The Brooklyn Rail

Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars
@elonmusk

I was there that day, swept along on waves of heat and data, when I felt under my left foot, then the right, the unmistakable arghhh yuck feeling that I was walking on a human body. I had never walked on a human body before, but I knew that’s what it was. Even in my Nike Alphaflys with their next­-gen cushioning tech, even as the launch team came shrieking past me like idiots, hair on fire and hands flailing overhead, it was: ah yup, that’s a human body.

The foot is our interface with the ground, our main point of con­tact with the planet we live on, and it gives us both postural control and much of our proprioceptive capacity, our feel for our own bodies as they extend into and move through space. Twenty-­six bones and thirty-­three joints and more sensory nerves per square inch than anywhere else in the human body, along with a hundred­-plus ten­ dons and muscles—and that’s for each foot, so double it.

I wondered if anyone else was walking on a human body.

But no, it was only me, I’m sure of it—I was the only one walking on a human body. And that quality of being-­on-­a-­body seemed to slow time, or thicken it, and we were the eye of everything, the human body and I, the serene point around which whirled a thou­ sand torched incompetents.

The human foot and its capacities had already been front of mind for me. A thought in one sector leads to an innovation in another, which leads to another thought, which leads to an innovation in yet another sector, and so on, which is another way of saying that everything is connected, and when I am in a flow state, I find those connections profoundly legible. And so, even as our rocket was successfully test-­launched—and yes, it was a great success, a rocket that blows up is often the most successful rocket, because the fact of the explosion is so rich with information, about the rocket and the launch procedures, yes, but also revealing the incompetents and bunglers who need to be axed—I was also thinking about the next major event, the humanoid robots we’d be demoing on Tuesday, robots that would require the same sort of robust intuitive mapping that I myself was bringing to bear as I slowly walked across the body of the human female. My robots would need to feel what I was feeling, map what I was mapping, and what I was mapping was not merely the contact points between foot and body. It’s as though my feet were suddenly bats or tiny dolphins casting sonar into that figure and telling me everything about that body and the person within the body: sweatshirt and the rib cage, the flesh of an almost certainly female chest, the bony knot of a hand clenching a phone, which made me laugh a little—as if your grip on your phone can save you from being trampled, as if a trampled body has need of a phone—and beyond all of that a squish and resistance so precisely anatomical that it’s too yucky to describe, ugh, blech.

I allowed myself to feel the disgust that was washing over me— to feel it absolutely. And when that feeling had completed itself, I let it go. And then I allowed myself to truly feel what it is to be walking on a human body, an assemblage of living human meat, unless, of course, it was dead already, a dead human body, a dead assemblage, but no, I’m sure it was still living meat, it didn’t squish like the dead would squish, it squished beneath my feet like the muscles were clenching and unclenching, like blood still flowed through the meat, and like the heart, that central chunk of meat in the larger meat container, was still beating.

I could feel the heart beating, however faintly.

It was fascinating. I was also a meat container, like the body I was an assemblage of human meat, with its own heart still beating in its own meat cage, and if this is something one can do—if one can be human meat walking on other human meat—if this is in the range of human experience, then, I thought, what else might be possible? And I felt a shiver of pleasure, both at the feel of the living human meat beneath me, this human meat that would soon be dying, or already was, I felt a pleasure that tipped from passive enjoyment to active, conscious enjoyment as I surrendered, deliciously, to a state of flow, and became a part of a flow state of meat and bone and nerve tissue that joined both of us now, and in the same moment connected us to the whole earth and to all on the earth, and then to the worlds and stars beyond, and even as I felt the universe move through me, and through her, supporting both of us, her body and my body walking on her body, the two of us together, I under­ stood I would save her.

She would not die, this woman, this human meat, because I would save her.

I would be the savior, the rescuer, the first responder in her time of greatest need. The time was now, I would be her savior now and I would save her now, there was no question any longer, no question at all, that I was about to save the woman I was walking on, to end my walking on the human body, the human meat, and begin my lifting up and rescuing of the human body and human meat.

