Elon Musk, Wokeness, and the Myth of Meritocracy

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Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of racism and antisemitism.

When I was a kid, long before the 2008 film made him a household name, Iron Man was my favorite superhero. I liked him because he didn’t get powers because he was an alien like Superman, wasn’t given them by someone else like Green Lantern, wasn’t born with them like the X-Men. He wasn’t a hardcore athlete with a single-minded fixation on crime like Batman. No, Tony Stark became a superhero by using his brain, creating something with his own intelligence and a fortune that intelligence had helped build. And on top of that, within the 80s milieu of my childhood where intelligence and tech-savviness was synonymous with stereotypes of glasses-taped social inverts, Stark was a charmer and a ladies man. He was a model, in other words, perhaps the only one in American media of the time, of someone at once smart, powerful, rich, and attractive to boot. The perfect power fantasy for an antisocial nerd.

At the time, I wasn’t sensitive to the more misogynistic overtones of his womanizing, where he often seemed to treat women as a prize and a distraction rather than people. (It’d be some years before his secretary Pepper Potts, originally married off to Happy Hogan, would be brought back as his love interest.) And certainly I didn’t pick up on the more frighteningly militaristic implications of Stark being a weapons manufacturer, more pronounced in the early, jingoistic comics where Stark was regularly shown developing weapons of mass destruction like a jet-mounted ray that could destroy a city, and shown regularly fighting evil and often racist Communist caricatures from Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. In an interview, Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee said he created the character to be the kind of person he thought his young, idealistic 1960s readers wouldn’t like but that he would make them like him.

Tony Stark is a genius. This is textual, in the comics and films he’s shown as someone who’s not merely very intelligent but whose intelligence takes on a magical quality of creating things that others can barely comprehend—as illustrated by the scene in Iron Man (2008) where the villainous Obadiah Stane’s highly-paid engineers and vast resources can’t reproduce something Stark put together in a cave in Afghanistan. In the comics, Stark’s exoskeleton technology is so singular and irreproducible that the Armor Wars storyline (1988-1989) revolves around the technology being stolen and Stark’s fight to take it back. By this point, rather than Stark being an asset to the US military, he’s someone who jealously hoards his tech from them, with the danger of the armor falling in public rather than private hands being emphasized by the military’s own Stark-tech Firepower armor being equipped with a literal nuclear warhead, to nearly disastrous results. (The alternate universe of the Ultimate line of comics took Stark’s miraculous abilities to their logical conclusion and simply made his genius an actual mutant superpower.)

In ancient Rome, a ‘genius’ was a kind of attendant spirit of a person, place, or family, something like a guardian angel whose divine power could move through a person and bring them to perform great works. By the European Middle Ages, it was thought that great works of art were granted by God, the artist merely a vessel through which the art passes (and through much of the period artists went unnamed, as who they were wasn’t thought to be important since the Lord was the ultimate author). In the 18th century, the word took on its modern meaning of a person with exalted mental abilities and artistic sensibilities and, particularly in the wider culture, maintained its overtones of the mystical and divine, implied in the ubiquitous language used to discuss it—like calling it a “gift”. (A gift from whom, after all, if not the divine?)

What intelligence actually is and how one might go about measuring or understanding it is a hotly debated topic, but it’s clear that genius doesn’t exist the way it appears in stories like Iron Man. While the media continues to love stories about lone geniuses, and having things like “Stark tech” or “Pym particles” as the product of singular minds that no one else can create provides convenient MacGuffins for stories, in reality contemporary discoveries and technological advancements usually happen as the result of collaboration and people building on the work of others. Albert Einstein is practically synonymous with genius, but his theories of Relativity relied on the work of countless scientists who came before, colleagues who assisted him, and work on developing and proving his theories was taken up by the scientists who came after. The book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962) explores in detail how radical scientific revolutions happen not because of Great Men and their Great Ideas, but because of build-ups of knowledge and experimentation that reach inflection points where new scientific ideas become necessary and impossible to proceed without. Scientific change is a group effort.

