"A tragedy for the world": How the Trump-Musk takeover is sowing global chaos

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"A tragedy for the world": How the Trump-Musk takeover is sowing global chaos
Social scientist Michael Bang Petersen: Trump's demolition project will create "massive" global problems

By Paul Rosenberg
Contributing Writer
Published March 22, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Irecently interviewed social psychologist Kurt Gray about his new book, "Outraged! Why We Fight About Morality and Politics," in which he argues that we can bridge ideological divides by drawing on evolutionary evidence and developing ways of building trust. Despite the state of the world today, there’s evidence that this is possible through the use of randomly selected mini-publics modeled on jury duty, whether here in America or around the world. But creating conditions in which such examples can flourish may seems like a pipe dream as America risks descending into autocracy, where no dialogue is possible or permitted.

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One of Kurt Gray's key arguments is that humans evolved as a prey species with a profound orientation toward avoiding harm, which has become the basis for all our morality. He thinks that's also a basis for liberals and conservatives to understand each other by focusing on how they both see harm. There's evidence for that in citizen's assemblies in specific contexts, but in politics at large that doesn't seem to be the case. Your work seems a lot more realistic, in terms of what we actually see right now. I want to start by asking about what's happening on the individual level, and what you've called the "need for chaos." That seems to apply most clearly to internet trolls, and now we have the biggest social media troll of all acting as co-president of the U.S. How does the "need for chaos" help explain Elon Musk and how he operates?

It's always difficult to apply these general theories to single individuals, because there's so much contextual information that isn't available and it's difficult to get people's genuine motivations from a distance. But at least we can talk about the effects that he is creating. If you look at the observable behavior and the patterns, he seems to be a person who is extremely motivated or willing to share information that is false, to the extent that it fits into his political talking points, his overall political agenda. So you have a person who is not sharing information with the objective of creating an accurate representation of the state of the world, but who is trying to mold the way that his audience thinks such that it aligns with his core interests.

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And with powerful effects.

Let's talk about the effects of those messages in a second, but if we talk a little bit more about Musk's dispositions, it does seem that he has all the behavior patterns of a person who scores high in dominance-seeking, a core feature of individuals who have a high need for chaos. It does seem to be an explicit leadership strategy to use dominance to instill fear into people who are working within his organizations, and it's very clear that there has been a strategy of instilling fear into bureaucracy through the random firings, constant threats of firings, cutting funding and so on.

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In that paper, you broke down the coalitional functions of falsehood into three stages. The first of those was mobilization. You said, "By enhancing the threat — for example, by saying things that are not necessarily true — then you are in a better situation to mobilize and coordinate the attention of your own group." I thought of that when Trump made the claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets: Clearly that was false, and they didn't care that it was false. That didn't seem to matter at all to Trump's followers, who seemed to revel in claiming it, regardless of whether it was true or false. Could you say something about how that works?

When you're trying to mobilize a coalition, you need to overcome a fundamental problem, which is the coordination problem. Even if everyone within a group wants to do the same thing, it is actually difficult to get the group to do that thing, because their attention is scattered across multiple different issues. It's not the only thing that they want to do. So they need to agree: Is it now that we're doing that thing? That problem of coordinating people's attention at the same time to do X is a difficult problem. A lot of propaganda is about creating that coordination, to say it's now that we need to do something about it, and we need to do this. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/22/a-tragedy-for-the-world-how-the-musk-takeover-is-sowing-global-chaos/