Story of Me

Elon Musk has regrets. He says he got "carried away" when he slashed the governmental sector to the bone early last year, and that he should have focused on his businesses instead of governance. You can’t say Musk is sorry, though. Certainly he doesn’t say he’s sorry. (He also isn't changing his actions; he just announced that he's actually going to spend over $100 million on helping members of America's fascist party elected.) When asked how many people he thinks have died as a result of his actions, he said the number was “zero point zero” even though the count of the dead is in the hundreds of thousands, speeding on its way to the millions if we don’t reverse the effects of the decisions he made. Musk has specious rationales to justify his claim that he is responsible for the death of zero people, and, because his grotesque cancerous wealth gives him unconscionable power, his unserious point of view is taken seriously, and there is argument and controversy over whether his actions—which, again, very deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of the exact sort of people who Musk insists represent an existential danger to Western Civilization—can be considered murder.

Yet still, though Musk claims no responsibility, though he refuses even to admit that any damage was done, he wants it known that he has regrets.

He doesn’t have regrets, but he wants the story about him to record that he does.

How interesting.

But never mind that for now. Where were we?

Oh yes, we were trying to win the story game—that spiritual tug-of-war between competing shared cultural stories, which govern the range of possibility for human belief and activity.

Because one of these competing stories—which I refer to as “supremacy”— is founded in terrible unsustainable lies, and create catastrophes such as slavery, genocide, corruption, and collapse, this is a struggle with high stakes.

Because adherents of a story based on lies do indeed lie (as might be expected) about their motivations and intentions, to others and often even to themselves, this is a struggle that can get very complex and confusing to understand. This confusion is only compounded when we realize that supremacy is a foundational story, which have leaked into our shared cultural mythologies and power structures, so even those of us who hold ourselves opposed to it might still reflect supremacy’s assumptions, without knowing we are doing so. And those of us who have inherited some measure of supremacy’s privileges bear a measure of the shared responsibility for supremacy’s harm, because through those privileges we participate in supremacy, even as we are opposed to supremacy.

So the story struggle is complicated and it is costly, and it has been made more complicated and costly than it needs to be. But it’s still a story struggle, because it is a human struggle, and we humans operate on story.

Humans operate on story. What do I mean by that?

What is my story? Let me tell you a bit of it. Let me tell you about the protagonist. Let’s call the protagonist Me.

Me is tall. Me is only somewhat clumsy. Me is rather articulate. Me is professional and organized and cooperative. Me is a pretty good writer, and Me likes to engage with and create complicated narratives. Me is a father and a son and a husband and a brother and a friend, and Me tries to be a good version of each of those. Me tries to be helpful. Me tries to be considerate to other people. Me tries to do well by other people, and when Me discovers that Me hasn’t done well, Me tries to change and do better. Me sometimes doesn’t speak up when Me should, and Me is working on that, but Me hopes to stand up to bullies wherever Me finds them. Me has brown hair and a brown beard.  Me hopes to reflect his belief that all human beings are unique and irreplaceable works of art. Me hopes to make some positive difference somewhere in the world, however small that contribution might be.

Perhaps you get the drift. I suspect you know something of what I’m talking about. My story has thousands of details, and some of them are part of my frame, core to my perception of myself and the world around me. Sometimes I’m surprised to discover that a detail I didn’t think was important is actually more important than I had let myself know. For example, I still think I have brown hair, though the mirror is rapidly telling me a different story, and I hadn’t realized that the onset of white would surprise me quite as it has, because that belief was (I have discovered) a part of my submerged belief that I am still in my early 20s or mid 30s, which is probably a vestigial leftover of a childish belief that I am immortal—a belief that has been undergoing a gradual adjustment over the decades. That’s how it goes when you're open to adjustment. Other people do crazy things with their hair to avoid making adjustments to their internal story. (Can't think of anybody like that right now, but maybe you can.)

I don’t think I'm unique. I’ve got fifty odd years interacting with this funny species of which I am a member, and we all seem to have a story of Me. Your details are different but I notice it works in a similar way. We tell ourselves things we believe about ourselves, and we tell others those things, too, to see if our own story gets reflected back. I tell myself these stories about this fellow Me and his place within the world, and they inform what I believe about the world, and how I operate, and even what choices are available to Me within the realm of possibility for me to make. There are other choices Me could make. Me could start to harass trans people in bathrooms, for example. There are people who do choose to do that, as weird and gross and abusive as that choice is to me. Me could start believing that most other people don’t actually exist, are in fact Non-Player Characters, which is something Elon Musk says about people. Me could do those things; intellectually speaking anyway, that is a possibility for Me. But Me really couldn’t do those things unless I changed my scripts and frames in significant ways. It’s not really a possibility for Me. There’s a story Me runs on, just like other human beings. This is what I mean when I say human beings operate on story.

