Most people do not have strong beliefs. They arrive at them by developing the exact opposite views of those they despise. The ongoing political drama in the United States gives us a chance to see this clearly.
The legend of Elon Musk was the creation of wokes, who include people who call other people woke. Wokes are those who have to make a guess about what it means to be a decent human being. They are tremendous in building cult figures very fast because they talk a lot about what they adore with others who adore the same things. At the time, the US tech industry was not called ‘techbros’; I think it was called Silicon Valley, if my memory is correct, and tech billionaires were all “good guys.” Facebook was good, cryptos were good, and Apple was so good that the sort of people who would have been hippies in the previous generation stood in midnight queues every time the corporation released a new product. These cool coders were going to change the world. And Musk was an environmental warrior because he had acquired an electric car company called Tesla and was out to kill the internal combustion engine. Musk said things that wokes loved. He spoke about climate action and direct democracy, for example. He sounded like a Democrat. He worked with Barack Obama and donated to the Democratic Party too. So what happened?
It does happen commonly—men who appear to have the same politics as women are soon revealed as charlatans, or just misunderstood. Still, how did he get associated with Caucasian racism? Does an adult really change his political convictions so fast?
Donald Trump was a registered Democrat for nearly 10 years; he donated to the party. For decades, as an American celebrity, he was probably a regular New York liberal who did not take himself seriously. What could have happened to him? Why is he at war with the whole empathy industry? How is a man not known for believing in anything suddenly the world’s most impactful conservative ideologue? It is in fact odd to describe him with any serious word that would end in ‘-gue.’
The political direction that Trump and Musk took was influenced by those who vilified them. They are now at war with all that was dear to their deriders: welfare state, bureaucracy, unelected institutions, liberal media, wokedom, migrants, diversity, feminism, transgender rights and probably all of the humanities. Trump and Musk were given a political direction by a type of people whom they cannot stand.
This is how it works with ordinary people too. They are not public figures, so they may not have public enemies. Whom they despise are their preachy colleagues, nasty bosses, acquaintances. And spouses, who are the most under-rated counter-influencers. Many political ideas of ordinary men and women are shaped by their dislike for their spouses.
That a society changes because of the reforms of career reformers is nonsense transmitted by reformers. Rather, a society changes when people want to defeat those they dislike. Modernity itself occurs chiefly because children do not want to be their parents, or when they want to be the exact opposite. When parents are too strong, usually a society regresses. Apart from modernity, there are other changes in a society. These occur in every generation through the same process, the nature of media only changes the speed of transformation: the young hold mild opinions; then some people who form the political mainstream harm or annoy them, and so they develop views that go against those of their tormentors.
This mechanism does not distinguish between what is called the ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics. The ‘right’ is a reaction to the ‘left,’ just as the ‘left’ is a reaction to the ‘right.’ No one is born with a political wound. Something happens. It always does. But some people react more than most, depending on their mental health.
Also, political victimhood gives an opportunity to the ordinary evil inside most us to express it in the name of ideology. That is why we see such festive aggression in both wokes and ultra-nationalists. They are the same kind of nasty people. Also, strong political opinions give people an easy way to appear upright and moral. For instance, I have seen corrupt men and those who have sexually harassed their colleagues rant against Trump.
A defining quality of our times is that everyone appears to have a political opinion. But that is only their appearance. People have more trouble with the ambassadors of ideas than the ideas themselves. Most people are in reality moderate, just that they have disdain for some people. A large number of Indians dislike sanctimonious evangelists of ‘secularism’ more than the idea of it; most people dislike climate activists who vandalize art more than what they stand for, or even the art they tried to ruin; many people can explain why they loathe posh socialists, but not why they can’t stand socialism. Many people in my city hate the pious feeders of stray dogs more than stray dogs.
This is because all mainstream ideas have a point. They have to be moral, otherwise they would not have survived infancy to go mainstream. Morality is the tax an idea has to pay to survive. Even Trump and Musk cloak all their views as concern for Americans. Also, no mainstream political idea violates human nature. Another reason why people don’t have trouble with ideas is that they do not know enough about them beyond their synopsis. But annoying people is a different matter. We know people, we see a lot in people.
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