Whose Pursuit of Happiness?
The rhetoric finally boiled over for Elon Musk - but it was a predictable moment if you know your Aristotle.
“He’s the most formidable personality to take on Trump so far. We will see if The Catturd and Laura Loomer will have the capacity as Captains of the Wagon Circlers to tarnish Mr. Musk enough to help capture enough political capital to help the bill limp over the line.” — Aaron Everitt
Hello and happy Thursday.
I’m running around like a madwoman this week, but I’ll be back tomorrow with a well stocked roundup of the latest headlines—including what Montecito locals are whispering about the Markles.
There’s a lot happening in the news. I pulled what I found most compelling and will post a thread on the app tomorrow so we can dissect it all together.
Also ahead: the top ten hottest Congressmen (you’re welcome), plus a summary of the Kim Porter book—which I finally managed to track down.
In the meantime, thank you to Aaron for dragging us all into deeper thought about the Trump–Musk breakup, currently unraveling in real time as I type. I feel unexpectedly affected by the fallout, but I’ll share those thoughts upon my return.
Aaron Everitt:
When I was in high school and would bring friends or a date to the house, we typically had a few moments with my dad sitting in the living room before we went downstairs to watch a movie or play table tennis. The conversation was usually the same with him.
“So… what’s the difference between liberty and freedom?” he would ask my unwitting companions.
The Pursuit of Happiness - By Aaron Everitt
Their shocked faces would look over to me, hoping I could at least deflect their ignorance and help them steer this intellectually adrift ship closer to port. Usually, they would sheepishly take a stab at answering, but their lack of confidence in their answers and the intimidating stare of my father were enough to make the room temperature feel ten degrees hotter.
“I guess I don’t know.” They would usually say. “I didn’t think there was one.”
Gleefully, my father would start in on the education.
“What does freedom mean?”
“I guess it means you are free to do what you want.”
“OK,” he would say, conceding the definition. “And liberty?”
“I thought it meant freedom.”
“Liberty is individual freedom constrained by individual responsibility,” he would pronounce. “How does that definition work for you?”
“Fine, I guess,” they would all say, sweatily looking over at me as if to plead for their torture to end.
“We have to go, Dad,” I would say to cut off the inevitable pain my friends were suffering under. “I’ll fill them in.”
I grew up in a home where conversations like this were the norm. We weren’t intellectuals, but we had these kinds of discussions daily in our house. My dad went to one semester of college before skiing overran his willpower to attend university. My mom always wanted to be a mom. She loved art and painting, but desired to be a mom more than pursuing art as a career. We were not people who chased after the call of higher education formally, but it was implied that we lived a life pursuing being wise. My own experience was arduous, in which I limped over the line with a degree in theology and a minor in music. Despite our dismissal of a formal education, being educated was an imperative in our home. We didn’t need letters on paper to validate our pursuits, but both my sister and I were encouraged to read and explore any subject or place until we had exhausted ourselves over it. My father notoriously read all of the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his teenage years in his pursuit of understanding. We debated and discussed things often in our home: politics, religion, and current affairs all were worth our intellectual gymnastics. So, having my dad ask my date for the evening what she thought of the difference between liberty and freedom was not all that foreign to my way of life.
The interesting part of those conversations and the interactions my friends and my potential romantic interests had with my dad was that it taught me to be skeptical in thought, and reserved about what anyone said in regards to how the world worked. There may not seem to be a distinct difference between liberty and freedom to most, but the difference is vastly different in its outcome amongst a community, a city, a state, or a nation. Unrestrained freedom can be damning to the soul. All humans are best when they restrict their desires in order to elevate others above themselves. The founders understood this notion. The word freedom never appears in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Go look - it isn’t there. They chose not to use that word for a very specific reason. They understood freedom to mean something entirely different than liberty, and they chose to communicate their passions for a new form of government from the perspective of individualized restraint being an imperative to living a civilized life.
“Because we have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams
My understanding of this from my living room conversations always framed my hearing of political rhetoric. When someone would pronounce from the nightly news how some new act was infringing on our freedoms, or how we need to spread freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East, my ears perked up with caution.
I have used this quote often from Jean Paul Sartre because it encapsulates the post-modern philosophy better than nearly anything I have ever read. Postmodernism is the world we live in, the one where God is supposedly dead, and the peak expression of life is self-interest. We live in a world shaped by Sartre’s philosophy.