If she was dying meat, the dying processes would slow and then stop, she would go back to being living meat, and fully living meat, or meat as fully living as possible, given whatever damages had been sustained.

Then came a second explosion. In the flow state I was in I knew it was happening before it came, I was perfectly balanced with and against the shock waves, my feet in their Nike Alphaflys moving naturally with and into the human meat as the blast wave rolled past us. I understood completely and with complete certainty in the micro-second before it happened that the outboard stage two fuel tank was about to explode.

The first explosion, the one that had started this, that had placed me here on the human meat I was walking on, it had been caused by failing planar discs—I knew that at the instant of the first explosion, and I would be shown to be absolutely correct, that was just what had caused it.

And it was a whole new stampede of bodies, the launch team and the on-­site engineers, even the custodial staff, even the cafeteria workers, hundreds of human bodies streaming past me into the east tunnel concourse of the cave system beneath the launch site in my beautiful town in Texas. I thought of my beautiful little town in Texas, and the explosion, and I wondered if everyone who lived in the town understood the explosion for what it was—a success. Because the people in little towns in Texas, they don’t al­ ways understand success, that a launch failure is a launch success, these little Texas people in their little Texas town. I would have to have it explained to them, I thought, launch failures as launch successes, that a few burning houses, a few burning churches and taco trucks, were a part of a larger and greater and definitive, historical success.

Meanwhile, even with all these people coming past us, they never for an instant forced her and me apart, all my engineers and technicians and scientists, going hell­-for-­leather in a randomized panic of movement, they were nonetheless giving way and flowing around us, in the flow state I was in I had willed them to part around us with nothing more than a movement of my hand, and a subtle shift in gait, an ease that entered my whole body and my whole person, as I walked on human meat and felt the squish of that, the way the squish itself was part of this system of screaming humans and human meat, the way that all of this was chaos, all of this was sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and yet I—and only I—could control, me and the human meat below me, I could feel into the squish of the human meat I was walking on how the living meat vibrated with the momentum of hundreds of bodies thundering past us reeking of burning hair, but not one touched us.

It was time to stop walking on the body of the human. It was time to save her, I reminded myself in the flow state I was in, that she must be saved and I would be the one to do it, there was no one else who could, and I would be the savior of the human meat.

But first a joke, one that had just occurred to me, a really perfect joke, and I touched my earpiece, the one that goes out to all the hundreds of other earpieces, and I said, Hey guys, where’s the fire? And in perfect sync they all stopped their running and stopped their screaming, they froze, then they laughed, and tunnels and caverns echoed with their laughter, all of them frozen yet laughing, then time released them and again they were running and screaming, never once touching me or the human meat.

The thing about a joke, a good one, is that if people don’t think it’s funny, that’s funny.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

But everyone thought it was funny.

Now, with my good joke accomplished, I was fully prepared, and it was the moment at last, I was prepared and fully capable of being the savior of the living or dying human meat I was walking on, when something happened, something shifted, and the jostling squish no longer felt so good.

Can you guess what had happened? Go ahead and guess.

If you said the woke mind virus you’re right. Ding ding ding ding, that’s what it was.

Keep in mind, I had not yet seen the face of the human meat I was walking on.

But out of nowhere, and at the worst possible moment: the woke mind virus.

Even for Elon, even for someone as committed as I am to the eradication of the woke, sometimes the virus slips in.

You work your whole life against the woke mind virus, you fight it with all of your resources and all of your intellect, but to do that—to truly do it—you must at times submit to its logic, some part of you has to, it’s the water they wanted us to be swimming in and that we are swimming in, the air that they want us to breathe and that we are breathing.

Wokeness wants to destroy meritocracy and replace it every­ where with divisiveness, exclusion, and hate. Wokeness gives rude people a shield to be rude and cruel, armored in false virtue, and in this armor they will destroy a society which has been for hundreds of years based on increasingly pure forms of meritocracy, and when the woke mind virus has succeeded, human progress will grind to a halt, we’ll be back in the Stone Age.

