Big Balls' Game
There has been much criticism of Elon Musk's using teens and twenty somethings as lead fighters in the effort to fix America's broken government.
When I became aware that Elon Musk was using hyper bright teenagers in his DOGE effort to destabilize the "war plans" of the entrenched US government deep state, I thought immediately of Orson Scott Card's great science fiction novel, "Ender's Game." In Card's novel, hyper bright American youth are designated and groomed to lead, as teens, a US/earth assault on the formics, an alien race seeking mankind's annihilation and the use of earth for their own purposes. The whole idea sounds ridiculous, right? Teens as US military leaders?
Card's lead teen contender to lead US space forces is Ender. Groomed teens, it appears, are best prepared to operate (like a video game?) the war fighting tools of a space force. Ender, who possesses the right balance of technical ability, empathy, and leadership skill, succeeds in destroying the formics. But where Ender is technically and managerially superior, he is, like any teen, emotionally underdeveloped. As he matures in understanding that he has been instrumental in destroying an entire race, he reacts by seeking a way to find restitution from his actions. He finds that a formic queen embryo has survived. He retrieve's the embryo and dedicates his adult life to finding a way to reseed the queen (and her expected progeny) somewhere else in the universe.
The parallel between Card's Ender and Musk's Big Balls (sobriquet for a young man on Musk's team) is clear. In both cases hyper smart, but malleable, young brains were being used, to manipulate tech tools which could open up heretofore seeming impossible solutions to big problems. Science fiction and reality seem to be on the point of converging in today's fast paced world. Card's far-flung hypothesis of hyper bright teens executing a space war doesn't seem so obscure as we watch real time use of teens using tools to fight, not a war against formic aliens, but a war against civilization threatening bureaucracy.
But maybe Orson Scott Card's and Elon Musk's idea of using the hyper young to fight complex ideas is not so radical after all. There are many examples in history of very young people accomplishing great things. Alexander the Great led Macedonian forces to overthrow the Persian Empire at the age of 23. Another Alexander, Alexander Hamilton was an aide-de-camp for General George Washington at 20. At 24, he commanded the attack that won the Battle of Yorktown and secured American independence. At 29, he wrote the final report of the Annapolis Convention, which put out the call for a new Constitutional Convention for America. At 30, he was the only man from New York to sign the Constitution and wrote the Federalist Papers.
So, tell me, why exactly can't Elon Musk recruit genius teens and 20-somethings to help fix America's broken government? Maybe Card's Ender, a youth sparking great change, is the default and we just of have lost sight of that. Still, I agree, it's going to be a challenge to wrap our collective minds around the notion that Big Balls is leading the way into the new American future!
Here is my review of "Ender's Game," which I read in 2024.