Elon Musk takes the red pill

Anyone familiar with movies from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries knows what a “red pill” is. From the popular franchise The Matrix, a “red pill” is a Moment of Truth, usually about a massive confidence trick that some person or persons, usually in real or pretended authority, have been playing on the person having the Moment of Truth – the person to whom someone offers the red pill. The confidence trick always involves a false version of how the world works and what, if anything, threatens it. Usually the trick also involves the motives of the ones playing the trick. Thus, “to take the red pill” means to realize that someone has been tricking you and “stringing you along.” Elon Musk seems to be getting close to a massive “red pill” moment. The question now becomes: when will he realize the full extent of the deception?

How Elon Musk fell for the trick at first

Elon Musk – who comes to America from South Africa – has always had a vision for the betterment of humankind. Of course, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations also claim to have such visions. The difference with Elon Musk is that he is sincere, and they are not. (What organization or coalition that promotes normalization of sexual relations between adult and child, could possibly care for humankind? But we digress.)

So Elon Musk heard repeatedly that the globe is warming, that the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is responsible for that, and that human industry must decarbonize, and fast. So he applied his engineering aptitude to consider what he thought were practical solutions. He came up with one good solution: the Space Exploration Company, with the goal of opening Mars to human settlement. (In a very real sense, he is running his own space program, and has other space program runners as clients.) But he made himself most famous for designing electric vehicles, premium roof tiles that generated electricity from the sunlight that falls on them, and new generations of batteries for single-family houses, office parks, industrial installations, and even grid-level storage.

But the powers-that-be have ruined everything at every turn. They have canceled the building of nuclear power plants and shut down existing plants of all types. The grid hasn’t enough power for electrifying the entire vehicle fleet – and already Elon Musk begins to know it.

He’s tried to tell them, but…

At first he tried to remonstrate with those powers-that-be. To start with, he warned that nuclear power, as a concentrated source of energy, was essential in the early stage. Before his planned mega-solar-battery (in the Mojave or Sahara Desert, to name two examples) can come on-line, nuclear energy must carry the load. But leftist politicians shut down generating capacity while at the same time moving to forbid the building, or driving-in, of conventional vehicles.

What Elon Musk did not realize at first, is that the powers-that-be never intended to replace the vehicle fleet. They intended all along to remove it. That’s why many cities have already carved out no-car downtowns. One parks at the border, then walks, or rents a bicycle (or in Washington, D.C., the gyroscope-operated Segway®), while “downtown.” And those electric vehicles? Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) actually told people to refrain from charging them at certain “peak hours.” Obviously no one has thought about making the grid ready to support such a fleet. (To say nothing of the failures of these vehicles in regions that do get cold in some seasons.)

His latest realizations

Lately, Elon Musk has had four moments that must surely make him realize that the motives of those he tried to work with, are not what he thought. Environmentalists have refused to work with his SpaceX company to find solutions to alleged environmental issues. Apparently his intention to spare the Earth environment by relocating heavy industry, counts for nothing with these people. His idea of creating a second home for humanity counts for even less. “Instead of running away from Earth, why not stop messing the Earth up?” But that also means more than the environmentalists say as well. (More on that below.)

Other environmentalists, especially in Germany, have protested his building of a plant in their country to build more electric vehicles. Their complaint – that his plant won’t leave them any water to drink – seems incredible when one remembers that he would regard that as another engineering problem to solve. A man like that thinks of these things ahead of time. But the environmentalists won’t admit that.

Two weekends ago, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico held primaries. They used electronic voting machines, which of course are vulnerable to power failure – a frequent issue on the island. In the process of coping with that, election officials discovered that those machines were undercounting ballots and zeroing-out vote totals for disfavored candidates. After Robert F. Kennedy highlighted that issue, Elon Musk agreed: electronic voting machines must go. But why he said that is just as telling:

The risk of being hacked by humans or [artificial intelligence], while small, is still too high.

Elon Musk sounds another alarm: the birth dearth

Also over the weekend, Elon Musk returned to a theme he has sounded before. Human beings are not having enough children to replace the dead and dying. In an interview with a representative from the CATO Institute, he said flatly:

If there are no humans, there is no humanity.

He took note of two things. First, birth rates have fallen below replacement level, not only in the United States, but everywhere in the world. Second – and worse – it has become fashionable with too many people to assume that human beings are a blight on the Earth. He went on:

I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist philosophies. And that’s what really matters. If humans go extinct or civilization collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant.

He ended with a plain message: “go forth and multiply.”

Next question: does he yet realize the full magnitude of the confidence game the powers-that-be have been playing? They do want to extinguish humanity – presumably excepting only themselves. Larry (The) Fink of BlackRock said that quiet part out loud:

I could argue [that], in the developed countries, the big winners are countries that have shrinking populations. That’s something that most people never talked about. You know, we always used to think that a shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t have anybody to come in, shrinking unemployment (excuse me) tricky demographics. These countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology. And if the promise – I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but – if the promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living [of] a country as the standard of living of individuals, even with shrinking populations.

And so, the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing, and the social problems that one will have, in substituting humans for machines, is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations. And so, for those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education. And so rapidly developing, for those countries that do not have a foundation for the rule of law or education, they’re going to be left [behind]. That’s where the divide [is] going to get more and more extreme. And unfortunately,…

Shrinking populations. Robotics and AI – to replace those Great Unwashed Masses. Ironically, Elon Musk has a project to build a humanoid robot – as a domestic servant or factory worker. Even before then, he foresaw SAE Level Five cars functioning as “robotaxis” (his word) to shuttle people point-to-point without drivers.

But in all this, he genuinely thought he was paving the way toward a post-scarcity society (if that’s possible). The elites had something else in mind: having the entire planet to themselves. Robots and AI would take care of them.

What will the red pill moment look like?

If Elon Musk lacks anything, it’s enough information to “connect the dots.” To do that, one must take this time-honored advice from the late Ian Fleming:

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it’s enemy action.

Elon Musk can find plenty of dots to connect in how the elites have twisted most of his versions to suit their real aims. What they haven’t twisted (i.e., SpaceX), they are trying to destroy – happily, without much success. But any astute observer can find more – with the Alphabet Soup movement, which also aims to depopulate the planet. (Promises of enabling “trans” individuals to reproduce are just that: promises, all of them empty. Reproduction in the Alphabet Soup community would still be reproduction. The elites designed the Alphabet Soup community to be sterile by definition.)

Musk observed correctly that Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is below replacement in every society. TFR is the total number of children a woman might be expected to have. Replacement-level TFR is 2.1 only in lawful and ordered societies. In lawless, disordered, and war-torn regions, it’s more likely to be 5 or 6. Therefore TFR is likely below replacement everywhere.

But hope does remain. Traditionalist societies, especially those (like Old Order Amish) who avoid entangling interconnections (like the electric grid), will continue to reproduce at or above replacement. They might never use SpaceX’ planetary migration technology. But if their enemies voluntarily die off, they won’t need it.