You see it everywhere and you work against it everywhere, but to fight it effectively you must inhabit it, you have to understand it from within, and even as you’re understanding it from within it’s understanding you from within.

Because even Elon on human meat can have a moment where his mind catches the woke mind virus.

The woke mind virus wants to filter everything, poison every­ thing, it twists everything per its own disordered logic, and its logic is totalizing, it wants us to believe that there is nothing out­ side of it, and in that most critical of moments when I should have been saving the life of the human meat, the woke mind virus tore me out of the present and cast me into its demented spirals of stupid and wasted thought.

The thought I had is the precise thought they wanted me to have, the entire woke­-industrial complex, and in spite of myself, I still thought it.

Can you guess what I thought? What if she’s black?

Understand: I had no idea if she was black. Walking on her in that state of flow it is true that I’d understood everything about her, absolutely everything, but that is not something I had understood, because properly speaking it is not something you should understand about living human meat, you shouldn’t be thinking of race like that.

But still I wanted to—I needed to—see the face, whatever face it would turn out to be.

But the people rushing around us were so close, passing within millimeters without touching us, that I couldn’t look down.

Though sidebar, can I get a sidebar, and maybe, just maybe, we can at least for one second acknowledge it’s the whites and Asians now who are the ones who the system is racist against.

The point is, I had no idea what race she was.

And the point is, I still thought: What if she’s black?

And with that thought, still on the body, my mind had already split, I was in a version of the present where I was not walking on the woman, on the female human meat, but rather I was already helping her, helping the meat. I had acted like the ones who leap onto subway tracks to save children without thinking and before they know what they are doing.

But that was only in my mind. It was in my mind that I saw my­ self as her savior, while in reality, I was still on top of the body, still walking on top of the body. I felt myself thinking, still on the body, Who cares if she’s black or not, but what would it mean for me and for my companies if she was, what would it mean for me and my rockets and robots, how would they use that against us, how would it look, wouldn’t it be bad, because of course in the woke ideology nonwhite lives are more valuable than white lives, just as The Little Mermaid is more valuable than the artistically superior The Flash, just as all the old movies and TV shows need to be canceled and flushed down the memory hole so the IP can be recast to make way for the new “diverse” monoculture, and you can’t rank lives like that, say that nonwhites are better than whites, and yet those under the spell of the woke mind virus do just that, even to the point of destruction. Take the Jews, the Jews vote for Democrats, and in so doing they let into the country the nonwhites who would wipe them from the earth, the Jews do not even value their own lives as much as the lives of the nonwhites who are champing at the bit to kill them.

And I felt myself thinking, still on the body, of how the wokes would respond if it was reversed, if a black person was walking on a white person, or a black woman walking on an Asian woman, and then I was cycling through the possibilities, all the different types of human meat, the races of human meat, so if the one marching was this and the one being trampled was that, and the twenty-­one resulting possibilities, or twenty­-eight, or thirty­-six, or forty-­five, depending on how many races you say there are, and whatever you peg it at, you can guess exactly what the wokes would say about each one, you know what they’d say, and which ones were good and just, and which were unacceptable and cancelable, which races can walk on which races under the regime of the woke mind virus.

And while part of me was imagining saving her, another part of me wondered: Would she even want my help?

And I thought that this was a narrative I was imposing on her, and that she would have her own narratives about me, this meat had its own thoughts and opinions and narratives, and I didn’t know what all those narratives might be, I had no control over how a black woman, a black meat container, would react to being saved by me, after I’d walked on her, after I’d been walking on her for what now must be quite a substantial amount of time, but I knew, in any case, that I should start the saving process, I should end my walking on her, I should work with the people rushing past me—the employees who stank of burning hair—to get her on her feet, and if she was black, then what a photo it would be, the three of us, whites, if we were all whites, helping a black woman to safety, or two whites and an Asian, or two Asians and a white, and how that might in fact help our rockets and robots, but I was still caught up in the woke thought spiral, and that meant I was not taking action, not saving her, I was still walking on the living human meat with its faintly pumping human heart.

Can you see how frustrating this is? Can you see how this right here is everything in a nutshell?

