The World Economic Word salad
The insulting promise of competence
I got a perfect comment to my last post, let me quote it here in full:
“I’m also subscribed to their [the WEF’s] emails and skimming them. I am reminded of too many management off-sites and consultant gab fests. Someone half-read an already inane HBR article and now you’re wasting a full day learning about the powers of clever acronym #24365.
It’s all such a vapid morass that I can’t even begin to take it seriously.
The thing is, a large number of participants in those meetings not only took the nonsense seriously but were positively elated to be there, felt genuinely enlightened and proceed to implement clever acronym #24365 with great vigour and to even greater detriment to the organization.”
I lived in that Dilbert world as well and can attest to it, but I also lived in a communist country where we had to take a whole lot of nonsense seriously.
The World economic Forum Great reset wheel (pictured above) can be found on some pages of the site, but the organization seems to be so enamored with the concept that it has been replaced by a very dominant whole section called: Strategic Intelligence. As if the original idea was not enough, they had to multiply it by a few hundred.
As of this writing, there are 327 of these charts on the strategic intelligence section of the site.
Every single one of them is a vomit of undigested clichés, buzzwords and virtue signaling.
No linguistic coherence, logical structure, not a single proper problem formulation or well-articulated question.
It is embarrassingly dilettante. The kind of ‘thoughts’ the Dilbert BOSS is throwing around to impress his subordinates who in turn are expected to contort and squeeze some meaning into them.
I encourage you to play with the wheel charts. Go on the site, select a subject, then start clicking around. Click the buttons on the inner circle will show the connections, while the buttons on the outer circle will take you to a new page with that subject in the center. Great concept, utterly clueless content.
It reminds me to the association games I played as a teenager. It’s a great party game, but it should never be taken seriously.
When we are talking about “Advanced energy solutions”, one of the aspects is sustainable aviation fuel, which is connected to energy transition, climate crisis, mobility, the future of consumption, innovation, chemicals and advanced materials, travel and tourism, Aerospace and aviation and the net-zero transition.
Or look at Green hydrogen, which is connected to science, geopolitics, finance and superconductivity among others. It is just embarrassingly stupid.
Or nuclear energy, that is connected to mobility and to media, entertainment and Sport. Colossal nonsense.
Energy storage to batteries and electricity (to start with) WOW!!!
One must wonder how did they figure that one out.
We could, of course, ask questions about the actual meaning of every expression and their connections, but it would be pointless. The answer will be even worse than the diagram.
We could, of course, contort some sense and logic into these connections, but that would not make them sensible or logical. It would be like the courtiers praising the elegance of the emperor’s new cloth.
Andersen’s fairy tale was not just about gullibility, conformity and the innocence of a child’s perception, but also about the daring con of the tailors, who got rich on it. Everything about the World Economic Forum is just a giant con, based on the concept I exposed in:
The point I made is that Harari is by far the most successful popularizer of post-modernist relativism, the idea that narratives define our reality, not the other way around.
If and when you look at the charts of Strategic Intelligence, anything you see on them is defined by the Humpy Dumpty principle:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
It is useless to ask what they mean, because in the end, they all mean the same thing: the power to decide what they mean.
It is never about the particular subject but about the WEF’s desire to control it.
The non-specificity is a feature, not a bug. The site is designed not to inform, but to confuse, and to dazzle you into acceptance and compliance. All of these pages demonstrate utter cluelessness.
They have no idea what they want beyond the obvious – the power to control every single bit of it..
There are, of course, common elements on these charts. The one that appears almost everywhere is ‘Global Governance’ or some variation of the idea, like Agile governance, Internet governance, corporate governance, etc.
The message that the World Economic Forum is trying to convey to the public is this:
The World is a complex and dangerous place. No country can fully control its problems. We need a central governing authority with the brightest minds of humanity to take care of it for us.
No individual can fully understand its complexity. We need a global team of experts to make sense of it.
Allowing nation states, rouge businesses, populist leaders and selfish individuals to act on their own endangers the rest of us. We need a central authority to keep us all safe.
We, (the people in this room), the Young Global Leaders, the experts and contributors of the World Economic Forum have the intellectual and moral superiority to define and control science, AI, health, the economy, geopolitics, the environment and whatever else we can think of. Just explore our Strategic Intelligence pages to see what else.
Our superior morality ensures that we will selflessly labor in your interest, not ours.
You will own nothing, and you will be happy. When we are a little secretive about our business, it is only to protect you. Full transparency would just confuse you.
The whole organization is steeped in postmodernist relativism and woke virtue signaling.
In the middle of writing the sentence above, I stopped. I cannot be this mean, I said to myself.
They must be doing something positive. They have conferences and panel discussions; they publish whitepapers. They are trying to behave like a humanitarian think tank. There must be something! What I found was worse than my lowest expectations.
Strategic Intelligence with its magic wheels of remixable word salad is what I looked at above.
On the Agenda is a set of articles and white papers from various authors. As of today, there are 50,865 articles on it. The quality is varied, but anything I looked at is nauseatingly woke. They cannot all be bad but my sampling was not encouraging.
Events - The events are dull and boring. They stink either of woke anxiety or sweaty, cheap salesmanship.
In the end, I was left with only negative feelings. The World Economic Forum behaves exactly the same way as any other ideological, authoritarian movement did in the twentieth century.
With delusional righteousness and an unquenchable thirst for power.
Most critics of the WEF picture it as some dark power with the real movers behind it in the shadows.
Many see evil intent driving us toward the complete enslavement of the global population.
It is all very ominous and very possible. Still, I believe that the real danger is not the totalitarian intent but the dilettante woke stupidity that it is built upon.
The arrogant, totalitarian delusions of the perpetrators and the cowardly, complacent stupidity of its subjects.
The virtue signaling herd mentality that is so readily buy into it.
I have a hard time to see the WEF as a threat to civilization. What I see is so pathetic, that it is difficult to take it seriously.
On the other hand, if I met Lenin and Trotsky in the Zurich train station where they got on the train to Petrograd in 1917, I would have thought the same about them……
The Schwab is naked. Can anybody else see that? Let me know in the comments.
Further reading
Worthwhile reading
I collected a pile of references and examples to expose the WEF, but removed most as I would like YOU to look around on the site yourself. These are, again, the important starting points to the site:
Now is the time for a 'great reset' of capitalism
Strategic Intelligence (weforum.org)
On the Agenda
Events
As I was writing this post today,
posted her excellent piece on the WEF.She is a little more sanguine than I, with my low-key, contemptuous bitterness.
I too, think that the WEF has true executive villians but its myriad of dilitantes are bimbos. Bimbos are easily beguiled and swindled, they'll take any shiny lure. The same dilitantes occupy our "elected governments" because the voters are themselves, in the majority, bimbos. The power of the WEF is in the NGOs, think tanks, lobbiests, corporatists, and associated rent seeking psychopaths that use the bedazzled bimbo consensus as the basis of untestable mandates funded by stolen and counterfeited fiat. The global initiatives of WEF watermellons are much like DoD projects, the object is never to win a war or save the planet, but only to pursuade the administrative state to approve the next mutally expansive phase of every boondoggle.
If you were to fashion that WEF mad libs prompt assortment into a drinking game you could wipe out the human race without firing a shot.