Democracy

During my over 50 years of being an employer and an employee in the American economy, there is one type of personality that I ran into all the time. And that is someone who’s new to a company who comes in with the idea that they are going to change and fix everything. They are generally pretty young, but always have this feeling that they are superior to others. The other employees who see this new person realize that he’s just another jerk who thinks that they are all inefficient and worthless employees and this guy’s going to fix it.

I was even one of those in my early days until I realized that I’m not superior to these others, and I can’t go in and fix everything because I learned over time that certain practices and habits are there for a reason, and those reasons have often come down over decades and centuries. What I learned was called humility.

Humility is something that Elon Musk needs badly. His money has gone to his head and now he has a God complex. He’s like Trump, who also has a God complex. Trump also thinks that he’s going to come in and fix everything in the world—and that he is superior to everyone else—that only he can fix it.

Someone needs to tell Elon—and Trump, for that matter—that efficiency is not the goal of everything. In fact, efficiency can almost be the bane of human existence.

And this thing with DEI. We need to have a society that’s diverse, equitable and inclusive of all types of people. DEI hiring is often bringing in people who live on the fringes of society because the majority of society, or maybe a large group, doesn’t like them, often because these people are of a different race, religion, sex—or have some other unpopular trait. In other words, they’re prejudiced against them, and they don’t want to deal with them, so these people just fall by the wayside because society doesn’t engage with them. And engagement means that they aren’t as efficient. But efficiency, again, is not the main goal in life, nor should it be in government and society.

What good government and a good society should be has yet to be determined; It’s a work in progress, although there are a lot of people who are convinced that they know exactly what it should be and they want to force that on everyone else—except the idea of democracy, which is only defined as rule by the people—and is also a work in progress—stands in their way.

Elon should understand all this. After all, he grew up in South Africa, a place where the majority of the people who were black were once ruled by the minority of the people, who were white. The white people just didn’t like the black people. They thought they were superior to the blacks. Democracy came along and changed all that. And that is still a work in progress. But Elon, who is white, left. Maybe it wasn’t efficient enough for him.