Sure, he says, it’s ok for individual humans to show empathy toward other individuals, but when society, and especially our government, acts with empathy toward its citizens, that’s a bug in the system, a glitch that needs to be fixed. As Musk sees it, if we care about our fellow citizens who need help, and demand that our legislators act accordingly, we are making our country worse, and weaker, by spending our government’s money on things like food assistance for children who are hungry, or health care for people who can’t pay for it on their own.

Clearly, Musk feels that people who are hurt by the lack of government assistance are collateral damage. An acceptable price to pay. In the Doctrine of Elon, individual chumps can donate to relief funds for victims of natural disasters, like the recent victims of the California wildfires or the North Carolina hurricane, but our country as a whole should not be funding FEMA, or for that matter, our national weather forecasting system, or public media like NPR that are often the community’s main source of information on disasters, both pre-disaster and the ongoing situation, especially in rural areas. Of course, Musk believes that funding humanitarian relief for other countries, especially African nations, or funding disease-prevention in other parts of the world, or funding better methods of agricultural production in other countries, or basically anything that USAID does, is stupid, worthless.

Sorry, Elon, you are not the genius you believe yourself to be, nor are you the savior of our country. Our communities, our nation, and our world are made far better and stronger with empathy as a core value and guiding principle.