Stable Diffusion
Amid Musk’s recent rash behaviors, the connection nobody seems willing to make (perhaps feeling it in poor taste) is that he is indeed autistic. After Alex Martinez of Project Veritas described Musk as “special needs”, so he “does not need to be taken seriously”, understandably few other people want to touch that topic with a very long pole.
Well, that’s what I’m for. I roll around in topics nobody else will touch with someone else’s long pole on this page, and I myself have Asperger syndrome. So rest assured nothing I say comes from a place of ableist hate, and all of it is informed by the authentic lived experiences of real autists (me in this case, as I am one of those).
It’s been very uncomfortable for me to watch him floundering on Twitter. Trying to be cool and relatable in one post, then ranting about cancel culture like Thanksgiving Uncle in another. Acting like he doesn’t care what people think, while also banning people for making fun of him. Trampling Chesterton’s Fence because he doesn’t see what it’s for and felt the best way to find out was to dismantle it and see what the consequences are.
It’s like bearing witness to a much more expensive, high-profile version of my own social failings in middle school. Desperately seeking approval, friendship and romance. Brutally rebuffed and ostracized during my tenderest, most vulnerable and formative years.
Only, Elon’s a grown man, albeit evidently a very sheltered one. He owns the school now, so he can simply expel his bullies. That greatly upsets the natural order of things, as we’re about to get into.
When I broach this topic on Twitter it often proves at once disruptive and disarming to people with Elon Musk hate boners. Suddenly they’re embarrassed, though understandably unhappy with Musk’s characteristically autistic lack of self-awareness about how his behaviors impact others, or how transparent his description of his own motivations is to people with healthy, normal levels of emotional intelligence.
They scramble to put it down to anything else, uncomfortable with attributing any of his personal failings to a medical condition. Politically, maybe personally inclined to hate the man, so naturally unwelcoming of any reason to sympathize, or any reason why unqualified hatred might be problematic.
To be clear, there’s nothing specifically autistic about, say, his personal politics or goals. That’s all on Elon, as it’s who he wants to be: A showman and a bullshitter. The kind of bullshitter who would pretend to go MAGA just to sell electric cars to the demographic previously least likely to consider them. Why? Because only bullshit can put a colony on Mars. There is no business case for it. There is no military case, no scientific purpose which could not be served with a much smaller, temporary base.
It is not a lack of engineers which have kept us from colonizing other worlds. There’s a STEM glut in fact. If engineers were all it took to put cities on Mars, we’d have thousands of them. What has stalled manned space exploration is instead the lack of absurdly, cartoonishly rich guys who sign engineer paychecks. An inhumanly stubborn, persistent Mister Moneybags who is willing to pay engineers for a venture as insanely, inadvisably risky as private spaceflight when there exist countless money-making ventures with far more certain returns.
That basically all but requires whoever that Eccentric Rich Guy™ is to be, in fact, the absolute wealthiest man in the world, which Musk was until very recently. Because even if gold bricks were stacked up eyeball deep on Mars, they couldn’t be returned at a profit. It could only happen by massive, unilateral fiat. In other words, only if the world’s richest man willed it so, and was willing to utterly ruin himself making it happen.
This explains essentially everything Elon Musk has done between Paypal and the present. The good, the bad and the ugly, including borderline scams like his Dogecoin pump and dump. “Mars at any cost” unsurprisingly entails a great many morally dubious costs.
Perhaps it takes that kind of man to force the impossible to happen. Beyond public notions of good and evil, a cunning showman builds a wide foundation of empty promises. His loyal engineers then burn the midnight oil behind the scenes, hurriedly turning his fantasies into reality so as not to make a liar out of him.
If successful, and it mostly has been so far, he can then use the gains to layer a narrower, taller set of empty promises on top of that foundation, and the cycle begins anew. Always just barely outrunning embarrassment and bankruptcy. And then, what it’s all for: The pinnacle built upon those ever-narrowing layers, coruscating at the very top — the big promise, space colonization; We just need to believe strongly enough.
Which is to say, he just needs to keep enough wealthy investors fooled, for long enough, that suddenly BAM! Now there’s a permanent human population on Mars. The big, improbable, difficult, expensive, impractical act of fiat is over and done with, as well as being impossible to undo. Where before capitalism was no help, as no business case existed to build the first colony, now it kicks into overdrive as there are human beings in a harsh environment with a litany of needs that must be met, for which they will trade labor and information.
One might compare this to all the familiar arguments against bringing a child into this world, what with the economy and climate change. But if there suddenly is a child…then those arguments, despite being incredibly compelling, all suddenly become irrelevant. The reality is simply that there’s a baby now that needs feeding, so going forward everything has to be organized around meeting that goal, whereas before everything conspired to prevent it.
