Thank you, Elon!

Sergey Kleftzov
srgg67@gmail.com
Well, finally, our moral guru has reached nirvana. Or almost did. For that to happen, he just
needed to read the tweet where Elon Musk, in the process of an altercation with E. Warren
over the same issue of income inequality, said that he would pay over $ 11 billion in taxes
this year.
Dr. Jordan Peterson considered this event significant enough to personally thank E. Musk.
Hallelujah.
Now, isn’t this an act of selfless mercy in the name of the prosperity of the whole society?
Or is it something else?
Was this a choice of the richest man on Earth or a forced step? Besides, isn’t it Elon, aside
from all his really outstanding deeds, who gave reason with his controversial tweets to
suspect him of manipulating public opinion in order to achieve commercial benefits (Bitcoin,
Tesla shares, etc.)? Wasn’t he the author of a nasty tweet (“pedo guy”), insulting the
lifeguards who rescued the trapped children in Thailand? Isn’t he also infamous for his
boorish treatment of Tesla employees, reaching their dismissal simply because he was in a
dark mood?
However, this, in fact, is not about Mask. So, to move on from him, I would like to make it
clear that, in my opinion, he is undoubtedly an outstanding person, extremely talented,
purposeful and, perhaps, doing the most for the progress of mankind out of all those
inhabiting the sublunary world. There is no doubt that he is living under constant pressure in
the ruthless environment of big business where the cost of one mistake can be catastrophic.
So he can be forgiven a lot, especially so on Christmas Eve. Yes, skeptics can argue that
everything he does, he does, first of all, for himself (perhaps only for himself), but it is not for
us to judge him, for, even if so, who can claim that he/she is better? After all, he is just as
human as the rest of us, in the sense that he shares with each of us the same human nature —
with all the flaws, contradictions and even vices inherent in people. But, unlike the
overwhelming majority, Elon Musk has achieved so much that only history can truly judge
him.
So, let me reiterate, this is not about him. But about those “apostles of morality” who, by
their indicated narrow-mindedness, combined with belief in their greatness as fighters for
freedom of speech (and freedom in general), actually do by this fighting more harm than
good.
Dr. Peterson, of course, can be understood. He is one of those who piously believe that if our
society is the best of all that has existed so far, then: 1) any attempt to change it will only lead
to its deterioration, 2) that it was the representatives of big business who made it that way and
3) of course, we should all look at those people from the bottom up and humbly thank them
for every deed, because everything they do is, by default, good. And all who disagree with
them are Marxists.
Indeed, how can a non-Marxist question the insane difference in income between the rich and
everyone else (have you forgotten who you owe everything to?)? As well as why, despite the
steady growth of public prosperity, an ordinary, not outstanding person still spends most of
his life to make those people even richer, as if this life could not have any other purpose.
However, we note that each of regular people may still find themselves in a situation where
they cannot afford medical care or current expenses. By the way, what happened to
the Society with Equal Opportunity, Doc? Has it sunken (as one contemporary villain put it)?
Has it disappeared into oblivion, or have we just stopped noticing it? Probably, this is, again,
a conspiracy of Marxists, and not a direct consequence of neo-liberal politics, entirely
dedicated to turning society into a corporate appendage and the state into a tool for setting up
the unholy union of the oligopolistic and ruling classes.
So, should we still pretend that, as M. Thatcher put it, “there’s no such thing as society. There
are individual men and women and there are families”? That is, again, that only the
individual has value, and the rest will take shape by itself. Indeed, why do we need a society
of people with all its problems? Why do we need such concepts as the solidarity of human
beings even in the face of the obvious and tragic fact that the main common property of being
each of us is its finitude?
Indeed, what solidarity can there be if “poverty is a personal defect” (Thatcher again) —
always, regardless of what a particular individual has got as a result of hereditary factors or
the circumstances of his birth or any vicissitudes of fate. We don’t need social solidarity, we
need the blindness of our subjects not to prevent the upper class from doing what they see fit
under the guise of so-called “liberal democracy,” which has long since evolved into a quasi-
totalitarian ochlocracy. I mean, nobody but big business now decides what people are
allowed to read and watch and what they are not, all these information market monopolists —
Google, Facebook and Amazon — that are flesh and blood 100% capitalistic corporations.
And which thinkers such as Dr. Peterson contribute indirectly by spreading the myth that
individual morality is the issue here. Kind of let's all be moral and everything is going to be
OK, mutual hatred and censorship will disappear. And we don't need to think about insane
income inequality, about the social (un)responsibility of the government, and about the fact
that the political system of the West has mutated into a parasitic organ on the body of society,
serving own interests while it had been designed for the opposite in the first place.
And so, the ridiculousness of what he wrote there in his tweet unfortunately matters. In the
sense that it demonstrates the futility of the way of thinking to which a vast number of people
are still oriented — who feel that modern, as yet free, society is in trouble, and something
must be done about it. I readily admit that Dr. Peterson was a breath of fresh air, that his
sincerity was not to be doubted, and that yes, many people (and yes, I myself to some extent
as well) saw something like light at the end of the tunnel because of him. But what next?
What will we do with our room after we clean it up? Discover the meaning of life? Or do we
turn to God to give us grace? Do you know where we go from here?
Dr. Peterson has enormous power — yes, exactly power — over the minds of others, who
take as literal truth everything he says. Unfortunately, this means not only responsibility, but
also the problematic nature of admitting one’s own mistakes. Saints don’t make mistakes, do
they? So, let’s follow the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not make thy idol…thou shalt
not worship or serve it.[1]” Let us be critical (while remaining polite, friendly, and humane)
— to ourselves and to others, and remember that Dr. Peterson’s picture of the world is only
one thing. Peterson’s worldview is just one of countless descriptions of reality, not reality
itself. We can take from it what brings us closer to the truth, and there is indeed much there to
take. But that doesn’t mean we should treat this picture as a proven scientific theory or, if you
prefer, as gospel. Let’s be reasonable in more ways than fascinated.
[1] Exodus 20:2 and Deuteronomy 5:6