Comment by gumboza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumboza | Hacker News Reader

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He does run a cult.

My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion.

This is exactly cult behaviour.

I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK.

I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front.

Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.

Ugh, Sorry to hear youre going through this. Unwinding an entrenchment is hard, wonder if theres a support group or something for those deep in techno-optimism.

For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat).

A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .

This is extremely sad and I hope you and your father can try therapy together or separately, but the fundamental issue is not Tesla or the car. Those are the symptoms. Best of luck.

You're right. It's not the car or Tesla.

It's Musk

America is not becoming atheist.

People are just substituting God with false idols and cults.

That deep need to believe in something bigger than self is not going away, it will always be there, it can be filled with religion or something else.

I believe the least destructive way to fill it is with sports affiliation so I won't be so cynic about the SuperBowl hype come this February

Literally. People thought the death of God would bring enlightenment to society. Instead, God was replaced by stupid idols. You only have to look at the resurgence of astrology among young women.

It might never go away but that doesn’t mean it has to be filled with religion or something equally as bad. There is such a thing as community and public service that have some actual meaning and benefit to society, they just don’t get as much airtime as corporate ad spends.

We find ourselves living in a vetocracy, where very little groundbreaking work actually gets done. Critics rule the roost at this current cultural moment. So there's a lot of pent-up energy that will be rewarded to anyone able to articulate a concrete positive vision for the future. Of course people are going to bow down and worship the one guy actually making progress against all odds. The only other person might be Zuck with his metaverse bet, but although he has the concrete positive vision, unlike Musk he hasn't delivered (yet). Anyone have other examples?

I think you're on to something. At every other point in history the wealthy were expected to use their wealth. Victorian wealthy funded folly and public libraries and other stuff. Roman aristocrats paid for entire armies.

Our billionaires subscribe to greed is good capitalism and hoard their wealth though. Musk bucks this trend and therefore gets a ton of my sympathy despite his erratic nature. We need more Elon Musks not less.

Would you kindly present an argument as to why one should believe we are living in a vetocracy? I see people pursuing all manner of projects all the time, I don't really buy that the world has been narrowed by criticism. What I see limiting people's ability to pursue projects they're passionate about is a lack of funding and opportunity.

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build...

See also: The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri which focuses a lot on the criticism issue

I found this thoroughly unconvincing.

A billionaire tells his critics they should build stuff instead of criticize him, as if their opportunities to do so are equivalent, and as of criticism and building stuff are mutually exclusive? That doesn't hold a drop of water.

We didn't have enough respirators because of critics? My recollection is that we failed to invoke the Defense Production Act and impress companies into building them. This was based on the values of the Trump administration (who saw this as a violation of free market principles) and not an overabundance of criticism; as an executive order, it would have been immune to veto.

The piece goes on to argue the federal government is a vetocracy, and I can agree that Congress is in a state of gridlock like 90% of the time. But that isn't because of critics, that's because of party politics and deficiencies in the structure of Congress. This is a cynical power play to sabotage one's opponents, not criticism run amok.

I can agree that there's "vetocracy" in the sense of gridlock, but when you say "critics rule the roost," I remain unconvinced. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the book you recommend, I have not taken a look at that yet.

People are, as are companies, but public works are increasingly bogged down but polarization, litigation, and bureaucracy. I think this creates a sense of unreality because campaign promises and outcomes end up feeling so disconnected from each other. 25 years ago it was more common to see public officials pop up in the news and say 'we're gonna start doing X' and then see construction crews or the equivalent at work the following Monday. It was also easier to keep track of 'progress bars' because the media landscape wasn't fragmented into 10,000 tiny snowglobes depicting a particular narrow view of the world.

The internet is part of the issue, but only part. Long-term political strategizing is another part, and a third factor is 9-11 which seems to have permanently traumatized the USA. As a simple example, information displays on subway platforms in my area are still putting up announcements about how public bathrooms in the subway station are closed for security reasons. It's been 21 years since 9-11 and major cities in the US are too freaked out to figure out basic things like public bathrooms and instead live in a permanent state of mental emergency.

I think we need to look at the assumptions made. Has Musk and Zuck actually improved the world or merely reorganised it to gain market for their ideological purposes?

Delivery or not doesn't imply improvement. Progress for the sake of progress is not necessarily an improvement either.

I am quite happy to hear "progress for the sake of progress is not necessarily an improvement either", as that is indeed true.

What ideological purposes do you think Musk has? What is the ideology he is pushing building rockets and electric cars?

Longtermism: https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-secret-obsession-wi...

Yes and no. Yes, progress for the sake of progress isn't strictly an improvement.

On the other hand conditions are ever changing and our knowledge of the world changes our understanding of those conditions. To me these things nearly always imply that we should act in some direction to improve our lot. I don't see many people willing to put in the work. I see a lot of people willing to sit on the sideline and talk about how the people on the field are dumb or what they're doing obviously won't work, and that they are evil scheming villains who will surely change the world for the worst for their own benefit.

Please, be aware that if you call the mental health services on someone it can be extremely difficult to unwind. Once a giant bureaucracy tags you as a risk, sane decision making can go out the window. No-one will want to say you're not a risk even if you are sane, because their reputation suffers if they are wrong. Only a trained psychiatrist can make such a judgement legally and they may have an hour with you once every 3 months to make it. The psychiatrist will be acting in their forensic capacity, and will be unlikely to agree that you are sane unless you agree that you have a personality disorder and need medication. Being in that position can 100% drive a sane person mad.

Yeah 100% agree which is why I haven't actually done it yet. I would do it only if he put himself or someone else at grave risk.

I am so sorry. I don't know what to advise other than talking to a family lawyer. Regrettably, the highly networked society we have collectively created has spawned its own sort of mass media and cultishness has become widespread because it is easy and profitable to engineer.

I don't know what to suggest for your situation - maybe talk to a family lawyer? I have the impression that the NHS is probably not up to providing the kind of mental health support needed to deal with a broad spectrum social problem.

Thank you for sharing. I think it's important for people in this forum to hear stories like this.

This is not even the only case of Elon musk related psychosis that I've heared of.

Sometimes I legitimately believe that the SCP foundation or something like it is real because it feels like elites who are totally asses have reality distortion fields around them.

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