WEF Waffle
The WEF is a bizarre outfit and its projects have rightly drawn attention to the weird world of Davos. But some reaction to its rise has created an unhelpful sense of fait accompli. Resist properly...
To many, policy agendas that their advocates claimed would protect us from existential threats seem to have made people the enemy. A few do not seem to understand why anyone would question attempts to save us and the world from pathogens, Gaia’s revenge, foreign tyrants and ultimately, even ourselves. A tension between the many and the few has formed, and now the many are identified by the few, like the virus, the dictator, and environmental degradation, as the existential threat. And this act of mutual recognition marks a distinct new phase in what both regard as an existential conflict: Utopian, intransigent and remote elites versus people who are seemingly expected to own nothing but be happy but want no part of the designs for a new normal. But have the many properly identified their counterpart? Can the mess of 2022 be so easily explained, and is the explanation itself self-defeating, preventing the most from joining the many?
I have been researching the weird world of glossy, lofty academic and non-governmental organisations, think tanks and campaigns, their bizarre Utopian plans, and attempting to chart their undue influence for a long time. Put simply: I believe that the green movement and the green ideology that underpins it (which is my main interest) would not exist at all had it not been for the generosity of billionaire philanthropists. And environmentalism appears to be a mainstay (but far from all) of what has been identified as ‘globalism’: supranational agencies of all kinds, and ancillary organisations, aligned in their purpose to remake the world in their benefactors’ image. Philanthropic cash races around this nebulous organism as its blood, pumping more and more as it extends new blobby limbs through every corridor of power and public institution, aligning them to green, woke, and adjacent ideas.
So I could not be more delighted with the work of the World Economic Forum, which appears to be at the nucleus of the blob. Just as it was the Remain contingent who signalled their intransigence to voters, to convince them to put their ‘X’ next to ‘Leave…’, the WEF’s extraordinary resources have only been put towards producing what has been perhaps the biggest PR disaster in history. The ‘WEF’, ‘Klaus Schwab’ and the ‘Great Reset’ trend routinely on Twitter, with countless thousands of unfavourable tweets telling Davos man, ‘GFY’, and to stick his 3D-printed solar-powered self-driving fake-meat burger up his nudge unit. The WEF’s insipid, plinky-plonky social media videos are comment-blocked and ratioed, and only serve to epitomise the vast gulf between ordinary people and the virtues signalled by aloof, remote, self-serving and largely self-appointed elites.
They have designs for how we must “build back better”, but that slogan too has become a symbol of degenerate elites’ and atrophied political institutions’ desperate search to resurrect some connection between the public and favoured policy agendas… Windmills in the sea, advocated by Boris Johnson, urged on by his wealthy, green entourage show the total failure in microcosm. Stood under the slogan in 2020, he declared that Britain would be “the Saudi Arabia of wind”. And no sooner than he had uttered the words, energy prices doubled, doubled again, and were set to double again. Inflation rose to double digits. Deep recession looms. War, urged on in no small part by Johnson himself, now threatens to escalate, and has likely sealed a new global multipolarity.
And so, despite being grateful to the WEF for aligning so many people in criticisms of policy agendas that have gone unscrutinised for too long, I think a mistake is being made by some who think the story begins and ends with the WEF. Worse, and short of ideas on how to confront such a phantom, a counsel of despair has developed that attributes our worsening condition to an inevitable process. The billionaires’ club has us by the throat, the balls, the wallet and the mainstream media. The plan is set in motion.
But as we can see, the plan has faltered. What if the WEF is a feint… Not as such a deliberate distraction, but a distraction all the same, and one which could have taken myriad forms but for the turbulence that shaped it — a chaotic world, from which things such as the WEF are expressed merely because wealthy and powerful people do come together to protect their interests just as clouds gather at the front of weather systems, because that is what they do.
I will make two arguments, some parts of which I’ve published elsewhere (so I apologise for the self-plagiarism if you’ve seen it before). First, we must not credit the likes of the WEF with agency — the capacity to make and execute a “plan”. Second, we should not give the WEF too much attention, there are many other organisations, which arguably deserve much more of our focus.
Plans vs ideology
This first question is about conspiracies. Plans. Plots. And things of that kind. Many responses to me, especially on Twitter, inform me that what I have discovered is what they’ve always known — that it’s Agenda 21, or 30, or the Great Rest simply unfolding, as it was designed to, to control our lives. And the likes of the WEF are simply executing their agenda with no resistance. But the evidence for such a plan’s (or plans’) existence is contradictory.
