Let's End Empathy and Shorten People's Lives

Elon Musk's plan for America

I am in France right now, staying at an anarchist co-living community in a chateau. I am tempted to get a visa and escape the U.S. It is unclear, at the moment, whether the U.S. is going to descend fully into an authoritarian police state, which will lead to the extrajudicial imprisoning of dissidents, journalists, political opponents, and so on. I won’t be surprised if this is where we end up. I do not like the feral look in Kash Patel’s close-set eyes. At the same time, I see the value in “facing the demon” instead of running from it.

When I was younger, I avoided politics because it was corrupt and hypocritical. I found both U.S. political parties awful. When I bothered to vote, I pulled the lever for Team Blue without enthusiasm. In retrospect, I see that my ability to feel such disregard and contempt was a privilege. My friends and I belonged to a wealthy, permissive society which served us well enough that we could remain ironically detached, above the fray.

The only way I could imagine contributing politically was by building something outside of the establishment. I tried to do this from 2006 - 2013, with The Evolver Network. Evolver organized local groups around transformative practices and ideas we believed in, such as permaculture, local currencies, and consciousness exploration. We ran out of capital long before we could establish a self-sufficient model.

These days, I find it hard to tear my eyes away from the political juggernaut bearing down on American society and the established global order. It is unsurprising to me that America has been taken over by a despotic or authoritarian regime. I always suspected this would be America’s destiny. American “democracy” only offered a flimsy pretext of participation at best. Both parties are tightly controlled by the financial elite. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign seemed the last opportunity for real change. But the Democratic Party, unsurprisingly, snuffed it out.

America was, after all, the center of a global Empire — although that seems in free fall at the moment. With hundreds of military bases around the planet, we controlled the flows of resources and capital, invading and attacking countries who wouldn’t do our bidding, engineering coups to topple Leftist governments who dared to protect their resources from our extractive industries. We maintained our hegemony through the post-war institutions we set up at Bretton Woods, such as the World Bank, the UN, and the IMF. On some level, it feels like America is undergoing an inevitable reckoning right now, although, unfortunately, the damage will be severe — perhaps fatal for all of us due to an approaching climate Apocalypse.

It is sad to witness the moral abdication of the Democrats. With rare exceptions, they have been exposed as useless corporate apparatchiks, lacking courage or conviction. After Kamala Harris’ defeat, I read “How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?” in Current Affairs. The article substantiated what I already suspected: A huge amount of the billion dollars raised by Harris was squandered, with much of it going into the pockets of campaign strategists, political advisers, and tone-deaf TV ads.

“A whole class of people exists to make money off political campaigns and doesn’t particularly care whether their candidate wins or loses,” Nathan Robinson writes, continuing:

As the Democratic Party leaders’ ideology has become hollow, it’s not surprising that their operations, too, seem like they are the kinds of organizations that would be built by people who don’t really believe in anything, a consultant class completely out of touch with on-the-ground organizing. All they know how to do is demand money and spend it on nonsense, like a big light-up sphere or a concert with celebrities.

The Democratic Party’s operations resemble a form of fraud, “not quite a scam on the level of Bernie Madoff or the crypto industry,” Robinson notes, but bad enough. They convince supporters to donate under false pretenses, squandering funds on useless spectacles and inflated consultant fees instead of using the money wisely, for meaningful political action.

Yesterday, The New York Times published “ActBlue, the Democratic Fund-Raising Powerhouse, Faces Internal Chaos.” ActBlue is the primary political fundraising machine for the Democrats. It has raised $14 billion since 2004. As congressional Republicans investigate the nonprofit platform, seven senior officials suddenly resigned, including their general counsel. Unions for the organization wrote a letter calling out “a growing pattern of volatility and toxicity stemming from current leadership.” The situation sounds dicey — very worrisome for future Democratic campaigns, which rely on ActBlue.

The Republicans intend to use their dominant position to cement long-term rule. They are exploiting every fault line within the Democratic establishment, just as they continue to attack voting rights in every state. Unfortunately, while the Republicans are totally corrupt, the Democrats are, also, seriously corrupt. This leaves those of us who would like to see our country not become a perma-fascist theocracy / technocracy in a hard place.

I spend a lot of my time considering what kind of resistance, alternative, or social movement in the U.S. could have an impact. I am also studying, as best I can — trying to understand — what tech broligarchs, particularly Elon Musk, are actually seeking to do and what they want to accomplish. Musk recently spoke with Joe Rogan for three hours on Rogan’s podcast. Musk comes across as a person with little conscience, not deeply insightful about world affairs, with regressive ideas about race and a megalomaniacal conviction in his own importance as a savior of civilization.

Long ago, I appreciated Rogan for bringing psychedelics to the mainstream. I was on his podcast in 2011 and we interviewed him for our documentary. Now he is one of many awful, insipid trolls clogging our deformed media landscape. Rogan is a total suck up to our techno-feudalist overlords. Like Lex Fridman, he gives them a platform to express themselves, facing no criticism or pushback. There were so many exasperating lies and half-truths in Musk’s statements: It would take days, if not weeks, to catch them all.

Musk — who has been tasked by Trump to remake whole departments and fire tens of thousands of government employees — dismisses government, as a whole, as a “pyramid scheme.” This is extraordinary considering that the government subsidizes many of Musk’s companies. Public money also paid for the Internet, which Musk used to make his initial fortune.

While working people pay into Social Security over the course of their careers so they can survive after retirement, Musk calls Social Security, “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Musk — who is given to making Nazi salutes and hid Nazi symbolism in the DOGE logo — seems irritated that ordinary people are using the system they built to live beyond their utility as units of economic production: “Basically people are living way longer than expected um and uh there are fewer babies being born so you have more people who are retired and get to live for a long time and get retirement payments.”

Robert Reich refutes Musk’s claims in The Guardian:

Social security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s an exceptionally efficient part of the American social safety net – the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cutting it. Social security is a “pay as you go” program. Current workers, via the payroll tax, fund payouts for retirees and disabled people. In 2024, about one in five US residents received social security.

I used to be a trustee of the social security trust fund. I know social security. As the social security administration explains: “In 2025, when you work, about 85 cents of every social security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund. This fund pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died. About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.”

The only reason social security is running out of money is that its trustees never anticipated America’s current degree of income inequality – with so much of the nation’s income in the hands of relatively few people (such as Musk). The way to fix this is to lift the cap on income subject to social security payroll taxes, which is now $176,100.

The goal of Trump’s budgetary policies is to gut social security, Medicare, and other social services to offer a tax cut to the wealthiest members of society. In “Social Security’s Death Warrant Was Just Signed — Are You Ready?”, Thomas Hartmann lays out the Republican plan of attack. Like many of you, I have elderly relatives — in this case, my mother — who depend on Social Security and Medicare to survive. We live in a country where three individuals possess more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population, while the top 1% controls more capital than the bottom 35%. Personally, I believe we do not need billionaires and support limitarianism.

One exchange was about what Musk calls “civilizational suicidal empathy” or “weaponized empathy.” It is worth highlighting his statement, which has made the rounds: “I believe in empathy, like I think you should care about other people. But you need to have empathy for for civilization as a whole and not commit civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.