Davos Man And The Climate Change Folly, Part 1

It’s that time of year. The town of Davos Switzerland is once more surrounded by a ring of  Gulfstream jets, from which some 2,658 corporate executives and wanna be bigwigs from the world of media, politics and international do-goodism have disembarked.

These include the CEOs of Amazon, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Pfizer, Moderna and countless more, the President of the European Commission, the IMF’s Managing Director, the secretary general of NATO, the chiefs of the FBI and MI6 and the publisher of The New York Times, among others. In short, the rulers of the modern world.

We don’t favor tinfoil hats, of course, but it still can’t be gainsaid: This is hands down the most malefic jamboree on the planet and the event’s infamous host — founder and chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab–is one of the great villains of our times.

Yet not because he and his collaborators are surreptitiously conducting some grand conspiracy to eliminate popular democracy and install the rule of a tiny elite drawn from the privileged and wealthy precincts of the world. To the contrary, the trouble with Davos is the open-air propagation of a stultifying and frequently malign groupthink-–one which then radiates to the movers and shakers all around the planet.

As the astute writer Walter Kirn observed,

What strikes me most about the WEF is how little disagreement there is. The largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees don’t argue. They don’t debate. All points seem smugly settled. It’s an ego orgy, a great self-satisfied mutual grope.

Nor do we need rely on just critics with their nose pressed hard up against the glass like Mr. Kirn for that conclusion. Here’s what Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, the most hard-core of woke establishmentarians, recently said,

  “…this echo chamber we live in here in Davos where everybody’s basically repeating back to each other what they’ve heard from the last person. Let’s be honest.”

Thus, within this temporary village of the elite camped in the Swiss Alps there is a consensus that;

• NATO’s proxy war against Russia is righteous and necessary;

• that the Climate Crisis has become acute, justifying draconian restrictions on fossil fuel use and energy-intensive lifestyles (except for private jets);

• that global institutions like the WHO, WTO, the IMF, World Bank, G-20, EU, the International Criminal Court etc., are the hope of mankind and therefore need to be drastically upgraded;

• that Keynesian central banks are an indispensable cog in the great wheel of global commerce;

• that the Welfare State is the most benign of institutions, representing the highest level of civilization and social enlightenment;

• that society is encumbered with legacy ills relating to race, gender and economic status which must be aggressively attacked and remediated by the legal arms and processes of the state;

• that the great global corporations and governments are natural allies and must systematically cooperate in pursuit of higher social goals;

• that populism, racism, sexism, homophobia and similar base sentiments are rampant among the hoi piloi and must be superseded by the enlightened sensibilities of the educated elites;

• and that society’s communications arteries have become clogged with misinformation, disinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories that needs be countered with content moderation, censorship and cancellation of offensive thought and opinion.

Needless to say, we take exception to the entire catechism of Davos Man. Deep in its interior there lurks two propositions which are flat-out wrong and insuperably dangerous. To wit, that politics is far more important than commerce in the conduct of mankind’s affairs; and that local democracy and even nation-states must give way to supranational governance on the world stage.

We strenuously dispute both propositions.

In the first place, peaceful commerce is what gives rise to societal prosperity and scope for individual fulfillment, not the machinations of the state and the political struggles to which it gives rise. That is to say, the more that societal life becomes enmeshed in the maw of politicization, the more that capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty are imperiled, and the more economic and social life becomes a zero sum game of strife and conflict in the battle to control state power and pelf.