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
In the world that we have created, we have said that being free to choose is the highest value. We make our destiny, and therefore should have nothing restricting our choice to do so. We should live our lives as we wish, unbound by prudish puritanism or religion. Our decisions about our interactions, from the most mundane to the most intimate, are best, in the eyes of our culture, when we place our choices at the pinnacle of the experience. What is it that would make you happy? Will this transaction benefit me? All roads in our freedom-loving culture lead back to ourselves. We are nothing more than what we propose ourselves to be — the sum of our actions. Making ourselves the star of every movie is not just the norm; it is the expectation of a culture that adores itself. You will be a self-made person, immune to the consequences of societal participation. Boundaries are for bores.
I often write about the need for spiritual direction in this world of narcissism. When we are consumed with ourselves, our society suffers. This is ancient wisdom. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known written story, Humbaba is the guardian of the Cedar Forest. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu come to the forest, they kill Humbaba in order to chop down the largest Cedar tree. Gilgamesh and Enkidu serve themselves and are punished by the Gods, with Enkidu losing his life in the process. The Epic was written to teach people that self-service has consequences. The beautiful tree was at the center of the forest and created beauty. Enkidu and Gilgamesh came to serve themselves, and both beauty and the men were destroyed.
In Egypt during the Jewish captivity, Pharaoh was given the chance on numerous occasions to let the people of Israel go. His refusal led to plagues and darkness, famine for his people, and ultimately the loss of his own firstborn son. His self-interest caused his demise.
David chose Bathsheba to have as his own. His sexual desires overtook his discipline, and Bathshebas’s beauty drove David to lust and self-service. With each decision to satisfy his own pleasures and to cover up the evidence of his misdeeds, he dove deeper into deceit, ultimately having the husband of Bathsheba, Uriah, slaughtered in battle by the betrayal of his own army. They, under David’s order, turned on Uriah and left him to die by the swords of the enemy. David had chosen himself, or his freedom to choose his own desires, and the results were devastating. The son that David and Bathsheba had conceived in their act of self-gratification ultimately died.
This tale of self-service and love for unrestrained freedom is shown over and over in ancient manuscripts. In The Book of the Prophet Hud from the Koran in chapter 11, we hear “And God alone comprehends the hidden reality of the heavens and the earth: for all that exists goes back to Him as its source. Worship Him, then, and place thy trust in Him alone: for thy Sustainer is not unaware of what you do.”
Paul, a disciple of Jesus, admonishes this same devotion to the death of self in his letter to the Romans. “Therefore, I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Often, I have wondered about how the founders squared the circle of dying to self, which they clearly knew from scriptures that were deeply embedded in their culture, and the language they chose in the Declaration of pursuing happiness. How can a pietistic people who lived under the pretense that God was real and integral to their cultural experience, write down that the natural law of the universe was fixed towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Did they not understand the wisdom of the past? Were they interested in creating a Godless civilization? Did they think that the future would be brightest if culture abandoned self-control and only pursued its economic self-interests? It is highly unlikely.
George Wythe, who by all accounts was the intellectual giant and teacher of the Virginia founders, saw the American Revolution as an act of high responsibility for the citizens. In many of his letters and in journal entries by Thomas Jefferson, Wythe speaks of the American Revolution as figuratively removing one crown from the head of a king and placing it upon the heads of thousands of people. Mysteriously, the crown bears the same weight as the original. All of the duties and responsibilities of the sovereign rest upon the thousands of crowns now resting on the brows of the citizens. Wythe proposed that with that crown comes the responsibility of acting as a sovereign, with the duty to their subjects over self. A good king, Wythe described, is one who is not self-serving, nor apt to use his power for his own benefit. A self-serving king would be called a tyrant, a despot, a false leader. Wythe and by educational osmosis, Jefferson, believed that a virtuous, others-first oriented people would create a society that was functional and tempered.
When it came time to declare independence, Jefferson used the words “pursuit of happiness” rather than the version most familiar to Enlightenment minds, “property,” for very specific reasons. To Jefferson, property was only part of the equation for a society to live an enriched life. From his studies at William and Mary and his tutelage from Mr. Wythe, Jefferson knew his Greek and his Aristotle. He knew that if life, liberty, and property were all that were to be pursued, then the society would inevitably destroy itself upon its own interests and self-serving. He knew the word Eudaimonia from his studies and from Mr. Wythe’s teachings. This was a more noble concept. Something much more in line with a vision of a country that could sustain itself through its better intentions. Eudaimonia comes from Aristotelian Ethics, and it means: the condition of human flourishing and living well.
