile, is about a Martian-raised immigrant (Valentine Michael Smith) who, upon coming to earth, founds a new religion that will reorganize society and culture. He is not appreciated for his contributions and ultimately killed, but his followers prepare to carry out his vision. The only part of the novel that Musk doesn’t care for is the ending (“it kind of goes off the rails at the end”), with its hint that Smith is an incarnation of the archangel Michael. Why venture into spirituality, one can imagine Musk asking, when the rest of the novel describes his aspirations for the strange land to which he immigrated at 21.
Science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was very technologically oriented, with scientific engineers—always men—seeking way to impose their will on their surroundings. It would change later under the influence of such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel Delaney, who were more interested in sci-fi as a metaphor for interior states of mind. But although Musk would have started reading sci-fi when they were in their heyday, he appears have preferred the earlier technocratic stuff.
His preferences here help explain why he likes Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I too love Adams’s satire, this satire is aimed at 1950’s style sci-fi, and there is very little about the intricacy of human relationships in it. I wonder if Musk identifies at all with Zaphod Beeblebrox, a character with an ego the size of the universe. (My post asking whether Zaphod or Trump has a bigger ego can be found here.)
Waiting for Godot is also an emotionally barren work. In fact, all of the works mentioned by Musk lack human complexity and love. And yes, this goes for Lord of the Rings as well, at least when it comes to male-female relationships.
In the final analysis, Musk has been drawn to literature that doesn’t challenge him emotionally and that encourages him to indulge in conquest fantasies. And as I noted in my post on his Tolkien fixation, he fails to take away the author’s main point, which is that power without humility and without compassion corrupts.
