Elon Musk’s Eugenicist, Anarcho-Communist, Technocratic Sci-Fi Cult
How Apartheid, Russian Cosmism, the novels of Iain M. Banks, and “longtermism” created a genocidal chaos monster
Elon Musk has spent most of his career being Elon Musk — that is, he has been far more concerned with building an image of himself as a technological genius and a titan of business than actually solving problems or managing things. While there have always been hints in the fawning press about his “eccentricity,” until very recently he has been given a very big pass in terms of his actual motivations, and his behavior towards others.
When he purchased Twitter, everything changed. Musk decided that in order to groom his own image and manipulate reality, he needed to own the means of communication. But in the process he has exposed who he truly is — a dangerous, genocidal psychopath allied with Vladimir Putin and literal Nazis.
But why? What drives this man to radicalize and deceive hundreds of millions of people on Twitter? And why the fuck is he so obsessed with colonizing Mars?
The answer is unsurprisingly… complicated. But it’s also right there in the open and decipherable. Last June, Elon Musk’s girlfriend at the time, Grimes, recorded this TikTok video which everyone understandably laughed at.
I have a proposition for the Communists.
Typically, most of the Communists I know are not big fans of AI. But if you think about it, AI is actually the fastest path to Communism.
So, if implemented correctly, AI could actually theoretically solve for abundance. Like, we could totally get to a situation where nobody has to work, everybody is provided for with a comfortable state of being... comfortable living.
AI could automate all the farming and weed out all the corruption, thereby bringing us to... as close as possible to genuine equality. So, basically, everything everybody loves about Communism, but without the collective farm.
Cuz, let’s be real, enforced farming is really not a vibe.
Communism? AI? Abundance? What the fuck?
Whether or not Grimes was on drugs at the time, she was, in her own way, tipping her boyfriend’s hand — which she later tried and failed to walk back. She’s describing his vision for the future, specifically a future described by a science fiction writer named Iain M. Banks (d. 2013), who was an avowed anarchist/socialist who despised oligarchs like Musk.
Nevertheless, in 2018, Musk announced his ideology:
Iain Banks’s “The Culture” is a spacefaring, post-scarcity (abundant) society with no money and no laws that is run by a symbiotic federation of humans and super-intelligent AI. It has been often described as a literary example of anarcho-communism. But it is also utopian insofar as the humans are largely satisfied and content — although you can argue the “symbiosis” with the AIs makes the humans more like pets than allies.
Importantly, the “humans” are really “post-human” because they are able to modify their own bodies to be almost anything they want — many of them install glands that provide mind-altering drugs while others add parts like butterfly wings. This is the most optimistic possible vision of “transhumanism.”
In Banks’s Culture novels, the implant that allows you to augment your own brain is called a “neural lace” — which is also what Elon Musk calls the brain-machine interface his company Neuralink makes.
Elon Musk is the most aggressive transhumanist in the world, which is why he pretends to be against it. Elon Musk is validating 9/11 truther Luke Rudkowski’s conspiracy theories about transhumanism while Musk himself is trying to implant chips in people‘s brains in the next six months.
On the same day Musk declared himself to be a “utopian anarchist” he said:
By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from the most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.
Hilariously, “socialist” Elon Musk got into a fight with the United Auto Workers union in his thread. When he talks about seeking “the greatest good for all” he is talking about “effective altruism” and “longtermism” which represent the idea that rich people know better than poor people how to manage resources. Musk’s version of “socialism” is far closer to communism, in which an omnipotent state enforces what’s good for everyone.
Longtermism led Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently lost $32 billion on the crypto scam FTX, to believe that he was in a better position than all the people he defrauded to spend their money. He believed, like Musk, that you should collect as much money as possible so you can shape the world for the “long term.”
Musk is a huge fan of longtermism and has invested millions of dollars pushing the idea and he promotes it whenever he can.
The problem with longtermism is that it is an intentionally naive idea weaponized to give narcissistic billionaires a framework for forcing, by any means necessary, their own selfish vision of the future. It’s also a vector for disinformation and pseudo-science. For example, the inventor of longtermism, Musk’s friend William MacAskill believes that climate change is no big deal and we could withstand a ten degree warming just fine. For the record, no we cannot.
But Musk is taking this idea to an even more dangerous extreme. His long term vision is this:
Making life multiplanetary expands the scope & scale of consciousness.
It also enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth.
Humanity is life’s steward, as no other species can transport life to Mars. We can’t let them down.
In March of 2018, a few months before publicly aligning himself with the anarcho-communist future of “The Culture” Elon Musk crashed a SXSW panel to quote the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (d. 1935) who was not just an inspiration for the Russian cosmonaut program, he was a proud Bolshevik, a Russian Orthodox ascetic, and a founder of Russian Cosmism.
Russian Cosmism is a movement started in the 19th century by Nikolai Fyodorov and influenced by contemporary theosophists like Madame Blavatsky and science fiction writers like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.
One of Fyorodov’s students was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who took Fyodorov’s ideas and merged them with his Russian Orthodox roots and created a belief system that proposed that the only important thing was man’s quest for immortality. This idea included the resurrection of every human being who ever lived. Tsiolkovsky was also very interested in Theosophy.
