By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Why can’t our leaders imagine anything other than a
future of privation and control?
Listen, just about everyone seems to have fallen for one
conspiracy theory or another. Americans regularly confess as much to pollsters.
In 2018, 66 percent of Democrats polled by YouGov said they found it believable that Russia tampered
with 2016 vote tallies to get Trump elected. In 2022, YouGov did polls of Republicans, and only 22 percent said that Joe Biden’s election was
legitimate.
Oddly, these disquieting poll results are themselves a
kind of emergent conspiracy. Here’s my theory. Without any coordination, the
respondents to these polls use the advantage of anonymity to say they believe
the worst of their partisan enemies. By expressing their partisan animosity
this way, they end up feeding it from the other side. These partisan
respondents accidentally create disinformation about themselves, namely that
they are nuts who can’t be reasoned with any longer, only defeated. In this
way, individuals acting rationally end up producing a larger irrationality.
And this brings me to the gathering of many heads of
state, corporate CEOs, and other elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF)
being held once again in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum is a
perennial subject for conspiracy theorists and QAnon people, having long since
eclipsed the Trilateral Commission, the Bildeberg Group, and Bohemian Grove.
The 2020 confab at Davos was billed as “The Great Reset” and promoted the ideas
of German industrialist Klaus Schwab for rebuilding society and the economy
after the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s from the creepy WEF promotional videos making “8 Predictions For the World in 2030” that
the menacing phrase, You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy, emerged.
The other predictions were that there would be new
climate taxes, and you will get 3D printed organs rather than organ donations,
migrants will be welcomed, and you probably won’t be eating much meat. The word
“reset” started making its way into speeches by Joe Biden, Canadian prime minister
Justin Trudeau, and New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern. You’ve seen
resistance to the way of life depicted by the Great Reset whenever some young
conservative says, “I will not live in a pod. I will not eat the bugs.”
Davos is an invaluable networking opportunity for its
participants. It allows CEOs a nice chance to lobby the U.S. government for
help and warn the Irish prime minister about raising taxes all over the same
lunch. But Schwab’s obsessions with global political cooperation, environmentalism,
and “the fourth industrial revolution” — his idea that the next great leap in
capitalist productivity will come from integrating technology with the human
person itself — guarantees that the presentations will be a mix of utopian
globalism that somehow combine visions of global austerity (to reduce carbon)
with nightmares about a handful of corporate and political leaders having
direct access to your amygdala.
Or here’s the president of one of the largest Chinese
multinationals, imagining a future in which all
your movements, and everything you eat, are tracked in order to give you a
score on how bad your life is for the planet.
And here’s the CEO of Microsoft, talking about how software
developers are getting assistance from artificial intelligence as they write
their code. So perhaps all white-collar jobs, or all humans, will soon have
a “copilot for every cognitive task.”
One would think that a technology-powered future with 3D
printing would finally increase the productivity of great artisans and
craftsmen, which has remained stagnant for centuries and become so prohibitive
that these arts and trades are being lost to the prefab altogether. Such a
breakthrough would allow the physical environment to be rebuilt in the most
glorious Georgian, Tudor, or Spanish Colonial styles, but available to the
masses. Farms and pastures could practically run themselves, making food
better, making it cheaply, and delivering it fresh. The greatest educators
would run classes for all those who wanted to take them. And new technological
breakthroughs would clean up the atmosphere.
But that’s not what they imagine at all. For the
Davoisie, the future is your guts wirelessly reporting you truant and then a
text message buzzing on every device in the house, warning your pets to exit
the room while it is flooded with gas to sedate you into compliance with
Pfizer. Afterwards a Chinese multinational informs you that the gas-flooding
and Pfizer SWAT-team incident have brought about serious penalties to your
carbon score, thereby deferring your long-awaited meat ration by several more
years. As a help in the future, Microsoft’s cognitive copilot will be taking
over even more duties and tasks previously assigned to you.
It is actually a crisis for our global elites that every
idea they have for solving problems involves subtracting more of our humanity
and freedom from human civilization. The only vision they have of the future is
of a population drugged, fed on fake food, entertained by phones strapped to
their faces, and controlled by machines. They see our unhappy reaction to this,
and their imagination only comes up with more elaborate gags for us, and dreams
of unsolvable mazes to drop us in.
These ideas seem, almost word for word, like the
hackneyed lines in a first draft of a dystopian movie, the words stuffed into
the mouths of characters to identify them as the supervillains in the plot
before James Bond, or Jason Bourne, or Ethan Hunt shows up to impale them on
their expensive flatware.
And I mean that quite seriously. Like YouGov’s poll
respondents, the Davos elite are presenting themselves as incurable villains.
People who talk this way are almost begging for red-blooded men to rise up in
anger to depose them violently. Honestly. It feels like a dare. I worry that my
own hidden social credit score is now going to be severely penalized for even
noticing that these people are saying such crazy things that the narrative propulsion
of the story they are putting themselves in ends only with their repentance and
conversion, or their enjoyable demise.
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