Maybe I’m making that terrible mistake of imagining I know something about the inner lives of our crew of national leaders and tech edge lords – Trump and Musk, Altman, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Andreessen, so many others in this American epoch of brutality and decay.
Actually, I imagine emptiness, a zone of disinterest or worse, a generalized, free-floating contempt. Not a howling void, but a brightly lit, almost blinding echo chamber that endlessly repeats their names. Anything to shut out doubt.
I don’t think any of them believe in beauty. They might believe in the stuffed, filtered, plumped and stretched ideal of feminine beauty so common now to their domains, but that’s only lust.
No, I mean beauty as the quality that elevates the human condition. Beauty as found in a picture, a sculpture, a line of melody, a poem, a novel, a movie. Not as an object of wealth to be possessed, a status sign, or one made to flatter them, but something astonishing made by another not under the sway of implacable avarice.
I do not believe that any of them have ever been transfixed by beauty or humbled or suddenly knocked into transcendence. How can such a person love another?
They believe in the ideal of more. More power. More money. More homes. Only more renders them untouchable and being untouchable is next to immortality.
Their ambition is to be unbothered by the common concerns of human beings, to be a pure man or woman of power and business, a ruthless person, one who believes that he or she has earned the service of others, their fealty, their fear.
I wonder if anyone will mourn them when they die? When their moment of being all-powerful is trembling at that final sharply defined borderline, when they look around to the faces gathered before them, what will they see? Impatience. Indifference. Loathing. More than one thinking, Free at last, Free at last, Thank God, free at last.
