Understanding Elon Musk via a 20th century novel...

Is art merely a reflection of life, or is life merely a reflection of art? Don't bother looking for an answer, for the question contains a false dichotomy. Why not both? Ideas, beliefs, and behaviors crisscross from art to life and back. Life and art are in a feedback loop.

Take a fictional character: John Galt from Ayn Rand's dystopia, Atlas Shrugged. Take a real man: Elon Musk. Jordan Peterson, one of the world's most prominent psychologists, thinks Elon Musk shows many traits of John Galt. Let's see how:

John Galt gives a speech in the final pages of Atlas Shrugged. He does to the philosophy of life what Elon Musk has done to businesses: use first principles to disrupt conventional definitions and arrive at new insights. Galt redefines morality, the nature of man, and much more..

Galt tells his listeners: Remove the "middle-man between your consciousness and your existence." Only a direct encounter with reality will save your life and civilization.

Elon's mission with twitter? Make it the "most accurate source of information about the world."

Parallels.

John Galt told people that they have a total "responsibility of judgement" that they can't outsource to some "authority." This syncs with Elon Musk's warning against believing the mainstream media narratives. Don't let the media be the "middle man" between you and truth...

Let's move past free speech. Elon Musk is also obsessed with falling birthrates. He thinks it's the single biggest existential crisis for humanity, much bigger than climate change. His logic: fewer humans, lesser energy, less innovation, more stagnation, shrinking possibility...

John Galt doesn't explicitly refer to birthrates, but he says that morality must be judged by the standard of "man's life." Anything that diminishes man's life is immoral. Hence any political system that saps the will to live, to continue striving, to have kids - is no good.

John Galt said that an honest look at the world today reveals people who “oppose, negate and contradict” the foundations needed for human survival. To critique George Soros, a billionaire he disagrees with, Musk said Soros is "eroding the fabric of humanity." Similar language.

Whether Musk's critique of Soros has weight (it does) will be a subject for another Memo. Here we are just bearing out Peterson's thesis: Elon Musk is speaking in civilizational terms, doing a Big Picture analysis very reminiscent of John Galt...

I've further explored the similarities between Musk and Galt here. If you want to know what Galt's central ideas are, and do the comparative on your own, read John Galt's Moral Worldview.

For now, I'll leave you with Jordan Peterson's tweet:

"John Galt Lives."