Andrew Miller: Trump & Musk remind us humans are predictable in moral vulnerability and propensity for hubris

Whenever a wedding scene comes on TV, Mum says “it starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in the sink.” Their passion was hot, but now the bromance is over. President Trump has thrown his virgin red Tesla out of the cot, and Elon Musk says he won’t let Donald play with his rockets anymore. If they are correct now, they must have been terribly wrong just last week. Either way, neither is fit to run a lemonade stand, and the world is sick of their drama. Their clowning example makes their mutual war on diversity, equity and inclusion in the name of “merit” even more grotesque. America will neither be the first nor last empire to fall. “We are all Greeks,” wrote the nineteenth-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, acknowledging the intellectual heavy lifting of the Hellenics, which underpins all modern western civilisations. The Greeks told all the important stories. Humans are nothing if not predictable in our moral vulnerability and propensity for hubris. Icarus’ father Daedalus gave him the advice that all caring parents try to impart — “try to neither fly too low, nor too high.” Back in the loved-up days of February, Musk swung a chainsaw about and paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, claiming unironically, “I am become meme.” The world’s richest alleged ketamine user triggered not only massive cringe, but a vision of young Icarus, flying too close to the orange sun. Mind altering substances are never far from the action — even in ancient Greece. Nicotine, alcohol, methamphetamine, cannabis, ketamine, opiates, psychedelics — none of these are new. Percy Shelley used opium and laudanum to “dampen his nerves,” between arguments with his neighbours about his pistol shooting, radical politics and “science experiments.” President Trump spuriously claims his right to impose tariffs is based on a fentanyl trafficking crisis. A year ago, I wrote of Musk — “when it comes to the chemical modulation of our impossibly complex brain, the stakes are much higher than boring old money.” Now his whole house of cards is wobbling and the one president who possibly might have shored it up is brandishing a flame-thrower. In properly trained hands, drugs can be useful. I have been employing ketamine and opiates all week. How to use them safely and sparingly though is a matter of dispassionate science — populism does not make for good medicine. In November 2019, I appeared on Channel 7’s Flashpoint programme, alongside then low-flying WA Health Minister, now Premier Roger Cook. As he announced that GPs would be permitted to openly prescribe medicinal cannabis henceforth, I was watching the face of another panelist — the CEO of a start-up cannabis supplier. Her blushing visage could only be described as “just told she won the lottery.” I was called cynical at the time, but in the second half of 2024 eight doctors alone — assisted by eager pharmaceutical companies — wrote over 80,000 scripts for the highest strength cannabis, much of it to be smoked. Over 400,000 Australians started prescriptions for the highest THC content cannabis during that period. It’s way out of control. Mental health services picking up the pieces of addicted young people are not amused at this State-sponsored jump in the boringly predictable complications of cannabis. “First doing no harm” won’t be good for the online reviews of doctors or politicians, but that’s our job. Shelley’s brilliant wife Mary wrote an excellent warning about science gone morally wrong. Her protagonist was Doctor Frankenstein. Percy Shelley’s 1818 sonnet Ozymandias interpreted a statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses the Great as saying, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” He points out the irony of egotistical monuments: “No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Time kills the importance of all men. It ends when we sink in the sand, so let’s strive to do no harm.