But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?
But the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as much as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. No matter where you live, the car is a nearly 7,000-pound Rorschach test: It has become the defining symbol of the second Trump term. If you hate Trump and Musk, it is a giant MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” If you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, well, a giant MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel called Tesla vandalism “domestic terrorism” as he announced a Tesla task force to investigate such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the back of his own Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Kid Rock has a Cybertruck with a custom Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll buy another “because it will own the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and another by Musk.
The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.
QUOTE: My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car
The Atlantic
March 29, 2025.
The Cybertruck is a 7,000-pound Rorschach test.
By Saahil Desai
Photographs by Kent Nishimura
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/cybertruck-washington-dc/682232/?gift=dpNmmIb8s6tgeaq0wQsEo2glZ4544pNCAuftZg9a0vY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Desai’s The Atlantic article is a study of “Socio-Political-Culture Mass Attitudes”, and in particular of partisan hatred as a mass movement. The broader Queensland society saw organisations in a certain light – with a certain conventional attitude to the way things were done, and a safe organisation to honour. The perspective was true as it goes, but it also meant that few understood the nuances in the scope of beliefs within organisations, where conventionality was not so respected. Nevertheless, the awards also related a sense of the new, and of progress for those who resist the Socio-Political-Culture Mass Attitudes.
Conservatism, broadly speaking, is the conventional attitude. It is the general attitude of the shallow thinker (exceptions in the intellectual variant unrelated to the common), who cares little for education, except training for ambition, and who is obedient for success. It is the conservation of obeying your parents, obeying church leaders, and obeying all in authority…religiously. As ethical judgement, the thinking can be neither good or bad, and it can be both good and bad, and that can be teased out. The judgement is contextual with questions of the harm done, fairness and human flourishing.
Paul Tillich then describes the methodology of “The Existential Thinker” (sixth step): passion and ideas. The twist, which must not be so simplistically misunderstood by the political decision-makers in Feuerbach’s own projection thought:
“Do not wish to be a philosopher in contrast to being a man . . . do not think as a thinker. . . think as a living, real being . … think in Existence.” Love is passion, and only passion is the mark of Existence.” In order to unite this attitude with the demand for objectivity, he says: “Only what is as an object of passion-really is.” The passionately living man [let’s say “person”, Feuerbach-Tillich] knows the true nature of man [let’s say “person”, Feuerbach-Tillich] and life.
The twist in Tillich’s statement is that thinking in Existence is thinking as the better philosophic thinker. Historically speaking, the Existential philosophy attempts to return to a pre-Cartesian attitude, to an attitude in which the sharp gulf between the subjective and the objective ‘realms’ had not yet been created, and the essence of objectivity could be found in the depth of subjectivity-in which God [let’s take that as a metaphor, Tillich] could be best approached through the soul [let’s take that as one of Charles Sanders Peirce‘s signs]; and it is the desperate struggle to find a new meaning of life in a reality from which men [again, Tillich, persons please] have been estranged, in a cultural situation in which two great traditions, the Christian and the humanistic [let’s say all institutional systems, Tillich], have lost their comprehensive character and their convincing power.
The reasoning of intuition and internalism involves perspective. In philosophy, epistemic perspective is a specific attitude or manner through which a person thinks about something. This figurative usage of the expression (figure 1) dates back to 1730*. It is a point of view. Whereas propositional attitudes approach to analyse points of view internally, the ‘location/access’ approach analyses points of view externally, by their role. A propositional attitude is an attitude, i.e., a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Examples of such attitudes are ‘to believe in something’, ‘to desire something’, ‘to guess something’, ‘to remember something’, etc.
Figure 1. Choice in how each thinks.
Attitudes as a function of social metacognition. The way that individuals think about attitude greatly affects the way that they behave. Metacognitions about attitudes influence how individuals act, and especially how they interact with others. Some metacognitive characteristics of attitudes include importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge, and they influence behaviour in different ways. Attitude importance is the strongest predictor of behaviour and can predict information seeking behaviours in individuals. Attitude importance is also more likely to influence behaviour than certainty of the attitude. When considering a social behaviour like voting a person may hold high importance but low certainty. This means that they will likely vote, even if they are unsure whom to vote for. Meanwhile, a person who is very certain of who they want to vote for, may not actually vote if it is of low importance to them. This also applies to interpersonal relationships. A person might hold a lot of favourable knowledge about their family, but they may not maintain close relations with their family if it is of low importance. Metacognitive characteristics of attitudes may be key to understanding how attitudes change. Research shows that the frequency of positive or negative thoughts is the biggest factor in attitude change. A person may believe that climate change is occurring but have negative thoughts toward it such as “If I accept the responsibilities of climate change, I must change my lifestyle”. These individuals would not likely change their behaviour compared to someone that thinks positively about the same issue such as “By using less electricity, I will be helping the planet”. Another way to increase the likelihood of behaviour change is by influencing the source of the attitude. An individual’s personal thoughts and ideas have a much greater impact on the attitude compared to ideas of others. Therefore, when people view lifestyle changes as coming from themselves, the effects are more powerful than if the changes were coming from a friend or family member. These thoughts can be re-framed in a way that emphasizes personal importance, such as “I want to stop smoking because it is important to me” rather than “quitting smoking is important to my family”. More research needs to be conducted on culture differences and importance of group ideology, which may alter these results.
