A respected, and now suspected, newspaper once pledged to give subscribers “All the news that’s fit to print.” Today, that same paper violates its pledge both by commission and omission. Time for a new slogan? Here’s a suggestion: “All the propaganda that will fit.” And yet I read the rag, if only to monitor its machinations.

So, the other day a headline leaped out at me. “Frenzied Billionaire Is Going All In to Elect Trump: ‘This Is Existential’” (New York Times, Oct. 13). Yes, the richest of bad boy billionaires, Elon Musk, is now tripping the light fantastic in MAGA-land.

Have you noticed, gentle reader, that the declaration “It’s existential” has bounced to the forefront of buzz talk? Perhaps its surge marks a mini-revival of existentialism, à la Jean-Paul Sartre. Ironically, even Sartre, who later slid into Marxism, fretted that “existentialism” had become largely vacuous. No surprise there, since once we deny essence, as did Sartre, there is nothing to form existence.

Søren Kierkegaard, however, the father of existentialism, deserves respect. Jacques Maritain, an “existential Thomist,” welcomed Kierkegaard’s core intuition of “the primacy of the act of existing.” After all, St. Thomas Aquinas writes of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the personal Act of Existence Itself. There is Scriptural warrant for this language in God’s self-revelation to Moses, “I am Who am” (Exodus 3:14). God is not, of course, the played out Creator of the deists. Rather, He keeps us in existence from moment to moment. Not a shred of being exists without God’s sustaining it.

There’s a straightforward way to get a handle on talk of “essence” and “existence.” We can ask what something is (quod sit). The answer identifies its essence. We can also ask whether it exists (an sit). The answer registers its existence. For example, we know what a centaur is and we know that it doesn’t exist. Or, happily, we can ask what a woman, or a man, is and whether they exist. With answers in hand, we can exclaim vive la difference! Of course, sometimes a real doubt arises, as it does when we ask what a planet is and whether Pluto passes muster.

But I would not digress, whether into philosophy or astronomy, without reason. So let’s return to Elon Musk. The frenzied billionaire recently wrote, “Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulation…humanity will never reach Mars.” The post had some 18 million viewers, and he concluded it with “This is existential.”

Golly. Let’s take stock. We know enough about what a planet is to know that Mars counts as one. We even know enough about regulatory zeal to realize that it is a passing condition that need not forever stop us from reaching Mars. And to be candid, there’s really no rush to get to The Red Planet. Isn’t Arizona enough?

What puzzles me, however, is why Mars matters so much to Musk. Like presidents and regulations, planets come and go—or so the astronomers tell us. On my view, reaching Mars any time soon is not so much existential as it is inconsequential. What is existential, rather, is that we make every effort, here and now, to wage peace in a world torn by war, to feed the hungry in a world of widening famine, to form families in which men and women can be fruitful, and to educate our children in a world of calculated disinformation—however prestigious its provenance. Domine, miserere nobis.