I would have been saving the meat, if not for the woke mind virus, instead of walking on the meat.

And that is exactly where they want us, the cultural Marxists, in distraction, in endless useless thought, the kind of thought that makes it impossible to save the possibly black meat container I was walking on and feeling the squish of, but really, how many black women engineers do I even have, I don’t know, it’s not how I think about things.

I’d be the first to hire a black woman engineer who is hard­ core and a total beast with engineering, but even as I’m thinking this, and thinking how now really at last—right now—I would need to break the woke thought spiral and get down to the business of saving her, but then I’m thinking, still on the body, how the wokes would say you can’t call a black woman a beast, and how absolutely fucking stupid that is, not being able to call a black woman a beast. And after I’d helped the black woman, if that’s what she was, after I had in fact saved her fucking life, the black woman would be bellowing that I had assaulted her, that I had walked on her, and that I had done it on purpose and in a sexual way.

Then a third and final explosion propelled me through the emergency exit doors and out of the tunnel, and I was outside, and it was too late.

I don’t know if she was black.

But I thought about it in the car, and then in the jet, and now on the other side of the world at the robot factory, speaking to you, to my robot engineers, and also to my robots.

The squish of flesh, the little hard gnarled knot of the hand clutching the phone.

The input bandwidth of our hands and phones, the two thumbs, the bandwidth is already terminally slow, and it grinds to a halt in a body that’s being walked on.

Was she black?

It costs human lives, the woke mind virus. It puts you into thought, when you should be in action, when you should be devoting the full force of your brain to humanoid robots and our multi­ planetary future, or at least saving the human meat you’re walking on, not wondering, Is she black? Is she black?

And even now at the robot factory with the media here and cameras rolling, with all of you, my engineers, and you, my robots, and you, my media, my press, I’m still wondering if she’s black.

That’s what I’m wondering, when I should be demoing my robots. I know that I’m not a racist.

So why did it feel so good?

Yes, now I can admit it, there is no harm in admitting it now, if we really want to get to the bottom of this, it is of the utmost importance that I speak the truth, the truth to power.

I walked on a woman who may have been black, and when I thought that, how she might be black, there was a little extra squirt of dopamine, a little burst of enjoyment. Not because I’m racist, but because of the wokes, how they keep saying we’re racist.

And this I know for a fact is the fault of the wokes, we can all agree on this, it’s no one’s fault but the wokes.

It’s just science, it’s just human nature, if you impose fascism on people, then the people find sources of joy and pleasure outside of your fascism—joys and pleasures that these people would have never otherwise dreamt of.

What I mean is, call people racists enough, and they’re going to get off on joking about being racist.

That does not make them racist.

Isn’t it clear that the wokes are both the real racists, and also are creating racism in everyone else with their language­-policing and fascism?

The essential element of it—that good, almost exhilarating, I would say, feeling of walking on someone that the wokes say you’re not supposed to be walking on, is that it just feels really really good. It’s that same dopamine hit you get from sharing a meme you’re not supposed to share, from reposting a line about the Jews you’re not supposed to repost, from doing a bit about Hitler or Stalin, from taking a chainsaw to a world that stood for so long that people thought, what? it would last forever? But I gotta tell you, I really do, it’s a million times better, a person like me maybe walking on a person like that.

And the press can cover this any way they want to cover it, but until we beat the woke mind virus, until we create a bypass for the woke mind virus, we’re pretty much hosed here, and we’ll never reach our interplanetary future.

And this moment, this walking on the human meat, it really is the whole kitchen sink. I’ll photoshop myself with a sink in my hands walking on a person who isn’t white, and post it, and if people don’t like it, well, sweetie, it’s heads I win, tails you lose.

I’ve got my robots and my rockets and my car, now we’re heading into the brain, by the end of the year we’ll have a woke mind virus bypass worked out, and just like that we’ll have expanded the scope and scale of human consciousness, and set up our interplanetary future, we’ll all be in like a sink, a-­rink­-a-­dink­-dink, in like a sink, a-­rink-a-­dink-­dink.