Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad argues that whether Elon Musk's success inspires you or fills you with resentment reveals a great deal about your own psychology — envy versus aspiration.
Gad Saad
Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad. As many of you know, a few days ago there was the IPO of SpaceX, which was, you know, usually successful, leading to Elon Musk becoming the first trillionaire on Earth. And of course, many people were perfectly happy with that outcome, and many others were bathing in seething anger that such a reality could exist. And the typical suspects, the Bernie Sanders, the AOCs, the Elizabeth Warren, the Gavin Newsom, were all reading from the same playbook. That this is intolerable, that such a reality could exist, that a single individual could amass such wealth. So today I wanted to discuss several principles that can explain why different people could look at the same reality and arrive at different conclusions. So I want to begin with Herman Rorschach, his iconic test and the power of seeing the inkblots. So this is a biography on Rorschach, for those of you who don't know. The Rorschach inkblot test. It's a projective technique that was used. It's part of a class of psychoanalytic tools that were called projective techniques. Projective in that oftentimes, when at least that's what these folks thought, that someone may not. They may have some latent responses that they either are. They're inaccessible to them or they don't wish to share. These projective techniques would unlock that, right? So if you think about the old Freudian, you know, the. The unconscious mind, right? And that, you know, you repress many things. So, for example, a word association technique, you know, I'm going to give you a word, and please tell me, without thinking much, what's the first thing that comes to mind if I say mother and you say Hitler? Well, maybe we need to explore that on the proverbial couch because you didn't have time to filter your response. And when I said mother, you said Hitler. Well, probably this is something worth, you know, digging deeper into. And that was subsequently, you say, in marketing, if I tell you, first word that comes to mind when I say the word Mercedes and you say power or status. And so the idea is to use these projective techniques to unlock some of these latent motives, latent preferences, latent repressed, you know, issues. Now, in the case of the Rorschach inkblot test, I'm going to give you sort of an amorphous stimulus and ask you to tell me what you see. And the idea is then you are projecting onto that stimulus things that hopefully the analyst can tell you about. Now, why am I saying all this? Because I've often said that the way that people respond to me is akin to a Rorschach inkblot test. In French, there is an expression that says, dit moi qui sont est amis estudiere qui chuyer. Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are. Right, well, the same applies to tell me, show me how you react to a stimulus and I'll tell you who you are. So many of the most secure, you know, alpha, successful men in the world react to me, to my work, to my humor, to my larger than life personality in ways that are distinctly different from how other males, my academic colleagues, you know, beta guys on Twitter and so on, react to me. How could it be, right? I haven't changed. But, you know, a very, very powerful guy looks at me and says, oh, I love your boldness. I love your sense of humor. I love your big personality. I love the way, you know, you express yourself in your academic work. Someone else looks at that and says, oh, how unbefitting of a professor. He's such a buffoon. How he uses satire. He just is not welcomed in our community of esteemed scholars. Well, I think the hierarchies have assorted themselves and maybe I'm not very interested in going to their cool kids party, but the reason I'm saying that is because I then become a Rorschach Inc. Blood test. Tell me how you react to me and I'll tell you who you are. Well, this. I've extended that maxim to tell me how you react to Elon's musk success and I'll tell you who you are. Now, many people look at Elon's success and say, my goodness, he deserved it. He innovated. He's a visionary, he's a futurist, he's an incredible mind and he deserves all of the spoils that he gets. And by the way, his spoils end up having downstream consequences on many, many other people in a beneficial sense, right? So it's not as though he's, you know, taking all of this money and, you know, buying luxury yachts and nobody else other than him is benefiting. So now I'm going to try to explain why it is that not the people who look at Elon and see his success and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I would, right? I mean, I'm, I'm not, I'm not diminished by Elon's success. On the other. On the contrary, it makes you dream of all the endless possibilities, right? This guy came to Canada with nothing, right? He had a difficult Childhood. Look where he is now. Wow, what a story. It's incredible. We should emulate