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On the Vision of the World Economic Forum
I think the WEF [World Economic Forum] envisions a world where most people “have everything they need” in the same way that animals in a zoo have “everything they need”. Everything except freedom.
— Jonathan Fortier, e-mail to Don Boudreaux and Todd Zywicki. From Don Boudreaux, “Cafe Hayek” (website: www.CafeHayek.com, 2023-01-17)
As for me, I partially agree and partially disagree.
I accept the analogy of the vision of the WEF as a zoo, and I too reject that vision.
But I also reject the vision of the liberal unbeliever.
He is determined to attend not the banquet of the zookeeper, but the banquet of freedom, where he will delight in what the world serves him. But at the end of that banquet is death, and what man discovers as he finally faces death is that what his heart longs for is life. The promise of freedom is like the promise of green grass to a sheep. The grass soon withers and dies, and the sheep’s body withers and dies with it.
I don’t accept the implicit assumption, “Freedom is everything people need”. What David needs is everything that the other Jews needed, which is what other men need: to delight in God, who never fails. Green pastures and still waters that last forever. His banquet satisfies every human longing and it has no end.
Published in General
I had a dream once that I was at a banquet table as you describe. It had a white cloth and it was a lavish setting. However, there was a middle-aged man in a nice suit sitting next to me and didn’t speak. I could sense he was very evil. It was a weird dream but I get what you are saying. Freedom without morality, a counter-balance, leads to slavery in the end.
Mark, I agree with your conclusion.
I don’t see any reason to accept the analogy that people under a government are like animals in a zoo. This seems like rather transparently juvenile rhetoric in the service of anarchism.
Based on what little I know about them, I don’t much like the plans of the WEF. But I don’t think that government is a necessarily bad thing. It can be a good thing. It depends on whether it is a good or bad government.
Thanks, Jerry.
Boudreaux and Fortier strongly agree with all three of your statements about government.
Do you agree with their statement about the kind of government that the WEF envisions?
Thanks for the post.
A lot more people need to understand what the WEF is about and how it thteatens our very existence.
I don’t know. I’m not sure what kind of government the WEF envisions. I certainly disagree with their zoo analogy, and disagree with their apparent emphasis on freedom as the only relevant goal, though this is an implication from a very short quote, not something that they explain in any detail in that quote.
What does the WEF want to do? My guess is that it’s the typical moderate Leftist stuff about sustainability and climate change, which generally seems to be about getting rid of fossil fuels. I don’t much like that. It may also extend to the fertilizer bans or limitations, like we saw recently in Sri Lanka, and which sounds like a bad idea to me.
You haven’t read any of the WEF’s web site? And you haven’t read the UN’s 2030 agenda, published on the UN’s own website — it matches the WEF’s. This is NOT typical leftie stuff. This stuff has been out there for years now. Have you even listened to Yuval Harari’s plans and prognostications? Are you not aware of the WEF conferences, attended by billionaires, the world’s richest men?
Why don’t you investigate the WEF? You may have to use the wayback machine because I read that the WEF is deleting a lot for it’s lectures from its website.
Do a search result for Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab’s favored philosopher.
There’s no reason to say, “I don’t know.’
Yeah. Like Jerry!
:-)
Jerry, as Rose Castorini might have said if this were the movie “Moonstruck”…
What you don’t know about the WEF is a lot!
That is not the sort of “argument” that I would seriously make, of course. I just don’t want to look up links and quotes from Klaus Schwab and his top aide right now, so I am taking the easy way out that I learned from the _____s: just insult the other guy!
Hoo boy. I pass, for now.
Who are you saying has insulted the other guy? I don’t see that. What are you talking about?
Dear Lord, of course I haven’t read all of their drivel.
I just went to the WEF site. The few top-line pages that I read were typical Leftist/Wokeist drivel about sustainability, diversity and inclusion, climate, and so on. There’s link after link, and I imagine that they have a whole small library of so-called Progressive foolishness available online.
