Addendum 3 – The fulfilment of Elon Musk’s – and the human race’s – yearning for meaning

Elon Musk in 2022

In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on 30 November 2023 Elon Musk said, ‘If I was to describe my philosophy it is a philosophy of curiosity. I did have this existential crisis when I was around 12 about what is the meaning of life, isn’t it all pointless, why not just commit suicide, why exist? I read the religious texts, I read the philosophy books, especially the German philosophy books…​Schopenhauer and Nietzsche…​But…​we don’t actually know what questions to ask…​figure out what the question is, that’s the actual hard part…​If we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask…​and maybe we can find out the meaning of life…​you know, where did we come from, where are we going…​man’s search for meaning…​life has to be more than simply solving one sad problem after another, you know, there have to be reasons where you wake up in the morning and you’re happy to be alive, you have to say why are you excited about the future, like what gives you hope.’

As I described earlier in Part 3 of this booklet (where I summarised what I explain in THE Interview I did with Craig Conway), the human race once lived in a nurturing cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state, which the bonobo species of ape are currently developing. But then, when we became conscious some 2 million years ago, an upsetting battle unavoidably broke out between that self-adjusting conscious mind and our already established dictatorial instincts. The result of this upsetting battle was we became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated. Then to cope with our guilt and shame at having corrupted our original cooperative, selfless and loving innocent instinctive self or soul, we had no choice but to ‘resign’ ourselves to living in fearful denial of the truth of our corrupted condition. And so ever since then (as I explained in paragraph 15 of this booklet), every generation of young adolescents had to go through this agony of trying to confront the suicidally depressing truth of our ‘fallen’, soul-corrupted condition before learning to resign themselves to having to block out from their minds the truth of their own and the human race’s corrupted condition. As I mentioned in that paragraph, this agonising process of ‘Resignation’ is fully described in F. Essay 30, and in chapters 2:2 and 2:3 of FREEDOM.

Elon was describing the time he went through Resignation when he said, ‘I did have this existential crisis when I was around 12 about what is the meaning of life, isn’t it all pointless, why not just commit suicide, why exist?’ Yes, for young adolescents who had yet to learn to resign to living in denial of the issue of the human condition, trying to understand it only led to ‘suicid[al]’ depression.

And yes, the resigned world of adults has been so deeply committed to avoiding that fundamental question of our corrupted condition that they aren’t able to recognise what that key question is. There is an all-important question about human existence that they are aware has to be answered, but they are so committed to avoiding the question that they aren’t able to know what the question actually is! As Elon described this bizarre situation where we know but don’t allow ourselves to know, ‘we don’t actually know what questions to ask…​figure out what the question is, that’s the actual hard part’.

And yes, Elon is right when, from his resigned, human-condition-avoiding position, he said, ‘If we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness [i.e. if we can free ourselves from our resigned state of deep denial, which is a state of virtual unconsciousness, and begin to think truthfully and effectively], then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask’, and from there, as he said, ‘find out the meaning of life…​you know, where did we come from, where are we going’. While resigned humans weren’t able to face the truth of their divisive, competitive, and aggressive, soul-corrupted, ‘fallen’ human condition, they were in no position to admit the integrative, cooperative and loving ‘meaning of life’. The Negative Entropy driven, Integrative Meaning of existence, which we have personified as ‘God’, is fully explained in F. Essay 23, and in chapter 4 of FREEDOM. Metaphorically speaking, divisively behaved humans were in no position to confront ‘God’ while unable to defend themselves in its integrative presence!

I might mention that in another expression of his yearning to find ‘meaning’, Elon in 2023 even created xAI to ‘assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge’—with the particular goal to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’, which, as I’ve explained above, is Integrative Meaning, a truth we couldn’t face and admit until we could explain our divisive human condition. All real ‘understanding and knowledge’ depended on solving the human condition; that’s been the real unlocking point for human progress!

And, most significantly, living in fearful denial of our species’ corrupted condition meant we were in no position to find the all-important, unlocking answer we needed of the redeeming explanation for why we corrupted our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul. We were in no position to solve the human condition while we couldn’t admit and face the issue of our corrupted condition—which, incidentally, has led to the litany of dangerous pseudo-idealistic, pretend-solutions to artificially bring relief to our species’ corrupted condition that have been documented in this booklet.

Thankfully, that desperately needed, greatest of all breakthroughs of the biological explanation of our corrupted human condition, has finally been found and presented in my various publications, which you can see a concise summary of in THE Interview.

So we humans can now fully understand our corrupted human condition and so never again have to suffer from the ‘existential crisis’ of trying to understand it, and as a result of that breakthrough can finally safely admit the great integrative meaning, ‘true nature of’ our lives, world and ‘the universe’—AND, AS ELON YEARNED FOR, FINALLY ‘have…​[the] reasons where you wake up in the morning and you’re happy to be alive…​[be able to] say why are you excited about the future, like what gives you hope’!!!

So having in effect recognised that he went through the process of Resignation to living in fearful denial of the ‘suicid[ally]’ depressing issue of the human condition when he was young, Elon has in effect acknowledged that he hasn’t been living in a truthful paradigm since then—and therefore that his thinking about wanting to explore outer space, make extravagant, escapist, materialistic vehicles, etc, etc, is all off-track, evasive, insecure, ‘I-can’t-face-the-truth-of-our-corrupted-condition’, fraudulent thinking. As I said earlier in paragraph 165, “the real frontier is not outer space but inner space, the issue of the human condition. Outer space was a necessary distracting escape, but the way forward now that understanding of the human condition has finally been found is back to our soul’s world of soundness, real togetherness and real happiness.” And I would also like to make the point about Elon’s brilliant technological innovations, and about the advances being made in Artificial Intelligence, which I know Elon is concerned about, that playing God with ever more sophisticated technology while we couldn’t even confront God (Integrative Meaning) and were living in complete denial of how immensely psychotic we are, how corrupted our instinctive self or soul is, was a potentially very dangerous pursuit!!!

It was so meaningful for Elon to say that his philosophy ‘is a philosophy of curiosity’ because, as Professor Harry Prosen said in his Introduction to my book FREEDOM, ‘The fundamental goal of the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry has been to find the reconciling, redeeming and rehabilitating explanation of our species’ troubled condition’, and that ‘Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight humans have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of our species.’ Being a human is all about being ‘curious’ about our world and place in it, ultimately about finding understanding of our corrupted condition, which thank goodness we have now found.

Finally I would also like to emphasise that there is no greater need for the magnificent championing of freedom of speech against its suppression that Elon demonstrated in purchasing and overhauling Twitter/​X than this breakthrough understanding of the human condition because it has to overcome humans’ fearful, human-condition-avoiding, resigned desire to suppress it, which our Persecution of the WTM essay documents. So I do hope Elon hears about our all-important, human-race-saving understanding of the human condition, and that he, and others, will urgently support and promote it.