And where do we human beings get the details for these stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves and others? I’ll tell you where I get mine. It’s the same place Elon Musk gets his ideas about himself. It's where I think you get your ideas about yourself.

I get them from other people.  

Its not the end of the essay! It's only a quick reminder that The Reframe is me, A.R. Moxon, an independent writer. Some readers voluntarily support my work with a paid subscription. They pay what they want—as little as $1/month, which is more than the nothing they have to pay. It really helps.

There’s some variance here, of course. The rather unimportant matter of my hair color (or more precisely lack of color) is objective: It just needs a glance at the mirror. And I have an internal locus of myself that can weather the storms of the occasional critique of my underlying narrative map of myself, especially if I perceive that the critique is offered with malicious intent or in bad faith. (Alternatively, I’ve noticed that sometimes I’ll believe things about myself that don’t change no matter how many people tell me they aren't true. I’ve found that these fixed objects tend to be the more self-critical and harmful narratives, and I’ve noticed this is true of other people, as well. There seem to be unfortunate bends in our rivers that we have trouble straightening out. Maybe something for us all to explore further someday. Maybe in therapy.)

Mostly though, the story I tell myself about myself relies upon less objective mirrors—the report of others. Some of this is practical and deliberate. I always start with my own experience because I know it best, but, because I hope to be aligned with truth, I try to check my experience against actual evidence, and that comes from others. Evidence is not, despite what some of our more influential podcasters seem to think, something you can figure out for yourself, nor does ignorance make one an expert. The world is not a red or a blue pill to swallow whole; it is a very complicated and mysterious thing, and an understanding of even a tiny portion of it can be the work of an entire career, and require a lifetime of testing and searching. But even the autodidacts and self-teachers, as independent as they believe themselves to be, usually discover their counterfactual conspiracies and quack remedies and other unsubstantiated nonsense from some outside source.

Moreover, human experiences are wide and varied, and lived perspectives are diverse. So, if we would align with reality, we would take care to listen to others about their perspectives and experience, and seek evidence for our beliefs drawn from the common well, and assure ourselves of that evidence’s trustworthiness by noting the rigor of the methods from which this evidence was derived and the authenticity of the perspective. As a practical matter, then, we rely on the report of others when crafting our stories of Me.

Another aspect of this narrative dependance requires less effort; it simply is. My relational realities—father, son, and so forth—depend very naturally upon the existence of my relationships with others—children, parents, and so forth. My understanding of myself as a writer of some skill is largely based on the report of my readers. My understanding of myself as professional and organized is based on the report of my colleagues. Even my understanding of myself as a tall sort of chappie is based on my eyeline relative to the average person around me. If I lived on an island of 7-footers, I would think of myself as short. Even if I’m starting to consider myself to be older, among the residents of a nursing home I would probably be called “young man” and I would understand why.

Deeper still, relationships formed me from childhood. My environment and socialization created the framework upon which my scripts were written, and reinforces those scripts. There are times when I’ve realized my framework was wrong, and when realized that if I were to write better scripts, I first needed to do the challenging work of reframe (which would be a fine name for let’s say a blog or a newsletter). Still, even when doing the significant internal labor of tearing down new frames and building new ones, the shadow of the old framing can be detected; the places where outmoded and unhelpful ways of believing once stood. And I didn't come up with new frameworks and scripts by myself; I learned them from others and reinforced them upon the reflection of others. So I can perceive that my story derives from and depends on others.

Nor is this narrative dependance upon other people merely a personal internal psychological matter. If I consider myself a fair-minded and kind person, but everyone else around me considers me an intractable son of a bitch, then the way the world interacts with me will change, even if I keep insisting that the opposite is true. I will find myself compelled to live in the effects of the story others tell about me, even if I have absolutely no interest in the opinion of others—unless, that is, I can somehow compel people to live within the false story I propound rather than the one they can see is true. But even if I did have the ability to compel people to live in my story, notice I would still need to compel them, because it seems as though the social narrative—the story others tell—has some sort of overriding force upon the practical realities of any individual story.

