Every week is like this. Perhaps we should be used to it by now: the weirdness began in earnest six years ago, when the first Covid cases were reported in Wuhan, China. In short order, this triggered the worldwide lockdowns that forced everyone online, with economies in freefall and cultures into a pervasive state of low-level derangement. 

Some of that first and loudest wave of Covid-era internet derangement seized upon the World Economic Foundation’s “Great Reset” program. The influential Davos talking-shop attracts an elite circle of businesspeople, financiers and their hangers-on (including in Labour), and has long been a bête noire for radicals across the political compass. The patrician “Great Reset” proposal to treat the pandemic as a social-engineering opportunity rapidly became a byword for every imaginable flavor of conspiracy. 

The program’s proponents, not least the Blofeld-esque WEF founder, German economist Klaus Schwab, celebrated it as an exciting new dawn for humanity. What was it really? And were the conspiracists right? As is often the way, the answer is: literally, no, but poetically: not far off.

The Great Reset called for coordinated global action by governments to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions”. On the face of it, that sounds utopian; but it proved, to say the least, unpopular. Why? Well, the WEF’s own website acknowledges that, to work, a Great Reset would call for a “level of cooperation and ambition” that “is unprecedented”, requiring “stronger and more effective governments” along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way”. 

And if Covid taught us anything, it’s that competence of this sort is not guaranteed. Quite the contrary: for most, the experience was both of a spike in high-tech control measures, such as drone surveillance and digital tracking, and a concurrent plunge in the quality of basic stuff, such as road surfaces or waiting times for a driving test or a GP appointment. Nor have things improved since. Labour may have been elected to restore competence after a string of hopeless Tory leaders, but even now the stories of state ineptitude come thick and fast, wreathed each time in a fog of cover-up and sometimes outright lying. We spend millions on fish discos and bat tunnels, while nothing gets built. There’s that Avanti train. And so much more! 

In the last year the number of prisoners released early by mistake has run into the hundreds, including very high-profile offenders such as the Epping sex attacker. The Home Office was recently forced to admit having lost track of 53,000 asylum seekers. The military emailed a spreadsheet of Afghan collaborators to half the planet, then tried to hide it by smuggling the list members into Britain under a super-injunction. I doubt the WEF actually are lizards in human suits or whatever. But given the manifest incompetence of our leadership class, the WEF haters are surely right to resist any further power-grabs (such as, for example, the recent return of Blair’s cherished digital ID scheme). Who in their right mind would entrust the kind of sensitive high-tech work envisaged by a “Great Reset” to the sort of clowns who make mistakes of this kind? They can’t even lie and manipulate effectively: their propaganda efforts and secretive “misinformation units” keep being spotted and denounced, only to resurface again with the next round of cock-up and cover-up.

But why is it like this? Why is everything now run by numpties? Nothing is ever monocausal, but the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might have argued that it’s not just falling birth rates, or MPs’ low pay (though this doubtless doesn’t help). It’s also the way our technologies are changing us. McLuhan argued, all the way back in the Sixties, that the objectivity, logical thinking, and technical wizardry that gave us the modern age was in important ways a byproduct of widespread print literacy. And this age had already been superseded by electricity. 

McLuhan claimed that this exit from the print to the electric age was driving a decline in rationality and technical competence, and return to tribalism and magical thinking. And perhaps we can point to the first use of “dumbing down” by Hollywood executives in the Thirties, to describe adjusting a film’s content for less intelligent people. Or we could note that especially beginning in the Sixties, when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, electronic media were indeed competing ever more vigorously with books for public attention. Against this, though, international IQ scores went on rising over the 20th century. So for all that Starmer admits he doesn’t read, or at least doesn’t read novels, there is surely more to our now woefully thin political talent pool than just electric media dumbing everyone down.

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More recently, though, commentators have begun to warn that another factor accelerating this “more” may be the shift to digital reading. As Nicholas Carr warned in 2005, this activates the brain in ways quite different to reading things in print, with the effects including the degrading of concentration. And this, others argue, is driving our having apparently passed peak IQ in the early 21st century. Perhaps the culprit is our distracting smartphones, or — increasingly — the use of AI. (Labour MPs have been accused of reading out ChatGPT-generated speeches.) 

So what does it mean for our technocratic overlords if the world is getting dumber? The strongest argument in favor of technocracy was always that modern states are too complex to be managed by elected non-specialists, and should be left in the hands of super-competent experts. But what if the technocrats are also doomscrolling, and it’s making them stupider too? 

If so, you might expect to see (for example) tribal thinking and emotional logic coming to infect even technocracy, resulting in large-scale, top-down social engineering programs that don’t work as expected, or at all. Imagine. In response, then, you might also see supporters of such programs beginning to question their value. You might, in fact, see even such high-profile figures breaking ranks as Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin and erstwhile powerhouse philanthropist. 

