George Monbiot writes:

Vengeful nihilism, the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, is a major theme in Maga politics. It is applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world. It is hard to avoid the thought that environmental destruction is not just a means by which Trump serves his corporate backers, but an end in itself.

At the same time, Trump enthusiastically (albeit vaguely) boosts Musk’s plans to send people to Mars, a planet incapable of supporting human life. These men, who claim without evidence that unless they cut $1tn from the federal budget, causing innumerable harms, “America will go bankrupt”, are pressing for a programme likely to cost hundreds of billions while delivering no benefit to humanity. For all its grandiosity, the plan amounts to nothing more than an elaborate means of sending people to their deaths.

One of the most persuasive explanations of our times I’ve read is an essay by the author Jay Griffiths, published in 2017. She connects today’s planetary vandals with the Italian futurists of the early 20th century. The futurists, who created much of the iconography and ideology of fascism, fetishised the machine, fantasising about “the technological triumph of humanity over nature”. They were obsessed by flight. “Hurrah! No more contact with the vile earth!”, the author of their manifesto, Filippo Marinetti, exulted. “Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business,” the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio claimed. “It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements.”

Through flight, Griffiths notes, they believed they could achieve their ideal, purified state, characterised by the notion of Deus Invictus: the unbound, totalitarian god, no longer restrained by such earthy, humdrum matters as honesty, kindness, sympathy, respect or even gravity.

I believe, like her, that the revival of this belief system might offer a key to understanding Elon Musk and his remarkable hold over the Trump administration. What Musk presents is the definitive fantasy of escape: from decency, care, love and the living planet itself. They can leave it all behind, leap off the vile Earth, and ascend into heaven. [Continue reading…]