Lest Faith Turn to Despair
Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents' rage—
Which but their children's end, naught could remove
Is now the two-hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
A quick Google search confirms it. Elon Musk loves Romeo and Juliet. Just like me.
When he tweeted “Do not let ancient grudge break to new mutiny” four weeks shy of his official acquisition of Twitter, I suspected it. Though I’ve known it in my bones for some time. It was three years ago when I started writing an essay on Tesla’s Cybertruck and the power “rich entrepreneurs hold over our future” and, in doing background research, came across this profile in Rolling Stone where Elon fesses up to an all-consuming love addiction.
After explaining that he is in severe emotional pain due to a recent breakup, Musk asks the reporter if they know of anyone he can date—or rather, not date, he clarifies, “stammering softly,” but someone who could become his “soulmate.”
When the reporter—Neil Strauss, author of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists—suggests that it “may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship” right away and that Elon might consider taking “some time to himself” to “figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked,” Elon responds, frowning,
“If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”
Yup. There is it. Classic love addiction.
Neil responds, playing the role of therapist that celebrity profilers so often do, by suggesting that, “needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.”
But this does not sit right with Elon.
“It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there – and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”
How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?
My whole life I have been looking for a soulmate, so, I sympathize with Elon on this. I truly do. But, as far as I can tell, this is where the soulmate search similarities between Elon and I end, and where the differences begin. Because, while Elon’s had two wives and multiple long-term partnerships, I have never had a romantic relationship last longer than four months. Which means I’ve been forced to work on my love addiction—to understand it, and to overcome it. Meanwhile Elon has found multiple women willing to commit to him, play soulmate, and, at least temporarily, fulfill the bottomless gaping void that exists inside of him, and all of us.
It is through love, and lack of love, that we will understand the true nature of reality. Love is simply a metaphor for wholeness, an entire completeness, a sense of one’s meaning in the universe.
It is my personal opinion that the world is on fire because we seek love outside of ourselves. I’m not talking about genuine human connection or the sweet communion of souls that is our birthright. I’m talking about the possessive, obsessive, grasping, capitalist, Don Draper “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons” kind-of-love. The kind of the love that peddles the mythology that you are not whole until you become someone else’s other half.
This narrative is a key part of the myth of separation—the same myth that exploits the natural world, driving us into a state of forced scarcity.
The myth of separation is also known as duality or binary thinking. It is an us versus them, good versus evil, black versus white, man versus woman, left brain versus right brain mentality. It is a world of heroes and villains wherein you can point at something specific and it doesn’t disappear.
In Romeo and Juliet, our titular characters had to die in order for their warring sides to reconcile. Whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parents' strife. (For any of you still convinced that R+J is romance and not a tragedy, see Shakespeare’s opinion of their behaviour right there: piteous.) Both families had to lose their children in order to see that their ancient grudge was bullshit.
Now, the warring sides of the world today are a little more complicated than Two households both like in dignity, but for argument’s sake, let’s say they’re not. Let’s put aside the morality of it all and postulate that the death of something could bury all our strife. In this case, what would have to die for warring sides to reconcile?
The Ego.
The ego is our relationship to our personality, to our identify. It is the Ego that maintains our worldview—the belief system that *I* would never be like *them.* And, of course you would never be like them. They’re terrible! Stupid! Dangerous! Liars! Nazis!!
But maybe, just maybe, had you shared the circumstances of their birth and grew up with all the same environmental influences that they did, you would be like them. We simply cannot know.
What we can know, however, is that judgement only leads to more judgement (and a whole heck of a lot of hypocrisy). Judgement pushes down the belief that we could never be like them into our shadow self and, as Carl Jung famously pointed out, when we suppress “shadow” aspects of ourselves, they become more powerful drivers of behavior, not less. Being in judgement means living in our shadow, navigating the world from deeper and deeper within a trench of separation.
And so, we must kill our Egos. Or, not kill—but compost. Because you can’t kill an ego. Egos make us human. It’s wonderful to have an identity! The key is to make your ego work for you, and not the other way around.
Judgement is the biggest clue to understanding when we’re slave to our ego and so we learn to transmute judgement into discernment. Discernment is ego-neutral, and judgement is ego-engaged. Transmuting judgement into discernment feels like removing the knife from your stomach and finding a way into acceptance. It does not mean we are “okay” with the behaviour we were once judging. It means that we are no longer triggered by it in a manner that makes us shut down and shut off our empathy, compassion, and true moral centre.
Discernment is the recognition that everyone—every! single! person!—is only doing the best they can with the tools they’ve been given. It is an interior knowing, guided by love and the understanding that blaming and shaming only leads to stagnation and opposition—never changes in behaviour. Discernment is the acceptance that there is, and always has been, harm in the world and that there are no saviour-nature-perfection-soulmates which will save us from the pain and suffering of being alive.
The which if you with patient ears attend,
When we commit, not to killing our egos, but to composting them, again and again, until new flowers grow and we no longer seek love outside of ourselves and we stop fighting the other side, because there are no sides—recognizing that sides are an illusion created by the myth of separation and fuelled by the addiction of soulmates and the belief that something outside of ourself can make us whole—then we can undertake the steps necessary to build, and live in, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Do not let ancient grudge break to new mutiny and do not believe that a soulmate can fulfill you. The fate of the world depends on it.