The Anality of Evil

Why Are Earth’s Wealthiest Men Such Worthless Assholes?

“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource [sic] is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.” - Jeff Bezos, Earth’s fourth richest man, in an interview with Business Insider, October 2018

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” - Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), post-ideological bandit, misquoting Plutarch in Die Hard (1988)

Rava: “Why were you in my bathroom?”

Kendall: “Because I don't like to drop a deuce where the staff go.”

-Rava Roy (Natalie Gold) and Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), Succession Season 3 Episode 1

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I asked an AI for images of Elon Musk with a toilet on Mars

Let’s get two things out of the way right off the bat.

First thing: we’re about to embark on exercise in what you could call “Vulgar Freudianism.” This means I’m going to draw on some concepts from classical psychoanalytic theory to think about current events. Not just any concepts either, but some of the crassest and most “earthy” (in Sigmund Freud’s own words). My goal isn’t to do Freudian apologetics, vindicate any particular Freudian theories as “science,” or the like. Nor still am I trying to convert anybody to “believe in Freud,” let alone asking you to sign off on the entirety of the guy’s thought.  Rather I want to suggest that these concepts - however coarse, gross, uncomfortable, or otherwise “vulgar” they might seem - can be exceptionally useful. This, for me, is a core value of psychoanalytic thinking in general: it can lay bare things that are right in front of us but which are otherwise so absurd, so ludicrous, and so in-your-face obvious that our polite discourse and cultivated habits of thought work overtime to prevent us from seeing them and calling them what they are. The approach may be zany, and the vocabulary involved can feel taboo, but, to put things bluntly, it sure can cut through a lot of bullshit. And so we’re about get into some shit, talk shit, etcetera, all while plumbing some of psychoanalysis’s weirdest and most off-putting models and metaphors, because in my opinion this is one of the most productive ways to think about some truly shitty people.

That gets us to the second thing: I make no pretense of diagnosing what’s “really” going on with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or anybody else. You may perhaps be familiar with the so-called Goldwater Rule, a convention across mental health professions that it is unethical to publicly proclaim diagnoses about prominent political figures. Formally adopted as part of its code of ethics by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, the Goldwater Rule takes its name from the brouhaha surrounding an issue of the short-lived Fact magazine, which in 1964 published a pretty wild survey of medical professionals volunteering what they thought was wrong with Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, a Republican US Senator from Arizona. The ensuing mess spawned a lawsuit, generated an important Federal court ruling about the First Amendment, and led various medical professional associations to formally disavow their members from invoking the credibility of their discipline for what were deemed to be hackish or defamatory political purposes. As a foreclosure of “every psychiatrist’s God-given right to make a fool of himself or herself” (in one doctor’s memorable phrase) the Goldwater Rule was controversial then, and has only gotten more so, especially during the Trump presidency. Whether or not the Goldwater Rule is a Good Thing is a topic for another occasion; my own opinions on the subject go back and forth. But for our purposes here I want to stress that I am neither a clinician (although I do have my share of clinical analytic training) nor a dues-paying member of any professional medical organization. More importantly, when it comes to thinking about the particular set of people who constitute our billionaire class, I am of the opinion that scruples about “armchair psychoanalysis” miss the point. This is not just because being ultra-rich is an unelected office, and thus worries about skewing the opinions of The Voters are meaningless. Rather, I think that what happens inside the brains of people who can wield such immense power while facing no real accountability is folly. On some level, trying to fathom their subjectivities would be like trying to grasp the inner workings of one of HP Lovecraft’s grotesque and indifferent Elder Gods - that is, it would court a descent into gibbering madness, and that’s even before their Cultists come for you. But also - and this is why I think psychoanalysis is so useful - if the interiority of such people remains irreducibly black-box, I think we can still read their behavior, and indeed their very existence, as itself symptomatic.

A person like Elon Musk is both less and more than just Some Guy - he’s a site of projections and a quilting point for public affects, an object for feelings that range from disgust to veneration and more. He’s a dealer in fantasies and a larger-than-life main character in plenty of stories, including but not limited to whatever is currently playing out on Twitter and presumably in his own mind. And, most importantly, he - like others in his tax bracket - is also the product of a particular social and economic system that rewards certain traits, monetizes certain narratives, and fosters an entire approach to the world and the people in it. Whatever Elon Musk may self-identify as “being” and whatever DSM code a clinician with direct access to him might diagnose him as “having,” a psychoanalytic perspective can explore him in terms of meaning, which is a field of legibility that can at once interface with but also traverse boundaries between the individual and the collective, the normal and the pathological, and more. Put in other words, we can think about such people in a way that’s overdetermined and ambivalent, that is, in a way that’s provocatively about both them and about us, without reducing either them or us to singular, flattened propositions. In yet other words, we can think about such people in a way that once accords with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous lines about how the “very rich…are different from you and me” while also capturing the truth behind the stock tabloid refrain that “stars – they’re just like us!” For better and definitely for worse, these assholes are human, all too human, at once very different yet just like the rest of us. Or at least they are for now, until the transhumanist neuralink upgrades hit, and they can slip the bonds of the world they’ve soiled and take to the unpolluted heavens.

Enough caveats. Let’s do this shit.

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