The Prospect and Tenets of Muskism
A Player Lays His Cards on the Table
The dispositions, habits, and customs of any particular time are so stifling as to prevent most people from really imagining things being any different.
The (mostly) young lawyers who ran the French Revolution, for example, had radical beliefs for their time in the pre-revolution era but did not live or think in terms anything like they would become. The same with Christ’s Apostles, the American Founders, or really anybody who is caught up in changing events. Ideas, I believe, are crucial to events in history, but a changing landscape of events and facts on the ground can and will produce a different landscape of ideas and ideals in the mind.
Ideas affect reality, but reality affects the ideas in the head. What seems completely unimaginable, impossible, wacky, or too extreme one day, could become, due to events expected, normal, or perhaps not even going far enough. Just look at what happened again with many of the players in the French Revolution. The same men, under different circumstances, become very different.
We know this in general, but again can’t apply it well to our own time. We imagine our future selves, if we’re capable of future imagination at all, as living in a world generally like ours today. We know we can’t predict the details, but we think as if we can assume the broad stripes. But we can’t seem to predict or realistically imagine ourselves in a different world politically, technologically, or culturally.
The present is eternal and inescapable to our minds.
Most of the time, that is. Sometimes, there’s a break in the continuity, a moment where the inevitability of the current way things are is, briefly questioned. COVID was one of these moments. 9/11 was another. But while these events brought about changes on the margins, and created painful aftershocks and side effects which we are still dealing with, things, mostly returned to normal.
But in this particular temporally measured stretch of the long moment, Fall 2024, things feel like they could be headed to… … …, well, somewhere…
As conservative intellectual Charles Haywood has been predicting for several years, things have been falling into place in a very interesting direction as a certain billionaire has chosen to involve himself in U.S. politics.
And not, it seems, for the typical reasons. For Elon Musk’s involvement and advocacy in U.S. politics really has very little to do with the United States. Perhaps he is the most openly self-interested player in U.S. politics but he’s at least being honest about it.
Musk wants to go to Mars. The current regime won’t let him. Therefore Musk will break the regime.
Of course, his stated intentions are a little more altruistic than this, but what really motivates him at the core could probably be stated that simply.
Unlike most people who want to do things that the government won’t let you, or at least makes it hard for you to do, the fact that Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, owns Twitter/X, and is well on his way to Mars as far as the technical requirements are concerned, there is a lot more reason to sit up and take notice when Musk states his position pretty much this plainly, as he did in the below post from a week or so ago.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1837908705683059166
Musk does of course frame what he wants in altruistic and existential terms. And I think he does have those intentions. But let’s look at this merely from the perspective of Musk as a rich man who wants to play with his toys. Musk wants to do something. The current regime is making it difficult for him. What does he do? Fold? Give in? Or decide to lay all his cards on the table and go all in?
Past a certain point, powerful men facing an obstacle realize they have nothing to lose by going all-in and everything to lose if they do nothing.
Men with ambition, competence, and ceaseless drive are unwilling to play by rules that screw them over.
Men who win the support of the masses, solving problems that a previous regime can’t gain a following. And the active support of such a following is more powerful than the implicit consent given to a failing status quo. For a stable regime depends on the dual pillars of the consent1 of the masses as against a popular revolution and the support of those elite men with the power and resources to propose an alternative order of things. While there have been pure popular revolutions in the past, most changes in regime occur when elites with power, money, and prestige withdraw their consent. When such men can propose a credible alternative to the current state of things to the masses and have the resources and allies to put their alternative into reality, the masses switch their allegiance.
Example of this beginning, maybe…
https://x.com/crusadepepe/status/1842306368939708865
There’s no way of knowing how things will play out over the next few months, but it sure seems like men like Musk have the opportunity, motive, and means to affect something.
Beware, when you make it hard for a rich man to play with his toys.
But what would this “something” look like? What would a new dispensation, a new constitution, a new regime, or otherwise, some new order of things should the history of two millennia ago be repeating itself in America?
