TRUST: High achievers say the strangest things!

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2025

Elon Musk, come on down: With substantial regularity, highly accomplished people say the darnedest things.

They may say, and even believe, the darnedest things! Once you step outside their area of achievement, they may even turn out to have a whole bunch of crazy ideas.

Harvard history professor Jill Lepore visited this realm of being in a fascinating guest essay in Sunday's New York Times. Her essay takes us back to the early 1930s—to the start of the Great Depression—but her essay is also as current as our own day's crackpot headlines.

Professor Lepore was back in the past. But she was principally discussing a very important present-day figure. 

Her essay starts as shown below. It then takes us into the realm of badly failed human discernment and stone-cold nutty ideas:

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

President Trump has reportedly told cabinet members that Elon Musk may soon leave the administration. If and when he goes, what will he leave behind?

Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets—the rockets and the robots and the Department of Government Efficiency Musketeers, carrying backpacks crammed with laptops, dreaming of replacing federal employees with large language models—few figures in public life are more shackled to the past.

In Lepore's assessment, Musk isn't simply "shackled to the past." More specifically, Musk seems to be shackled to an array of the past's "failed ideas."

Let's punch up that language. As Lepore lays out the landscape, we'd have to say that DOGEmaster Musk can almost seem to be shackled to a set of borderline crazy ideas. As happenstance would have it, those crazy ideas track back to Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman—to a man who died when Musk himself was just three years old.

Who the heck was Joshua Haldeman? As we noted yesterday, the leading authority on his life presents this unflattering thumbnail:

Joshua N. Haldeman

Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902-1974) was an American-born Canadian-South African chiropractor, aviator, and politician. He became involved in Canadian politics, backing the technocracy movement, before moving to South Africa in 1950. Over the course of decades, he repeatedly expressed racist, antisemitic, and antidemocratic views. In South Africa he was a supporter of apartheid and promoted a number of conspiracy theories. A pilot since 1948, he died in a plane crash in 1974. Haldeman is the maternal grandfather of businessman Elon Musk.

Haldeman was born in 1902 in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota...[H]is mother studied at E. W. Lynch's Chiropractic School in Minneapolis and earned her D.C. on January 20, 1905. The family then moved to Saskatchewan, where she became the first recorded chiropractor in Canada.

[..]

In 1950, [Haldeman] emigrated with his family to South Africa and settled in the capital Pretoria, where he opened a chiropractic clinic. He served as secretary of the South African Chiropractors Association from 1952 to 1959, after which he was its president until 1969.

He was born in Pequot Lakes, but he grew up in Canada. In that northern land, he became a backer of "the technocracy movement"—a political movement which was briefly influential, despite the highly unusual ideas which lay at the heart of its struggle. 

Haldeman wasn't an industrial giant or a massively accomplished public figure. Today, his famous grandson plainly is. 

That said, Lepore marvels at the way the modern-day Musk seems to share the peculiar ideas which lay at the heart of his grandfather's movement. He was only three when his grandfather died, but ideas can be hard to kill.

Alas! Highly accomplished public figures—massive achievers like Elon Musk—may turn out to have crazy ideas, and very poor judgment, when you take them outside their narrow lane of accomplishment.

At any rate, what the heck was the long forgotten "technocracy movement?" Below, we'll quote Lepore as she highlights some of the movement's weird proposals. To simplify, the leading authority on the movement provides this overview:

Technocracy movement

The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics...Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy...

At that time, plain old "representative democracy" seemed to be failing. This movement proposed handing the reins to a new set of philosopher kings—to the brilliant scientists and engineers who would be able to noodle out the best way to shape the society.

Has this started to sound a tiny bit familiar? In the present day, Dogemaster Musk and his "engineers" have been allowed to intercede in all sorts of federal agencies. They've been applying their technical brilliance—their "expertise"—to the pitifully failed undertakings of elected officials and government employees and others within the deep state.

Some of them may be 19 years old; they may have names like "Big Balls." That said, the theory seems to be that their technical brilliance will overcome any obstacles as they reorder the world in a way which at last makes sense.

Unfortunately, highly accomplished technical people will sometimes turn out to be extremely dumb in all other areas. Musk himself has paraded about with a 3-year-old pendant draped on his neck, making one clownish claim after another, as his DOGE bros have blundered ahead. 

Our journalism seems to lack an established language for reporting the sheer stupidity of this highly accomplished industrialist. That said, how dumb can people of this general type be? 

That brings us to Lepore's remarkable recollection of the highly peculiar dreams and ideas which lay at the heart of the technocracy movement, back in the day when Musk's grandfather believed that he could reinvent the basic shape of the world.

How nutty were the original technocrats? We human beings can have the darnedest ideas! In this passage, Professor Lepore starts to describe the movement which seemed to make sense to Musk's grandfather:

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

[...]

Joshua Haldeman [was] a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.

Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants—indeed, all of government—with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.

Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.

Technocracy first gained worldwide attention in 1932 but soon splintered into rival factions. Technocracy Incorporated was founded and led by a former New Yorker named Howard Scott. Across the continent, rival groups of technocrats issued a flurry of tracts, periodicals and pamphlets explaining, for instance, how “life in a technocracy” would be utterly different from life in a democracy: “Popular voting can be largely dispensed with.”

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.”...Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”

They wanted to bring on "the technate!" We humans would swap our tired old names for numbers—for new names like X Æ A-12!

Canada and Mexico would be annexed by the United States. Popular voting would go. We'd turn it all over to a group of intellectual giants. They would make the trains ruin on time. They'd make the Coast Guard efficient.

This was a journey back to an ancient idea—to the ancient dream of that philosopher king. The technocrats may have been completely sincere in what they proposed—but were they also perhaps a bit nutty?

Decades ago, in the desperate, darkest moment of the Depression, technocracy seemed, briefly, poised to prevail against democracy...In the four months from November 1932 to March 1933, The New York Times published more than 100 stories about the movement. And then the bubble appeared to burst. By summer [1933], Technocrats Magazine and The Technocracy Review had gone out of print.

[...]

Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. 

So it apparently went. Occasionally, it got even stranger than that, as we'll note tomorrow.

Stating the obvious, the possible sins of the maternal grandfather should not be visited on the highly accomplished grandson. Also, many of the technocrats were almost surely fully sincere in their dreams of this new world order.

That said, we humans can have the darnedest ideas! How nutty did some of these technocrats possibly seem? For a look at the identical suits, you can just click here.

The identical cars may be even stranger. To glimpse the movement's "Grey Fleet," click this, then scroll down.

Tomorrow, we'll show you more from Lepore's essay. For today, we'd suggest this:

Accomplished people may often fail to understand one key fact about themselves: Their high achievement in one specific area doesn't mean that they are "highly stable geniuses" is any other moral or intellectual realm.

In fact, accomplished people may often have the weirdest ideas and make the dumbest possible statements! As a general matter, their powers of reasoning may not be great. Swollen by their sense of self, they may not always be obsessively honest.

So it possibly seems to be in the case of the endless ridiculous claims issued by Elon Musk. Should a sensible American citizen trust the things this rather strange person says and does?

He has said a lot of extremely strange things. Who can a citizen trust?

Tomorrow: Journalistic deference! Within that world, who can a citizen trust?