WEF Davos Man: what does he want?
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3jGX1iw)
Samuel Greg, a Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the
American Institute for Economic Research and author, most recently,
of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an
Uncertain World, has written a good piece for the Spectator about
the WEF on the eve of Davos 2023. He argues that if you care about
liberty, democracy and national self-determination, it's perfectly
rational to be concerned about the influence of Klaus Schwab and his
followers. Not because they are the puppeteers controlling
politicians across the West, but because they're ideas permeate the
upper echelons of the global elite. In particular, Schwab's belief
in the top-down, technocratic form of government exemplified
by the EU.
It wields no formal political power and can't make anyone do
anything. Nonetheless, since its founding in 1971, the WEF has become
an organisation which embodies supreme confidence in the imperative
of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down. In
his famous 2004 essay entitled 'Dead Souls', the political scientist
Samuel P. Huntington called this prototype 'Davos Man'.
A clever moniker that neither Schwab nor the WEF have ever succeeded
in shaking off, Davos Man was Huntington's short-hand description
of "academics, international civil servants and executives in global
companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs" who
thought alike and tended to view national loyalties and boundaries
"as residues from the past". Davos Man also looked with undisguised
disdain, Huntington suggested, upon those who weren't getting with
the programme - whatever the content of the programme happened
to be. Therein lies the deepest problem with the WEF. It's one thing
for people to come together in international settings to discuss
problems, share insights, and network. Business leaders, politicians,
and NGO-types do this all the time.
It's another thing for an outfit such as the WEF to decide that the
time has come to rearrange the world from the top-down and remake
the planet in a corporatist image. The ideal for which Schwab
is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin
to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic
ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers
of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women.
In short, it's easy to caricature the WEF and Schwab as something
akin to Ian Fleming's fictious Spectre and its criminal-mastermind
Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Yet the agenda now being pursued at settings
such as Davos is sufficiently alarming that anyone who believes in
preserving things like liberty, sovereignty, and the decentralisation
of power should be concerned.
Robert Malone has a saltier take on the WEF's current agenda on his
Substack (
https://bit.ly/3WFXQXm), particularly no. 4 on the WEF's
list of priorities: "Preparing for the next pandemic requires ending
health disparities." That's uncomfortably reminiscent of the toxic
new ideology I discussed yesterday, which combines extreme risk
aversion - to pandemics, climate change, hate speech, etc. - with
'equity', meaning a commitment to protecting 'vulnerable' groups,
e.g. ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. So the argument
for, say, keeping mask mandates in place forever would run something
like this: airborne viral diseases have a disproportionately negative
effect on marginalised people because they have less access to
healthcare, therefore governments have a moral duty to impose masks
mandates.