It seems the more people tell a story, the more that story shows its effects in the real world, whether or not the story is true. Anti-Black racism, for example, is an extremely popular story in the United States, and Black people live within the effects even while they know it to be a lie. Recently I wrote about a story I stopped believing, one that serves as the foundation of anti-Black racism: It’s the story that my country, the United States, is an exceptional and self-perfecting bastion of freedom and opportunity for all, even though the evidence does not support it, even though our founding was in slavery and genocide, even though our history is slavery and genocide, even though our present reality is slavery and genocide. This extremely popular and pervasive story of national exceptionalism is a story that has guided my country for centuries even prior to its incorporation, pointing toward liberty and justice to justify slavery and corruption, even while it rises from a frequently submerged foundation of racialized supremacism.

Speaking of racial supremacists, let’s get back to Elon Musk.

The story that people told for many years about Elon Musk is the same one that Musk is pushing; namely, that Musk is a unique generational tech super-genius who does extraordinary things. That story has guided our reality regarding Musk for many years and right up until this current moment, even though the mounting evidence is that he is a fraud and a huckster with a mania for race supremacism, eugenics, and ethnic cleansing, a genius mostly for self-promotion and shamelessness, and a profoundly ignorant worldview that he clearly intends to push into reality, by using the influence his cancerously massive power and wealth lends him in order to force the world to tell the story he tells himself about himself and the world. And this seems to be the whole point of being a billionaire, really; to reach a stage beyond money, beyond evidence, beyond the need to rely on others to validate your story of Me, where you have enough weight to make people tell your story to you even if it is incoherent to the point of delusion.

The story Musk tells himself about himself clearly includes the idea he is funny and epic. This is a problem for him, because he is, speaking objectively, a grotesque and discomfiting figure with the ghastly pale dead-eyed face of a frozen mackerel, the sense of humor of a badly-socialized pre-teen who enjoys setting frogs on fire, and a nose-snickering stammering delivery that makes milk curdle, babies cry, and causes nearby songbirds to lay eggs filled with spiders.¹

It appears psychologically distressing to Musk when he gets a story reflected back to him that contradicts the one he tells himself. There’s a reasonable speculation that a prime motivator in his purchase of the former Twitter was to finally create a space where others would tell him he is the thing he tells himself he is: A funny guy. Anyway, that’s certainly one of the things he’s done with the joint; he retrofitted the algorithms to make himself the centerpiece of a sort of Algonquin Roundtable of hateful dorks, who serve as his sycophants and proclaim him and his Nazi memes hilarious and epic. “Comedy is legal again!” he proclaimed, and then proceeded to make use of this apparent new freedom by delivering effervescent ripostes such as “True” in response to cartoons featuring Nazi-level dehumanizing ethnic stereotypes and suchlike. It’s the sort of thing you can do if you have so much wealth that money stops being real, and you can throw $44 billion at the problem of people finding you unfunny and off-putting, instead of paying the much higher cost of listening to other people and learning to be a better person.

And Elon Musk has no apologies for murdering hundreds of thousands of people, accepts no responsibility, he does want it known that it is ridiculous to think that he’s culpable for all the people who suffered and died in the recent global train derailment that was DOGE simply because he was the man who deliberately derailed the train. Yet he also wants to make it known that—though he remains vague on the specifics—he has regrets, because even though he seems to tell himself that the rest of us don't really exist, he also seems to realize that he depends on the stories we tell about him, no matter how wealthy he becomes.

How interesting.

Interesting, yes. But why am I saying all this?

I'm saying this because a story doesn't just have a protagonist. It has stakes.

I’m saying this because this story is not only complicated and confusing; it is also desperately important. I’m saying this because a  bus driving toward a cliff will keep driving toward the cliff as long as the people inside tell themselves a story that turning busses is dangerous and cliffs are not; or tell themselves a story that cliffs and gravity are myths; or tell themselves a story that their bus cannot ever crash, will somehow, should it find itself in free fall, spontaneously manifest the ability to fly. The story will dictate the reality of our speed and direction. But when the bus goes off the cliff, we will discover that gravity does not listen to false stories. The bus will plumet and crash. Those inside will die the same, whatever story they believed, and whether or not the driver insists on the way down that he bears no responsibility, that by driving off the cliff he killed zero point zero people.

While a story becomes more real the more people tell it, a story can be built upon terrible lies, and while story can guide the range of possibilities of human action, and therefore can craft reality in its way by dictating what action is possible, a story cannot change reality itself, and when people tell stories based on lies and untruth, catastrophe follows.