Undoubtedly Musk has done some reprehensible things in pursuit of the all-consuming goal of foisting a Mars Baby onto the world. I don’t in the least bit mean to absolve him of that, simply because he is autistic. Autism is inseparable from the personality of the autist. It’s like the lattice that vines grow around. It shapes our own growth, without it we’d be some other entirely different person. We don’t have autism. We are autistic.
So there’s no moral case to exonerate him of wrongdoing when he makes baseless accusations of paedophilia against an ex-pat, disowns his transgender offspring or unbans white nationalists. There isn’t a pure Elon trapped in there somewhere, separate from his autism demon, who is being forced to do any of that.
Besides this, it doesn’t factor into his motives or politics, except perhaps how doggedly single-minded he is about his goal. He can be, and is, an arguably odious person in ways which have nothing to do with his autism.
Whether an autist’s intentions are good or bad is independent of their autism. What it affects is whether or not they realize some of their actions cause harm to real people in a larger context, beyond the all-consuming importance of their own goals.
What it also affects is their ability to conceal their motivations and mistaken belief that nobody else can detect their deceit. Autists not born within the protective barrier of wealth learn very early in life that they cannot fool anyone. Their peers are perhaps not as technically inclined, but possess far superior emotional intelligence and thus insight into the motivations of their fellow man. That is what makes the attempted duplicity of an autist so audacious and insufferable; they’re so bad at it and don’t realize how bad they really are to an outside observer. Like a drunken pickpocket who insists that’s not his hand in your pocket and in fact, you’re none the wiser.
Because I didn’t have the protection of wealth, when first I practised deceiving and manipulating, I was brutally corrected by the public ridicule of peers in my age group. And so be it! Whatever cannot survive scrutiny, shouldn’t. This happens to every autist eventually. Merciful if it happens sooner. But often not soon enough, because of the allistic tendency to insist “you’re fine” to be friendly and polite when in fact you’re in some way causing steadily mounting irritation to them, which eventually boils over.
To you, that explosion seems to be totally unprovoked and out of nowhere. Their entire self-contained emotional journey through the events leading up to it was something they mistakenly believed you could infer from little things like their word choice during conversations or small facial muscle contortions. So it is that to the young autist, the world is a scary mean place full of dangerous, incomprehensible creatures.
Something like opaque mechanical mannequins which displace the same volume and possess the same strength you do, but which you cannot see into the internals of. So, you cannot diagnose their motives or predict their next movements. Yet somehow they’re as transparent to one another as you are to them. Laid bare before the scrutiny of judges you haven’t any means to hide yourself from, if you should wish to.
Even so, you try to share your unique talents with these unnerving things, which occasionally become violent all of a sudden for unclear reasons. Hoping that they might love you for what you can do. Mistaking that love, perhaps willfully, as being loved for who you are.
Traumatic wouldn’t capture half of it. But I consider that trauma to be a crucial rite of passage. It’s the only way we can receive correction. If everybody doesn’t tell us what they think of us, we won’t know. It is so taboo in our society to simply say aloud what you think of people, that many autists don’t find out they’re behaving in unacceptable ways until people around them are already inwardly furious.
The resulting eruption of public ridicule and ostracization is unfortunately very painful, but in most cases an inevitable consequence of long mounting tensions against behaviors which until then went unopposed except in private. This could all be avoided if allistics were upfront and honest about their feelings for the first time in history, but that’s of course off the table on account of allistic monkeyshines.
To be clear: I don’t mean to suggest that frustrated bullies are in fact enlightened humanitarian teachers we should thank for provoking important realizations in autists that then serve as the catalyst for a change of course and personal growth in a new, better direction. Of course not. People, especially children, are shitheads who enjoy inflicting pain on someone who irritates them, even unwittingly.
However, pain is nothing but a free lesson. Bullies teach us how to better defend ourselves, by showing us where we didn’t realize that we’re vulnerable. Stubborn belligerent simpletons teach us how to structure our arguments in a more easily comprehensible way for less technical audiences. How to be more patient in the delivery of those arguments, and how to remain politely persistent in our handling while inwardly tempted to violence.
None of this recommends the stubborn, belligerent simpletons who only teach us those virtues by testing them! None of it recommends those bullies either, who after all aren’t looking to provoke insight and growth, only to satisfy their sadism. So shame on the bullies, but more shame on us by far if we learn nothing useful from our experiences with them.
They say that experience is the teacher of fools. Pain is not the best teacher, just the quickest. Potentially still instructive, to anyone willing to accept the invitation to learn and grow as a person. Enduring this pain either forges autists into stronger, better people, like Nick “Ulillillia” Smith, or utterly breaks their minds forever, like Christian Weston Chandler and/or Drachenlord.
Elon Musk has seen to it very effectively that such a thing can never, ever happen to him. Online, anyway. He’s done exactly what I would’ve in middle school if I had access to the power that he has, to restrain bullies from making fun of me by making examples of a few.