Thomas Edison, another name frequently synonymous with genius, famously filled his laboratories with scientists who constantly experimented and collaborated, and one of his most famous quotes is that “genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”. Edison did not somehow intuit exactly how to make a lightbulb, but building on the known phenomenon of electricity causing materials to glow, tried with his team 2,774 different filaments before discovering one that worked.

The more you look at people who seem to have been “born” with miraculous abilities, the more you find people who trained hard at them typically from a young age like Tiger Woods being taught golf from toddlerhood or Wayne Gretsky’s father creating an ice rink in his back yard so he could focus on hockey as a child.

Moreover, the idea of genius as genetic, as a “gift” a person is “born” with, naturally plays into eugenic ideas. If genius is genetic, we should logically breed more geniuses. If idiocy is genetic, we should breed fewer idiots. Or perhaps we should identify those with heritable talents early on and put them on a path to leadership while we funnel the more modestly endowed into lives of subservience and humble trades. And in effect, in the United States and around the world, this is often exactly what we do. In our schools, we segregate children as young as four into “talented and gifted” programs which themselves stem directly from the work of eugenicists like Lewis Terman and Leta Hollingsworth. And these programs typically have admittance by standardized testing, often IQ tests.

The IQ test began as a tool designed by French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon to help identify children who would have difficulty in school. Binet, however, did not believe that the IQ test could be used to measure some kind of single, permanent, inborn intelligence level, instead believing that “intelligence was far to broad a concept to quantify with one number”. But this didn’t stop American psychologist Lewis Terman as taking it up as just that, averring that intelligence was just as measurable as height and weight. In 1928, Terman selected 1,528 subjects between the ages of 3 and 28 with high IQs and proceeded to follow them throughout their lives, sure that this group represented the future leaders and pivotal figures in their fields. Though from a scientific standpoint he poisoned the study by actively mentoring the children and aiding them behind the scenes to, for example, get into Stamford (thus proving more about the power of privilege than intelligence), in the end the study only showed that the group he followed were by-and-large normal people who lead normal lives, and the various accomplishments they showed could have been predicted by their greater-than-average socioeconomic status alone. Further, when looking at the most successful and least successful people in the study, the IQs were virtually the same, while the true differentiating factor between the two turned out to be “confidence, persistence, and early parental encouragement”.

Indeed, even since Terman’s time, the IQ test was known to have problems based not on inherent intelligence but on education level. Many of the questions on IQ tests rely on knowledge of vocabulary or mathematics, things that are taught and teachable. This, for example, is a problem with a lot of studies cited in The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994), the racist tome that claims to scientifically prove that some races are superior to others, but relies entirely on studies that run the gamut from hopelessly flawed to outright fraudulent.

Further, IQ scores overall have been going up over the course of decades, which is theorized to be the result of the ascendency of standardized testing in school which generally makes students simply better at the kind of standard tests that the IQ test represents, further emphasizing how IQ test results are affected by preparation and study rather than some mere genetic predisposition, as well as the effect of better nutrition and healthcare.

A huge body of evidence, thus, has shown that IQ just isn’t a great measure of cognitive ability.

The point of all this being not that genetics have nothing to do with intelligence, but that focusing on intelligence as a source of status or as something miraculous and magical feeds into pernicious ideas of natural hierarchies and damages the self-worth of people deemed ‘unintelligent’ by the system when the reality is that persistence and privilege are much bigger determiners of success. And the fallout of these pernicious ideas in our culture often result in formerly “gifted” children crashing hard against reality (see: “gifted kid syndrome”) or providing cover for rationalizations for the legitimacy of wealth and power (witness Donald Trump’s obsession with “high-IQ” people and “low-IQ” people) to outright racism (Donald Trump again). In other words, it becomes part of the justification that those who have wealth and power do so because they deserve it, because they have greater merit than other people.

