#14: Elon Said It's My Turn to Root Your Limbic System

Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars. A giant publicly-traded cybernetic egregore has been saddled and bridled by one human being — and now we learn whether man or machine will prevail.

Like Trump, Elon seems to enrage the establishment almost by accident, being unwilling or unable (he is literally neurodivergent and a miner) to respect elite cultural taboos. But, also like Trump, there doesn’t seem to be any ideological muscle behind his provocation. They’re both basically just liberals with Aspergers, suffering ruthless ableist persecution.

Guys like Musk and Trump are desperately bored by “moralizing” — questions of Right and Wrong, questions of how we ought to live. In fact, they view anyone insisting too strongly on those lines of inquiry with suspicion.

They aren’t liberals of the heart, passionate about human equality or justice; they’re liberals because they believe that liberalism is a social contract in which we all agree to leave each other the hell alone about such questions, so we can focus on things that matter, like orbital rockets and luxury hotels.

The only reason Trump and Musk have made enemies of the Left instead of the Right is that the Left is in power, which means that their moralizing is the moralizing that counts.

The problem is that liberalism can’t leave them alone.

No doubt you’ve seen this piece of corporate art explaining the vital liberal imperative to punch Nazis. Adolf Hitler was democratically elected, they argue, and used his democratically-assigned powers to dismantle democracy — so in order to maintain a tolerant system, it’s necessary to place intolerant ideas “outside the law”.

The problem is that once you’ve created a category of Intolerant Ideas which must be forcibly suppressed without discussion, you create a massive incentive for the system’s powerful constituencies to declare their political enemies ipso facto Intolerant.

And of course, their political enemies are intolerant of them, because that’s what it means to be “political enemies”. If I am not trying to use political power to stop you from doing something that you feel you have a right to do — in other words, unless I am unwilling to tolerate your behavior — we are not political enemies. All policy controversies hang on “intolerance” in this sense.

Of course, not all of us want our moral judgments coercively enforced, and when your centrist liberal relatives imagine “hate” or “intolerance” they are picturing coercion — but the whole point of this “paradox of tolerance” is that intolerance is so dangerous that it must be forcibly stamped out before it obtains coercive power, while it’s still in the realm of theory and rhetoric. In other words, by this construction, there is no meaningful distinction between “intolerance” and “dissent”.

The current ruling ideology of the West, sometimes called Cultural Marxism or Bioleninism or Liquid Modernity or Globohomo, is merely a full-throated commitment to the Refusal to Tolerate Intolerance, carried to its natural conclusion. Moral judgments lead inevitably to Auschwitz, therefore moral judgments are not to be entertained, anywhere, ever.

You look around, of course, and things don’t feel less judgmental or intolerant — in fact, people seem suffocatingly watchful for immoral and socially harmful behavior. They police it in themselves, constantly, without thinking, and publicly apologize for not thinking about it more. If these people don’t believe in anything, why do they believe in it so much more stridently than any actual religious believers?

Would-be dissenters love to point out this “hypocrisy” — but it isn’t hypocrisy. The managers of this regime are — sincerely — devoid of moral judgment. This is precisely the distinction they are defending when they say that In This House We Believe in Science.

When is a priest not a priest?

The above creed may seem to you to be a series of straightforward moral judgments of the kind that spontaneously produce overloaded cattle cars bound for human crematoria, but they are all in fact evidence-based conclusions of social science and psychiatry. The Experts spent long hours building linear regression models and conferring with their peers and determined that, actually, No Human Is Illegal.

Law and religion were domains of moral judgment, designed for the moral improvement of (respectively) Bad and Good People. Now, to the extent that they are welcome in policy conversations at all, it is strictly as institutions of psychological and social health and hygiene.

When the police kick down your door to confiscate and castrate your son, it will not be a punishment for your wickedness — it will be the delivery of a public mental health service. You will not be judged to be an evil force in your child’s life, but a Toxic one, like black mold or flame-retardant runway foam.

Obviously this Science is predicated on all the value-laden moral assumptions of the coastal elites who produce it, not only because they’re bad scientists, but because it has to be thus predicated — there’s no way to study a subject like “mental health” without some premises about what human beings are and how they’re meant to live.

When we say “it’s not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy”, it doesn’t just mean that people at the top of the hierarchy get to be hypocrites. Every society has to be established upon premises against which all other assessments and comparisons are made — and people at the top of the hierarchy establish those premises.

Liberalism, in the attempt to eradicate the religious impulse, has mutated into a governing religion with all the Religion markers sheared off, so that liberalism antibodies like “pluralism” and “empiricism” are powerless against it even in the minds of its own adherents. It’s invisible to them.

Guys like Trump and Musk are problem-aware, but can’t supply the solution.

