People like that genuinely believe that they should be in charge because of who they are. He has absolutely no feelings of guilt about the terrible things that he does; he thinks they’re good because he did them.
Narcissistic megalomaniacs, especially ultra wealthy ones, lose their ability to empathize (or even the ability to mask and pretend) because they quite literally never have to care about how another person feels.
I do think he’s confused as to why people hate him though. He sees himself as a lovable cheeky troll instead of the Nazi dickhead that he clearly is.
A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
That’s my point: billionaires are an establishment unto themselves, and they’re already in a cartel to control the US government.
Corey Robin put it better than I can in The Reactionary Mind:
Far from yielding a knee-jerk defense of an unchanging old regime or a thoughtful traditionalism, the reactionary imperative presses conservatism in two rather different directions: first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; and second, to an absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes. What conservatism seeks to accomplish through that reconfiguration of the old and absorption of the new is to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses. A new old regime, one could say, which brings the energy and dynamism of the street to the antique inequalities of a dilapidated estate.
There isn’t really any rehabilitation of his current image possible. It’s not like he did one or two bad things he could apologise for, it was systematic and continuous. He’s revealed himself to be a fascist which is pretty bad to begin with, but also a degenerate which repels even the fascists from liking him.
On the face of it, it looks like that. It probably is that.
But if we think about it for a moment. He is a person after all. Brushes teeth, eats, po*p s like everyone else. And it is sometimes when we do these mundane things in our lives, we just think. At least during some of those moments there would be some self reflection. Everyone has something to be guilty about. It’s just that these kind of people have a lot of options in that area. So I’m wondering if they are just in denial. And that is such a sad superpower to have.
I think it’s a mistake to believe that everyone has a sense of empathy; there are plenty of people who do not because of their brain meat or their experiences.
I think the closest Musk gets is the desperate and pathetic attempts to get gamers to like him: it makes him crazy that he can’t just buy their respect like he does for everything else that he wants.
I’m with the other commenter. There are people in this world born without empathy, and within that group, there is another two subsets, those that can learn it, and those that can not. It gets broken down further to people who can learn it and use it for good and learn it and use it to manipulate.
People born without these emotions aren’t common, but there really are ‘psychopaths’ out there that don’t/can’t/won’t feel things for other people. The only hope for these people is therapy, and even then, therapy is a double edged sword that also teaches them the tools to manipulate. And to a group that already is predisposed to not care how others feel, that’s a risky move.
People like that genuinely believe that they should be in charge because of who they are. He has absolutely no feelings of guilt about the terrible things that he does; he thinks they’re good because he did them.
Narcissistic megalomaniacs, especially ultra wealthy ones, lose their ability to empathize (or even the ability to mask and pretend) because they quite literally never have to care about how another person feels.
I do think he’s confused as to why people hate him though. He sees himself as a lovable cheeky troll instead of the Nazi dickhead that he clearly is.
Before the not-a-cunt mask slipped he was seen as a cool, anti establishment troll by space nerds. I think he is trying to get back to that.
But that mask slipped long ago… and the longer you look at his past the further back in time it slips…
How anyone can see a billionaire as “anti-establishment” is beyond me.
A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
That’s my point: billionaires are an establishment unto themselves, and they’re already in a cartel to control the US government.
Corey Robin put it better than I can in The Reactionary Mind:
There isn’t really any rehabilitation of his current image possible. It’s not like he did one or two bad things he could apologise for, it was systematic and continuous. He’s revealed himself to be a fascist which is pretty bad to begin with, but also a degenerate which repels even the fascists from liking him.
On the face of it, it looks like that. It probably is that.
But if we think about it for a moment. He is a person after all. Brushes teeth, eats, po*p s like everyone else. And it is sometimes when we do these mundane things in our lives, we just think. At least during some of those moments there would be some self reflection. Everyone has something to be guilty about. It’s just that these kind of people have a lot of options in that area. So I’m wondering if they are just in denial. And that is such a sad superpower to have.
I think it’s a mistake to believe that everyone has a sense of empathy; there are plenty of people who do not because of their brain meat or their experiences.
I think the closest Musk gets is the desperate and pathetic attempts to get gamers to like him: it makes him crazy that he can’t just buy their respect like he does for everything else that he wants.
He doesn’t do that thinking. People like him are incapable of self reflection because they truly believe they can do no wrong.
There is quite a bit of evidence that, in his spare “thinking” time, he is ingesting a huge amount of mind-altering drugs.
Musk is so impervious to ego-death that I suspect his will hang around for a few decades after his body.
I’m with the other commenter. There are people in this world born without empathy, and within that group, there is another two subsets, those that can learn it, and those that can not. It gets broken down further to people who can learn it and use it for good and learn it and use it to manipulate.
People born without these emotions aren’t common, but there really are ‘psychopaths’ out there that don’t/can’t/won’t feel things for other people. The only hope for these people is therapy, and even then, therapy is a double edged sword that also teaches them the tools to manipulate. And to a group that already is predisposed to not care how others feel, that’s a risky move.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
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