Meritocracy is the notion that a system does (or should) function so that people advance purely on the basis of ability and worth; those best able to do certain jobs will naturally rise to do them and likewise those best able to lead will become leaders, while those only suitable for menial work will find their own respective level. On its face, this sounds rational. However, to have a true meritocracy, people would have to begin with the same opportunities—as the right wing saying goes, “equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome”. And yet equality of opportunity obviously is not what we have anywhere. For example, in much of the US, local education systems are funded by property taxes. This means people who live in wealthy areas get a better education than those in poor areas, creating better opportunities and thus better outcomes. This shouldn’t be a controversial point, it’s plainly obvious. And this is one of many examples of the systemic inequalities built into our system that produce unequal opportunities. Yes, a poor person might be able to overcome these inequalities and achieve success of whatever measure, but there’s no question they’re going to have a harder time of it than a rich person or even a comfortably middle class person. And if someone really wanted to create a meritocratic system, eliminating these systemic inequalities would be top priority.

And yet for some funny reason the biggest boosters of the idea of meritocracy are the same who routinely deny that systemic inequality even exists, while simultaneously fighting tooth-and-nail to keep those same structural inequalities in place. The term “woke” is just the latest volley in this game of how to dismiss anyone who fights for equality.

“Wokeness” is a nebulous term that even its supporters often have trouble defining (as even Donald Trump hilariously pointed out), but the communications director for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, one of the country’s biggest boosters of “anti-woke” propaganda, openly defined “wokeness” as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” And perhaps no greater example exists of the Right’s insistence that inequality of opportunity does not exist is DeSantis’ erstwhile presidential rival Nikki Haley’s frequent statement that “America has never been a racist country”.

How could anyone make a statement so plainly false in a country built on chattel slavery and genocide? Haley’s argument, a common one with those on the Right who routinely lament the fall of patriotic feeling in America, is not that America doesn’t have “problems” but that by teaching people that America itself is “bad” (or whatever other negative adjectives), you’re teaching them that the country will always be against them and to embrace “victimhood”. In their view, programs like Affirmative Action, DEI, and Welfare only teach people to be dependent on the state or on not having to work the hard to get ahead, which you might as well do if you believe America doesn’t grant them the blessings of liberty and opportunity. But this is a circular argument; America grants everyone an equal opportunity so anyone who says it doesn’t is an unpatriotic victim because America grants everyone an equal opportunity.

You simply can’t fix a problem if you aren’t willing to acknowledge it exists. People are on welfare because someone working 40 hours a week at the Federal minimum wage would still be $11,000 below the poverty line. Kicking those people off welfare wouldn’t ‘motivate’ them to get a better job (as if being below the poverty line wasn’t motivation enough), it would only starve them. But then much of our country’s business depends on having an impoverished and desperate strata of workers who will take any job that’s offered; even better if their undocumented migrants willing to work below minimum wage—again, these inequalities are built into the system and help to propagate it. Affirmative Action exists because centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and racism prevented black Americans from building wealth like their white peers, and so weren’t able to become legacies at universities or pass greater opportunities on to their children. DEI exists because racism, even subconscious racism, makes it more difficult for black people to get work than whites, as shown by an experiment where the same resumes were sent out with both stereotypically white names and black names, and the white names were 50% more likely to get a callback from employers. In other words, these programs exist to help combat structural inequalities and create equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. They don’t exist to be “racist against white people”.

It’s not that meritocracy is necessarily a racist idea. But if you insist the country is meritocratic when it isn’t you inevitably backwards engineer yourself into racism. You will conclude that if a disproportionate number of poor people are black or if a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by black people, there must be something inherently wrong with black people. If you don’t believe structural inequalities exist then there’s simply no way around this conclusion, which makes it little surprise that the Right Wing has found itself overrun with people who describe themselves as “race realists”. Which is to say, “racists”.

All this folds neatly into the worship of tradition that typifies conservative thought which I talked about back in Loki, or How Conservatives Becomes Fascists. As I said there, if you believe tradition holds important truths that should be revered, and your tradition includes prejudice, then you’re going to revere prejudice as somehow essential to your morality and identity and react violently when that prejudice is challenged.

If America is already a land of equal opportunity, if everyone already can make their way purely by merit, than those who are successful deserve to be, and those who aren’t also deserve not to be. The poor deserve to be poor, and helping them isn’t only futile it’s actually wrong because it upends the ‘natural order’ of things and empowers the inferior over the superior, the weak over the strong.

