Has there ever been a “meeting that should have been an email” so glaring as Davos? Each year, the world’s masters of politics and finance ride carbon-spewing jets to the World Economic Forum in a lavish Swiss resort town bristling with armed guards, where they opine somberly about solving poverty and climate change. The very act of attendance exposes all the subsequent dialogue as hypocrisy. The event serves primarily as a rare point of unity for political right and left wings, both of whom agree that everyone there should be in jail. If all of these professional decision-makers were really good at decision-making, they would replace the whole farce with an annual quick chat. “So then, we’ll carry on with global capitalism for another year. Agree? Right. Cheerio”.
Davos and similar conclaves can only be understood as performances. They are the stage upon which the Masters of the Universe act out the dramatic narrative of their own lives. They are exercises in mutual self-affirmation: we’re here, and we are important. What good is a powerful position without a rapt audience to listen to one’s pronouncements? Anyone can be rich, but only a select few can be influencers.
It is this intoxicating allure of performative influence that lends Davos its underlying absurdity. There is nothing very remarkable about officials who control the world getting together in private to make self-serving decisions; they do that all the time. That’s the job. The fatal flaw of the Davos crowd is that they are not satisfied simply with being in control of everything. They also want to be good, or at least to give the public impression of being good. Thus the typical CEO and presidential interviews and panels of economic and geopolitical predictions – the real things – are leavened with piles of other cultural and do-gooder content meant to convey the idea that at the center this crowd of the world’s most cut-throat plutocrats and cold-blooded status-seekers lies a heart of gold.
Yes, they are here to dominate all aspects of your life, but they are doing so with the best interests of humanity in mind. Trust them! Would people who didn’t genuinely care about morality sit through a panel entitled “Profit and Purpose: Accelerating the Equity of Opportunity?” Checkmate, Marxists! The word “equity” is right there in the description!
The pastry-munching crowds of Davos want to have their Swiss chocolate and eat it, too. And that is their fatal flaw. The supreme irony is that this event that claims to identify and analyze global trends – and which has, for years now, been fretting over the rise of what is inexactly termed “populism”, which threatens to consume the political order that has facilitated corporate capitalism’s postwar dominance – is itself one of the most perfect fuels on earth for populist anger. If the minds of Davos actually believed their own bullshit, they would shut the conference down immediately, understanding that it is a threat to the values they purportedly believe. It is no exaggeration to say this monstrosity of opulence playing out amid the ominously reduced snowpack of the Alps is such a powerful symbol of all that is wrong with the neoliberal era of the world that it will help to bring about its own downfall.
It is a symbol of cloistered elites boldly pampering themselves as they lecture on the need for sustainability; it is a symbol of exclusivity draping itself in the language of democracy; it is a symbol of the unaccountable financiers and bureaucrats and intellectuals who went to the right schools and work for the right institutions and are therefore allowed to lock themselves in an impermeable bubble, gaze out in ignorance at a world whose problems they have never experienced, and prescribe a course of action that will, coincidentally, perpetuate the dominance they have enjoyed for generations.
The utility of any actually worthwhile networking or communication or information-sharing that occurs in the halls of Davos pales in comparison to the inferno of disgust that its existence stokes among millions of angry, mistreated, locked out people around the world who will never set foot inside its security cordon. If nothing else, the attendees of Davos should shut it down out of pure self-interest. They’re making everyone mad.
But it is in the peculiar nature of bubbles that those inside will never know what they don’t know. Convincing Davos Man that his milieu is poisonous is as impossible as convincing Thomas Friedman that talking to cab drivers has not granted him infallible insight into humankind. The problem is not so much that Davos exists – I can imagine a world in which it served as a useful sort of exile that kept dangerous people ensconced in a comfortable simulacrum of reality away from the rest of us, The Matrix for economic thinkfluencers, a zoo where you could watch a livecam of Larry Summers explaining to Anthony Scaramucci why higher unemployment would be good. No, the problem is that The Davos Matrix is plugged directly into the mainframe. The decisions that these people make in their little atmosphere of illusion percolates out into the real world, leaving the rest of us holding the bag as wealth trickles further and further upwards, decade after decade.
The only useful thing that happens at Davos each year is the release of Oxfam’s report on economic inequality, a document that always drives home exactly why Davos is a monstrosity. This year, Oxfam found that the richest 1% of people had pocketed two-thirds of all the wealth created in the past two years. Many of those same people digested this news with equanimity in a nice warm chalet, before heading off to make proclamations on a Davos panel. The rest of the world simmers.The rage of the lower classes compounds. Some will go fascist, and some will go socialist, and some will just buy guns and bide their time. The Davos types will continue speaking of “global risk” without noting that their own way of living is at risk as well. There is much that all the leaders at Davos could learn from the wide, wide world. But there is nothing that we can learn from them, except who to blame.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer at In These Times.