One thing that has always bothered people about the World Economic Forum (WEF) is how aesthetically disagreeable it can be. Its style seems deliberately outre. Why does Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s impresario and MC, dress up like a cultic high priest? Why does Yuval Noah Harari – the organisation’s court philosopher – make slightly gleeful dismissals of the idea of human rights? “Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find the blood, you find the heart, and the lungs and the kidneys – but you don’t find any rights.”
Why this dogged insistence on giving people the creeps? Fundamentally it’s an affectation. The showy amoralism of the WEF is in fact a personal branding exercise, one that arose in response to the first real stirrings against its worldview in the middle of the last decade.
These conflicts after 2016 have been cast in a certain way – not least by Davos itself. What ‘populism’ was objecting to, it was said, was economic and technological modernity. The world was being ironed flat by a ruthless process of economic optimisation that had begun in the 1980s, one in which all the old social institutions that might inhibit the free-flow of capital were to be swept away. What populism meant, then, was a romantic but essentially doomed revolt by those who had been squeezed out.
Armed with this idea, the WEF and its extended class of hangers-on have worked up a kind of equal and opposite anti-romanticism: amoral, bloodless and smirkingly technocratic. If populism represented the past, then the WEF represented the future. One aspect of this is an affected elitism: even the WEF’s website now makes a wry reference to its reputation as a clubhouse for ‘distant elites’.
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