DeSantis directly brands ‘Anti-Wokism’ as socialist under the banner of the old term ‘Cultural Marxism’. The Cultural Marxism narrative states that Marxists, beginning with Antonio Gramci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School (a group of German-Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany in 1936), ‘realized’ that the poletariat was not playing the role proscribed by Marx in creating the global Communist revolution, and Marxists therefore needed to focus on destroying traditional, Christian culture and morality to apparently “drive the disoriented masses to Communism”. Forget that the postmodern project of the Frankfurt School was often critical and at odds with Marxism and that it didn’t promulgate Marxist ideas. Forget that this whole concept is fundamentally incoherent. Forget that people invoking Cultural Marxism (who’s current form dates only back to the 1980s) don’t seem to be familiar with the actual work of the Frankfurt Schoo l or the ideas that came out of it. The term is merely the latest dog whistle for the age old “vast Jewish conspiracy” idea which dates back centuries. Ultimately, some faction of conservatives will always blame whatever they don’t like on the Jews.

The implicit connection is that Marxists just want to destroy the “natural” hierarchies around which our society functions and that includes racial and gendered hierarchies. And so of course even the mild, center-left policies of the Democratic Party of the United States like raising taxes on the rich or modest immigration reform are hilariously painted as ‘radical Marxism’ by the Republicans.

Meanwhile, if white men lead the world in the past, if white men are justly in positions of power, then they should be represented in our media as our heroes and role models and changing this to place women and minorities in those same roles becomes affront to ‘natural hierarchies’, tradition, and to the identity it represents. Those who criticize representation in media often couch it in terms of being “forced” or a “lazy” or a “substitute for good storytelling”, but the average comments section for one of these videos will quickly disabuse you of the idea that it’s anything but rote prejudice. Such people see a movie poster that doesn’t put someone like them at the center and it enrages them.

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The truth is, there really is a problem with representation in media, but it’s not the one being complained about by racists nor one even being widely discussed. Our media is still obsessed with “special people” born with “special gifts” (like Tony Stark) but it needs to ignore or deny the eugenic implications of that premise. And thus we get the message succinctly articulated in the film Ratatouie (2007), which proudly declares that “greatness can come from anywhere”. A literal rat can become a master chef. And I say “become” but in truth we never see Remy the Rat learning anything at all; our murine hero is a brilliant chef from the moment he steps on screen, crafting actual garbage into culinary masterpieces and knowing how to create award-winning French dishes without ever having been trained or having worked in a kitchen. The one training sequence we get is of the hapless human the rat controls having to learn how to chop properly, keep his station clean, and his sleeves clear of the food. This isn’t to say that we expect absolute realism in a film about a talking rat, but that the way we portray intelligence in media has meaning and consequences, it tells our children how things in the world work and what to expect, with the implication that if you’re not a master chef now you never will be. And we see this same strategy in how Marvel Comics, lone, singular geniuses still abound but now they can be people who aren’t rich, white men, but black girls from more modest backgrounds like Riri Williams and Moon Girl. If anything this is less coherent than the racist position that genius is inheritable and breedable; here genius seems to happen purely by random chance to anyone at all with little regard for privilege or effort, a cosmic lottery played by every baby on Earth.

During the eugenics era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the genetic origins of heroes mattered. This was true not just in how non-white people were portrayed as racist stereotypes, but which white people got to be heroes. For example, when Tarzan was left as a baby to be raised by apes, it was the intelligence and physical ability granted to him by his aristocratic bloodline that allowed him to become the hero of the jungle while the African natives all around him remained common savages. The first wave of superheroes from the 1930s and 40s like Superman or Wonder Woman likewise followed this general pattern of having powers by virtue of their lineage or magical conception, while Batman is the son of a wealthy industrialist, the closest America has to royalty. Even the exceptions to this trend aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Captain Marvel, a homeless newsboy turned veritable god, was watched by the wizard SHAZAM from the moment of his birth and was actually destined for wealth and privilege until he was turned out by his wicked uncle after the death of his parents, and the package of powers he receives represented by the wizard’s name includes the “wisdom of Solomon” and the “courage of Achilles”. Similarly, Captain America, so scrawny he was turned away from military service, is given a serum that increases not only his stature and musculature but also his intelligence, science granting him the mind that mere genetics had not, just as magic does for Captain Marvel. Always there was the implication that ordinary people simply didn’t have the psychological make-up to be real heroes without help.

