The amazing fascist-adjacent coincidences of Elon Musk

Presidential Adviser Elon Musk made an arm gesture, twice, that was or wasn't a fascist salute.

A few days later, he appeared by videolink at a campaign event for Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, saying, "There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that," adding that the anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist party is "the best hope for Germany" and urging them "not to lose [German culture] in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything."

After judges blocked parts of his federal downsizing effort, Musk called them out by name in a non-excessive 30 posts on X, calling them “corrupt,” "evil," and “radical,” and deriding the "TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY" — something that may or may not have direct, sobering parallels to Germany in March 1933.

This was followed by a coincidental rise in violent threats against the judges Musk had named.

While appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, Musk said, "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." There is of course a context for that one — but the context, as sociologist Philip Cohen points out, makes it much worse.

In the course of paraphrasing ideas from marketing professor and Trump enthusiast Gad Saad, Musk said:

Musk: [Saad] talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

(Full episode transcript here)

It’s good to "care about other people," Musk said in a hand-waving way. But you mustn't let concern for individuals get in the way of concern for The People.

As the historically literate will know, more human suffering has resulted from that exact idea than almost any other in history.

'Greater than myself'

Elevating the collective above the individual has immense appeal for our mental architecture. Contained in and extolled by the lofty aspiration to be a part of "something greater than myself," it can be extraordinarily pro-social, flipping what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the "hive switch." But both extremes of the political spectrum have exploited that very switch with devastating results, from Stalin and Mao on the left to Hitler and Mussolini on the right.

The Third Reich's Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz ("Common good before self-interest") and Mussolini's Giacché, per il fascista, tutto è nello Stato, e nulla di umano o spirituale esiste, e tanto meno ha valore, fuori dello Stato ("For the fascist, everything is within the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State") are both expressions of this concept. Lenin's evocation of the class struggle of the proletariat, Kim Il Sung's Juche ideology, and many of Mao's aphorisms ("At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and of the masses") all revolved around subsuming the individual to the collective.

They all sparkle on the surface with selfless morality, these phrases — and every one of them led directly to immense suffering. The alternative is to balance the rights of the individual and the good of the collective — arguably the essence of the American experiment, now arguably ending.

So Musk sees caring about individuals as a potential threat to civilization, an obstacle to big plans. Saad and others have even begun defining empathy as the particular fault of women, who therefore cannot be entrusted with power. The phrase "suicidal empathy" is trending in MAGA circles.

It all slots neatly into the history of humanitarian disasters.

In The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, historian Thomas Childers describes the Nazi effort to flip the hive switch:

The ultimate goal of this intense indoctrination was to condition Germans to think racially, to view the world through a biological lens, and to infuse German society with a new racial ethos. Germans were constantly reminded that they were no longer merely Germans; they were Aryans, and their first duty was to the Volk, defined in racial terms.

Doctors, too, needed to adjust their priorities. They were no longer tending to the individual but to the Volk. There was no higher moral obligation. In this new biological society there could be no outmoded sympathy for the weak or for the racially inferior. Feelings of “false humanity,” “exaggerated pity,” and brotherly love were no longer operable values…

With stunning callousness, the Nazis produced photographs of desperately disabled children juxtaposed with rosy-cheeked healthy children, accompanied by charts that purported to document the exorbitant costs of maintaining the unfit. These illustrated charts appeared in newspapers, journals, and as posters, ostensibly documenting the drain posed by the disabled on the economy and reminding taxpayers that they were footing the bill for this false “humanitarianism”—and that in a stressful time of economic recovery.

As one poster frankly stated, “The genetically ill damage the community. The healthy preserve the Volk.”

It's just a question of government efficiency, you understand.

Charmed circles have an inside and an outside. Who is included in the circle of protection and value, and who is not? The Nazi Volksgemeinschaft specifically excluded Jews, communists, and other "undesirables." Even the Jewish and Christian call to "love your neighbor" has sparked a millennia-long debate about who really qualifies as a neighbor — and the implicit invocation of the inverse ("do not love those who are not your neighbor"), most recently by the vice-president, has justified pogroms and crusades and genocides.

So who qualifies as part of Elon Musk's "civilization," and who does not?

Decision time, again

As we stumble into the future, there will be innumerable decision points, moments when we have to puzzle out whether and how to lay ourselves on the tracks. This is yet another one of those moments. Is Elon Musk — currently the most influential person in American government — repeatedly but innocently and coincidentally blundering into one fascist trope and phrase and gesture and expression of concurrence after another? Or should we see them as dangerous and real indicators of a toxic influence sitting at the heart of our national life?

Whether or not you've arrived at the latter conclusion as I have, please now add to your deliberations his statement that empathy is a weakness, a "bug" in our civilization, a threat to a charmed circle that he carefully declines (for now) to define.

Then consider the likelihood that our future will be colored in part by all of us — individually and collectively, as it were — looking back and wondering why we didn't see this, all of this, and why we didn't do something.