The end of Davos Man?

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is wrapping up today, but in a very real sense the whole institution is wrapping up, too. The event is organized by a private entity controlled by Klaus Schwab, author of the stultifying guide to global top-down control known as The Great Reset. He convenes the world’s heads of state, central bankers, CEOs, and top status thought leaders annually, and they tell us what risks are on the horizon and how they will protect us from them. The implied social contract has been that if we obey these “masters of the universe,” they will care for and protect us.

It’s a 1 Thessalonians 5:3 kind of deal, “peace and safety” in exchange for freedom. But they make us an offer we should refuse. WEF’s prognostication skills are found wanting. A deflationary banking collapse was nowhere near the top of their concerns in 2007 before The Great Recession. The WEF did not tell us that a global pandemic was the big threat in 2019. It still wasn’t on the likely list even in January 2020, when the pandemic was already underway. Inflation did not appear on the top of their risk list until 2023, long after moms saw it on their grocery lists.

WEF’s prescience moves at the pace at which a busy CEO catches up on the past issues of The Economist that have been piling up on his desk.

And not only did they fail to foresee these various crises, but they also exacerbated them. The global healthcare elite’s lockdown strategy created a global recession. Then they turned to easy money to combat the recession that they caused from the shutdown that they imposed to deal with the pandemic that they didn’t see coming. That triggered the inflation.

But no worries. The rising price of goods shouldn’t matter because the WEF tells us (in a highly controversial video) that in the future, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.” Meat prices going up? No problem, in our WEF future “You’ll eat much less meat. It will be an occasional treat.” Oh, and the United States will no longer be the major superpower, the video tells us, as it pans to a cluster of national flags with China’s in the center.

Is it any wonder that this year’s theme for the conference was “Restoring Trust”? The fastest growing trend in global politics has been populist nationalism, a direct revolt against the agenda of the men who gather each year on Mount Davos and make grand plans for the rest of us.

The late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “Davos Man” to describe the folks who gather there this time of year. Davos Men are “cosmocrats,” made up of “academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies.” These “transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing....” Davos Man is post national and, of course, post religious. What passes for spirituality is Arianna Huffington teaching meditation classes to executives.

Perhaps it was an attempt to co-opt the global revolt that tempted Klaus Schwab to invite and personally to introduce Argentina’s new populist free-market conservative president Javier Milei. If so, it was about as foresighted as his other strategies. Milei pulled no punches. At the heart of the organization that told you that you will own nothing, he made an impassioned moral defense for private property. To the global ruling elite, he explained the appeal of socialism to “those who desire to be part of a privileged class” and attacked leaders with “a greed for power”. He declared that we “are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights” and attacked “radical feminism,” “population control,” and “bloody abortion” as strategies that socialism has employed to deal with the social crises that it creates.

When a heretofore unknown from a third world country accepts an invitation like this and feels free to speak with such boldness, we know that we are seeing a new leader for freedom emerge, but also that we are seeing the old global elite submerge. Davos isn’t cool anymore. Milei knows it, the social media satirists know it, and even Davos Man knows it. If he asks for our trust, that means he knows he has lost it. Davos Man might just have made his first accurate prediction. Christians should consider something much better, The Christian Economic Forum, a deliberate counter to WEF, the members of which know the true master of the universe and who thus know to Whom we must turn for peace and safety.