Of course there is a plan… in the middle of the last century, the United Nations very quickly formed around the idea that national sovereignty must be heavily modified, if not entirely dismantled, and the nation state made subordinate what was candidly called ‘world government’. These ideas are clearly stated in its founding texts and in its machinations. Among its leading proponents in that era were Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, who having urged for the creation of the atom bomb during WWII, then argued that only science could regulate global society in the aftermath of its creation. But this was an impossible dream, given the emerging geopolitics created by the bomb. The USA and USSR could not be reconciled in that way.
In fact, the idea of ‘internationalism’ preceded WWII, the bomb, and the UN – the League of Nations – and was advanced by many, including the architect of Apartheid and founder of ecological holism, Jan Smuts. That is to say that the idea of a world political order, led by Europeans (i.e. white people), founded on seemingly scientific principles of ecology preceded Greta Thunberg’s existence by some 100 years.
The idea of technocracy was well and truly established by Technocracy Inc. in the 1930s. These ideas have gripped wealthy and powerful people throughout the following century, who saw opportunities to influence designs for social organisation in their interests. Initially, they were able to influence the UN. The UN Environment Programme, for example, was established in the 1970s by oil tycoon Maurice Strong, and supported by the Rockefeller family, among other green billionaires.
However, the UN proved to be too inflexible and slow-moving for their ambitions. The raft of weirdo outfits like the WEF/Bilderberg/Trilateral were established as parallel processes (to the UN), because their convenors believed that international governance based on the cooperation of governments of sovereign nations was clumsy and outmoded. They believed that global society should be regulated by business leaders and ‘stakeholders’ – i.e. a neo-feudalism, in which democratic governments are diminished, and serfs represented only to the extent that NGOs take an interest in their lives.
Those are the plans. But the historical detail has been lost, and the rightfulness of global institutions (including Bretton Woods institutions) was first taken for granted, and then taken as the necessary solution to every conceivable ‘problem’ with a plausibly global dimension — poverty, climate change, inequality and so on.
But of course there is no plan… Though nearly everyone can see the problem with globalists’ designs for a new world order, some have presented open, easily accessible, recorded but boring historical fact as evidence of a nefarious, secret plot. By overstating what plans are capable of, and the plotters’ abilities to assert their plots on society, a sober reading of both history and the present are obscured.
The plan is the Great Reset. Or the plan is Satan. Or the plan is to smash planes into skyscrapers and direct blame. Or the plan is to activate a modification of human bodies using nanoparticles activated by the 5G network. Or the plan is Agenda 21. These claims – and more besides – fill gaps in their authors’ historical knowledge and understanding to replace them with elaborate fantasies. They conceal an inability to explain the problem with ideologies from first principles. And the notion of a plot simply raises the question mark over the good faith of conspiracy theorists, who seem sometimes keener on promoting themselves than developing robust ideas to challenge the plot — it’s as if they need each other.
But plans do not need a “plan”. Ideology establishes the basis for institutions, and institutions take opportunities to advance themselves and their founding ideologies with them. As sure as the maxim ‘when you’ve only got a hammer’, an institution established to protect society from novel viruses will see every new pathogen as the re-emergence of Spanish flu (or worse) and will act accordingly.
And every natural disaster will seemingly highlight the urgency of global institutions required for the amelioration of global warming. But notice that greens did not need to cause a natural disaster, even if they did lie about the frequency, intensity and destructive potential of extreme weather. It is green ideology, not a plot, that drives the agenda.
The ‘plan’ is the ideology. To forget this means invariably to overstate the case. Claims that require a plot to explain their position — such as a document like Agenda 21, or Schwab’s dire prose, or nanoparticles — overreach, even if such props of crutches are used in good faith.
The questions that get neglected by a preoccupation with plots are: who the F does Bill Gates think he is? What are the competencies of global institutions? What legitimate role exists for ‘philanthropists’ in global society, and public life? Why have seemingly democratic representatives been such an open door for global projects, but at our expense? And why should we take global institutions’ (or even any institutions’) good faith for granted, and at face value?
Worse, attempting to explain that what has been ‘exposed’ is not what it seems, is prosaic or incredible, draws the ire of people who have been frankly lazy in their search for evidence and making sense of history, in otherwise well-meaning attempts to explain their sense that something is wrong. In seeking to understand the world, they may well have fallen for ideas that are no better than the WEF’s ambitions to create a dreary existence for us.
