My opinion of people like Musk and the rest of the technocrats is they ARE Darwin's finest example ... of "Marauders and Pillagers".

Any service to society is coincidental and unintentional and solely related to 'wealth accumulation'. Philanthropics too... It's for the writedown. Not because they really care.

Rr

I certainly won't argue with that. I would point out, however, that these sorts of ulterior motives are essentially always present in any group purportedly trying to "help humanity." Your observations about mega-rich philanthropists is well-noted. But for example, among the religious there are those that say "our way is the only real truth." These groups then go on to try to convert others, ostensibly for their own good, but really because "winning souls" becomes a competitive game. Then you have the religious that say "Oh, we believe there are many paths to God" .. they are playing a game too, this game simply being "I'm more tolerant than you are" and this allows them to believe that they are more loving than their intolerant opposites. Likewise, amongst the political activist community, one sees the same holier-than-thou mentality. So-and-so is *REALLY* committed, because they will live in a squat, or will intentionally get arrested, or whatever. All of this is an expression of the effects of simple human ego. Certainly, we can agree that some of these are less problematic than others, but I think that they all share the same difficulty at scale, and so we see all types of oppression by oligarchs, theocrats, and political purges whenever one of these groups gets any real control, or power. I would say that any system or ideology which contains some type of metric for measuring one person better than another will always suffer from these types of problems in some way or another. Which is a very thorny problem, it seems, because it is very natural to look at a rapist and say "Yes, well OBVIOUSLY, I - who would never rape - am BETTER than this bastard." My personal solution, which I will admit I often fail at, is to try to see such people not as lessers that I am superior too, but rather as sick people whom I am healthier than. This helps in the way of compassion, but may not - in the end, really even solve the problem. As one can see the egoist perspective at work in the "healthy living" fad popular these days already.