Critics describe Elon Musk’s guiding philosophy of longtermism as primed to justify “atrocities.”
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Adam
How furiously we have flown. Where are we now?
Lucifer
Did you not wish to rise above the earth
To a higher sphere, where, if I understood you
Quite correctly, you have heard the cries
Of fellow spirits?
Adam
That is true, but I
Never imagined the way would be so barren.
— The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách
PORT ISABEL, TX — The roads were filling up as the countdown clock ticked down. It took nearly an hour to pull into Port Isabel, a town of roughly 5,000 near the southernmost point of Texas. Rusting sheds boasting “Texas Gold” and rows of shrimp boats nestled close to shore, approaching the town’s working port as Gulf waters reflected the early afternoon sun.
Across the bay from Industrial Drive, SpaceX teams were readying another Starship for launch. The gleaming silver rocket at top is as much a break from NASA’s whale-shaped ceramic-colored shuttles as the Blade Runner-inspired Cybertrucks that increasingly stalk these small town streets are from normal cars.
Elon Musk has, if nothing else, reliably delivered the future in his SpaceX rockets and Tesla cars just as mass entertainments have conditioned us to imagine it (even if, in practice, they require considerable cleanup, as in the case of his killer cars.)
Thousands are gathered near the once pristine but rapidly industrializing outfall of the 1,800-mile Rio Grande to watch a 400-foot tube cover the land with fire and rise beyond the clouds. Most gathered in this back pocket of town are locals. A couple, including a welder who said he works on SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster rocket, boast SpaceX merch. A group at the periphery fly Trump flags off the back of their truck. Many exchange Starship-centered small talk.
The first since the election, this launch is different from those that came before. Folks seem cautious in discussing the fact of President-elect Donald Trump standing across the bay beside new presidential appendage Elon Musk. To my right, a man points his chin at a second launch tower beside the now steaming Starship. Starbase is growing: Musk plans to accelerate operations in 2025 as the company seeks to incorporate as its own city.
“Are they gonna name those the Trump Towers?” smiles another man observing the twin launch towers.
A couple on a blanket share a strained look. They describe how the windows on the nearby boat that they inhabit rattle threateningly with every launch. They share these details carefully, without seeming to complain. But it’s clear they aren’t enthusiastic about the thought of more frequent sonic-boom-producing rocket launches. They aren’t alone.
While this couple can up anchor and relocate at any time, relocation is less possible for many in Cameron County, one of the state’s poorest counties. Announcements about a recent launch had residents piling on Facebook with stories of personal damages that SpaceX, granted immunity from their claims by former Gov. Rick Perry (R), will never compensate them for.
A recent survey found that 16 of 665 Cameron County residents surveyed claimed to have experienced property damage that they ascribed to SpaceX activities. Extrapolated across the entire population of Cameron County, this could mean that thousands of area residents have potentially seen their homes damaged by SpaceX.
Back at the launch, a few watch in obvious rapture, including one high school student celebrating her birthday with her parents. She claims to have attended every Starship launch to date. But the crowd is largely subdued. Opinions about Musk and SpaceX have been shifting, as Gaige Davila wrote for Deceleration.
Given Musk’s influential role in getting Trump reelected, it is impossible to celebrate SpaceX today without also celebrating Trump and the MAGA agenda. Without also celebrating, for instance, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, who used the November launch day as an opportunity to offer Trump 1,400 acres of state lands for the construction of camps to facilitate the promised largest mass deportation campaign in US history.
Here in the Rio Grande Valley, where immigrants make up a quarter of Brownsville residents, the closest large city to Musk’s Spaceport, such plans are bitingly personal. Trump’s recent suggestion that he will include US citizens who cohabit with undocumented residents in this mass roundup puts another 1.4 million people at risk in the state.
Even for those who are allowed to stay, the impact on the economy of this massive action is expected to be severe, potentially shrinking the US gross domestic product (GDP) by more than 6 percent.
To those who voted MAGA based upon fears of inflation and promises to reduce the costs of basic necessities: There’s more bad news. Trump’s promised trade wars could cost Texas hundreds of thousands of jobs and devastate the Texas economy — particularly across the borderlands — as companies pass along the cost of those tariffs to consumers.
Somewhere between offering random millions to potential voters and the day of the election, Musk started breaking the bad news, warning that a Trump victory would come with economic penalties. That we must all prepare for “temporary hardship.” Since MAGA’s victory, Musk began promising to take this economic warfare even further by pledging to carve out trillions from the federal budget, an act certain to reduce or eliminate a range of social services that working families depend upon.
Two weeks ago, he stepped in front of Trump to help tank stopgap efforts to keep the federal government funded, demonstrating both his personal power and his commitment to economic turmoil. Somehow arguments defending the need to crash the economy — and for those most on the margins to suffer the result — from one of the largest welfare recipients in modern America doesn’t land right.