According to Aristotle, every living thing has a unique function or activity that distinguishes it from all other things. It follows then that the highest good of a thing consists of the good performance of its function, and the virtue or excellence of a thing consists of whatever enables it to perform that function well. In the Eudemian Ethics, he maintained that eudaimonia consists of activities of the soul in accordance with “complete” virtue, by which he meant both intellectual and moral ones.
Washington Today
But what about Elon Musk’s drug use? When do we get to that? This is sure a long, ramb-ly way to talk about ethics in government. Who’s next in the sperm receiving line? We’re like 30 pages in, and you have yet to mention Ashley St. Clair.
We sit here on the eve of the Big, Beautiful Bill, and Trump’s advocacy for it politically. DOGE has a token bill being presented simultaneously that would cut, not hyperbolically, 0.0243% of the $37 trillion debt. The political spin machines for the Republicans are out in full force, telling everyone this is shrinking government. Meanwhile, Elon is posting his frustrations with it all over at X. Rand Paul is being blasted by the president for not going along with it, and poor Thomas Massie has been kicked like a sad dog again for his supposed “grandstanding.” The Republican Party is always best at being the Washington Generals. Easy to beat and paid to be the loser. The Democrats don’t even have to show up. You know why? Because the Republicans fail at the pursuit of happiness as Jefferson defined it without anyone’s prompting. The Republicans are the only ones who have to win elections by telling the people that to live with the ethics of Aristotle is the best thing for America, while they simultaneously head to town to vote for the next tranche of money we don’t have. Their rhetoric never matches their actions. The Democrats are at least honest. They would prefer to rob you blind and tell you that it’s best for you while they do it. That isn’t in line with eudaimonia, but they never said they would be. Only the Republicans are ever caught between what the people want and what the blob wants. Their dishonest rhetoric is the Pied Piper’s flute to the American people. Don’t feel discouraged. It captured Elon’s attention, too.
As things continue to heat up on X and Elon speaks out about his disdain for the bill, the normal, circle the wagons crowd has come to the aid of Trump. There is a lot in this bill that needs to be examined thoroughly. The provision to disallow the states to regulate AI for the next ten years, the Palantir database that this bill helps fund is something the American people have repeatedly said they have no interest in, and the spending…let’s not forget the gargantuan numbers that this bill would spend. All of this has brought the First Buddy to his wits end. His posts have ranged from exasperation to outright frustration.
“No one who actually reads the bill should be able to stomach it.” Elon Musk. June 4, 2025 on X
Just an hour later, he urged people to call their Senators to block this bill. So much for any future couch surfing evenings with Little X at Mar-a-Lago. This is escalating quickly into a fight between how most Americans want government to work, and how it actually does work. The illusionary world that most citizens think they live in is one where the politicians so many of us rally behind and work hard to help elect become totally unable to move the needle of this leviathan that marches on. Musk, somewhere in this six month adventure, realized that his proposed solutions and capabilities as a business owner are incongruous with a government that wants nothing to do with a change in course. Musk found that keeping silent about his frustrations was an unacceptable choice and has seemingly started the fight. He should ask Rand Paul and Thomas Massie how that typically goes down. I don’t want this bill to pass, and I think most Americans, if they were able to see what is in it, would not want it either. Trump is playing politician with a defunct Congress and I sympathize with his plight, but in the end this is the stuff that drives the average working person in America nuts. They don’t care about the pet projects of a Congressman from Los Angeles, and they sure as hell do not care about Lindsey Graham's war in Ukraine.
Don’t underestimate that Elon has had his pride squashed a bit by this monster and he likely isn’t going to take that lying down. The rumors of his shouting match with Scott Bessent who called Elon a fraud and fake, if true, are likely fuel upon this ego driven fire. The machine is raging and and it fights back much harder than anyone ever expected, particularly Elon, who’s personality and reputation usually are enough to overcome nearly all flaws in his business plans.
Why Is This Happening?
Washington is an abject mess. I think it needs a total overhaul, even to the point in my own mind that I am comfortable with the idea of mass secessions by blue states and red states and allowing them to form their own paths forward. The entire thing has been consumed by debt, grandstanding, and self-interest. It barely functions, and no matter who goes up there, the same sausage gets ground out of the front of the machine.