The 1960s, however, saw a wave of superheroes from ordinary backgrounds who have greatness “thrust upon them” like Spider-Man or the X-Men. (Obviously, this isn’t true of all 60s heroes—Thor for example is still both a royal and a literal god—and there are plenty of heroes from this period who come from wealthy backgrounds like Iron Man. But we do see a deliberate movement away from the racial overtones of the idea, with the Black Panther, for example, being both royalty and a black African (though it would take some years before his country’s depiction changed from a savage backwater to a technological utopia).) And so the superhero gradually transformed into a genre where any unprepossessing person with a good heart and grit might be blessed with fabulous powers. And this way of dealing with the fantastic extends far beyond the superhero, for example the Potterverse with its natural born wizards and “muggles”, and where muggles can have wizard children but the status remains an unalterable accident of your birth. Only in quasi-medieval high fantasy do ideas like the “birthright of kings” still tend to matter, and even there the good king’s restoration of order and justice as depicted in Tolkein’s Return of the King has largely been replaced by the more cynical (and realistic) gamesmanship of unbridled ambition implicit in the title Game of Thrones, where lineage only matters for the claim to power it represents and being righteous and pure of heart is liable to get you beheaded.

The notion of a cosmic genius lottery helps justify wealth and power for the wealthy and powerful on whatever side of the political aisle. At its most comic, we see this when Hollywood nepo-babies insist the film industry is meritocratic. But perhaps the most iconic example of a man in denial of his own privilege as well as how the idea of “giftedness” trends backwards towards eugenics is the richest man on Earth.

When I first heard of Elon Musk, he was already being referred to as the “real life Tony Stark”. Cartoon Lisa Simpson even called him “possibly the greatest living inventor”. I remember looking up Musk’s CV and being profoundly confused. Tony Stark was the CEO of Stark Enterprises, certainly, but even more than a businessman he was an inventor, constantly shown tinkering away at some new gadget or improvement to his armor. Musk, as far as I could tell, had never invented anything. Born into money, he’d started a business with funding from his father and venture capitalists, who refused to let him be the CEO and where the extent of his technical expertise amounted to updating a website. He lucked out on an acquisition windfall that {he then used to start an online bank called X.com, which merged with PayPal} where he was removed as CEO because of his incompetence and leadership style, and lucked out on another acquisition windfall from that. He took that money and muscled his way into someone else’s electric car company and then carefully crafted the lie that he’d founded the company or had anything to do with its technology. He’d famously proposed replacing the California High-Speed Rail project with something called a “Hyperloop” which, as I suspected when I read about it, turned out to be a nonsense idea made of nonsense, and which Musk later admitted was just a ploy to stall or sink the rail project because he hates trains and public transit more generally. (He did eventually get to build a tunnel in Las Vegas through which people… drive cars. A true genius!) And well before the Twitter fiasco outed him as a fool to the public at large, I’d read a Wired article about him that made it clear he had no idea what he was doing and treated his employees like hot garbage. But the complete sins of Elon have been elaborated elsewhere at length—I recommend the episode of Some More News on the subject.