Certainly Musk has dropped enough hints to suggest that he recognizes “Wokeness” to be an all-consuming metastatic threat to human civilization. The problem is that he, like many “anti-woke” or “intellectual dark web” types, labels Wokeness as a Religion derisively. He views the existence of theocratic institutions as a failure state, rather than an inevitability and a human universal.

Musk wants to make Western liberalism deliver on its promise of a values-neutral world: the dream of the 90s internet, in which we’re all free to be you and me and the Wokes will just Leave Us the Hell Alone. The problem with this is that a values-neutral society is not just a practical impossibility but a category error, a box without a box.

Western liberalism worked out pretty well when its theocratic element — the gestalt of the society’s moral and teleological premises — was broadly Christian. The judges and doctors and schoolteachers all read the Bible and, without speaking about it, or even thinking about it, built the society brick-by-brick around the moral consensus it supplied. Sure, we believe in religious freedom, but you can’t sacrifice your virgin daughter to Huitzilopochtli. Sure, “freedom of speech”, but no smut — etc. They didn’t share all their beliefs in common, but what they really believed in common was enforced as absolutely (and unconsciously) as any other system with divine mandate.

Liberalism allowed the West to hum along without fighting over transubstantiation — which is, ultimately, a fight over whether the Catholic Church is the Kingdom of God or the Whore of All the Earth — but it did so by getting everyone to cosign that it just doesn’t matter that much whether the Pope is the vicar of Christ on earth. Which is to say: “look, none of us really takes this stuff all that seriously”.

What we did take seriously, it turned out, was Getting Along. Sure, the Bible provides some pretty strong material to encourage Getting Along, but it also says lots of other things, and Western Christians increasingly liked to focus on the parts about Getting Along. Which leads inevitably to the Paradox of Tolerance — or, “what the hell do we believe in now that we don’t believe in anything”.

Moldbug says the problem with Twitter is way bigger than Elon thinks — he says Twitter can’t just withdraw from the game of fact-checking, contextualizing, and policing speech. He says in order to defeat the Blob, Twitter must become an absolutely pristine source of Fact, independent of (and forthrightly superior to) the New York Times and Harvard.

But I think the problem is much bigger than Moldbug thinks.

The source of Globohomo’s power is not its rapidly self-immolating intellectual credibility, but its pre-modern moral certitude — its utter confidence in its right to violently impose its own totalizing moral premises, while the rest of us agonize about whether holding a sign outside an abortion clinic is too strident for Christian witness.

So someone has to provide superior answers to questions of the soul — answers so self-confidently superior that they can be enforced with unexamined theocratic intensity (as all real religions have been enforced in every age of human history).

It’s not enough to best the Blob intellectually on COVID or Ukraine; it can’t be a series of studies that prove that trans surgeries fail to prevent suicide, or that intact biological families deliver superior childrearing outcomes, or that implicit bias training is fraudulent. That’s all been done; it didn’t matter. It’s still fighting the war on their turf, arguing in terms of the liberal criterion of harm from a liberal materialistic epistemology — literally the contours of intellectual terrain that gave shape to their ideology in the first place. You can’t beat them there.

The dragons you have to defeat are “Science is Real”, “Love is Love”, and “Kindness is Everything”. And you can’t just convince ordinary people that this is a fake and ugly and vapid moral ethos that is making them miserable, or show them how it forecloses sticky conversations that will burn down our civilization if we keep putting them off. In their secret hearts they can feel this, too, most of them.

The problem is that when they (privately) allow themselves to entertain such conversations, to admit some “ugly truths” to themselves, they have no way of metabolizing them. They recoil in horror at the atavistic monster they might become if they were to pursue that line of inquiry further. They have no mental model for a person who is Decent and also accepts these truths; so they retch, and puke them up, and go back to being liberals. They do this over and over, sometimes several times in a day.

Guys like Musk and Trump (and many of our friends on Twitter) have overcome this difficulty by simply throwing up their hands and giving up on respectability; but that’s never going to work, not in a million years, for your sweet centrist lib aunt. (If your aunt is a prole, maybe it doesn’t matter what she thinks — but many of you have sweet centrist lib aunts who work at the Pentagon.)

What she needs is a worldview that allows her to integrate these naughty illiberal ideas while firmly maintaining her self-concept as not only a good and pro-social person, but an uncomplicatedly zealous enforcer of goodness and prosociality. This worldview would need to either share liberalism’s resistance to liberal anti-religious antibodies, or be so compelling that it could overwhelm and destroy them.

Elon Musk obviously isn’t going to supply this answer in his capacity as a hyper-competent bigge-brayne executive; we need a prophet, not a king. But what a king can do is seek out prophets and protect them and give them audience. It’s possible that he can hold the portal open long enough for that person to emerge.