Why is that? Because we have placed freedom ahead of liberty. We have decided that the pursuit of property (money, wealth, fame) is greater than the pursuit of human flourishing. We want everything for ourselves. We may say we want the wrecking ball. We might even send people up to Washington who we think might be able to shrink government. Yet in the end, our own self-service is all that we care about. We have taken the guard rails off of ourselves and decided that the crown we wear on our heads is there for our own aggrandizement, and not for the duty that the crown represents to our fellow humans. When we replace true human flourishing with confiscated dollars at the trough for our own benefit, we lose the plot of what good government is supposed to be: service of others. So a couch surfing, sperm-donating, billionaire businessman with the best intentions to change government is stymied into open frustration at the President and the government he spent the last six months as acting First Buddy in.
People all the time say that it is up to us to change this because “wE aRe ThE GoVErnMenT!” But that is a trope. It isn’t true at all. I am not the government and neither are you; the people who are elected, and more importantly, the people who have entrenched themselves in the seats and halls of Washington, are the government. They are the ones who crack down on the person who failed to file a wetland permit, or whose fence is on the wrong side of the survey, or who messed up on their taxes. They are the tyrants who have forgotten that they have a crown of equal weight to that of a king on their heads. They are the ones who sit in judgment of others, serving themselves before they serve the people they supposedly are there for. The difference between freedom and liberty is playing out in our government, in our churches, in our civic institutions, and nearly anywhere else we look. Each move that those entities make demonstrates why that subtle difference matters. We were never supposed to be free people who pay no heed to anything related to other people. We are designed to be people who restrain ourselves in order to help and benefit our neighbors. If each of us treated one another as we would hope to be treated ourselves, the world would look very different than the one we presently find ourselves in.
Those ancient books of wisdom teach humanity the necessary lessons of dying to self in order to have a good and beautiful society. I have no interest in a world that only craves the adoration of itself. We are ruining quickly the future opportunities for our children. Our war machine marches on towards oblivion because it can. No one restrains it because their paychecks and self-interests depend upon their participation in perpetuating the awful. Our kids are being poisoned with food and shots for the benefit of corporations who see money in a grander light than the health and future of a nation. Nearly everything we see across our American system has decided that the pursuit of freedom is greater than human flourishing and liberty.
So, I know you didn’t ask me, but what do I think George Wythe would think of the America that lies before us today? He would be unsurprised, and yet still saddened. He would ask us to recall the lessons of Aristotle. He would ask if we knew our ancient texts, our scriptures, our Greeks. He would pose the question to us, “Are you burdened by the weight of the crown you bear as the sovereign? Because if you are not, you are a tyrant.” He would not sugarcoat the words either. He would demand better of our politics and our people. I also imagine that he would not be inclined to defend the government that has been wrought through coercion and corruption. He would wonder if those who we have at the helm of politics in our Congress and in our bureaucracies have the same ideals of politics as the men of his era seemed to be striving for. Are they thinking of our future as a people? Do they exercise their politics for the benefit of future generations, or for themselves only?
To Wythe, the restraint that the word liberty implies is the most significant aspect of a free and good people. We can be free only as long as we choose to surrender some of our personal benefits on behalf of our neighbors. That means we will have to forgo the next round of stimulus or the bridge for our construction buddies, or the fish ladder project that came in some obscure grant. We have to find the will and restraint to change how this flow of money from Washington works. We must restrain our desires for unfettered freedom, and look to the future if we hope to have anything of worth then or in the present. What good does it do us to have something for ourselves now, if our children and their children tell us to go pound sand because they refuse to play along in the Ponzi scheme any longer. Would you blame the future generations for giving up on America if the America we hand them looks like one designed only for the service of those who have the power now? I certainly would not.
There has been a movement intellectually to make the founders into godless men who were uninterested in Christianity or pietistic pursuits. That, despite the best efforts to shape the conversation to a desired historic outcome, is blatantly false. The founder’s philosophy was imbued with the words of ancient wisdom. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is disguised in the words “pursuit of happiness” in the first lines of the Declaration. Eudaimonia is the basis of good government and a good citizenry.
Elon and others are frustrated by what this government is. I can’t say I blame them. In the end, this comes down to how we decide to live from here out —In freedom or in liberty? Will we have the fortitude to weather a total revision of government? That is what it will take to change the trajectory of the machine. Elon seems to be willing to discuss it. He’s the most formidable personality to take on Trump so far. We will see if The Catturd and Laura Loomer will have the capacity as Captains of the Wagon Circlers to tarnish Mr. Musk enough to help capture enough political capital to help the bill limp over the line.
 | A guest post by
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Elon can’t win- and has risked his businesses just to do what he thought was right. You don’t have to agree with his personal life decisions or antics but have to acknowledge his persistence for speaking up for what he believes in.
Damn- Aaron’s writings could not be suited for a better place and time. Thank you for your work.