The Cosmists reasoned that the process of raising the dead would lead to a population explosion, which meant that humans must expand to outer space to handle all the new (old) people. That‘s why “interplanetarism” was such an important theme. They needed a place to house all the reanimated corpses.
So, for this reason, Tsiolkovsky set out to figure out how to make it to Mars and beyond. That’s why he learned rocket science and helped initiate Russian cosmonautics.
Elon Musk’s admiration for Tsiolkovsky and his student, Russian scientist Sergei Korolev has ingratiated Musk with Russian state media and Putin.
But Tsiolkovsky’s vision for humanity was not just immortality and “interplanetarism” it was supremacist and eugenicist. In order to achieve “immortalism” it was necessary to eradicate all forms of life that did not contribute to his cosmist goals.
Russian cosmism was deeply intertwined with the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks. Tsiolkovsky was a Bolshevik, and one of the co-founders of the Bolshevik Party was a Russian Cosmist named Alexander Bogdanov who was for a time a rival to Vladimir Lenin for power. But Bogdanov was also a science fiction writer, who wrote a book called Red Star which described how a socialist technocratic government takes over Mars.
Bogdanov, like Peter Thiel, believed that blood transfusions are a fountain of youth. Unfortunately for Bogdanov, he died of a blood transfusion contaminated with malaria in 1928.
Note that Bogdanov was also an inspiration to anarchist sci-fi writers like Ursula LeGuin and Musk’s muse, Iain M. Banks.
But there was another movement inspired by Alexander Bogdanov that Elon Musk has deep familial connections to — the “Technocracy Movement,” started in 1936 by Howard Scott as “Technocracy, Inc.” One of the leaders of the Technocracy Movement in Canada was Joshua Haldeman who was a chiropractor by trade.
Joshua Haldeman is Elon Musk’s grandfather.
The technocracy movement was the idea that the only people we should trust with decision making power are technologists and engineers. It also wanted to get rid of money in favor of “energy certificates.”
It had hundreds of thousands of members in the late 30s. Joshua Haldeman was arrested for his participation in 1940.
Elon Musk has taken his grandfather’s technocratic ideas to heart and sees himself as the top technocrat that ever lived. That’s why he called himself the “Technoking of Tesla” and doesn’t care about being Twitter CEO as long as he can “run the software and servers teams.” It’s also why Elon Musk has been trying to get rid of money for his entire career, starting with PayPal and continuing through his many cryptocurrency scams.
After his arrest in 1940, Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman became increasingly disenchanted with his country’s “declining values” — he didn’t like movies, Coca-Cola, or refined flour — and moved his family to South Africa in 1950. This was two years after Apartheid, which literally means “apart-hood,” started. The oppressive, racist regime was advertising itself as a new “whites only paradise” at the time.
On the back of what was effectively slave labor in his emerald mine, Haldeman got “filthy rich,” to the point that the family “couldn’t close the safe.” In 1971, Joshua Haldeman’s daughter Maye gave birth to Elon in Pretoria. Elon remained in South Africa, raised in whites-only prep schools, until the age of 17 when he moved to Canada to avoid military service and make immigrating to the US easier — which he did a few years later.
Three decades after leaving Apartheid, Musk’s companies are infamously racist and Musk himself has persistently signaled to white supremacist, Nazi movements on Twitter. Given his upbringing and his inherent psychopathy, it should not be surprising that he is continuing the family tradition.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk is a runaway train who appears to be ready to destroy the planet to get what he wants. Given that he has lost more than half of his worth in the project, he appears increasingly desperate to accelerate his destruction to warp speed.
His longtermism gives him a false altruistic basis for his nihilistic goals; his technocratic beliefs make him think he is the only one who can fix it; his obsession with Russian Cosmism and anarcho-communist science fiction give him a political framework to pursue his whims at the cost of others; and his transhumanist ideas give his racist, eugenicist heart a “scientific” rationale.
Despite his denials, Elon Musk is in fact brainwashed by a lifetime of rich white male privilege in which his flights of fancy based on sci-fi books or Russian occultism or his grandfather’s bedtime stories are constantly turned into reality.
But the hodgepodge of bizarre beliefs that he holds in his head hardly resembles the racist caricature he perceives himself as — a 4chan Roman ubermensch.
Elon Musk is a dangerous man at a dangerous time with hundreds of millions of people in his captive audience. It should be a bigger deal that he is actively trying to psyop them all into his eugenicist, anarcho-communist, technocratic sci-fi cult.
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Fascinating insights, thank you. This ideology is wild and I wasn’t aware of much of it
But I also think Musk is being more forcefully manipulated here than meets the eye. Remember Bezos was hacked by the Saudis or so he claims, causing the most expensive divorce in history. I think team Putin-MbS has some dirt or leverage on Musk and are bending him to their will, sometimes quite reluctantly, sometimes in agreement. He is being corrupted and abused, although he himself is an abusive tyrant. Thats how these goons machinations work. They align such personalities to do their bidding as they corrupt them and sink them deeper into a amoral hole of sociopathy. Trump, Barr, Manafort - all narcissistic jerk bullies - Musk too.
Objectivism recycled with added touches of tech. I want to read all on this important topic, Jim, but my bandwidth is stretched so thin I'll have to come back to this when my energy does. Good night, sweet prince.