One thing that has always bothered people about the World Economic Forum (WEF) is how aesthetically disagreeable it can be. Its style seems deliberately outre. Why does Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s impresario and MC, dress up like a cultic high priest? Why does Yuval Noah Harari – the organisation’s court philosopher – make slightly gleeful dismissals of the idea of human rights? “Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find the blood, you find the heart, and the lungs and the kidneys – but you don’t find any rights.”
Why this dogged insistence on giving people the creeps? Fundamentally it’s an affectation. The showy amoralism of the WEF is in fact a personal branding exercise, one that arose in response to the first real stirrings against its worldview in the middle of the last decade.
These conflicts after 2016 have been cast in a certain way – not least by Davos itself. What ‘populism’ was objecting to, it was said, was economic and technological modernity. The world was being ironed flat by a ruthless process of economic optimisation that had begun in the 1980s, one in which all the old social institutions that might inhibit the free-flow of capital were to be swept away. What populism meant, then, was a romantic but essentially doomed revolt by those who had been squeezed out.
Armed with this idea, the WEF and its extended class of hangers-on have worked up a kind of equal and opposite anti-romanticism: amoral, bloodless and smirkingly technocratic. If populism represented the past, then the WEF represented the future. One aspect of this is an affected elitism: even the WEF’s website now makes a wry reference to its reputation as a clubhouse for ‘distant elites’.
More significantly, this personal branding allows the WEF and the orthodoxy it represents to take up the mantle of pragmatism, realism and modernity. Even the wobblier parts of this worldview, like mass migration or degrowth economics, could now be cast as simple historical inevitabilities, part of a general trend of bloodless rationalisation all over the world. These things were inexorable and therefore unanswerable; in this the WEF was only the bearer of bad news for the populists. Hence Schwab’s space-age getup.
Opponents of this worldview have been strangely willing to take Davos at its own conceit. Many are content to play the role cast for them: doomed rebels of the ‘heart’ against the unfeeling ‘head’.
And a conceit it is. Scratch a Davos attendee and you’ll find a gooey moralism and a generalised fear of any kind of material change.
For one, the WEF has never met a new technology that it likes. Davos is only beginning to recover from the rise of the internet, which decentralises information and so acts as a solvent to consensus. The average ‘left-behind’ white proletariat in Brandenburg, or Hénin-Beaumont, or West Bromwich has eagerly seized on the internet as a means of political communication; he or she wields it with much more savvy than, say, Angela Merkel. To people like the latter the internet is only sinister; what it puts at stake is not merely a particular consensus, but the very concept of truth itself. It’s always been the Davos line, then, that the internet must be bowdlerised in order to rebuild old solidarities.
Artificial Intelligence, too, is simply another subversive element to gut. Again, new technology is only something that’s allowed insofar as it shores up reigning social structures. What the WEF’s reaction to AI represents isn’t peevish regulationism but downright alarmism – one that draws heavily on the apocalyptic predictions of Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Effective Altruists. Sure enough, the topline recommendations from this year’s conference were for governments and the private sector to put “ethics and responsibility”, not commercial application, at the “forefront” of their AI policies. AI is something that really does threaten to dissolve the old certainties, economic and otherwise; but it’s Davos that’s leading the charge against it.
Think back also to one of the WEF’s more menacing slogans: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” The accompanying essay imagines a future society in which all modern conveniences are shared. But this is just another kind of atavism. The clamour for shared canteens, group constitutionals and mandatory kumbayas isn’t new; it was the stock-in-trade of the romantic and agrarian communal experiments of the 19th century – like the barracks-cum-school Phalanstère of Charles Fourier. These kinds of social wheezes are, above all, a reaction against the anomie of modern life; the objective here is to rebuild solidarities that industrial capitalism has destroyed. Every vision of society offered by the WEF defaults to this same crude Fourierism: Ida Auken’s essay; Stakeholder Capitalism; The Great Reset (2020). It takes a lot of nerve, then, for Davos to accuse its populist opponents of harkening back to some sort of frumpy communitarianism.
And whatever Noah Harari may pretend, the Davos worldview is one that’s steeped in the language of universal human rights. Despite the conceit of bloodless rationalisation, during the pandemic Davos never questioned the idea that all human lives – no matter how many years were left to them – were equally valuable, and so must be protected with a Lockdown that collapsed global trade overnight. The old concerns about interconnected ‘just-in-time’ supply chains were dropped in an instant. Nor is mass migration ever subject to any kind of cold accounting at Davos. Third World immigration does not add to Western exchequers, but for the WEF that is beside the point. For Davos this isn’t about cheap labour (its proposals never include simple Gulf monarchy-style work permits) but the universal brotherhood of man; a maximisation of total global welfare for which Western taxpayers are obliged to foot the bill.