The desire for smoking-gun evidence of a plot is understandable. But even a video of Bill Gates on Epstein’s private jet, an underage girl on his knee, with a bottle of poison mislabelled ‘vaccine’ in one hand and the blueprint for 5G-enabled nanobots in the other, while explaining the whole wretched scheme to the camera, would tell us nothing. It may humiliate him, and perhaps undermine organisations that he was involved with. But others will take their place, and plots do not explain how money and power work, like clouds forming at weather fronts, and how ideologies fester like gangrene. It distracts from ideas about how to resolve the problem.
Let’s focus on ‘plans’ as ideology, not as plots. All of the plots that need be discovered, and that are required to understand the world were published by the conspirators and given full exposition in countless boring documents. There is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, such that the scales will fall from people’s eyes. To see a situation with clarity and perspective requires hard work, discrimination, self-reflection and criticism from friends and allies. There are no short cuts.
What is ideology? In their book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--And Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay describe it in its contemporary form as “a philosophy with a moral imperative”. Maybe. Others have given it a deeper explanation. Citing Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous unknown unknowns speech, Slavoj Zizek observes that Rumsfeld’s speech omits one of the four possible combinations of known and unknown: unknown knowns. And this is where Zizek locates ideology, which certainly, in the case of Rumsfeld, a moral imperative… to bomb distant countries into democracy… but not a philosophy. (Zizek goes on to expose ideology in the form of unknown knowns at work in cinema, which even if you don’t agree with his Stalinist psychoanalytical postmodernism, raise interesting questions.)
Doctrine and ideology are related, but routinely confused. Religions and some political movements have doctrine. But ideology is more nebulous. One way you can sense that you are dealing with an expression of ideology is when you are confronted by a claim that something is self-evidently true: the climate crisis; the necessity of removing the tyrant; flattening the curve. Claims of these kinds are cans of worms, and unpacking them creates a mess, the unruly unknown knowns spill out.
What I am arguing here, however, is that what projects such as the WEF want is the moral imperative that ideologies can provide, though doesn’t necessarily have any of its own. Power, then, without a doctrine as such, assembles ideology to serve itself. And the plan only unfolds by virtue of the moral imperative having the benefit of billion-dollar PR and research budgets. It is essential to confront the ideologies, of course, but it is more important to understand that the historical continuity exists behind the superficiality of the borrowed-virtue signalling. For example, ESG’s cutting edge is unimpeachable green wokery, but behind it is a blunt hyperaccumulation of capital, the same as any power grab the world has ever seen (albeit astronomically larger), but which cannot assert itself explicitly, and so most mobilise vehicles in its service. “Civil society”, bought and paid for in nearly its entirety, is just petty cash from a financial institution’s marketing budget. Billions in funding ersatz society are nothing compared to the tens of $trillions AUM of financial institutions.
Banning the WEF
New leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre has vowed that no person who has had anything to do with the WEF may be a member of his cabinet when (if) he is appointed by the Canadian voter.
The UK’s Reform Party leader, Richard Tice, has followed Poilievre’s initiative in capturing this growing sentiment.
Canada’s answer to the BBC, the CBC, immediately produced the predictable response to Poilievre, asking WEF managing director, Adrian Monck for his views (or vice versa). According to the CBC, Monck claims that “Canada should be talking about more important things than conspiracy theories targeting his organization”, and that the WEF “was being targeted by state-sponsored disinformation campaigns”. In other words, Monck’s view is that a conspiracy — state sponsored disinformation campaigns — has created a conspiracy theory. It’s an interesting conspiracy theory.
The article says, “Monck said the WEF does not prescribe policy but rather acts as a forum for exchanging ideas.” And this reflects Monck’s claims on Talk Radio a few years ago:
“We’re trying to engage people from all sides of the political dynamic” is of course a lie. The WEF engages only people drawn from political and financial elites and simpatico organisations. And this is the problem.
It may well be a statement of fact that the WEF does not prescribe policy. However, discussions about policy, at all such fora, and within domestic politics, are monotonous, and manifestly exclude people from all sides of the political dynamic except those who have the ‘right’ views. As I point out above, civil society has been all but bought outright by “philanthropy”, which has in turn aligned nearly all public conversation and global political agendas. There are no fora for anyone who thinks that global fora are opportunities for elites and that democratic power should be restored to national democracies! Why would there be?
And the WEF is not the only global "forum". there are plenty of them, such as the OECD, Aspen Institute or Chatham House. Posh rallies for people you’ve never heard of, where they share ideas in the same way that an insufficiently supervised sixth form disco might precede an outbreak of chlamydia in a small town. It's arguably only the superficial expression of a much deeper, systemic problem. There are countless global fora for the transmission & normalisation of particular ideological projects & perspectives and alignment of governments & policy. There are the other objects of conspiracy theorists concerns: the Bilderberg lot and the Trilateral Commission. And then there are much smaller outfits, such as the Club of Three, founded by the late George Weidenfeld.