Right now, most people in my country tell stories that are founded upon terrible lies, and catastrophe has already begun. We’ve begun to feel the tug of gravity. Fires rage. Heat indexes spike. Glaciers melt. Sea levels rise. Immigrants are blamed for it all, while the billionaires and bosses who caused it collect rent from the rest of us for unnaturally high living expenses and use the surplus to buy apocalypse bunkers and eighteenth yachts.

We need to not go off the cliff. This means we need to learn to get people telling better stories. And that means getting people to change their frames and scripts. And that means understanding what causes people to change their frames and scripts.

And that means understanding their stories from their perspectives.

I sympathize with Musk this far and only this far: It really is psychologically distressing when people tell a narrative that runs counter to the one you tell yourself about yourself and the world. It feels like an attack on you, because it is an attack on your story of Me. There is evidence that running into somebody who does not agree with your story has actual physiological effects—a literal triggering of the fight or flight response.

The interview Musk gave The Economist didn’t go well. The reporter in question did her best to empathize with Musk, but in the end, she didn’t accept his delusional narrative that he has killed zero people, and continually called his attention to all the corpses. Musk’s psychological distress was so intense that he took to his ex-Twitter platform to call that journalist a "traitor to the West,"—incidentally a category of person Musk has previously targeted for priority assassination. Quite a bit of psychological distress!

Along with Nazi ideology and stochastic violence, Musk’s response demonstrates that even those people who seem to care nothing for other human beings put a lot of effort into pushing their story about themselves into the world. In fact, it sometimes seems as though people who don’t care about other people understand best how they are at the mercy of the collective narrative, which may explain why malignant narcissists invest so much time in trying to change narratives in their favor. It also demonstrates that Musk is threatened by different things than you or me.

I try to tell a coherent story about myself and the world. When somebody calls my attention to a way that I might not be living up to the story I tell about myself, it isn’t pleasant, but I try to remain open and honest, and make changes either to my actions or my frames and scripts. The revelation of incoherence in my story motivates this change because I want to tell a better story. This ability to think about one’s own story, to critique and adjust it, and thereby improve is a great strength, because the people who make this attempt improve themselves over time, and, by improving themselves, improve the world

But those who try to tell a coherent story often make the mistaken assumption that everyone tries to tell a coherent story, and will be motivated if we point out their inconsistencies. But if we listen to people, we'll learn that isn't true.

Some people are deliberate and calculating about promoting and defending the inconsistencies in their stories. They are disinterested in changing their stories to reflect the world; instead, they believe that the world should change to reflect their stories. They revel in their ability to compel other people to believe their lies instead of the truth. The inconsistencies and hypocrisies in their worldview aren’t for them something to repair; they’re the entire point, because they reveal an ability to dominate others. Hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists. Such people won’t be shamed, even though their worldviews and behaviors should be treated as shameful. They will be convinced to treat other people as human only when they are compelled to do so.

And I believe there are other reasons people tell inconsistent stories.

Some people with inconsistent stories actually do mean well, but they’re confused. Propaganda is a frighteningly powerful tool of the powerful for controlling the social story, and the thicket of inconsistencies that supremacists create through their propaganda is confusing and disorienting and wearying. Many who seek the thread of truth are confused and disoriented and weary, lost in a maze of nonsense, unable to recognize truth even when truth is placed in their hand. I fear at times, I’ve been among that number.

Some people with inconsistent stories just don’t want to engage with the inconsistencies. I think this is the most common case. People seek the easy path, and rather avoid the costs that attend engaging with our shared responsibility to fix and improve this world we’ve inherited, they choose not to pay. Supremacy’s trump card is its ease; it offers people blamelessness for free; it allows people to not do the work of thinking through the inconsistencies; allows them to think themselves good and moral while supporting terrible and harmful lies, even to consider themselves heroic while excusing villainy, and then praises them for not being so disruptive and annoying as to think about the inconsistencies too much. I’m no stranger to this camp, I fear. I daresay that if you are honest with yourself, neither are you.

Even people who are capable of critiquing and changing their stories can take their time getting there. The fight-or-flight response can be a powerful one. Even those of us who are aware of the effects can re-entrench back to our core beliefs, to avoid the implicit threat to our frames and scripts.