There is nothing necessary about any of this. The United States is not going bankrupt. This promised shock doctrine is not remotely helpful. As Eric Levitz wrote at Vox, these various demands expected to bring suffering to working families “would neither be necessary for — nor conducive to — achieving a healthier or more sustainable economy.”
On one level, breaking things unnecessarily and demanding others suffer for it is just what shit billionaire bosses do.
Musk, in particular, operates according to what one former employee describes as a “pigeon” management style (“he comes, shits all over us, and goes”). It would explain how the Austin transplant has been treating his adopted community’s water supply.
To see Musk today — his black “dark MAGA” hat, amplifications of racist anti-immigrant and antisemitic conspiracy theories, and at least $260 million shoveled into returning Trump to the White House — it’s easy to forget how he arrived in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley a nerdy billionaire wanna-be climate savior. His company Tesla’s drive to electrify transportation was a tool intended to help slow planetary overheating. Yet it remains today a luxury brand — by choice — keeping electric vehicles far out of reach for working-class families. Musk recently cancelled plans to roll out a line of affordable electric cars, The Washington Post reports, while funneling billions into improvements on their luxury car line.
As the Post outlines, much of this reversal followed Musk’s feelings of being personally snubbed by people with political power. The story arc that took him from Obama liberal to “dark MAGA” has a sympathetic echo in Trump’s own journey from a Clinton donor to his early presidential aspirations as revenge fantasy, set in motion by President Barack Obama’s now infamous roasting of the once and now future president.
Tesla owners have noticed Musk’s radicalization too.
“I’m embarrassed driving this car around after the election, thinking about the man behind it,” one Tesla Model 3 owner told The Guardian after the election. Pasting an “Anti Elon Tesla Club” magnet on the vehicle helped somewhat, they said. “It’s really changed how people think about the brand,” said a Bloomberg Business commentator of Musk’s political reformation.
Local elected officials in South Texas celebrated SpaceX as a trophy catch to whom they could arguably still ascribe the nobler intentions of turning a very dysfunctional species into a space-faring civilization. Some saw through this neoliberal posture and colonizing language. The Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and their supporters, for instance, have long decried the hypocrisy of exploding rockets over sacred sites while damaging the local ecology, ozone layer, and the climate system itself.
For Musk, deprioritizing climate as an issue is not because, as he says, accelerating fossil fuel use hasn’t ushered in the hottest temps planet Earth has seen in 120,000 years or more. It’s because this expanding maelstrom of heat and storms and floods displacing millions year after year doesn’t pose an “existential” threat.
Thousands can be wiped out by a single storm in French Polynesia as the ones responsible for adjusting the world’s Doomsday Clock warn that the climate crisis is “one of the most devastating problems that humanity has ever faced.” But Musk’s new calculus maintains that humanity’s economic apex predators aren’t threatened by ecological breakdown. For the foreseeable future, the super rich can continue gobbling up New Zealand retreats, or lands wherever people imagine will be safe from climate chaos, while readying their getaway to Mars.
Texas logged nearly 600 heat-related deaths in 2023. This was the hottest year on planet Earth, heat that has leached into 2024, which is now poised to claim that title next. Among the suffering have been residents in the Rio Grande Valley, who regularly experience some of the hottest temps in the state. This suffering has begun to inspire folks from outside to stop moving to the state.
Musk’s shift from erstwhile climate-concerned tech geek to dark MAGA acolyte has been smoothed by his concurrent embrace of something called “longtermism,” a philosophy that accepts large-scale, near-term human suffering as a reasonable exchange for the possibility of distributing human consciousness across the cosmos in the long term.
With roots in effective altruism’s debates over how charity functions in the world — and how to improve it — longtermism is rooted in the belief that denizens of the very distant future merit attention in our decisions today. It was given shape by a small cadre of men in elite spaces, at least one of whom espoused racist ideas related to human intelligence, and supported by Elon Musk.
Musk gave a huge boost to longtermist thought when he declared “What We Owe the Future,” a treatise by Scottish philosopher William MacAskill, to be a “close match” for his own philosophy. MacAskill, however, gets the science of climate change dangerously wrong, as longtermism skeptic Émile P. Torres has written. While the goal of growth long championed by economic elites like Musk refers in this case not to endlessly expanding capital or rising GDP, but to the number of future possible human consciousnesses (carbon- or silicon-based, longtermists don’t seem to discriminate). What’s good for SpaceX is good for … God, the universe, and everything, apparently.
Musk’s philosophical affair with longtermism intersects with his Great Replacement anxieties over population, sometimes in ways that seem almost contradictory.
Like many tech bros caught up in white nationalist daydreaming (JD Vance, Peter Theil), Musk is pronatalist, obsessed with falling birth rates, and warns of if we don’t increase reproduction. It’s a strange fixation, as humans have rocketed from the 19th century’s threshold-clearing 1 billion population mark to reach more than 8 billion today and are currently on track to surpass 10 billion in a few decades.
Humanity now outweighs all wild mammals on Earth by a factor of 10. Yet this fact didn’t stop Musk from funding a research center at UT Austin to study the issue. Longtermism means accepting the need to maintain a large population of austerity-impoverished masses if it means a chance to seed a version of humanity across the cosmos.