The Club of Three claims to “Encourage the exchange of new ideas at the highest level on how to tackle the greatest threats and challenges of our time”. Which makes it identical to pretty much every cutout of its kind, funded by the same-old-same-old. I stumbled across it while looking into lofty British Remainoid panjandrum, Lord Adair Turner, who in his time has been chair of the ESRC, chair of the FSA and CCC, among many others. Turner sits on the Three’s Steering Group — a similar role to the one he serves at the Resolution Foundation and the spooky and also Weidenfeld-founded Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Civil Society my arse! You see, it’s nothing but a fiction, when it’s operated by such establishment figures, so close to policy agendas, so similarly to countless other organisations at national and global levels, and which is so characteristically hostile to debate.
Put at its most simple, it's much more attractive to politicians and governments to rub shoulders with the wealthy and fabulous and to “share ideas” on the global stage, in these nice, comfortable surroundings, than it is to get down to the messy business of hearing and representing ordinary people's wants and needs. And since people have no power to hold politicians to account, why would politicians feel obliged to them?
Balancing domestic political constituencies and interests is for yesteryear's politicians. Today, all political projects must have a 'global' and seemingly external dimension, and are framed as crises. Hence, economic, foreign, energy and even education policy have these traits.
The WEF is interesting only because it's the focus of the attempts by European elites to recapture this process in their own interests. Feudal relics and degenerate financiers. It wraps this tendency in ethics and glamour.
They're not all Davos. One might just be an almost invisible annual series of seminars with a few bodies from financial ministries of European governments, like the Club of Three. But the process is insidious. Gradually, interests are aligned and power is removed from democratic processes.
So I'm glad that Tice and Reform will exclude WEF types. But whereas lancing the boil is straightforward enough, I don't think it will be so easy to rid ourselves of the full festering blight.
Getting over the WEF and facing the chaos
We need to take broader stock of ‘globalism’ than is possible while there is a preoccupation with the WEF. There are the other organisations of the same kind —constellations of WEF-like organisms, with their various vehicles and instruments to serve them. There are the networks of NGOs, think tanks and fake grassroots campaigns, that are supported only by ersatz “philanthropy”.
But beyond these basic relationships, and though there would be if they could generate them, there is no great plan and no broader structure. If there were, globalism would be too brittle and would fracture. In this sense, and as I allude to above, this has been the WEF’s undoing: it has moved too fast, made itself too visible, and stated its designs too explicitly. Almost unknown six years ago outside satires of Davos man’s utter naffness, and now a victim of its own success, it is the object of mockery across the world, and looks set to be a proscribed organisation in at least one country. It has created itself as a toxic brand that rightly should contaminate all those who indulged it.
And we need to be aware that, though such networks that comprise globalism are extremely well-resourced and well-connected, they are hideously chaotic and driven as much by fantasy ideologies that explode on contact with reality as driven by the desire to extend their power.
Globalism’s attempts to coordinate strategically, to achieve political ends, such as the abolition of hydrocarbon energy and even, of course, ecological Utopia, have destroyed its agents’ own means of support: the wealthy Western economies whose governments indulge them and whose industries power them and supply them with money. Their desire for global order has encouraged a European war, and the emergence of a new multipolar geopolitical reality. Even the attempt to protect us from a virus now looks likely to have been the greatest act of self-sabotage in history. Just as the WEF’s PR been a monumental own-goal, and Eurocrats’ intransigence secured Brexit, globalism’s projects have produced more chaos and political blowback than can be contained.
The conceit of technocrats, on the shoulders of whom globalism seems to rest, is that they, and only they, supported by a constellation of billionaires and corporate philanthropic foundations, can make the world a safer place. But where is this safer world?
All going according to plan, some, both critics and advocates might say. On this view, western governments’ continued catastrophic misjudgements, from foreign policy through Net Zero, via lackdowns, are intended to destroy the economy, and to create such debt that people are amenable to the solutions that will be imposed on us: digital currency and the abolition of normal money and private property, universal basic income, vegan/insectivorous diets, and whatever else the Great Reset shopping list included.
But this would make the plan’s success indistinguishable from its failure. Furthermore, it would put too much of many government’s failures at the feet of the WEF, when we can see other agencies being much more implicated.
