I read this article in The Atlantic the other day. About halfway through, I ran upon the following section which I think does aptly capture the gist, at least for me it did.
Musk’s moral idea goes by the name longtermism, which he has called “a close match to my philosophy.” This reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of human beings who will ever live. By this reasoning, the fate of the hundreds of billions of as-yet-unborn people who will inhabit the planet before the sun burns it up several billion years from now is more urgent than whether a few million people die of preventable diseases this year. If killing the American aid programs that helped keep those people alive allows the U.S. government to become lean and efficient enough to fund Musk’s grand project of interplanetary travel, thereby enabling human beings to live on Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable in some distant era, then the good of humanity requires feeding those aid programs, including ones that support refugee resettlement, into the woodchipper.
Holy shit! Thanos and Musk are the same dude! Or possibly Mister Spock when he blathered on about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one.
The Dude and Chief Musketeer has concluded all by hisself that the needs of the many is to travel to Mars, be fruitful, and multiply. A few people may die and starve and be killed along the way, but that is the price we must pay for eternal enlightenment. The fortunes of war, yada yada.
The flaw that I see in this logic is that the people with the most to gain get to decide what the needs of the many are. So the richest sombitches in the world decide that the needs of the many are best served by increasing the riches and power of the Scrooge McDuck cartel so that they can spend more time and treasure thinking about what the needs of the many are. Around and around we go ad infinitum, because who gets to decide when the needs of the many have been attained? You guessed it. It’s the same mother fuckers that started this never ending voyage down the toilet bowl of eternal enlightenment.
Musk speaketh
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
In the words of Mister Vonnegut, “So it goes”.