Perhaps, longtermism is nothing more than a dusted-off Machiavellianism, in which the end justifies the means. For despite its familiar-feeling pledges about benefiting future generations, as philosopher Alice Crary writes:
[Longtermism is] shockingly dismissive of “non-existential” hazards that may result in the suffering and death of huge numbers in the short term if, as they see it, there is a reasonable probability that the hazards are consistent with the possibility of a far greater number of humans going on to flourish in the long term.
Even ethicist Peter Singer, known best for his philosophical analyses of animal rights and utilitarianism — strands of which would reweave themselves into longtermist thinking — warned ominously in 2021 that longtermism is dangerously primed to fuel and justify “atrocities.”
“Marx’s vision of communism as the goal of all human history provided Lenin and Stalin with a justification for their crimes,” Singer wrote for Project Syndicate, “and the goal of a ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was, in the eyes of the Nazis, sufficient reason for exterminating or enslaving those deemed racially inferior.”
Singer here is not equating Marxism and Nazism, as many on the far right often do. Rather, he’s pointing to the political dangers of any teleological philosophy — any understanding that history does or must move inexorably toward a specific end — when seized upon by the interests of the powerful.
As one RealTesla Redditor observed recently of Musk’s seismic shift against climate action and toward MAGA escapism:
Yeah, all signs point to he has decided to screw over the Earth just so he can make it to Mars. And why? Because in a billion years Earth might be uninhabitable.
But Musk’s orientation is even worse than that.
Longtermism is, in spite of the name, sort of an antithesis of the seven generations philosophy rooted in so many Indigenous cultures, a reminder that we must vigorously protect the Earth and its many natural systems today as we are “borrowing it from future generations” and owe those future generations a good life.
As Potawotomi philosopher Kyle Powys White writes, Indigenous philosophy is far from wholly future-oriented; instead, seven generations can also be understood as standing in the present generation looking three generations back and three forward. It is not a linear timeline to the stars; instead it is a terrestrial experience of “spiraling time,” a dialogue between ancestors and descendants as we walk through this life, weighing their questions to us: “How do we return the gifts of our ancestors?” and “How do we become good ancestors?”
The facts of megastorms and expanding heat and fire have not escaped Musk’s attention in the way Trump talks about the climate “scam.” When Musk stands up for increased border militarization and mass evictions of immigrants, he can recognize these people as the same ones escaping years of crop-withering drought, caused in large part by US energy policies.
He sees the climate-dispossessed dehumanized and interned and nods approvingly. He understands too that millions of relatively wealthy Americans increasingly are driven from their homes by extreme weather and needlessly suffering from policies we could change if we accepted the climate crisis as the existential threat that it is.
But after advancing many years down a path concerned with terrestrial repair, Musk instead has chosen a revolution of extraction-minded billionaires demanding an unrestrained fossil fuel industry rapidly Marsifying Earth — the only habitable planet we know for certain. Three quarters of the lands on Earth have been made “permanently drier,” due to climate change, reports the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, a huge alarm for future famine. Meanwhile some of the most critical ecosystems on the planet, the coral reefs and Amazonian rainforests, are but a handful of years away from collapse, victims of ocean heat and rising temperatures, fire, and fragmentation.
Longtermism provides the absolution some part of Musk perhaps still requires for the all-but-certain torching of the Earth that will result from pitting climate action against the mission to Mars. This month, Musk’s use of obvious untruths to achieve his (narrowly avoided) objective of defunding the federal government in time for the holidays shows again how ready he is to punish others — in this case farm families and those soaked by Hurricane Helene — to achieve his goal of fundamentally restructuring the economy to better serve the interests of the 0.01 percent and, concurrently, his mission to Mars.
In the days after the Capitol Hill blowup, an unidentified Trump staffer insisted Musk was not a rogue self-powered interest running amok in national politics, but instead a “pawn in Trump’s chessboard, like everybody else.” In the same breath, they upgraded Musk to a “bishop” on that board of play.
Some have argued convincingly that Musk is animated by more than his Mars mission. Journalist and historian Dave Troy, for example, holds that Musk’s deepest commitment is to a new global power alignment that seeks to first eradicate democratic styles of national governance to pave the way for global totalitarianism. Watching Musk stumping for the extreme right in Germany, just as he has in Brazil, I’m not ruling that out. But be he bishop, pawn, or even king, Musk’s most toxic trait is his cosmological vision that, like MAGA, infects working people who have been failed by political elites and inflames desires for authoritarianism leadership above and punishment for those deemed to be below, including climate displaced populations at home and abroad.
“Longtermism offers a deeply impoverished view of our future,” writes Torres. It brings potentially “catastrophic consequences if taken literally by those in power.”
Understanding the tradeoffs Musk’s philosophy actually demands is the first step to defeating it.
•
Reprinted with permission from Deceleration.
Marisol Cortez contributed analysis for this essay.