In an interview this week, Shanahan lifted the lid on the clique of Silicon Valley “tech wives” whose money was, in her words, “used to set the groundwork” for “The Great Reset”. Shanahan no longer considers this a good use of philanthropic money. She admits: “I really believed I was giving black communities a chance to rise up out of oppression”. Now, though, she’s reviewed how those grants are performing and has concluded in fact “the problems of the community have gotten worse”. But nor can we hold out hope that the Right will save us from motivated reasoning, corruption or numpties. Remember literally everything the Tories ever did, in their 14 years in power. Are there really enough ultra-competent Reform-aligned people out there to form a government, should Farage win next time? I hope so; but I worry.

The central problem with the “Great Reset” was essentially the same as Reform’s, but on an even greater scale: the fact that there aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as such a program would have needed for it work as intended. So does this mean the end of technocracy? Perhaps; but that should raise two cheers, at the most. It’s true that Schwab has left the WEF, and quit shilling the Great Reset. Indeed, the circumstances of his departure make him a vivid illustration of precisely that central problem. Schwab didn’t just retire; he resigned, following whistleblower allegations that he embezzled money, manipulated WEF reports, and booked “private massages” in hotel rooms. 

Now, he’s launching something called the “Schwab Academy” from what appears to be a garden shed. He’s also published a new book, titled Thriving and Leading in the Intelligent Age. But when you map the shift from “Great Reset” to “Intelligent Age” onto Shanahan’s loss of faith in top-down social engineering, something worrying emerges: a sense that the technocrats have given up on the public, and are now quietly building an ark.

For the unspoken small print to Schwab’s “Intelligent Age” is how we define “intelligence”. Schwab tends to oscillate between the human and machine kind, as if these needn’t be distinguished sharply from one another. And were this right, we might say: a new “intelligent age” in public life would make a nice change, so bring it on. But Emily Bender and Alex Hanna have recently argued that this isn’t right. So-called “Artificial Intelligence” is a con: it is not, and will never be, intelligent in the human sense. It’s far more accurately described not as “intelligence” but “automation”.

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And one of the side-effects of automation is de-skilling. The more shoe factories, for example, the fewer skilled cobblers. So if AI automates at least some aspects of thought, it follows that in embracing it we’ll de-skill ourselves. I suspect that Schwab sees this, and is carefully leaving it unstated, on the basis that the much smaller group of people he considers worth trying to save already know. He and his buddies are just planning for their own survival in a future of universal post-literacy.

The real vibe shift, then, may not be a swing Left, or Right, at all. Rather, I suspect it’s a swing within the class that endorsed the first Great Reset, away from even trying to make things better for everyone. Silicon Valley’s “tech wives mafia” has fallen out of love with progressive social engineering, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. We can likewise expect the utopian justification for other tech-authoritarian policies to fall by the wayside too. The last great wealth transfer happened in the name of “flattening the curve”, drowning small businesses as Amazon boomed. Perhaps the next won’t even bother with a justification.

The real Great Reset, then, was always the post-literate collapse in intelligence. It’s already rendered large-scale technocracy unworkable. Now, the class that not so long ago dreamed of a global transformation are retreating to their bunkers instead, sometimes literally. The rest of us had better hold onto our loved ones; there is no one else coming to save us.

It may seem like an improbable leap from Chernobyl wolves to a flustered speech by Yuval Noah Harari, the pampered darling of the Western world’s corporate aristocracy, but if you bear with me, I’ll show you the connection. Harari, the chief intellectual of the Davos set, is a vegan atheist who practices mindfulness meditation and writes the kind of big-picture history books that evoke adoring swoons from the corporate media and eyerolls from real scholars. In his most famous book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future,  he takes it for granted that even the stickiest wet dreams of today’s internet-addled tech bros must surely come to pass. Intellectual hubris? His picture should be next to the entry in your dictionary.

The guy put on a fine display of pearl-clutching in an interview earlier this year, insisting that if Donald Trump is re-elected it will be “the death blow to what remains of the global order”. It wasn’t simply the King in Orange who had Harari fainting on the couch in the best Victorian style. What really seems to have shaken his world is that Trump and his supporters don’t just disagree with the specific institutions and ideals that Harari’s friends at the World Economic Forum are pushing these days. They reject the entire concept of a planned global order.

Reading about Harari’s outburst, I found myself nodding and muttering, “he almost gets it”. For all the mockery I’ve directed at him, the man deserves credit for an intellectual leap that most people of his class seem incapable of making. This inability to grasp the rejection of global order is quite a recent phenomenon, especially considering that the entire project of an international order planned and managed behind the scenes by an economic and political elite only dates back a little more than a century.

Before that point, efforts to impose some permanent structure on the seething chaos of human affairs mostly took the form of imperial conquest on the one hand, or treaties woven via careful compromises between major political and military powers on the other. It took the gargantuan carnage of the First World War to convince a great many people in the wealthy classes that these two traditional options wouldn’t make the world safe for plutocracy. That led to the creation of paired non-profits in Britain and the United States — the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations — and thence to similar organisations, of which the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum are perhaps the best known today.