What Davos’ affected amoralism occludes, then, is that this worldview doesn’t represent an unfeeling new modernity, but rather an egalitarian moral project which is anti-modern in its assumptions. So when Davos plays the card of technocracy and thin-lipped realism, its opponents should not take it at its word. Because what we see from Davos isn’t “All that is solid melt[ing] into air”, but the search for a deadening new solidity.
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For me the WEF represents the personification of Evil and anyone associated with it is likewise tainted.
Agreed , King Charles is upto his unusually large Ears in it ,as is his son Wills who has given Toothy Jacinda a climate non job !
I agree with anyone seeking to reduce the psychological elitist messaging of the WEF. Through the long tentacles of their influence, they have sought to engineer an image of solid intellectual foundations that simply do not exist. They create an artificial atmosphere of contrived consensus and pretend the only room for disagreement is about as large as the difference between the Tory establishment and Labour, or the establishment Republicans and the establishment Democrats. This is of course nonsense. But similarly the corrupting effect of their influence should not be underestimated.
Or rather they, the WEF, are a public pustule on the surface of a deeper more powerful confluence of global forces, which include corporate entities like Blackrock and Vanguard and billionaires like Gates and Bezos. The thing that should not be underestimated however, is the extent to which the vast wealth they control serves to unseat these people from the same realities and concerns as affect ordinary people. We understand how solitude and lead to psychological aberration and a lack of ability to empathise and socialise. Similar aberrations arise for the super wealthy. Some people are able to weather dissimilar experience and still recognise and appreciate the reality inhabited by others. This isn’t necessarily a sign of “empathy” either, but can be simply a sign of rationality or intellect. However we should be aware of our proximity to some truly harsh anti social behaviours exhibited and actually pretty widespread that have never, in truth, left this earth. It wasn’t too long ago that in the US, during the period known as the Wild West, there were corporate entities that gave rise the phrase “railroading.” The railroad companies were prepared to employ thugs to bully and kill in order to relieve citizens of their land.
The thing that, when viewed in a proper context, surprises me, is how many people think the globalist elites, having come through “Western” education, must now be civilised and divest of all such immoral drives, when their wealth insulates them and de-socialises them every bit as much, if not more than for the hermit loner living on a hill. Anyone who thinks that is asleep and simply not paying attention to what is occurring in the world.
So while I agree with this article and we need to break any propagandist psychology that conflates the WEF agenda with the truth, and while I agree we should laugh at these people, I also think they really are remarkably dangerous, and very very close to achieving their aim of global authoritarian domination and control.
Consider Blackrock now own 30% of the land in Ukraine.
Blackrock and vanguard private equity firms now own over 60% of the housing stock in the land of the Free.
Bill Gates has gone from owning no land to being the biggest landowner in the US.
and most worrying of all, private equity like Blackrock and Vanguard own roughly 80% of the S&P500.
This latter point is to my mind illustrative of the fact the authoritarian door is very very close to being closed on us.
The pandemic successfully saw the transfer of over a trillion in wealth to the global elites and very nearly as much out of the pockets of the ordinary citizen.
These facts, unfortunately, are harder to laugh at.
Excellent points.
The WEF serves a few useful purposes to the Trillionaires whom we never see.
They act as a point of coalescence with the global barons of wealth and industry allowing them to reinforce the goals of centralised authority and control
Create agendas that are implemented through UN treaties infiltrating all the way down to council level edicts from traffic regulation, energy usage, carbon taxing etc All designed to limit movement and constrain resistance.
They reward higher level bureaucrats and career politicians with social power manifesting in rewards such as travel, elite holidays, gifts, revolving door opportunities between government, corporations and NGOs so that their will always be a profitable landing place no matter how bad their public reputations become. All as long as they push the agendas.
They prepare the highest level elites for the transitions that are occurring and being forced through “polycrisis” offering them a place at the table no matter what engineered crisis occurs into the NWO.
They target emergent technologies and seek to appropriate them always in the aid of power and control by the few over the many.
So yes I wouldn’t sniff at the WEF.
Good point…I recall it was Rotterdam a few years ago that Bezos had a historic bridge removed and later constructed so he could sail his giant Yacht out of the city. That is an obscene amount of power and influence in the cold light of day. These people need taking down, this is not jealousy when they want to create a serf class with modern Robber Barons.
Egalitarian? Cobblers. The “anointed” think they know better than everybody else.
tof, for all the convoluted counter arguments in the article it really does boil down to:
The “anointed” think they know better than everybody else.
Although I would add – with menaces.
Menaces and then the jackboot in your face.
Bland, malevolent, ridiculous and uninteresting people who make sweeping, grandstanding pronouncements on big theatrical stages in a hideaway Swiss mountain resort about the futures of the other 7 billion or so other people in the world without any of their agreement or inclusion. Anyone associated with Davos should be psychologically assessed. It’s a hive of evil masquerading as the saviours of the world.
Hear, hear.
Don’t forget the others like the secretive Bilderberg Group.
