I've been dwelling upon how modern society, "mainstream" Western society, whatever that thing is, adores childhood while despising children.
That's no difficult trick, when you've got doublethink on your side. Ultimately "doublethink" is just a word to describe how people deal with cognitive dissonance—I'm sure there's nothing uniquely "Western" about doublethink, but I do suspect that Western society is especially prone to it because it's built round a post-Roman core. Roman society was used to doublethink; among other things, they had to pretend that a princeps wasn't really a king. Anyway, it's been far too easy for Western culture to worship childhood while, at the same time, treating children and the youth with limitless contempt.
(More doublethink: God's love, when expressed through the loving behavior of a God-fearing parent, is often indistinguishable from hatred.)
That brings me to the Elon Musk cult and its infuriating immaturity, which is a point of pride with them. I would hazard to guess that Musk's fandom skews middle-aged or older, for the most part, like Musk himself—the man is actually older than we are, and any honest photograph reveals that about him, which I suppose is why his online public image is now composed so largely of software-generated artwork where they can give Musk more hair and make his face and body look smoother and less saggy. There's also been a tremendous recirculation of childhood photos of Elon Musk by his online fandom. The combined effect of the jumble of fake AI pictures, real (if retouched) pictures from the present, and recycled pictures from the past has given Elon Musk a sort of...glamour of timelessness. Like Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, Elon Musk has been kicked loose from time—at least in the imaginations of his believers. Musk hasn't been anywhere near Mars, and yet Musk has already conquered him. Musk will always be the fresh-faced child full of promise beaming from his computer, and therefore his believers are also fresh-faced children full of promise, even as their hair goes grey and the wrinkles gather round their forced smiles.
There's nothing particularly new in this; we've experienced decades of being saturated in marketing campaigns with this specific purpose in mind: try to make what's old and faded into a strained parody of youth. I'd argue that this was central to Ronald Reagan's appeal (of which Joe Biden seems like a forlorn Democratic imitation): he was decrepit, made to look somehow more ghastly and wizened by his handlers' zealous attempts to give Reagan a more youthful cast. They dyed his hair and lied about it, they rehearsed his "puckish sense of humor" or whatever his propagandists called it, they crafted a deliberately puerile sort of public image for Ronald Reagan, leaning into his childlike habits (remember the jellybeans?) maybe because some explanation was needed for why a purportedly vigorous and manly adult was calling his wife "Mommy". When Reagan appeared in public with Margaret Thatcher, who was fourteen years younger than Ronnie, he gave the bizarre impression of being less like a peer to PM Thatcher and more like her child. So Elon Musk is in good company, as a celebrity with deliberately crafted man-child appeal.
There's one thing Ronnie Raygun never did, though, and that's boast about his prolific seed. Baby-making is integral to the Elon Musk brand. He's fully embraced fascıst fecundita as a value, frequently burbling about a "population crisis" and distributing publicity photographs of himself with his children—well, I suppose it's reasonable to assume that they're his children, though I point out that children who exist chiefly for Musk's publicity reasons wouldn't need to be Musk's real-life spawn. Or is that too cynical, even for me?
There's all sorts of horrible fascıst reasons for Musk's determination to brand himself as a champion breeder, not the least of which is that capitalism needs to consume human lives in ever-increasing numbers, which means an ever-increasing need to supply fresh replacements. The larger the pool of available bodies, the more intense the competition within that pool for elite status within it, and the rewards of such competition taste all the sweeter when they're the reward for struggling out an enormous mass of suffering humanity.
But aside from these ideological and rather abstract reasons for demanding ever more baby-making from humanity, there's this very personal reason: the aging men who make up the bulk of the fandom for capitalism and capitalist superheroes like Elon Musk are highly likely to have children they despise—not merely stereotyped college students or spoiled zoomers en masse but their own children, specifically. Recently I ran into a video clip of Dennis Prager fulminating about the ingratitude of young people today, and there was such venom in his words as could only arise from personal experience: Prager, a father, must have had in mind some incidents of insufficient gratitude (i.e. insufficient subservience) from his own children. At some point in the past several decades, the collective opinion has surely hardened among Western reactionaries: "our youth are diseased, corrupted, beyond hope; they must be purged and replaced."
And thus does Elon Musk fulfill a bizarre double role: he's the eternal child, but he's also the ideal father, who will repopulate the Earth with his genetically gifted seed—from sperm samples if necessary. The actual children of today aren't needed, not when we have Elon Musk and others like him. Musk and his ilk are both today's children (other, real-life children being worthless) and they'll spawn all the children we'll ever need in the future. Human evolution has ended with Elon Musk; to the Elon Musk fandom, the only viable human future is to be found in Elon Musk's supergenius spunk.
~Chara