Sunday, February 23, 2025

Brave New World.

February 20, 2025. 

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” 

-                        -- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New Word.”

Bookey.app says Huxley "imagines a future world in which the population is divided into five classes, each of which lives in a different part of the world and is subject to strict social and technological control.  Through a combination of scientific and psychological manipulation, people in this world are conditioned to be content and docile, never questioning or challenging the system.”

Elon Musk has read the book. In a May 2024 talk at Vivatech Paris, Musk said Huxley’s vision might not be far off. “We might be headed to a bi-modal human intelligence distribution like in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World where you’ve got a small group of very smart humans, but the average intelligence drifts lower over time," he said. "It is inevitable that human intelligence will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future. Hopefully, the computers will be nice to us.”

Once AI kicks in, Musk envisions the elite group and the robots will do the heavy lifting. He doesn’t see much of a role for us dummies. "Probably none of us will have a job,” he said.

Huxley wrote Brave New World as a warning. Space man and futurist Musk sees it as a viable option, or at least an inevitable result of advancing technology. In the book the masses are pacified by “soma,” a drug that allows them to live detached from reality.

Musk’s vision for the unemployed lower group is “there will be universal high income, not universal basic income. There will be no shortage of goods or services, everyone will have access to as much in the way of goods and services as they would like." You may work, if you want to, like a hobby, but you won't need to. Sounds a bit like soma. 

Musk has long been a critic of government. Any government. At the WSJ CEO Summit he said the best thing governments can do is “Get out of the way,” and let industry do its thing. “I think it is a false dichotomy to look at government and industry as separate. Government is the ultimate corporation, a monopoly that can’t go bankrupt, or usually can’t go bankrupt.”

Today, as a Special Assistant to Trump and (maybe) head of DOGE, Musk is preparing for his Brave New World. On February 13, in a livestream talk to the World Government Summit in Dubai, he said, “An inevitable consequence of a long period of prosperity is that you're going to get more and more rules and regulations over time. The normal force for getting rid of rules and regulations is some kind of existential war to force a reset in order to avoid being defeated.

“In the absence of that, every year you get more laws and regulations until eventually everything is illegal, and nothing is permitted. That's the sort of situation we have these days. The aspiration is a reduction in regulation and government spending so that the economy is able to grow faster.”

“Ending is better than mending,” Huxley wrote in Brave New World. Musk agrees. Entire government departments need to be ripped out “like weeds,” he said. “There are so many agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually step on each other's feet. There are roughly 450 federal agencies. How many agencies do you really need to run a country? Ninety-nine? I’m pretty sure it’s not 450.”

In tech talk, an Easter egg is a hidden code within software. Musk went on to deliver a little Easter egg to his international audience, signifying his alignment with the administration’s foreign policy just one day before Vice-President JD Vance delivered his shocking address to Europe. A byproduct of  downsizing the US government would mean, “there is less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. A lot of times the United States has been kind of pushy in international Affairs. I think we should, in general, leave other countries to their own business and America should mind its own business.”

Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump in July 2024, shortly after they engaged in a two-hour Twitter-thon and almost immediately after the attempted assassination of Trump. Musk went on to spend $250 million in less than four months to help get Trump elected. He has also turned his attention on supporting right-wing movements in England and Germany.

The richest man in the world and the once and future president seem to have bonded in pursuit of one grand plan, with Musk’s somatic vision of oligarchic elitism and isolationism melding nicely with Trump’s embrace of Project 2025.

Notes.

https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEMcgiC6goY

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/10/elon-musk-government-is-the-ultimate-corporation.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsDnCXlxGi8

https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/department-of-labor-doge

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