In economic parlance, Elon Musk emerges as a private limited government libertarian, who invariably recommends a reduction in government spending, hiking the H-1B visa fee and suggesting an annual fee to it so that hiring foreign workers becomes more complex and taxing, while also repealing such regulations that hinders the growth and expansion of his empire. Precisely, why such an illness is termed brutalism because it’s a war of a handful of people against all, just like a single virus can spread and peril the health and existence of so many of us. The illness, that I define as brutalism is contingent upon the positivity of growth and necessity of exclusion, promoting the template of incremental violence and ensuring the societies are punctured from all sides, thus rendering the familiar faces and places unnervingly unfamiliar. It narrativizes a global contest for self-sustenance while reaping the unchecked growth of a few select bellies, therefore, ensuring that the lord of this planet remains a handful of messiahs without empathy.
When the story of the planet becomes the story of a handful of powerful echelons, empathy is ossified. Empathy is seen as a “bug” in the words of Musk, or a kind of disease that must be loathed and vilified. But Musk can amplify that narrative given his credentials to stand with power and the subsequent financialization of the White House. A man with unchecked growth of empire decides to erase the vitality of empathy since the commitment to capital and power is more vital than commitment to the idea of social life. So much for the rhetorics of MAGA, and no wonder that Musk has moved closer to the White House. In other words, the White House seems to be the patronage of Musk’s anti-empathy drive. The companization of the state is the dawn of brutalism through which democracy is coalesced into companies.
It is also ironic to note that the man who dispels the essentiality of empathy also subscribes to it in a selective manner. In his podcast conversation, Elon Musk tries to strike a balance pointing out that he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people.” It is another matter that such other people for whom he decides to reserve empathy happen to be the custodians of the dehumanizing project. In one of his deleted tweets, Muk had written, “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder. Their public sector employees did.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/technology/elon-musk-x-post-hitler-stalin-mao.html) In yet another recent meme that Musk retweeted, he mocks the Americans receiving federal benefits, calling them “the Parasite Class.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/25/doge-gop-lawmakers-concerns-musk/) This is so wrong in many aspects. We all know that most parasites suck, and companies like Tesla and Space X are direct beneficiaries of billions of dollars in government funding, that comes from the tax of those identified as “parasites”. We know who the real parasites are, and in our cannibalistic system the rules of the parasites remain the same, it is just that Musk’s desperation to align with the power that he identifies as “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization [as] empathy, the empathy exploit.” He adds, “There they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Those who dismiss the working class, immigrants, senior citizens, or children as “parasites” are the declared enemy of our shared humanity. Musk, who happens to be an immigrant himself, knows this well, and that’s why his is a world where the real parasitism is airbrushed so that the unchecked villainy of colonization and exploitation goes on in the name of nation first, or through the performance of MAGA gimmickry. But such parasitism has become the underlying feature of brutalism, which is the next stage of neoliberalism. Brutalism legitimizes corporations to harbour pernicious new forms of control mechanisms, and we have reached that stage where the sate itself is the company, as evident in America right now, and integrated as it is into neoliberal technologies and methodologies of the marketplace and xenophobic exercises. In of his interviews Pankaj Mishra highlighted this feature suggesting that democracy and capitalism are going hand in hand, and it has become “difficult to sustain and to hold it up as a model for the rest of the world.” Marx knew this well and that is why he warned us that, “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”
It is no wonder that brutalism deprives democracy of a whole vocabulary of moral issues, legitimizing a framework for thinking about the accumulation of wealth and decolonizing both the present and the future world. In brutalism, democracy becomes subservient to capital, and alien-making is promoted and institutionalized through such storytelling as Musk’s. As such, anti-empathy pedagogy is not only subscribed but also coercively ingrained into the quotidian practices of extraction. To put it simply, brutalism paves the way for democracy to be compatible with extraction while society and borders are pushed under the gaze of financialization, thus converting democracy into a casino where all our belongingness can be snatched away at one stroke. Such a brutal rendition of democracy ensures that the capital existence becomes the norm of social existence across nations, including the planetary resources that can be sacrificed for the sake of unchecked growth of a select few. It, therefore, does not come as a sacrifice to see such parasitic practices illegalizing societal norms of collective wellness while also illegalizing other people and cultures. Benjamin Constant was so right when he prefigured that “there is no limit to tyranny when it seeks to obtain the signs of consensus.” The nub of the matter in brutalism of this sort is that such apertures of consensus are no longer required by the states as the gaze of tyranny has been reversed in a way that Musk can dare to morph democracy into autocracy, “I think it’s a false dichotomy to look at government and sort of industry as separate.. government is… the ultimate corporation.”
Our commitment to freedom, future generations, and the future of this planet is contingent upon organizing and nourishing institutions on which our collective existence depends. That is why such narratives of anti-empathy need to be countered from all sides. For, stories are not just assemblages of words, but these are also investments in our emotions, our empathy, and the way we build our common world. It is not to be mistaken simply as an act of telling but also listening. So, when one tells the story of the banality of empathy, it implies that the gaze is within oneself (self-inverted), and that the listening is restricted to the echo chambers of self-accumulation and expansion. On the other hand, listening demands a commitment to caring about the other and feeling into the other. It is an art of humanity that demands engagement, and once engaged, requires nourishment and maintenance. Even the most melodious of song cannot be enjoyed if one doesn’t harness the listening abilities.
Listening as an empathy can be seen as a secular faith. As Saint Augustine prefigured it, “If this faith in human affairs is removed, who will not mark how great will be their disorder and what dreadful confusion will follow?” But this is exactly where the West has repeatedly failed. It is indeed interesting to know that the word empathy was first used in English in 1909. Derived from the German Einfublung, which means “feeling into.” It was Edward Titchener, an American psychologist, who translated Einfublung into empathy. Interestingly only the word was invented, devoid of any constellations of feelings. The Western model of civilization ensured that the world is “made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims.”
The brutality of Musk’s fascist corporatism is merely a prelude to what may happen when democratic institutions are converted into private limited companies. It is no wonder that the MAGA pillage is filled with several financiers who control and drive American democracy. The extractive behaviour of such players pretending to be the new messiahs of democracy should not be seen as an aberration. Rather, such moves are ingrained in the present-day democracy so that the gap between the 1 per cent and 99 percent continues to operate unchecked. Apparently, our politicians seem to have become bankers now, ensuring that the economy only works for such financiers like Musk. This is reminiscent of what Hannah Arendt said in 1968, “for the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present.” The ongoing drive of brutalism has assured that this common global present is the spiralling moment of universal suffrage and uncertainty, centralized fear, and pervasive vulnerability. Brutalism has a modus operandi: the financialization of democracies and nations.