PhilBen

One month ago the following text was posted in a Facebook group of the integral community by Corey DeVos, one of Ken Wilber's top students and the current leader of the Integral Life community. It seems to me a fairly reasonable analysis, free from the delusion that Trump and company are Green: " “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.” – Elon Musk, speaking at the White House with President Donald Trump. Rarely has a single sentence carried so much unintentional truth. Elon Musk, the self-styled warrior for free speech and government transparency, admitted openly that his statements are not always accurate. But as it turns out, the word “some” in that quote is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The Importance of Truthfulness: An Integral Perspective Integral Metatheory emphasizes that validity claims—whether about truth, rightness, or sincerity—are only as strong as the credibility of the one making them. Musk’s repeated misinformation fundamentally undermines his ability to assert credible truth claims across all dimensions: Truthfulness (Upper Left - Subjective Validity): A speaker’s sincerity and track record of truth-telling affects how their claims are received. If someone persistently misrepresents reality, they erode their own credibility. Objective Truth (Upper Right - Empirical Validity): Facts must hold up under verification. Musk’s distortions crumble under scrutiny, revealing a consistent pattern of falsehoods. Cultural Legitimacy (Lower Left - Intersubjective Validity): Shared trust in discourse allows societies to function. Musk’s misinformation corrodes the shared reality necessary for sense-making, leading to social fragmentation. Functional Fit (Lower Right - Systems Validity): Effective governance and policy-making require accurate data. Musk’s fabrications exaggerate dysfunctions and disrupt institutional integrity, making real problem-solving more difficult. By repeatedly distorting the truth, Musk not only damages his own reputation but also contributes to a larger breakdown in epistemic trust, making public discourse increasingly chaotic and dysfunctional. Over the past month, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been caught in multiple lies and mistruths, exaggeration after exaggeration, often fabricating scandals out of thin air. DOGE was supposedly created to eliminate wasteful government spending, yet it has possibly manufactured more fake scandals than actual savings. Let’s break down the biggest lies Musk has told, why they are false, and what his broader strategy appears to be. --- 1. The $55 Billion Lie: Fake Cost Savings DOGE proudly claimed to have saved $55 billion in government spending. That number quickly fell apart under scrutiny. - Reality Check: DOGE’s own website only accounted for $16.6 billion in savings—less than a third of what Musk initially claimed. - Even worse, nearly half of those savings came from an accounting mistake. Musk and DOGE misstated an $8 million ICE contract as an $8 billion savings. That’s an error of 1,000x. - Final tally? DOGE’s real cost savings were a fraction of what was advertised. --- 2. The Social Security Fraud That Wasn’t Musk and Trump claimed that millions of dead people were fraudulently receiving Social Security benefits. - Reality Check: Social Security’s total improper payment rate is less than 1%—and most of those errors go to living people, not the deceased. - The SSA’s outdated software can sometimes show people over 150 years old due to a default setting in COBOL, but this does not mean those people are receiving benefits. - Payments automatically stop for anyone over 115 years old. - Final tally? A completely manufactured crisis that misled the public about Social Security’s actual problems. --- 3. The Fake “Media Payoff” Politico Scandal Musk and Trump falsely claimed that USAID paid Politico $8 million as a bribe to create good stories about Democrats. - Reality Check: In truth, USAID's payments to Politico totaled $44,000, primarily for subscriptions to E&E News, which covers energy and environmental topics. The $8 million figure refers to the combined amount spent by various federal agencies on Politico subscriptions, a standard practice for accessing specialized news and analysis. These payments are for subscriptions, not political payoffs. - The New York Times, Associated Press, and Reuters all confirmed that government payments to media companies are standard transactions for research and reporting purposes. - Final tally? A misleading claim that distorts routine government expenditures on information resources into a baseless scandal, designed to undermine the free press. --- 4. The $50 Million in Condoms Lie DOGE and Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that USAID spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza. - Reality Check: No evidence has ever surfaced that USAID spent this money. Further investigations revealed that the funding in question was actually related to a USAID program in Gaza Province, Mozambique—not the Gaza Strip in the Middle East. - Trump later inflated the false claim to $100 million, making