Well, it’s WEF time at Davos and all the travelers that fly “private” are assembling in the Swiss Alps up at Magic Mountain or Zauberberg in the original German. As are their playmates.
Steve Sailer links to an interesting take on these gatherings of the notable, “Ethnogenesis in Davos” by a Romanian, Alexandru Georgescu.
And it lets me think about: what do these chappies like Klaus Schwab and George Soros really want? Not the mention the notables that come to the publicized World Economic Forum and the secret Bilderberg Group.
The answer is obvious, if you think just a moment. They want to be “influential,” not just “notable.”
Wouldn’t you?
I mean, you’re a CEO, or a prominent government official, or a noted intellectual. Don’t you deserve a bit of recognition in addition to your multi-million dollar emoluments?
As for me, I really don’t. My thing is to think of things and write about them, and transmit the ideas into the aether. Does anyone read my stuff? Does anyone care? Who knows?
The fact is that the ideas put about by Klaus Schwab and by George Soros are derivative and anodyne. Oh wow! Build Back Better. ESG. “Tackle” climate change. Elect prosecutors that don’t prosecute anyone except right-wing racist-sexist-homophobe armed insurrectionists.
None of their ideas are going to change the world. They are just fashionable nostrums that appeal to the Great and the Good.
And they entrench the current ruling class.
Yes, but Change!
Sorry, Charlie. Change doesn’t work like that. It is almost never produced by the Great and the Good, almost never a product of politics.
What these ideas serve is the need of the Great and the Good to matter. What’s the point of being Great and Good and influential and notable if there is nothing to do, nothing that is going to get your name up in lights?
So the Great and the Good must make it up.
It’s the difference between John D. Rockefeller the store clerk that one day had an idea about the barrels of oil in back of the store and John D. Rockefeller who retired at age 50 to devote himself to charitable works. Doing good is good, and the Rockefeller Foundation did a lot of good, including eradicating Hookworm in the South. But building an industry to completely transform the exploration and distribution of illuminating oil broke the mold and was just in time to power Karl Benz’s cars and the Wright Brothers’ aeroplanes.
It’s the difference between adopted kid of a Coastguard mechanic Steve Jobs coming up with the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone, and the Widow Jobs giving money to the Great and the Good at The Atlantic.
The problem is, as George Gilder points out in Power and Knowledge, that just managing things and “tackling” things, is merely a slow descent into meaninglessness. The world runs down, slowly but surely, unless some punk comes up with a good idea that changes everything. Corporations get managers to keep things going, to direct traffic. After the heavy lifting has been done.
The problem is that corporate managers and notables and influencers can do a lot of damage doing the same-old-same-old before their stupidity becomes manifest. People defer to the Great and the Good. Until after it’s too late.
And really, if the Great and the Good are so important and influential and good at “tackling” things, how come we have the Putin problem and the Xi problem?