We can hope to do better than that. I fear we must. Our collective social story says the bus isn’t going off a cliff, even though it is. It says our drivers are geniuses of business and governance, even though they’re mostly murdering white supremacist frauds.

So we need to replace our incoherent and stagnant collective story with a coherent one capable of improvement.

OK. Great. So now what? How does one change the collective story?

I think you disrupt the existing frames and scripts.

The existing scripts and frames are some of the most expensive assets that billionaires and bosses have ever crafted. They've poured untold billions into crafting and promoting them, until people living on the rim of poverty believe that those who have sunk into poverty are the cause of poverty; until populations believe billionaires hoarding wealth creates prosperity; until working people believe that workers' movements represents an existential threat. People believe that the carceral state keeps us safe. People believe that capitalism keeps us fed. So we should disrupt those scripts by proclaiming new ones—sometimes using brand new and illuminating language, but sometimes by reclaiming the language used to promote the incoherent existing ones. For example, we can note Elon Musk claims no responsibility for his actions. We can note that he says he is not responsible. So we reframe: We do not try to shirk our responsibility to fix and improve what we have inherited, because unlike Elon Musk and his adherents, we are responsible people, and only irresponsible people shirk responsibilities.

I have ideas for disrupting existing frames and scripts.

The mind you need to change is your own. Recognize that yours is the only mind over which you have any true measure of control. Draw your awareness to your own story so that you know it so well you can detect the thread of it no matter how circuitous the maze of lies that is built around it. There is a story of Me. And then there's the collective story of Us, which is formed by all the different stories of Me we all share. The story of Us informs the range of possibility available to our stories of Me ... yet if enough stories of Me change, then the story of Us changes. That suggests that if you want to make changes to the existing scripts, you should focus on your story of Me. Know your beliefs and your reasons.

Combine radical curiosity with radical discernment. There’s a lot to discern when you’re encountering somebody with an incoherent story, and the best way to discern the truth is to be curious. If we change our own minds, our responsibility isn’t to force another mind to change. Our opportunity is to learn. What is this person’s story? What are their inconsistencies? What lies do they believe? What truths do they hide them behind? Do they seem to be aware of the inconsistencies? Do they seem to take pleasure in their lies? What seems to motivate them? Are they confused? Complacent? Afraid? Do they seem open to change, or do they seem to revel in the domination of blatant lies blatantly told? Who are they trying to dominate? What harms are they trying to excuse? Are they curious? Do they understand something we have missed?

Understanding these things will help us refine our own stories. They'll also help us learn what might motivate them to refine their own. It might be something quite different.

Utilize the knowledge your curiosity lends. Knowing somebody’s story is the best way to understand how to change it. Discerning another's intention is the best way to understand what you are trying to achieve, and what your options might be in achieving that end. To somebody who wants to move from confusion into understanding, you might offer perspective, and your approach might be less guarded. To somebody who wants to harm others, you might seek to disrupt that intention, and you might become more circumspect about your own intentions. Or maybe you'll want to plant a suggestion designed to make them question their story. Or maybe you'll want to convince them that if they want to harm others it will carry a cost they hadn't considered. In all cases, your greater understanding of their story will leave you better equipped to achieve that end.

I have more ideas. But I’ll stop at those three for now.

Elon Musk—huckster of hucksters, fraud of frauds— is pushing his story of Me. There are those who are pushing it for him, and those who are falling for it. It’s the old billionaire scam, the old fascist two-step. Plenty of other billionaires and would-be billionaires are pushing the same, including our current and temporary president, and plenty of bosses and would-be bosses are reaping the rewards of believing that story and administering it.

They all seem to think the bus won’t crash, or they think they’ll survive the crash.

They’re delusional either way.

They say they aren't responsible, and they aren't. They're irresponsible people.

Let's be responsible people.

Let’s change the story.

It's how we take the wheel.

The Reframe is totally free, supported voluntarily by its readership.

If you liked what you read, and only if you can afford to, please consider becoming a paid sponsor for as little as $1/month. If you'd like to be a patron of my work, there's a Founding Member level that comes with a free signed copy of one of my books, and thanks by name in the acknowledgement section of any book I publish while you are a member.

Looking for a tip jar but don't want to subscribe?

Venmo is here and Paypal is here.

A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries (2019) and the essay collections Very Fine People (2024) and Fighting in the Dark (2026), which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He's been leaving on his things, so in the morning when the morning bird sings, there's still dinner on his dinner jacket 'til the dinner bell rings.

¹ Allegedly.