Covid and conspiracy part two - what's the big idea?

Previously I tried to round up and summarise the main conspiracy theory(s) about Covid.

A common lynchpin seems to be the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Klaus Schwab, who is the NGO's founder and executive chairman, when he isn't performing official duties as President of the Intergalactic Federation. 

I had previously only thought of the WEF as yet another hi-falutin' but basically harmless talk-shop, best known for putting on the annual Davos extravaganza of self-importance.

This is where the richest and most powerful people on the planet fly their private jets into a luxury Swiss ski resort for a week to lecture the rest of us on being less wasteful and otherwise engage in a too-earnest orgy of mutual ego-gratification.

It's seems the sort of event that if you are not extremely careful you might run into Kevin Rudd.

What I wasn’t so aware of is the WEF Forum of Global Young Leaders , a rather sketchy training program that apparently has schooled a host of international government and business bigwigs.

What exactly is being taught in this academy of greatness?

It's not easy to say. 

However, if it reflects the WEF's more broad agenda it appears to be a mash-up of historical awful ideas.

On its Our Mission page the WEF states: “The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

The idea humanity should be "shaped" by the “best and brightest” has a long and inglorious pedigree stretching at least back to Plato’s philosopher kings.

Plato argued that what we experienced was the reflection or shadow of a perfect set of forms, or ideal versions that were best divined by the trained reason of a philosopher king.

This notion is fundamentally undemocratic and is also essentially static because once you attain something close to an ideal there is no further need of improvement or evolution.

That humanity should find some a utopian repose if only the right people were in charge and society was radically reconfigured has been tried on many occasions.

The results have been … well disappointing to say the least.

One reason for this is what economist Friedrich Hayek called the Knowledge Problem, that no centralised power can have the same knowledge of local issues and concerns that those closest and most involved do.

The second is that people just aren’t that amenable to being perfected and slotted in like cogs to some grand overarching scheme.

As the philosopher Immanuel Kant said: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made".

Plato recognised this problem and to mould the suitable subjects for his philosopher king he cheerily had Socrates suggest that all those over the age of 10 be put to death.

However, imperfection often equally applies to those who consider themselves to be above the normal rung of humanity, so a perfect system requires angelically perfect beings to run it and that isn’t what most people think of our leaders.

It also leaves aside the question of who gets to be the philosopher king and how is decided.

The philosopher king who has decided this for himself by seemingly setting up his own little WEF kingdom is Klaus Schwab.

For a figure of such prominence there is not a lot of personal information about him other than if moved office he would need a shipping container for his awards and degrees.

The WEF website contains acres of self-promotion, most of it bland styrofoam packaging of say-nothing sentences such as this: "Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does."

For all this apparently world-shaping importance it is remarkable, for example, how little Wikipedia has on Klaus and even the WEF.

Both articles lead with a warning that they appear to have been written by someone with a close connection to the subjects.

One thing Wikipedia does note is the opacity of the WEF in terms of its funding and even the salary of Klaus, which is somewhat at odds with its stated ambition of "upholding the highest standards of governance".

What we do know is that in 1938 Klaus was born in the southern German city of Ravensburg, which is near the Swiss border and he has lived mainly in those two countries.

His father was a manager at turbine manufacturer Escher Wyss & Cie, again a company with a scant Wikipedia entry.

However, one article suggests the company has a concerning history of helping arm the Nazi war effort and using slave labour.

If Klaus senior did this he was not alone among German industrialists.

Fascism distinguishes itself from its progenitor of socialism by allowing that government does not need to own everything but can work in partnership with big corporations to achieve "joint" objectives.

Benito Mussolini called this "State Capitalism", a term also used by Vladimir Lenin.

This term that has also been used to describe the Chinese economy and the WEF prides itself on being on being an early partner of China.

This type of political system is sometimes called corporatism.

It sees society as something to be determined from the top down by big government working with big corporations and sometimes big unions and other groups to achieve some sort of harmony or balance of interests.

This sounds remarkably similar to Klaus’s “big idea” of “stakeholder” capitalism, which I mentioned in part one of this series, where companies exist not to make a profit but to deliver other “communal goods” most particular environment ones.

It is just a coincidence that the Nazis were very into nature as well?

Scholars have traced the Romantic roots of Nazi nature worship that fostered the conceit of a divinely pure Aryan race.

This natural vigour and purity had to be protected from being diluted and corrupted by industrial urbanised society and interbreeding.

This leads us to the idea of eugenics, the desire to breed out impurity and thus re-engineer a more perfect human being.

While the Nazis are often labelled as being on the "right" of the political spectrum eugenics has historically enjoyed great sway with many on the "left".

Schwab isn’t a eugenicist but he does seem to believe that humanity can and should improved by technological and biological means, a belief called “transhumanism”.

One WEF podcast on this subject called "Beyond Human" asks if we are moving into a "post-human era".

This idea has a suspicious echo the Nietzschean idea of "Übermensch" ("overman" or "superman").

Nietzsche's association with the Nazis is not straight-forward but they certainly adapted, interpreted or you might say abused his concept of a superior breed of men who exhibited a “will to power” over those who were "Untermensch" (underman) and those practicing the "Slave Morality" of Christianity.

Being "beyond human" also sounds suspiciously close to the socialist idea of the “new man”, where the flaws and foibles that make us recognisably human are overwritten in the interest of making the more perfect society.

The Romantic roots of this idea lie in discovering the perfect "pure" and "unspoilt" man, or Noble Savage, someone who is able to live more in harmony with nature, or to put it in the ugly modern term being “sustainable”.

These ideas conjure images of an Earthly heaven or a prelapsarian return to the Garden of Eden where there was no sin and therefore no decay or corruption.

The thing that ruined the Garden of Eden was of course the first man, who was being told by the first woman that he "needed to eat more fruit".

In 2019 the WEF heard how man has again destroyed the Holocene "Garden of Eden".

The speaker was that well-known and despised far-right fringe figure of hate, David Attenborough.

Attenborough is not just the hoarse whisperer of natural secrets but he is also a patron of the Population Matters charity, which believes the Earth is becoming overpopulated.

In fact, the cuddly grandfather of Saturday night camera close-up animal antics has referred to people as a  "plague",

Attenborough does not single out any particular race as a plague or infestation taking up valuable living space.

However, he did deliver his speech about the sad demise of the Garden of Eden in Davos, which I might have forgot to mention is the traditional home of Swiss-German Nazism.

Part three of this blog will look into the WEF and the "problem" of people.

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