It was yesterday that I realised that Elon Musk seems so sad. A friend invited me to watch Elon's latest Ted Talk and I came away with the feeling that I was watching myself five years ago, if I'd had access to billions of dollars. Like me, Elon Musk was viciously abused as a child.
Terrorised in an abusive home, and consequently hospitalised by school bullies. The New York Times recounts:
A band of school toughs that constantly bullied Musk pushed him down a concrete staircase and beat him so badly he needed to be taken to the hospital. “It was just like nonstop horrible,” Musk recalls of his school and home life. It is a surprise to feel empathy for a jet-setting celebrity billionaire, but Musk’s childhood as recounted in “Elon Musk” is painful to read about — and no doubt excruciating to have lived through.
As Freud's Compulsion To Repeat predicts, Elon seems to have unconsciouly recreated his childhood in his adult life, acting abusively both towards himself, as The Times reports:
We see that Musk is brutal on himself, routinely working 100-hour weeks.
And abusively towards those he has control over:
He is brutal as a boss, too, often berating or summarily firing colleagues while hogging credit for others’ accomplishments.
As the psychologist, Alice Miller, observed:
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
Traits of self-harm, like Elon's work routine, are typical of adults who have yet to face and heal their wounded child-selves. Trauma theory predicts that the abusive caregiver is internalised as the child grows older. Then the grown-adult will relate to themselves negatively, in the same way that the caregiver once did.
In other words:
We become own own prison guards
At first, this might seem like a stupid thing for the brain to do: To internalise an abuser.
However, it is in fact a very logical step: When someone is abusing a child, the child can increase their chances of evading the abuser by avoiding all behaviour that provokes the abuser. The mechanism by which the child does this is to anticipate the abuser's behaviour.
Anticipating the abuser's behaviour is done in the brain by modelling the abuser internally: Now, the child has a mental model of the abuser who will attack the child internally before the child has a chance to be attacked externally.
Such an internalisation of the abusive caregiver is known as:
The Protector - Persecutor
We can see Elon's Protector - Persecutor in action in his work habits, which are described as "brutal". I can relate to this, as I also worked similar hours to Elon at one point in an attempt to fill all my time with activities that would prevent me from feeling the full emotional impact of the abuse I experienced as a child. Workaholism is a defence mechanism against feeling. However in our Western culture, which is deeply traumatised, self-abuse of the kind Elon puts himself through is considered to be admirable.
However, Elon has another trait that is not always expressed in the abused child, but appears to be part of his coping mechanism: He repeats the abuse on others. As Alice Miller predicts:
It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
"Elon, why are you so boring?"
This was one of the interviewer's first questions to Elon in the Ted Talk video and is a great example of what the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan identified: That jokes express a grievance. Although the interviewer was, superficially, playing with the name of Elon's tunnel-boring company, what was the latent meaning?
The first dictionary that came to hand defines a bore as "a dull, tiresome, or uncongenial person". And, although this does not describe what Elon does, it does describe how he behaves.
Now, before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I do not think Elon is boring: I think he is a deep, fascinating human being. However, Elon does appear to have created a boring persona as a defence. This is something I once did too.
The most interesting thing about Elon's Ted Talk is that he expresses almost no emotions beyond the minimum required to interact on the most surface level with the interviewer and audience. He is extremely guarded and uses his apparent dullness as a defence against intimacy.
At one point, the interviewer asks Elon about his tunnel boring business:
INTERVIEWER: How much time of yours is this?ELON:Two or three percent"
Here we see that Elon's relationship with himself is the relationship a computer processor has with its internal battery. An answer that is stripped of emotion and demonstrates a relationship to the self only as a mechanism for processing tasks.
Elon on burying things
Why is Elon obsessed with digging tunnels? He tells the audience in his Ted Talk that he wants to create a nationwide public transit system that is buried underground and conveys cars at high speed. But his tunnelling enterprise is a metaphor, again, for his relationship with his childhood. He intends to bury the traffic in our cities like he buried his childhood.