his secret sauce recipe. But if you are suffering from. Look at this one. You're suffering from one of the seven deadly sins. For those of you who. And by the way, this, this is a cool book because it actually looks at. So it's called Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology. Well, precisely. The reason why those seven deadly sins are so powerful is because they really do reflect many of the moral trappings of the architecture of the human mind. One of which of course is envy. We know also from the Ten Commandments that one of the commandments is don't covet your wife's neighbor. That's rooted in envy. Why don't I have as hot a wife as the neighbor? I want her. I'm coveting. I'm envious of what the other one has. Well, socialism and communism and the welfare state and the nanny state are rooted in parasitic envy, right? It's precisely the idea that why should someone else have more money than this person, than me, right? Elizabeth Warren maybe is worth many, many millions of dollars, but that's a really reasonable, logical amount of money to have. Bernie Sanders owns many homes which he was able to obtain by writing books about how evil capitalism is, but using the capitalist publishing system. He doesn't see any irony in that statement. But you know, he's deserving of it because they are. They are the reproductive queens in the communist social ant colony. And therefore it's okay for them to have money, but the money that Elon has amassed in their view and point and their calculus, that's simply obscene. So what is it that they are maximizing in their calculus? Right. I've explained to you before that the field of operations research is the applied mathematics field that says here is some objective function that we're trying to maximize. By maximize, it means either minimize or optimize some metric. And then what is the mathematical solution that we maximizes that metric? Well, if according to Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Elizabeth Warren, what you're trying to minimize is income inequality, well, then of course that Elon is not worth a trillion dollars and someone else doesn't lives on food stamps, that is wrong. And therefore we're going to intervene, take his money so that then we can have more income equality. Right? That's exactly the parasitic system of Canada. That's why we are finally, thank God, fleeing Canada to the United States. Okay, but if you realize that there are other metrics to optimize the greater utility to the greatest number of people. Well, is Elon doing that? Well, we know. I saw one stat that said that something like 4400 people as a result of the IPO became millionaires and about 400 of them became 100 millionaires. Now they will be taxed, so that will go into the public coffers. So it's so never mind whatever taxes that Elon pays, never mind how much innovation he creates, how many human problems he solves. He is contributing in endless ways to the public coffers, in ways that all of these parasitic people, the Gavin Newsoms and the Bernie Sanders and the AOCs could not if they lived 100,000 lifetimes. So using the metrics of contributing to the public good, who's contributed more? Elon or all those people? So now I'm going to read you from this book, the number one book, the instant number one New York Times bestseller book. I'm going to read you from page 145. This is from the chapter called Govern me Harder, Daddy. Are you ready? Speaking of Musk, suicidally empathetic socialists would love to see him taxed at a nearly 100% rate as he is apparently unfairly wealthy. While when other Americans must rely on food stamps to survive, these same folks fail to realize that Musk's Companies have injected 338 billion into the US economy over the past five years alone, stemming from $110.7 billion in salaries, $46 billion in levy taxes, and $182.2 billion in procurements. Musk's ability to generate and allocate capital is astoundingly greater than would be the case of a caring and empathetic centralized government agency. The parasitic reflex to punish successful capitalists who otherwise inject extraordinary economic activity is a manifestation of the Tall Poppy syndrome and is also captured by a cross cultural insight stemming from Bono, the lead singer of U2, who said, quote, in the United States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill and you think, you know, one day if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion in Ireland. People look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day I'm going to get that bastard. Pathological envy bathing and suicidal empathy fuels socialism. So rather than people saying, my God, what an inspiring story that Musk has thus far lived. How can I emulate that? How could I achieve one millionth of a percent of what this guy has achieved? The socialists that are now populating half of the political the US Government called the Democrats, are completely internalizing and normalizing the ethos of parasitic, pathological, envious socialism. There you have it, folks. Congratulations, Elon. You deserve it. Cheers.