So how had this rich, trust-funded asshole convinced the world that he was a genius inventor? The answer seems to be the same way he seems to have convinced himself. Musk is someone with geeky interests—a man who can casually refer to the science fiction novels of Iain M. Banks (even as he seems to completely miss their politics). And, as anyone who’s been to a science fiction convention knows, it’s easy for someone to confuse an interest in geeky or nerdy things with actual intelligence or competence. But reading a lot of science fiction novels does not actually make you a scientist. Further as our planet spirals towards climate collapse, Musk carefully positioned himself as a figurehead for technological solutionism, the idea that we can engineer our way out of the disaster, with electric cars and solar panels being two of the most promising solutions and ones for which he made himself the poster boy. We as a society wanted so badly to believe that someone like Tony Stark could exist and that he would use his magical intellect to save the world that we impressed those dreams onto Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is a walking example of how you don’t need a great intellect to find yourself in a position of wealth and power but it’s not a conclusion he can allow himself to believe. No one creates the kind of hype machine around himself like Musk did without a narcissism complex hiding a thin skin and a desperate need for approval. Not only is he a genius who can and will save the world, even if he has to save it from itself, but like Raskolnikov he believes his status makes him exempt from the common rules of society and morality. So what if he’s beta-testing fundamentally unworkable self-driving on his customers leading to deaths? So what if Tesla is suspected to have programmed cars to automatically switch off self-driving moments before a crash so it wouldn’t show up in self-driving crash numbers? So what if Teslas are hastily and shoddily built and yet the company routinely blames customers for parts it knew were defective including “wheels falling off at speed, collapsing suspensions on new vehicles, and sudden and unexpected braking”? So what if he seems to think labor laws and health and safety regulations are suggestions? So what if he treats his employees like human cattle for his mercurial and frequently changing whims? What are they even there for if not his glorious purpose?

In a recent interview with professional dickwad Bill Maher, when asked about the “woke mind virus”, Musk said “I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic”. But of course he believes in meritocracy. He believes in meritocracy so hard that he leveraged himself up to his neck to buy Twitter for an outrageously inflated price as part of his war against ‘Wokeness’. And because he’s so convinced of his own hype, of his own righteousness, he seems to have been completely rattled when this resulted in a backlash from the liberal media strata who’d previously fawned over him and his ecological crusade.

And so now he finds himself in a curious position, increasingly embracing the right-wing grift-o-sphere that adores his anti-wokeness but still committed to electric vehicle and solar technology that these same grifters and assholes despise. But he can’t turn back, can’t allow himself to face the notion that he might have made a mistake with this whole Twitter thing and so as he sinks further in we uncover, like an archeologist sifting through foundational layers, more of the racist and classist underpinnings of his belief system.

As an easy example, recently on Twitter he agreed with a tweet from someone suggesting that United Airlines shouldn’t have a program to grant interviews to students at three historically black colleges for pilot development programs because students at these colleges have low SAT scores which “correlates reasonably well with IQ scores”, with Musk suggesting this policy would lead directly to airplane crashes. This post is simply lying; SAT scores at these colleges are actually within the national average. SAT scores can’t be easily correlated with IQ. And we’ve already established that IQ is not a good measure of either intelligence or practical ability. But then the whole conversation isn’t actually about facts or reality, it’s about rationalizing racist beliefs. Musk is here agreeing with someone who openly implies that white people are simply smarter than black people.

To follow this through to its logical conclusion, Musk replied to a tweet opining that Jews promoted a “dialectical hatred” (whatever that is) against whites and support “hordes of minorities … flooding their country” with “you speak the actual truth”. (This resulted in an embarrassing, weird, and confusing apology tour to Auschwitz accompanied by alternate history tweets apparently supposed to show how Twitter could have prevented the holocaust.) Later he agreed with right wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders that there was a “collapse of our own culture and Western values due to open borders” and that an “uncontrollable amount of non-western asylum seekers” was the “biggest problem we face today”. Because Musk believes in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that Jews are bringing inferior non-white people into the country in a plot of manipulation and control. You remember, the idea that had white supremacists with tiki torches chanting “the Jews will not replace us” not so long ago?

Meanwhile, Musk laments that “wealth, education, and being secular” (which is hard not read as referring to rich white people) are all indicative of lower birth rates and “if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad”. This naturally has prompted him, as a self-convinced genius, to have as many kids as possible (eleven so far)—though he actively works to strips rights from the one who is trans.

What Elon Musk illustrates is that the ideas we embrace as a culture, the ideas we promote in our media serve to propagate real, destructive behaviors. And the people who own and control that media and the means of its reproduction and dissemination are the people who benefit from the current power structures of our society, and so on one level or another are likely to create narratives that make themselves worthy heroes who deserve what they’ve gotten. The message may have transformed from genetic destiny to one in which “anyone can be great”, but if the result is that wealth and power are deserved by an accident of your birth that will always necessary play into narratives of natural hierarchies, of a universe where the worlds of “wizards” and “muggles” are firmly and permanently divided.

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