the lie even more absurd. - Final tally? A completely invented outrage based on a geographical mix-up, used to distract from real policy debates. --- 5. The Fort Knox Gold Conspiracy Musk speculated publicly that the U.S. gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing. - Reality Check: There is no evidence that any gold is missing. - A 2017 audit confirmed the reserves are intact. - Final tally? A conspiracy theory dressed up as investigative skepticism. --- 6. The Celebrity Propaganda Hoax Musk spread false claims that USAID paid celebrities like Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie to visit Ukraine and pose with President Zelenskyy. - Reality Check: Stiller and Penn publicly denied receiving money, and there is zero evidence USAID funded their trips. - Final tally? A baseless smear campaign amplified by Musk’s social media empire. --- 7. The Reuters “Social Deception” Lie Musk claimed the Department of Defense paid Reuters $9 million for propaganda. Reality Check: A glance at the purchase order reveals that the payment was not even made to Reuters, the media outlet. Instead, it was directed to Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC, a separate legal and research entitythat provides data analysis services. Not only that, but the payment was initiated by the Trump administration in 2018, well before Musk’s current accusations. The contract was funded by DARPA’s ASED program, which focuses on defending against social engineering attacks, not promoting propaganda. Final tally? A misrepresentation designed to provoke outrage, which MAGA supporters quickly ate up, leading to Trump raging on TruthSocial that the Reuters media outlet needed to return the money. --- 8. The Bizarre Video Game Lies If Musk is willing to lie about trivial things, how can he be trusted with government reform? Enter: the gaming controversy. - Musk claimed to be one of the top-ranked Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2 players in the world. - Reality Check: When he livestreamed himself playing, gamers immediately noticed he had no idea what he was doing. His characters had impossible gear, likely acquired by paying others to play for him. - Musk was also mocked for his nonsensical Elden Ring build, which featured two shields and no healing flask—rookie mistakes. - Final tally? Why even lie about this? If Musk is willing to fake gaming achievements, what else is he fabricating? --- 9. Even Musk’s Own AI Confirms He Spreads Misinformation Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, which was designed by his own company xA and touted by Musk’s supporters as an unbiased, truth-based, “non-woke” AI platform, publicly admits that Musk is one of the biggest sources of misinformation on X. In multiple response to a user inquiries, Grok stated things like “there is substantial evidence” of Musk spreading false information, particularly about elections, misleading billions of people. Musk markets Grok as a “maximally truth-seeking AI”, yet his own creation has pointed out his role in promoting misinformation. Final tally? Even Musk’s own technology calls him out for misleading the public. --- The Myth of the Billionaire Bodhisattva Elon Musk has masterfully crafted an image of himself as a world-saving genius, a techno-mystic, and a benevolent billionaire whose sole purpose is to guide humanity toward a brighter future. Through grandiose promises of Mars colonization, AI safety initiatives, and meme-fueled libertarianism, he has cultivated a mythology of the billionaire as a Bodhisattva—an enlightened being sacrificing for the good of all. However, this image crumbles under scrutiny: Musk’s humanitarian gestures often appear self-serving—such as offering to buy Twitter in the name of “free speech,” only to turn it into a haven for his preferred ideological narratives. His technological promises frequently fall short—like the Hyperloop, Neuralink, and self-driving Teslas, which remain largely unfulfilled hype rather than reality. Rather than uplifting discourse, Musk has used his influence to spread disinformation, attack journalists, and stoke division, often for entertainment. Some argue, “Musk is already a billionaire—why would he want more money or power?” But this question ignores an essential truth: no one becomes a billionaire without aggressive self-interest. Billionaires are not known for their restraint; rather, they often exhibit a dragon-like obsession with wealth and power. The idea that Musk has somehow transcended the forces that created his fortune is a dangerous illusion, one that allows him to operate unchecked while convincing the public that his motives are pure. The contrast between the myth of Musk and the reality of Musk is vast. Far from being an altruistic force, Musk increasingly appears to be a political operator using technology as a smokescreen for power consolidation. --- Musk’s Playbook: How to Manufacture a Scandal Musk’s repeated falsehoods are not accidental—they follow a clear, repeatable strategy: 1. Invent a scandal. Take a normal government practice and distort it beyond recognition, presenting it as "fraud". 