How did the world's most visionary entrepreneur become an arms dealer? Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". So, then, what is the message of a long flame bellowing out of the end of a gun? This is the question we must ask of Elon Musk's latest 'invention': The 'Boring Company' flamethrower:

It feels like the message of Musk's flamethrower could simply be this: "I am angry."

After all, how did such a device come to be built by Musk, who previously claimed, "Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment" ?

In search of answers to this psychological puzzle we will revisit the horrors of Elon Musk's childhood abuse at the hands of his father and others. A father who, in his own words, has been accused of being, "a misogynist, a paedophile, a traitor, a rat".

Is Elon Angry?

I wrote before in an article entitled 'Is Elon Happy? about the problems inherent in starting a company to 'change the world' if you have no idea what it is about the world that actually needs changing. Specifically, a person is likely doomed to failure if they do not recognize their unconscious repetition of childhood trauma. What tends to happen is that esoteric fantasies, like Musk's space colonization dreams, take the place of reflection on the true motivation behind these dreams.

In other words: The dreams of the traumatized are often nightmares in disguise.

As I wrote previously, Elon's refusal to face his childhood wounds found expression in fantasies of leaving the earth behind:

"Like many of us, Elon is running from his past, trying to escape the planet. Because his attempts are so well-financed, he can make his metaphorical journey into a literal one, but it will never allow him to escape himself. No rocket is powerful enough."

And so, with this flamethrower, again we see Musk's unresolved childhood traumas playing themselves out in farcical metaphor. While the poor and grandiose throw bottles against alley walls; the rich and grandiose build flamethrowers; and the super-rich build nuclear weapons.

Musk appears to defend his flamethrower against critics with a sardonic smile, but as McLuhan also said, "a joke really requires a hidden ground of grievance, for which the joke is only a figure sitting out front."

Is this some kind of joke?

Our jokes are often, essentially, our wounds exposed to the world. And the audience's laughter a hollow sound produced by human mouths when our collective minds are short-circuited by the horror of the comedian's sadness.

Is Musk's flamethrower a joke?

In the most terrifying sense, yes: In short, it is a desperate cry from Musk's subconscious mind to have his anger heard and expressed. Building weaponry, however, is not an appropriate expression of anger in an enlightened world. Musk would do better to shout into the ocean, or punch a pillow. These are some of the safe ways to express fury at a father who Elon has said was “a terrible human being," and had, "a carefully thought-out plan of evil... He will plan evil.”

Instead, as so many covertly angry people do, Musk has allowed his fury to reflect itself back into the world from which it came. This the act of a survivor turned perpetrator. And so the cycle of abuse continues. Elon was abused, now he sells the symbols of abuse. Of course, as many people in a grandiose defence against their wounds do, he brushes aside all evidence of this grand folly. It is merely, he insists, a joke.

Surely nothing could be further from Musk's stated intention of saving the planet, or pushing humankind to new levels of consciousness, than building and marketing thousands of flame-emitting potential-death-hurling devices? The only way this contraption fits into the grand logic of Musk's broader psyche is that it represents his anger at his abuse as a child. No adult with healed wounds would introduce such a malevolent fire gun into the world, let alone into the tinder-dry kindling of a drought-ridden California.

It has to be asked, quite compassionately: What is Elon Musk doing?

We find ourselves, culturally, in a bizarre situation where the world's most prominent entrepreneur is also an arms dealer. Already, the consequences of Musk's absurdist foray into war machinery can be felt rippling across the greater pleats of his corporate carpets. There are the recent job losses at Tesla and the general feeling that Musk has spread himself too thin across too many categories of product. Sadly, the common end-game of grandiose defences against traumatic material (as any depth psychologist can attest), is breakdown.

There is only so long that subconscious trauma material can be kept in check by addictions and avoidance behaviours before it breaks through, like hot flames from a gun, burning everything in its path to ash.

Elon could save himself by examining the life of his company's namesake, Nikola Tesla, who also bore many of the same symptoms of childhood abuse and died alone and penniless in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, perhaps peering out at the lights of the city he had helped illuminate. Like Musk, Tesla's greater dream: To create clean, limitless energy, was beset by his failure to ensure that his own, internal, limitless source of energy was healed first:

His inner child.