Now, this may sound tenuous, but it is significant. There is a deep link between Elon's inner psychological landscape and his outer:
The solution is not to bury traffic, but to eliminate the need for it. Elon himself concedes that the system creates more traffic.
Just as burying the memory of an abusive childhood simply creates more traffic (in the form of work, difficult relationships, a negative connection to the self).
Elon's tunnel network is the perfect metaphor for the problems that arise when we do not face our deepest wounds: No matter how much we try to build a better future, we then cannot help but base it on the unstable foundations of the past. Everything we do to escape rather than face our pain, will just take us further from ourselves and create more trauma.
We cannot imagine a future without cars: Only a future where we bury the cars.
We cannot imagine a future without trauma: Only a future where we bury the trauma.
Elon's projects: Tesla cars; The Hyperloop; his battery factories and rockets, are on one level, inspiring stuff. It's nice to have a vision of the future. However, Elon's vision of the future looks very much the vision of the future presented in the comic books read by a child living in the 1970s.
A vision of a future that is now past
Elon seeks to eliminate the "risk of human extinction" by "making life multiplanetary". While this, superficially, seems like a great idea, it is completely pointless, and probably unattainable until humans can live in balance and peace on our current planet. Elon may have not noticed that we are already in deep space, and already (by mathematical probability) interplanetary in a sense.
Although, plausibly, Elon's projects look like a solution to our global situation, I feel they are a repetition compulsion.
Elon is unique, perhaps, in that he has a grand, public vision of a future. And although I feel that parts of his vision deeply entrenched in old-paradigms, at least he believes in a future. However, he gives the impression of a (wonderful) six year old boy in the 1970s building all the things he read about in scifi books of the day.
But the problem with this is, that those ideas were born in a different context from today. They are not the future we need now.
Today: I think the world's problems are rooted in the disruption of community, the abuse of children; the subjugation of women; and an emotional desert full of alienated men.
Elon offers us: tunnels full of cars and rockets.
But what's the point if they're just going to be occupied by more pedophiles and mysogynists?
What kind of future is this?
Elon's future is Bill Cosby in an electric car, travelling to the TV studios through a space tunnel.
And so, I think it's beautiful bullshit.
It's a vision of the future for people who don't care about people.
Or, more accurately: It may be that Elon is subconsciously building us his childhood on a global scale. And he's not alone in doing this. Many influential people are trapped in such re-enactments.
But: We don't need to colonise distant planets. We need to colonise our own. And until we do that, the universe is grounding us. That's how this thing works. It's an intelligence test.
For Elon, and many of us, the most important things to do now are:
Mission 1: Remember childhood.
Mission 2: Speak out.
Mission 3: Identify flaws and vulnerabilities in the current systems of subjugation.
Mission 4: Indentify conditioning in yourself that means your instinctive counter-reaction to these systems are themselves unconsciously re-enforcing that system.
Mission 5: Reconnect with your innermost self and retreat from society.
Mission 6: Return to society and effect real change, outside of the existing paradigms which you can now do because you see them.
What does Elon want?
Elon says he's not trying to be the saviour of humanity, he just wants to envisage a future where he's not sad. But, why not envisage a present where he is not sad by remembering a past where the feeling originates and healing it? Elon is preoccupied with building a future on a past that is no foundation for it yet.
What would happen if Elon put his billions towards raising awareness and understanding of the psycho-social mechanisms that cause our global epidemic of child abuse and misogyny? What might our children build then?
Certainly not tunnels full of cars, or phalluses that shoot off into the deep space that we're already in.
I want an Elon who is not sad. Whose dreams go beyond a well-financed reaction to the past. I hope one arrives soon. Like many of us, Elon is running from his past, trying to escape the planet. Because his attempts are so well-financed, he can make his metaphorical journey into a literal one, but it will never allow him to escape himself. No rocket is powerful enough.
As Alice Miller writes:
The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.
Hopefully Elon will find his true voice soon.