Mass Movements
Think of what Eric Hoffer said in 1951, in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism. Said Oliver Cromwell: “A man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going.” (Hoffer, The True Believer, Perennial Harper, 157)
Cromwell, as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland (16 December 1653 – 3 September 1658), was in power five years and turned the nation, ultimately, to opposition of his policies.
READINGS
* 1730.
July 12 – The papal conclave selects Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini over Cardinal Pietro Marcellino Corradini as the successor to Pope Benedict XIII. Corsini becomes Pope Clement XII as the 246th pope.
August 4 – Maria Madlener becomes the last person to be executed after the Galgeninsel witch trials in Bavaria, and is beheaded by sword.
August 5 – Prince Frederick of Prussia, the eldest son of King Frederick William and a high-ranking officer, attempts to flee to England after deserting the Prussian Army and is captured along with his fellow officer Hans Hermann von Katte. Katte is executed, and Crown Prince Frederick is imprisoned at Küstrin (modern-day Kostrzyn nad Odrą in Poland) for a year before being forgiven by his father. Prince Frederick later succeeds his father as King and will be remembered as Frederick the Great.
“In his 1738 bull In eminenti apostolatus, he provides the first public papal condemnation of Freemasonry.” The reactionary pushing down continued in the discrimination between associations.
On Maria Madlener and the the
Galgeninsel witch trials.
“The criminal succeeded in making his way through the water, which is deep even at low tide, and reached the mainland. He thus regained his life and freedom.” The reactionary pushing down continued between the genders and between orthodoxy and heresy.
“Frederick was a supporter of enlightened absolutism, stating that the ruler should be the first servant of the state. He modernised the Prussian bureaucracy and civil service, and pursued religious policies that ranged from tolerance to segregation. He reformed the judicial system and made it possible for men of lower status to become judges and senior bureaucrats. Frederick encouraged immigrants of diverse backgrounds to come to Prussia. While Protestantism remained the favored faith, he allowed religious freedom and tolerated Jews and Catholics in Prussia, however his actions were not entirely without prejudice. He supported the arts and philosophers he favoured, and allowed freedom of the press and literature. Frederick was almost certainly homosexual, and his sexuality has been the subject of much study. Because he died childless, he was succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II. He is buried at his favourite residence, Sanssouci in Potsdam.” A mixture. The reactionary pushing down continued in the Protestant prejudices, but the lifting up continued in better understandings of tolerance.
Buch, Neville (1987). Protestant Churches and their Attitude to Public Issues in Queensland 1919-1939, Honours Thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, November 1987.
Buch, Neville (1995). American Influence on Protestantism in Queensland since 1945, Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, August 1994, Awarded April 1995.
Buch, Neville (2019). The Changing Definition of Peace, Part 1: The Status Quo of Thinking in Queensland during the Armistice. Queensland History Journal, Royal Historical Society Queensland. Volume 24, No. 1, May 2019.
Buch, Neville (2019). The Changing Definition of Peace, Part 2: The Shifting of Thinking in Queensland during the Armistice. Queensland History Journal, Royal Historical Society Queensland. Volume 24, No. 1, May 2019.
Buch, Neville (2021). Politics in the Age of Uncertainty: Anti-intellectualism, Expertise, and the Technological Agenda in Queensland Politics, 1911-2011, a paper of local-regional relevance, 2021 Australian Political Studies Association Annual Conference, 21 September 2021.
Buch, Neville (2021). Finding Peace from the Culture-History War: A Historiographical Message for the Times. Academia Letters, Article 1916. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1916.
Buch, Neville (2023). Research Note: Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems, https://www.academia.edu/104984588/Research_Note_Anglo_American_Major_Belief_Doubt_Systems , 27 July 2023.
Hoffer, Eric (1951). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial Harper.
Wallace, Chris (2025). A tale of two campaign launches, The Saturday Paper, January 18 – 24, 2025 | No. 533.
Featured Image: Photographs by Kent Nishimura. Used in Saahil Desai, My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car, The Atlantic, March 29, 2025.
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Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.
