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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behaviour. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?

As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.

Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.

Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.

JBP was fine until he started using twitter regularly. So were lots of people. I genuinely think that the human mind isn't built for high stakes conversations with thousands of people at once. Let alone doing those every hour of every day.

It takes some character to tell a roomful of people that they're wrong to their face, but imagine if you were brought back to a new roomful of angry people every day for the rest of your life.

I do notice that Elon's zaniness has increased in proportion to his shitposting. But who knows which direction the causality goes there, if any.

Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.

He used to be a lot more interesting, Maps of Meaning, which is what put him on the map remains a genuinely interesting work if you are into comparative religion from a Jungian perspective.

I want to be fair here, it does seem like he lost some of his wits, but his recent Bible stuff isn't that bad. It just doesn't hit as hard as his old lectures for some reason.

Maybe we've all just moved past such ideas in some sense.

I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.

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