2. Amplify it on X. Spread the misinformation through Musk’s massive social media following. 3. Politicize it to attack the media, government, or NGOs. Frame it as a deep-state conspiracy. 4. Ignore or double down when debunked. Never acknowledge the lie—just move to the next one. This feedback loop of misinformation is highly effective. It keeps Musk’s followers angry, engaged, and primed to believe the next manufactured outrage. --- Conclusion: The Real Purpose of DOGE DOGE was not created to increase government efficiency — it was created to weaponize government oversight as a political tool. But the real goal goes beyond merely “owning the libs” or attacking wasteful spending; it is about sustaining a state of perpetual outrage among Trump supporters. This outrage serves a deeper function: it creates a false sense of a stolen or broken system that must be radically “fixed,” even if that requires unconstitutional actions. Musk and Trump are not just fabricating scandals for sport; they are doing it to justify extreme, authoritarian measures in response to the crises they themselves manufacture. By continually stoking these false narratives, they give their base the cultural permission to support radical changes to democracy itself—changes that they frame as necessary corrections to a “rigged” system. This is how they claim a mandate for extreme action despite receiving less than 50% of the vote. The more they can convince their supporters that the entire system is corrupt, the easier it becomes to dismantle or bypass it entirely. Moreover, when you have access to a trillion data points, it becomes incredibly easy to selectively release certain ones in order to drive a particular narrative. When there are a trillion stars in the sky, you can draw whatever constellations you want, to sell whatever mythology you want to sell. Musk understands this intuitively, which is why his version of “truth-seeking” is little more than an exercise in narrative construction—selecting just the right stars to draw the most useful picture to benefit his personal and ideological bottom line. And yet, there is something patently, objectively absurd about cheering on the richest man in the history of the world, as he gains unfettered access to the levers of power in the richest nation in the history of the world, with no oversight or accountability for obvious conflicts of interest. The idea that Musk is a countercultural populist rebel, rather than a consolidator of elite power, is one of the greatest scams of the 21st century. His self-fashioned image as a maverick outsider allows him to act with fewer checks and balances than nearly any other political or corporate figure in modern times. Elon Musk’s relentless flood of lies, exaggerations, and distortions proves that he is not a truth-seeker, but a master manipulator. From fabricating billion-dollar savings to lying about Social Security fraud to inflating media conspiracy theories, Musk is engaged in a full-scale war on reality. And if he’s willing to lie about playing video games, why should anyone trust a single word he says about the government? -written in collaboration with 4o " Corey DeVos

Both sides are not construct-aware, and they justify killing each other. Very simple. Zionism is an illusionary project. Ok... but why does this guy seem to think that Zionists are more responsible than the Palestinians for the craziness that is happening? Is it because they currently have more power? Is the victim free from its responsibility of being attached to a presumed, limited, and mortal identity? Anyway, I do agree that it only takes one to do their part for the relationship to change. The classic: It takes two to tango. So maybe the westernized Jews are closer to that and should therefore be pressured (?) What do you guys think?

I've been watching the videos shared here, and it has been quite transformative. I grew up in a Jewish community here in Brazil, and basically, the only narrative I heard throughout my childhood and adolescence was the traditional Zionist one. The exercise of investigating self-bias and self-deception has been special. Especially on the topic of whether or not it is an ethnic cleansing project, I found those two texts, and I’m curious about what you all think of these counterpoints. The first is from an Israeli soldier, and the second is from a left-wing Zionist (so I'm aware of bias risk): https://adin1664.medium.com/there-was-no-zionist-ethnic-cleansing-plan-in-1948-320b53aeb856 https://x.com/Fathom_Editor/status/1800529146759782760 It seems to me that Zionists are very insistent on making these theoretical distinctions between apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And that makes sense to me, but I know that, in general, these distinctions have been used to hide atrocities, ignore Palestinian suffering, and deny its direct connection to terrorism against Israel. What has been revealed to me so far is that it is much more of an unconscious ethnic cleansing project carried out by Jews who were desperate for security than a consciously designed plan to expel Arabs. What do you guys think after reading both texts?