Elon Musk's gesture at US President Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony in Washington on January 20 was widely commented on. It was denounced by some as a nod to the extremist – even supremacist – fringes, defended by others as a clumsy gesture. Nazi salute, clumsiness or charismatic impulse directed to the crowd? Some have claimed that accusing Musk of appealing to neo-Nazis is discriminatory, as Musk is said to be autistic, suffering from uncontrolled impulses and attention deficit disorder – in short, an eccentric genius whose eccentricities we're supposed to forgive.
My interpretation differs from these comments. I don't see Musk's gesture as an intentional evocation of the Hitler salute. But, while Musk didn't intend a Nazi salute, the Nazi salute happened to him, a bit like a tic happens to you.
It's impossible not to think of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Doctor Strangelove [1964], and Peter Sellers' performance as a mad scientist at the end of the film. The context, as you'll recall, is the Cold War: the fools, paranoids and drunks in power in America and the USSR have finally got the better of humanity, the apocalypse is imminent, the nuclear monster has escaped mankind. The cybernetic monster, thought mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1960s, had been invented precisely to save man from his own madness (God & Golem Inc., L'Eclat, 2001). In this case, it was the machine alone that took the initiative in humanity's extinction. A hammer without a master, as René Char put it... This autonomy of technology is worth pondering, in conjunction with what philosopher Günther Anders predicted as "the obsolescence of man" in the 1950s.
'Mein Führer, I can walk!'
Since it's now too late to turn back, Doctor Strangelove/Peter Sellers, the American government's scientific adviser with a grotesque German accent, proposes a solution: obsessed with eugenics, he advises preserving the best specimens of the species in atomic shelters. Over the course of a few centuries of hibernation, humanity would then be able to regenerate and produce a superior human type, a chosen race.
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