Note: The views and opinions expressed in blog/editorial posts are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of Misbar.
On Automotive News’ Daily Drive Podcast Friday July 31, Elon Musk was interviewed about the state of his company Tesla Motors, which among other things has opened a new manufacturing plant in China. Musk made several comments about the superiority of China’s work culture, with such statements as “when you’ve [the US] been winning for too long you sort of take things [winning] for granted.” Since Friday, Musk’s comments have exploded in the online press as well as social media, making a highly volatile, controversial, and viral story.
As Market Watch reports, these comments come at a time at which tensions between the US and China are continuously building into a series of escalating flashpoints. The American public’s opinion of China is the lowest it has been since records were kept in the early 1970s, and it is nigh impossible to find an instance of US media taking a pro-China stance on any issue (or vice-versa).
Ostensibly, US citizens and institutions seem to take issue with China because, if you are a conservative, China is perceived to be Communist. If you are a progressive, China appears to be aggressively capitalist. However, considering the fact that relations today are at a lower point than in the 1970s when China was under the rule of Mao Zedong, the man who killed about 50 million of his own citizens in the biggest genocide in human history, it would seem that perception of acts committed by leadership are not the sole cause of our present tension.
Rather, it would seem that US citizens feel China an authoritarian government perceived to be on whichever political wing is opposed to the Western observer. Said government is at the helm of a rapidly accelerating economy which is estimated by the International Monetary Fund to overtake that of the US in size by 2030 and which is estimated by Musk to grow to twice or three times our size due to the fact that it has four times the US population. As such, the perception of a foreign entity which is diametrically opposed to Western ideology and which is rapidly becoming more powerful than the West is likely to produce a climate of fear and aggression for the world’s current superpower.
Enter Musk’s full comments:
‘China rocks, in my opinion. The energy in China is great... there’s like a lot of smart, hard working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent.’ … “I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.” … “The United States, and especially like California and New York, you’ve been winning for too long,” he said. “When you’ve been winning too long you take things for granted. So, just like some pro sports team they win a championship you know a bunch of times in a row, they get complacent and they start losing.”
In other words, in contrast to the current political and media climate, Musk is actually pointing out elements that suggest this transition of power may actually be merited, rather than being an injustice. No doubt this insinuation —that there may actually be reasons why China is growing and the US is stagnating— is what has caused the media and social media firestorm that it has.
Misbar senses that if we were to attempt to invalidate these points that we would only be confirming Musk’s perception of American complacency and inability to acknowledge faults for fear of being less than the perpetual best. Rather, we’ll conclude by simply saying that maybe it is time for this fledgling superpower to look inward rather than outward and ask itself tough questions: who are we, collectively and who are we not? What do we want to be, collectively, and what don’t we want to be? What is our collective vision of the world? What are our collective values and sources of meaning?
And of course, what are our strengths and weaknesses as a society and how do we accentuate the former and change the latter? It would seem like we are in the midst of such a reckoning as a culture, but we are far from the end of it, and the nations of the world —like China — will not wait patiently for us to sort ourselves out before they strive forward and claim their own destinies, actualize their own visions, and realize their own dreams, which must by definition be distinct from and yet in competition with our own.