That would’ve been gratifying in the short term but in fact much to the detriment of my personal development. We’re often our own worst enemies in that way, too clever for our own good. The obesity epidemic, opioid abuse, and consequences of too-smart monkeys figuring out self-destructive shortcuts to dopamine. Setting up positive dopamine feedback loops, often with skinner box mechanics, like casinos or social media.
Someone as self-destructively clever as Elon Musk never has to learn this lesson, or any other pain might teach him because he doesn’t have to submit to pain if he doesn’t want to. He cannot forcibly be humbled, made vulnerable, which one must in order to reconcile with a community that’s unhappy with your behaviors, then receiving instruction in how to be more pleasing to their sensibilities.
He has the tragic benefit of being surrounded by exactly the sort of supportive, comforting, unconditional love I wished for in my youth, which I was only able to complete myself in the absence of. Supportive, unconditional love sounds awesome until you call it the Comfort Zone. Nobody ever learns anything new from within their comfort zone, and nobody has the power to push Elon outside of his. Online, anyway.
That’s deeply unfortunate. Because many of the more controversial actions he’s undertaken recently signal a pathological desire to be popular. Eager, painfully sincere approval-seeking. So that all, or at least most, might love him. But only by the purifying fire of pain, and the self-completion which proceeds from its ashes, could he be forever cured of that need for approval.
It’s a typically unfulfilling, yet mind-expanding “monkey paw wish”: You don’t attain the goal of your pursuit except by a process which also renders you no longer desiring of it. Attaining the goal of satiety by learning not to needlessly desire, for instance, is a very Buddhist solution.
What this means for allistic socialization and the Ancient Ritual of Public Ridicule is that the unwashed screaming apes won’t accept you as one of them until they see they can pull you down into the mud with them, that you bleed as they do when they bash you with rocks.
Which is to say, that your pain is like their pain. That your tears are as wet and salty as theirs. Horribly simian, I confess, but whether or not allistics are able to hurt you is a large part of how they determine whether you’re “safe”, from their point of view.
Elon Musk became so profoundly unpopular as of late because he’s revealed himself as decidedly not “safe” to a great many vulnerable people on Twitter, who were previously accustomed to the protections of an ideologically aligned content moderation team.
Elon is a monster to these people, for a monster is simply something or someone you cannot overpower if need be, whose interests are not necessarily in alignment with your wellbeing. Many who now live in fear of this monster do so from within glass houses, which survived so long before him only because the entire land was kept free of stones.
This is no great crime, but the most deeply human of all afflictions, to be so broken by the awful truth that you can only live on in a fantasy world. There are billions today irreversibly wedded to comically indefensible fever dream nonsense about Yahweh flooding the Earth to exterminate angel/human hybrids. Beliefs nobody who wasn’t raised with them could ever organically arrive at, which nevertheless they cannot live without.
Twitter prior to Elon was a safe haven for the modern, leftist equivalent of these sand religion lunatics, the so-called critical theorists. People who imagine they live in a post-truth world where consensus determines reality and that all things socially constructed, or with socially constructed aspects, are necessarily mutable.
The two have more in common than they would like to admit. Shunning. Confession. Inherited ancestral sin, absolution only by conversion. A worldview rooted in the subjective feeling which can’t be examined/argued with. A claim to be the exclusive arbiters of morality. Dissent is an act of epistemic violence, a notion which serves the same fundamental purpose as blasphemy laws. About all from Christianity that critical theory lacks is magic and forgiveness.
How should people from these tribes react, people who have declared war on reality because their biological truth (or the truth that death is our final end) is one they cannot live with when their protection from an unbearable reality is abruptly dissolved?
Good ideas are like well-built castles which stand on their own, against the siege weapons of critical analysis. Bad ideas are shoddily built castles which remain standing only because of the magic shield of censorship, without which the first siege would topple them.
Many of those now most violently upset with Twitter’s new owner feel the way that they do, because they used to reside within the bubble world of the lush walled gardens at the tippy top of very tall, very shoddy castles which never should’ve been built up to that height in the first place. Which never could’ve been, on a level playing field.
That’s not to say of course that the playing field is actually level, nor that censorship of all kinds has been abolished on Twitter. Just that “the right people” were being censored before. Now they’re not. Glass houses can once again be stoned, and poorly built castles once more sieged. Which constitutes a “threat to our democracy” according to the carefully coordinated messaging of every media outlet mouthpiece at once, in uncanny robotic unison.
Being forced out of your comfort zone is painful. But if they’re willing to surrender to reality and reconcile themselves with it, they might grow stronger and healthier from the experience. Having come full circle, Elon unwittingly gifts them with an invitation to transformative growth. Which, through his insistence on safety from pain, he might forever deny himself.