As if I don’t have better things to do.
I’m vaguely familiar with Harari, a perverted sodomite Jew who seems to want to get beyond humanity somehow. I think he wants to be like that Lobot guy on Lando Calrissian’s cloud city.
You say it’s not typical Leftist idiocy, but it looks to me like typical Leftist idiocy. I have better things to do than to read it, or to obsess about it. I do agree that the WEF are bad guys with bad ideas.
I was saying that it was I who had (jokingly) insulted Jerry, when I said, What you don’t know about the WEF is a lot!
I didn’t want him to think that I make irrational arguments like that seriously.
Well, I guess you threw in a modern Star Wars reference or something — but this is real. You and I see progressivism differently or else you haven’t read the WEF and associated manifestos. Thats okay, but it explains why you said, “I don’t know”.
You need to work on your insults, my friend. I did not recognize it.
They say that every observation is both an insult and a praise, until one has offended.
The WEF is ideologically a combination of eugenics, Malthusian doctrine, wokeism and millenarianism. They matter profoundly because they are the elites of every western country, most of Asia and what African and Latin American leaders and elites aspire to. They are the apocalypse in the making.
There’s nothing to the WEF. The AP, Time and Fortune and CBS all say the WEF is prey to “bizzare claims” that they want to rule the world for their own benefit and make us eat bugs.
https://t.co/DKUj5tIMo0
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/world-economic-forum-begins-in-davos/
What is bizarre is these “news organizations” do not report on how WEF destroyed the Sri Lanka agricultural sector
In the end, it was Sri Lankan politicians. Canadian politicians are doing the same and because Canada starts out richer than Sri Lanka, it will take them longer to destroy Canada. Same for the Netherlands.
What no one seems to grasp is that the ideas at WEF are intended to destroy a large portion of humanity. The same as Mao’s agricultural policies that starved tens of millions of Chinese. Except that those deaths may have been unintended in Mao’s case (though never mourned, as humans are of no concern for those with power). With the Davis crowd the impoverishment and destruction of a large segment of humanity is intended to save the earth and its resources for themselves. They seek to manage us like the Elk herd of the Yellowstone. COVID was a poorly executed attempt at that culling, and offered the opportunity to practice their totalitarian methods.They are very committed Eugenicists and Malthusians. They celebrate, aid, and abet the war in Ukraine for the culling it does for the Ukrainian (and Russian) populations and the harm it does to populations around the world. Theirs is a zero sum game and they seek to possess the entire sum. They are engineering massive crimes against humanity.
As Joe Biden would say: I’m not joking.
Coincidentally, my wife just said, No, we’re going to have to eat crickets because they are putting mRNA into livestock (questions about what mRNA and why livestock and for what purpose aside). And I said, what makes you think their crickets are not loaded with mRNA? The point is they don’t want to keep livestock healthy, and they don’t want to cure us of anything. If they want to kill us they will just poison the crickets.
And Schwab’s proposed world-wide computer shutdown crisis will be easier and quicker, if messier, than mRNA, anyway.
The WEF is selling a vision which relies on implausible technology and requires deep faith in the government involved. Forgive me if I am skeptical of their capabilities. What’s more likely is that they will enact the restrictions and never deliver the benefits. Add on the whole attitude of providing for everyone’s needs is crazy and has never worked outside of tiny tight-knit groups. Why do adults need to have everything provided for them? Where’s the evidence that the WEF actually knows more than we do?
What we’ll have is the WEF Orphanage, where we get cared for by the oh-so-benevolent state.
I don’t believe they are actively wanting to kill people, but they look at population control like it is some kind of desperate struggle that will cause collateral damage.
I think we need to work toward a conservative futurism to counter this vision.
You may not be interested in the WEF, but the WEF is interested in you.
Constitutional republic, maybe?
Sometimes the oldest futurisms are the best futurisms.