Kimbal Musk reportedly told TIME magazine back in 2021 that while his brother Elon was a business savant, “his gift is not empathy with the people”. Musk did not deny the charge and has admitted to “being on the spectrum”. His biographer Walter Issacson said much the same thing.
I was reminded of this when he proclaimed that he was a free speech absolutist. I wondered what on earth he was on about. Free speech is not an absolute right. It isn’t even a thing such as, for example, the right to life. Rather as Stephen Fry pointed out, free speech is a tool that one uses to advance a democratic ideal which in turn is based on the liberal idea of a democracy based upon individual human rights and the rule of law.
That means the right is subject to obligations, just as every other right is. You cannot, for example, defame or incite violence or deliberately mislead for your own benefit or to a person’s detriment. These are all age-old impediments to whatever right exists to freedom of speech.
If Musk is a free speech absolutist, why then is he anti-woke or critical of “fake news” or the media? Surely these are all protected if one adopts an absolutist approach to freedom of speech, whatever they might say. And why is censorship practised at X?
Dug further
So, I dug further and found that Musk accepted limitations to free speech provided they were prescribed by law. But then I asked, what does he mean by law? I remember all too well the plethora of laws that restricted free speech during the apartheid years, and how different that environment is today from what prevailed back then. Are they the laws he is talking about, or does he mean some other law? Sadly, he does not say.
And in this I found a revelation. You see, Musk never grew up in a free speech environment. He grew up in South Africa under Apartheid. Moreover, he left South Africa in 1988, or over a year before the Berlin wall came down and things began to change.
Those who grew up in those days will tell you how foreign the idea of free speech was to a white population who had grown up comparatively privileged, provided they behaved themselves. It took time to truly understand what living in a constitutional democracy meant, and to develop the empathy and understanding required to navigate this newfound privilege in a country where the majority had suffered very real oppression. I suggest that this is still work in progress for most if not all South Africans, myself included.
Legal positivism
I suggest that Musk’s lived experience was still locked in the mindset of legal positivism that rewarded power over the rights of the individual and the need to protect the ordinary person’s dignity that existed under Apartheid. And because he lacks the necessary empathy, he has never been able to understand anything else.
I was reminded of this the other day when I watched his media statement in the Oval Office. He spoke of democracy as a feedback loop comprising the people, an elected legislature and executive. He suggested that this feedback loop had been broken, and consequently so had democracy. He blamed an unelected bureaucracy for this failure and went so far as to attack the judiciary.
I was again struck by just how primitive his idea of democracy was. In fact, it reminded me of similar arguments by the Apartheid government and its belief in an unprincipled parliament reigning supreme. I wondered how a man who has read so widely had learned nothing at all.
And then a friend reminded me of the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger, and his criticism of science for its failure to understand the role belief plays in the human condition. This was in response to my observation that life was both magical and tragic, in that it is a fight against entropy where the more successfully life fights, the faster the planetary energy required to sustain life decays. I had been thinking on such things to understand Musk’s preoccupation with human beings being an inter-planetary species. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics provided the answer. In simple terms we need to find another source of energy before ours runs out.
Heidegger’s theory of our idea of existence as transcending science is contradicted by Musk’s idea of democracy being a feedback loop. I suggest Heidegger’s idea of the human condition emphasises our imagination or what Harari refers to as intersubjective realities rather than science.
Musk’s idea of democracy, on the other hand, reduces the humanity inherent in Heidegger’s analysis to an algorithm where government listens to the people and acts accordingly. It presupposes a kind of herd logic, rather than the chaotic reality of people motivated by a range of often conflicting ideas, desires, needs, beliefs and instincts.
Larger purpose
Societies succeed when they harness this chaos to drive a larger purpose while still maintaining the dignity of the individual. It’s an impossible balancing act, which is why democracy is both fragile and successful.
Good leadership enables people to achieve this rather than giving them what they want.
Musk seems to be oblivious to this or, if not, is dismissive of it and the system of checks and balances that are necessary to manage this and the bureaucracy we need to do so.
Trump on the other hand does understand, but he wants to destroy democracy in favour of a fascist or imperial system where the bureaucracy swears allegiance to the leader rather than to democracy itself.
I do not know if Musk realises this or whether he is blinded by the power the office of the president enjoys. Either way, I perceive him as someone out of a Greek tragedy; a huge talent that could well be brought down by hubris coupled with an inability to understand what it is to be human.
Time will tell, but we are certainly all living in interesting times.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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