because virtue and ability are not what get you elevated in society.

we live with a kind of socially affected dualism, and there are three things that elevate you in society: validating the fantasy world, having money, and doing violence against reality on behalf of the fantasy.

some degree of the fantasy(/ies) is unavoidable; it’s necessary for communication and collaboration at scale, maybe even complex thoughts. we build out waaaaaay extra to enable and justify horrible things, alienate the fantasy ever farther from reality to justify toxic power structures and appease the crowds with ever wilder delusion, ever less justifiable as scientists engineers and some public intellectuals create new models that edge ever closer to how reality works.

musk is the ultimate beneficiary of all this nonsense. he lives in a parasitic fantasy world, one that leeches upon all of our minds. some more than others, because the distribution of resources are determined by the logic of that fantasy, rather than any reasoning based in, or at least nearby to, material reality.