Haviv Rettig Gur@havivrettiggur
I tried to follow Davos. I really did. But I couldn't. Too many fatuous elites (forgive me) lamenting that someone was moving their cheese.
You can agree with their concerns over Trump's policies, but you shouldn't take seriously the never-ending, soul-wearying anxiety and moral panic. Anxiety isn't analysis. It isn't a strategy. It isn't going to make the world safer and better. And it isn't a good lens for understanding the things that worry us.
The West is led by people who suffer from what French sociologists once called "déformation professionnelle," the way a professional class can collapse in unison into the narrow mental habits and specialized vocabularies of their institutions and professional interests.
This is a variant of the "curse-of-knowledge bias," when a class of people raised on a particular vocabulary or analytical framework becomes incapable of observing events outside that specialized framework, or even of imagining how someone who lacks that lens might see things. It's mentally easier to just assume that everyone else, be they working-class Englishmen or Iranian ayatollahs, thinks like them and will ultimately behave as they expect.
That's how you arrive at elites across so many Western nations who viewed mass immigration as a mere economic calculation and couldn't see the social and cultural upheaval they were driving. That's how you get a European elite that came to view hard power politics as inherently evil, a boorish misuse of power, and so allowed themselves to grow happily complacent about Europe's dire military weakness -- rather than understand that geopolitics are an inescapable arena in which a weakening of the good guys inevitably means a strengthening of the bad guys.
That's how you get a whole class of Western policymakers to whom religious radicalism is assumed to be insincere and performative. The bean-counters and policy-paper writers of Western governments are rarely religious themselves nowadays, so they can't really imagine that anyone else out there takes their religion seriously enough to let it drive policy.
It's no wonder such people do such a bad job at running the world. They can't even see it for what it is. Their world is a mirror reflecting their own most self-righteous understanding of themselves back at them.
And so they fall back on the only cost-free arrow left in their quiver: Endless, tiresome moral panic.
If you want to actually understand the world without the perpetual panic, you need to listen to voices that aren't part of the Davos consensus.
Here's one small example. In Winston's latest episode, @MsMelChen describes Trump's strategic vision better than all but a handful of the Davos participants could have (including Trump himself, by the way; that's not his strong suit).
And suddenly it makes sense. It isn't just random and malicious nuttiness.
Friends, the world does actually make sense. I promise. It isn't disintegrating. Things are less fragmented and dangerous than they look (though real dangers loom, of course). The US is 25% of global GDP. Europe is another 20%. They are mighty enough to build any future they want. They just have to stop pretending they are hobbits and the world is an idyllic Shire, and stop being perpetually surprised to discover otherwise.
Less panic, less moralizing, more power and confidence for the good guys. It's a simple recipe, but it'll get the job done.
