Optimism is the only sane response to Davos

This article appeared in TCW under the original heading Optimism is the only sane response to Davos on 24th May 2022. I wrote this piece primarily to annoy the parasite class (they call themselves elite but none of that here). Their hubris, their pride and their vanity will be their undoing. One happy result of this piece was an invite to appear on the very lovely Julie Ponesse’s podcast link below, the second half hour really worked out I think, it was good to get a Mark Strand quote in.

‘Shared understanding is particularly critical if we are to shape a collective future that reflects common objectives and values’ ~ Klaus Schwab.

‘there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know’. ~ Donald Rumsfeld 

‘The real battle is not left v’s right but command and control technocrats v’s adapt to survive emergents’ 

I don’t worry about the WEF achieving their stated goals for 2030 and you shouldn’t either. If history rhymes, it positively sings with with the failure of such grandiose projects. The history books are littered with the corpses of centralised top-down ideas. The reason why we are not taking enough about the impossibility of Schwab’s Great Leap Forward is because the opposition are guilty of the same failure of basic understanding. The opposition is making the flawed assumption that this project is doable.  In fact, the future is resistant to shaping. What we should all be preparing for us the failure of the WEF’s program. This should be a cause of profound optimism. Put simply the universe works against centralised top-down systemisation. ‘They’ are swimming against the teleological tide of creation - an impenetrable future, the inevitability of the new, while we are surfing the wave of ontological emergence with decentralisation as the key to developing solutions via free and open debate.

“Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” - man plans and God laughs is an old Yiddish proverb. Well, she must be positively ROFL at the collection of billionaires and world leaders gathered in a fake village in Switzerland busily stitching together their own petards. 

As David says in Psalm 59:8 "But you, O Lord, shall laugh at them: You shall have all the nations in derision." Derision and ridicule are the correct responses here not abject panic. They are not going to succeed, Iron Mike got it right when he said ‘everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face’. For the Conservatives amongst you Harold MacMillan when asked what had been the greatest influence on his administration when he was Prime Minister replied ‘Events, dear boy, events’.

Schwab and his collection of command and control technocrats have taken the ideas of Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot and whoever wrote WeWork’s business plan and dressed them in new clothes. These threadbare robes are camouflaged with words like ‘Stewardship’ which actually means the absence of democracy. ‘Sustainability ’ roughly translated as ‘you eat bugs while we flambé the Wagu’. ‘Inclusivity’ which is a big club and you ain’t in it. ‘Resilience’ is what children need to have to protect adults and ‘Equity’ which redistributes assets to billionaires and associated parasites…

‘Everything a lie’ as Terrance Malick said (ironically via the establishment apparatchik Sean Penn) in the Thin Red Line. 1:14 . Same flawed ideology different era.

Every plan falls apart when you pull on its assumptions The Great Reset sits on the implicit assumption that everything in nature can be known, ordered and controlled via technology. Some twisted fantasy they call artificial intelligence. A general theory that they claim applies to everyone and everything everywhere. Globalism from above is just another in a long line of narrative fantasies stretching all the way back through the failed ideologies of the last century - Communism, Fascism, religious fundamentalism and so on. 

Our vital objective should be to avoid the fate of the victims of these failures. Anger is certainly a rational response to this prospect. I view it as a transition emotion. Get angry then get with the repudiation. Get with the presentation and promotion of decentralised, ground up, emergent philosophies. Get with the optimism. We are the right side of history; they are on the precipice.

In the real world it’s what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. The unknown unknowns to quote Mr Rumsfeld. However,Donald missed another crucial category - unknown knowns, those things we think we know that just aren’t true. Hubris defines Davos man, convinced by his own righteousness, wedded to his view of the world as closed and knowable. The technocrat who only sees the world as the ratio of this thing he knows to that thing he knows will inevitably be destroyed by infinite possibility.

Technology has created the illusion that the world is comprised of bits put together, however, to quote Iain McGilchrist from The Master and his Emissary ‘things are unique, whole, and indivisible not just instances of a type, substitutable by something else, and mechanically put together from bits. Each thing is precisely itself and not another thing, as Wittgenstein was fond of observing’. The Great Reset will be destroyed by a failure to see that the aggregate of these individual units does not add up to the whole. Technology has deluded the Davos drone into believing he has a tool of the gods. A hubris as old as man. Fortunately, the world interacts to create an unseen and unpredictable future which no amount of Schwabist shaping can control. The knowledge of the position of every molecule in the universe is not going to help you even if you could devise it. Centralisation is an inexorable path towards a single point of failure. The idea that there is one path irrespective of context is like a vortex which draws participants to an unseen edge. The reaction to failure is not to remake the system as they claim but to prescribe, with fateful predictably, more of the same - and the same solution is always a deluded attempt to hold the future to account.

So, we shouldn’t lie wake at night worrying about the inevitable success of the Great Reset rather we should concern ourselves with its failure and what we can do to adapt, survive and thrive in its inevitable demise. We should deride all the proponents of top-down theories. We should ridicule those afflicted with the delusion of control. We should calmly and patiently present ground up, emergent, decentralised adaptations to the challenges of our times. Most of all recognise that optimism is the only sane response to this crazy world. Because out of optimism arose everything we hold and holds us dear.