Enemy Aliens and (Freudian) Displacement

One way to think about billionaires and borders

A short piece today about a big subject: how should we interpret the utterances of tech billionaires (and their allies and clients) regarding the threat of migrants to Western civilization? What they say is often wrong, and what they say always matters. Where does it come from?

The easiest thing to do is to start with what was just said. But why do people say the things that they do? The simplest assumption is that this reflects some aspect of reality. But so often it does not, as in the case of Elon Musk. One level deeper: we could imagine that Musk (to take the most important example) believes that what he is saying is true.

But there is a missing logical step here: why might Elon Musk think that the false things that he says are true?

The question as to why a person says something, or thinks something, can never finally be answered. Historians approach these sorts of questions by assembling all the contexts, relying on the insights of others who were present, and testing explanations against other parts of the story. Historians do not assume that what people say and think represents external reality or even sincere convictions about reality. But historians have the luxury, as most people who work in media do not, of taking their time. They can test intuitions against the evidence. They can try things out.

I have written a couple or three books which touch on the intersection of tech billionaires and the new fascism, so you can see how I apply these methods at greater length if you like. Here I just want to suggest a certain way of looking at the connection between a figure like Musk and the migrant question that might be more fruitful than taking what he says literally, either as a description of the world or as a description of his views of the world. For one thing, he simply says a lot which is verifiably false!

Perhaps Musk is displacing something, or projecting something. After all, he is a migrant to the United States who worked illegally, and he has quite possibly done more damage to the country than any single other individual. Naturally, that is not the kind of reality that we as human beings like to face directly, so we displace the emotion and project the blame: it is not me the migrant who has done damage, but it is they the other migrants.

Personally, I think that that is not the most likely explanation. I believe that the displacement and the projection begins somewhere else, somewhere deeper.

Consider this: there are in fact alien entities that threaten the essence of our civilization. They are undermining education. They do consume our time. They do ruin our relationships. They do separate wives from husbands, children from parents. They polarize our politics. They enter into our very minds, reformatting them, cutting us off from what we once believed, what we once might have remembered. They prepare us for a generic life that is hardly life, separated from the history of what made each culture special and each individual different. They are truly inhuman!

Those entities, of course, are the algorithms of social media. They are the aliens who are penetrating us and changing us. And Musk has done as much (via his ownership and transformation of Twitter) as anyone to ensure that social media enters our lives in the worst possible form. It is he, as much as anyone, who has torn down the walls, opened the borders, and allowed the aliens in.

This, I think, is the source of the actual projection and displacement. At some level, Musk understands all of this; he is, after all, a very gifted man. But the responsibility is overwhelming. It cannot be he who has summoned all the chaos and destruction. It must be the human migrants. Blame them. Blame them every day. Blame them for everything. Never stop. Keep the truth at bay. The unbearable truth. About yourself.

We all do this sort of thing. But it is more consequential when the centibillionaires do it. Their giant self-deceptions affect not just the people around them, but the whole world.

It is comfortable, though ultimately unsatisfactory, to remain at the level of the words people say, and cling to the notion that they are either true or intended to be true. But staying at that level, I fear, can draw us away from some of the crucial realities of our everyday politics. We have to know what people say; but we also have to take each utterance in context and think creatively about where it all comes from. This interpretation is, of course, unfalsifiable. You can judge for yourself whether this account of displacement and projection helps to make the big subject easier to understand.