Whitney Webb discusses with Peak Prosperity the Globalist technocratic plans, the new serfdom system, and Conspiracy vs cock-up.
https://youtu.be/tkLq54lVqHU?si=KpLw8W0rVb6v_u-p
Who wants one of my new T Shirts? ——–JUST START OIL .—-They come in a range of colours and in small, medium. large, XL and XXL. They are not at all “sustainable” and I am sick to death of hearing that word anyway. ———What is the difference between a Just Stop Oil idiot and a plank of wood? ——The Grain. ——–Yes folks that is the only difference. Basically the Just Stop Oil people are the same as a plank of wood. They will sit on their cosy couch in their nice warm house (courtesy of fossil fuels) with a laptop on their knee that couldn’t exist without oil. Infact nothing in their house could, and neither could their house, their bicycle or their sustainable cabbage. Then out they march to chuck soup over a Van Gogh———But ofcourse these people are just the Elites useful idiots. They are the ones that do the WEF’s dirty work for them while they sit sipping prosecco and knocking back the Lobsters at Davos carving up the world and deciding whether we should be allowed wood pellets or whether we should maybe collect all our toenail clippings and recycle them into windows for our sustainable dwellings. ———Roll up Roll up get your JUST START OIL T Shirts while stocks last.
Can I order one in nylon please?
Put a link in then or is this just irony. Patrick Heningson the old UK Column had a good T-Shirt…”We Are All Essential”.
Ron ——It was a joke mate. I thought that was obvious. But it isn’t such a bad idea to have one of my T Shirts now is it? It seems only those who scream the loudest get listened to. ———-I remember away back in the 70’s before all of the wokery and political correctness I saw a person with a T Shirt that said “Equal Rights for Gay Whales”—-Boy was he ahead of his time.
This has nothing to do with “aesthetics” (whatever that is supposed to mean in this context). It seems to me that the policies the WEF advocates for are either explicitly or implicitly going to reduce the freedom and prosperity of me and my family, therefore they are my enemies.
The Davos Gang (“weffies”) are a gang of cold-blooded psychopaths, plain and simple. Anyone who doesn’t believe in human rights, particularly individual rights, does not belong anywhere even remotely near the levers of power whatsoever. There is nothing redeeming about them at all.
Even someone in The Guardian of all papers called Davos a ‘Pit of Vipers’.
My opinion is that we need to re read the novel Brave New World, this is the text that is being followed by the WEF not so much 1984. In Brave New World, the citizens are conditioned to be happy, they indeed own nothing, but their conditioning is such from birth,
does any of that ring a bell?, look how happy the majority were to be locked up, told what to do in exchange for “free money” and not having to work, they didn;t mind about the loss of freedom, they thought it was great.
In Brave New world children are grown outside of the womb and depending on societies needs for Alphas (the elite) or down to Epsilons, (the drone low caste workers) the foetus were fed or denied the appropriate hormones, oxygen to ensure the appropriate brain development, these children were then raised and conditioned seperately to fulfill their pre prescribed goal by the technocrats.
This is what Schwab and his disciples are aiming at, when they state you will in the future own nothing and be happy, they mean that you and your future offspring will be conditioned to happily accept the limits on your existence which they the small band of elites allow.
Dont believe me? look at what they did during Lockdown, look at the relentless propaganda, the happy way individuals allowed their bodies to be taken over, how they are now programming us to accept a digitalisation of our very beings through vaccine markers in our bodies, chips under our skin to pay and of course to be tracked, and the kids are happy to accept it.
The WEFS are part of an ole entitled elite, they are scared of freedom of speech and the internet, hence their manic desire to control, the only way they can protect their position is for the population to happily accept the conditioning to expect less, and to be controlled in exchange for convenience.
In BNW there is no comparable computer technology (or nuclear weapons, discussed by the author in BNW Revisited). Therefore that imaginary society needed people, even if they were simply godless slaves and clones. Soon humans could be completely replaced by robots, which are far easier to control (maybe). The conscious human population is becoming superfluous and completely dispensable to these crazed megalomaniacs. We should be terrified. Word has it that the depopulated Ukraine is being reconstructed as the first completely SMART nation; a model for the rest of the world to copy.
I find this discrimination against human lungs and guts, the by far most spacious inner organs one will find when, well, gutting a human, extremely offensive. The Davos crowd clearly suffers from lung-and-gut-phobia!
“For one, the WEF has never met a new technology that it likes.”
Except, that is, for mass facial recognition surveillance, blanket digital ID systems including medical records, CBDCs and mRNA gene therapy technologies.
All of which conspire to be the greatest collective threat to our lives in modern history.
While it’s easy to mock and write the Davos/WEF cartel off as an oddball bunch of cosplay villain eccentrics, they have an exponentially increasing dominance, influence and power over all aspects of our lives and remain without doubt the gravest danger we face in the world right now.
These grasping feudalist predators need to be completely defunded and obliterated into irrelevance before they can kick our foot out of the way and slam the prison door shut.
Spot on , + these freaks run the WHO !