Events and changes in regime bring about very different characteristics in men by changing the field of thought and debate. During the French Revolution, for example, a position like constitutional monarchy considered wildly revolutionary in 1789 would have been wildly reactionary in 1793 republicanism. The provincial lawyers who formed much the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror probably never could have imagined what they would become until the speed of events changed the field. Events make the unimaginable into the ordinary and the ordinary into the unimaginable.
Now Musk is not really a social conservative or liberal. He’s probably not really much of an ideologue in general. Any new regime he and his allies, men like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and the like bring into being2 won’t be ideological along the lines hoped for by either side of current political debate. These men, if they are anything, are practical men, who want human exploration of space, a revitalization of engineering and science, and a clearing out of stultified regulation and bureaucracy.
Such men will have no time for wokeness in any regime they help found, but will also have little time for conservative social policy unless it is conducive to their chosen ends. They will want a smaller government out of the way of what they want to achieve, but it won’t be a doctrinal position. They will neither be collectivist nor libertarian, neither left nor right in the current battle lines of our political and cultural divide. Their politics will be a new thing, and they will want, like Caesar the support of the masses to enshrine and stabilize their own position. With a new dispensation of political order they will want a new dispensation of social ideals, revitalizing exploration, experimentation, adventure, to be the highest virtues of everyone’s aims.
Their movement will be pro-AI, e/acc, pro-energy, for genetic and medical experimentation probably moderately environmentalist, pro-natalist but not necessarily pro-life, and pro-business in some ways but pro-labor in others. But they will be laissez-faire on most social questions unless it impacts their other goals because they simply don’t have time for stupid social debates. They will be for order internally and externally, but not necessarily for U.S. international dominance, representative republicanism, or democracy unless that suits their practical ends. Their positions will not be perfectly moral, Christian, or otherwise, but they will be against many vices for the reason that these interfere with their chosen ends. Any new regime and political dispensation they create will also breed a new opposition, one that I can already predict would be anti-growth and anti-technology in the mode and thought of Ted Kaczynski. The new political divisions would be growth and expansion and conquest of nature versus de-growth, nature, and, to some degree Puritanicalism.
This new disposition and regime will have its own problems, errors, horrors, and internal divisions that will ultimately lead it to be destroyed and replaced as well, far in the future. But it will be a disposition and regime that works for a time, that wants something, and that has an appealing mission that dissatisfied elites and dissatisfied masses can get behind.
Such was the appeal of Caesar. Such was the appeal (after the revolutionary period) of Napoleon. Such seems to be the appeal of Musk and friends.
I don’t know what will happen with the 2024 election, or the 2028 one. But there’s a good chance the current way things are going regardless of whether Trump wins or not are running its course, and men who want something different will make there be something different. We only have to hope that the transition will not be as bloody as the French Revolution.
What will happen to individuals through the transition to a new paradigm of politics and society?
Some who were once out of power will rise into new positions of power, a new elite will rise from a formerly counter-elite or lower-tier of the current elite.
Some will fall from power.
Some will fall from recognition as a possibility having not once held power.
Some will rise to a position of prominence, not having power, but forming a coalition that seeks to gain power within the paradigm.
Some will be fearful of this last category and form a counter-movement seeking to move society in a counter direction but still within this paradigm.
The majority will follow along with the rulers of whichever faction of the current paradigm is in power.
The future will not be like the present. We can’t imagine it, but rich men who like their toys will make it so.
Imagine the wildest possibility you can. Things could get even weirder.
And so, there could be a Musk space empire, with barons and dukes of Mars, Europa, Titan, and Neptune. There will be gross human experiments, gross immoral stuff among the elites. There will be factions, and counter factions… There may even be separate empires, one claiming the legitimacy of their Trump ancestry, yet falling into internal civil wars between the Barron and Don Jr. factions. There may even be a New Israel faction under the rule of Ivanka and Jared. There will be a Duchy of Zuckerburg and the Lands of Soros…
Or none of this.
But whatever the future is, it will not be like the present.
Long live Emperor Musk!
Explicit, as in positively desired by the populace, or implicit, if they have the consent granted through ruling by fear.
Ok, I’m out and saying what I think might happen.