What does your history tell you, Elon?
Dear Elon Musk, I’m writing this open letter to ask you to stand down from President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum.
I’m doing so not in a spirit of self-righteousness, but rather in a spirit of humility, partly because the dilemma you face is so familiar to us here in SA, the land of your birth. In an essential sense, the quandary is the same faced by South African businesses and so many thoughtful, honest and well-meaning people within the ANC: stay and fight from the inside or press for change from the outside?
I’ll just say from the start that it’s an impossible choice. There is no right answer and I understand your reasoning that your overriding mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and that being a member of the forum is not necessarily an endorsement of the president’s agenda.
I should also add that to say that I’m an admirer would be a huge understatement. I’m so proud of what you are doing and that you come from SA, even though I know these are historical things now.
As it happens, we went to the same high school and both hated it for the same reason: the brutality and claustrophobic nature of apartheid-era institutions. This, I suspect, might have contributed in a contrary sort of way to the value I now see — and I’m sure you do too — in innovation, freedom of thought and the need for escape.
The reason I feel so rudely at liberty to ask you to stand down is partly wrapped up in the history of being torn by the cold and steely requirements of change. Contribution to change from within comes with complicity. Contribution to change from without comes with the risk of irrelevance and failure.
Yet, I’m emboldened by a gradually building fascination, like so many others, with the writings of Nazi refugee and social thinker Hannah Arendt. Recently, her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1951, briefly sold out on Amazon. I think the book is fabulous.
Just to take one example, she writes: “In an everchanging, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think everything was possible and nothing was true.” What an extraordinarily apt summation of our times and hers.
The book was encapsulated on the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg podcast by Robert Eaglestone, a professor at the University of London. Eaglestone said the book identified two things at the core of totalitarianism: ideology and terror.
When people are disconnected and atomised, they become susceptible to the ideology of a self-proclaimed “strong leader”, who claims a way of thinking that becomes so overwhelming, its adherents can’t even experience their own experiences. There becomes only one way to think. This pattern was very obvious during the show trials of the Stalinist period but is evident elsewhere too, in colonialism and in racism and so on. The minds of adherents are colonised and hence they are simply unable to argue.
The second aspect is about terror. Essentially, the argument is that people are made up of two parts: a physical being and a social being. When you go to the doctor, for example, you are a body, but within society, you are a name.
Totalitarianism cuts away your name, your identity and your rights and reduces you to just your body. Once that happens, people get crushed like ants, particularly when the mob and the elite get together. Hence, her later phrase “the banality of evil”.
This is, of course, a simplification. Arendt was a classical scholar and her ideas were rooted in the ancient Greek writings of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato. She celebrated Socrates for his support of plural perspectives in the “agra” (the marketplace) and how interested he was in the “doxa” (the thought) of ordinary people. And she bemoaned Plato for his retreat into the solitary reflection of the isolated philosopher.
But Arendt is also interesting because she saw varying degrees of totalitarianism and different manifestations of it. Society does not have to be totalitarian for elements of totalitarianism to manifest. It is, she says, like a fungus. It grows uncontrollably without roots. It infects without discrimination.
Arendt was herself a refugee and at one time reflected on the Jews’ complicated options: integrate, assimilate or be an outcast. She chose outcast.
Perhaps you don’t think of it now, but you are also a refugee like so many South Africans of your generation; a refugee from a country that when you left it behind through the enormous luck of having a Canadian relative was on the brink of self-destruction.
Can you really be part of that?
SOCIETY DOES NOT HAVE TO BE TOTALITARIAN FOR ELEMENTS OF TOTALITARIANISM TO MANIFEST. IT IS, ARENDT SAYS, LIKE A FUNGUS