For example, elsewhere, I have pointed out the role of two green billionaires in founding and funding organisations that lobby investors, financial institutions and governments and central banks, to align them, formally and culturally to the green agenda. Mike Bloomberg, through his apparently close personal relationships with then governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney was appointed to chair the G20’s Financial Stability Board (FSB) Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosure (TCFD). And Christopher Hohn is one of a small number of billionaires, including Bloomberg, who fund virtually the entire green movement.
Through their actions, capital investment in hydrocarbon energy has been restricted, leading to the supply crisis. Carney’s successor at the BoE, Andrew Bailey, tried to explain away the energy shock as the unforeseeable consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But that is a lie. There is no way he could have been ignorant of the role of the BoE in restricting capital, nor in the signals of a looming supply crisis that were evident long before. How can I know it’s a lie? Because I knew, because energy traders told me. And there’s no way that we can know something of that kind that the likes of Bailey did not know.
What if governments and technocrats simply really are that stupid.
Bailey and the Bank of England aren’t being held to account because nobody is able to hold them to account. Or, at least, not able to hold them to account without causing grave embarrassment to current and former governments, all of Parliament, and beyond.
This is the reality of power and ideology in ‘globalism’. They're not constituted in particular forms, or apparatus, but are nebulous. Blobs. Facing no pressure to conform to reality, the ideologies and institutions that seemingly represent the expression of the plan roll out chaotically, like the tumbling, towering cumulonimbus at the precipice of a storm front.
We need to be aware of the possibility of an ideology developing out of the attempt to understand how things have developed. We should not try to make shapes out of this chaos, because such structures may not exist, and the forces that drive them may not work in the way that we imagine them to work. And this ideology may itself encourage defeatism.
Over on his substack, Michael Shellenberger rightly argues that the WEF and its Great Reset are real, and have visited real harm on people. At first glance, the title might seem to contradict what I say above. But on the contrary, Mike shows how the ideas shared by elites populating the likes of the WEF, IMF, World Bank, UN and governments, now orthodoxy, damage real people’s lives, yet withdraw from responsibility when the chaos they inflict on people is revealed. It is shown not presupposed, that the thinking (such as it is) epitomised by the WEF’s Great Reset ia shared across many global organisations with actual power and with governments, to influence their actions against their countries’ population’s interests. In other words, the WEF and the Great Reset are not the explanation.
The point I am making is not that organisations such as the IMF and UN have no power and the likes of the WEF have no influence. That would be absurd. But the claim that the WEF has influence is a trivial truism: only people with power are invited to its silly spectacles. And only people who believe that the alignment of civil society, business, and governance to “shared” “values” are likely to attend. More careful research shows *how* these organisations form, how orthodoxies and groupthink develop, how money and power elevate and advance agendas. The plans are all but arbitrary, also almost trivial truisms; the conspiracy is in the act of conspiring, not the content of the plot. If not the WEF, then some other organisation. If not the Great Reset some other half-baked scheme. If not green ideology, then some other weirdness.
Let’s not be content with explanations that stop at the WEF/Great Reset, or with politicians that promise to exclude just this one organisation’s self-serving membership. A full audit is required of all global institutions, including the UN. And so is a full audit of their populations’ reach inside domestic agencies and authorities — financial ministries and central banks above all. We need to show how civil society organisations, which no doubt depended on philanthropy have been simply bought, sometimes off-the-shelf, by private interests. We need to show how politicians deferred to, and also funded these organisations, often with no questions asked about the provenance of their research or the interests they represented. And we need to share an understanding how ideology worked, at each level of organisation and interactions between them, to sanitise the degeneration of democratic politics, into something that stinks like nothing that has gone before it.
I’ll be discussing the Great Reset and more at this event…
Terrific work Ben and a devastating analysis that raises some fantastic questions. Forensic analysis is required on the unofficial organisations heavily influencing and controlling our lives. There is no end to the misery these people can inflict on us. I do believe some think they are trying to help but those who are most influential are surely in this for power and control. Historic (visible) aristoracracies have been replaced by modern day oligarchs hiding in the shadows. I'm afraid I have very little confidence that anything will change - in Sept last year I was hopeful that physics would win over 'green feelings' because any rational debate has been completely villified or cancelled all together. But the Ukraine war is being used as a very convenient excuse. I happen to believe that most MPs know that this is bunkum but like you say they dare not admit it and instead prefer the path of (immediate) least resistance. If they do actually believe it, well, we're doomed. Sri Lanka is a good example of the road we are heading down and it looks bloody awful (to me).
Keep up the great work, we need people like you.
Fascinating. Thanks for laying this all out.