One consequence of this common heredity is that no matter what the problem is, the only solution these organisations can recognise is going further in the same direction they’ve been pushing all along. The one remedy they have to offer is global coordination by vast bureaucratic structures that erase the lines between government, corporate, and non-profit sectors. The mere fact that it hasn’t worked yet does nothing to slow them down.

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The Club of Rome is a good example. The one Club of Rome publication everybody’s heard of, The Limits to Growth, posed a set of problems that global bureaucrats have tried to solve in a flood of publications since. What’s fascinating about this obsession is that the problems discussed in The Limits to Growth can’t be solved through global coordination by vast bureaucracies. They can’t actually be solved at all.

What The Limits to Growth showed is that if economic growth is pursued far enough, the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits and force the global economy to its knees. Global bureaucracies can no more change that than they can amend the law of gravity. In fact, as the costs of growth begin to bite, one of the few options that offers any hope for improving conditions is to cut back sharply on bureaucracies of all kinds, since bureaucracy consumes resources and energy, and produces remarkably little in return.

A viable world on the far side of peak growth is not, therefore, a world of global managers. It’s a world where local, community-scale politics and economics replace the hugely expensive global systems that sprang up during the last extravagant blowoff of the age of unchecked growth. Yet you can read all those studies churned out by the Club of Rome and never see a word about this.

That the world of the future will inevitably have less room for global management is something that would-be global managers can’t even begin to conceive. Yet the system they dream of running is stunningly incompetent. Take climate change, for instance. For decades now, doing something about climate change has been one of the central projects of the Davos set. But none of their conferences and loudly praised international agreements have had any measurable effect on the rate at which CO₂ gets dumped into the atmosphere. If this is the best that global management can do, the world is better off without them.

It’s become popular in some circles to insist that the panoply of cascading failures set in motion by the Davos set prove that our global managers are evil masterminds who deliberately intend to cause the dismal outcomes their pet policies have so reliably brought about. A somewhat less popular opinion, though arguably a more accurate one, holds that global managers belong to a decadent aristocracy so sheltered from the consequences of its own actions and so caught up in a world of vapid abstractions that it’s a marvel they haven’t caused even worse disasters. I’d like to suggest a third interpretation: our world is far too complex for global management to be a viable option.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, from the perspective of modern scientific materialism, human intelligence is not some kind of nature-transcending superpower; it is simply the set of cognitive processes our ancestors evolved as they sought to find food and mates and avoid predators — important tasks, to be sure, but not especially intellectually demanding ones. By contrast, from the religious perspective, humans are simply one class of created beings, irremediably finite and fallible. It’s only in the hubristic delusions typified by Harari’s book Homo Deus, which jumble misunderstood scientific and religious ideas together into a kind of crackpot anthropolatry, that these obvious realities get mislaid. The fact that our current caste of global managers has fallen into such stupidities goes a long way, I think, to explaining their failure to manage the world.

This is where the wolves come loping back into sight. When the Chernobyl exclusion zone was first evacuated, people speculated that it would become a radioactive desert, devoid of life or populated solely by a scattering of hideously crippled mutant life forms. As we now know, that didn’t happen. Instead, the eastern European forest of an earlier time promptly grew back, coping easily with the increased radiation flux. Deer found their way there promptly; horses abandoned by their owners shook off centuries of domestication, found mates and gave rise to herds of wild horses. Wolves soon followed in pursuit of tasty prey.

At the top of the food chain, the wolves of Chernobyl absorb more radionuclides than anything else in the area. Under ordinary circumstances, this would make them horribly vulnerable to cancer. But wildlife biologists researching the wolf packs recently discovered that the wolves had evolved a robust resistance to cancer. Nobody understands the biochemistry yet, and it’s possible that nobody ever will. In their quiet way, the wolves have achieved something that modern medicine has tried to do for more than a century, without any noticeable success.

Impressive though this is, it is by no means unique. Nature outwits science all the time. There are bacteria and algae that thrive in the water that circulates through nuclear reactors, basking in streams of high-intensity gamma rays that would fry you and me on the spot. There are living things that grow on the outside of spacecraft in orbit, handling the hard vacuum, lethal cold and sizzling radiation of outer space with perfect aplomb. There are fungi that eat carcinogen-laced toxic waste and go back for second helpings. We can’t do any of these things. Nature chuckles at our incompetence and shows us how it’s done.

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Then there’s Ascension Island. Nearly two centuries ago, when HMS Beagle dropped anchor there, it was a barren little cinder of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, so far from any other scrap of land and so devoid of water that the only living things on it were sea birds and a few species of fern whose spores were light enough to blow there across the ocean. On board the Beagle was the ship’s naturalist, a young man named Charles Darwin, then at the beginning of his career. While he’s most famous for his theory of natural selection, Darwin was also the only person in history to invent a tropical forest, and he did it more or less by accident.

It’s a remarkable story. After his visit to Ascension Island, Darwin wrote to the British Admiralty suggesting that if somebody planted trees on the island, the increased water vapour arising from the trees would make the local climate suitable for a naval base. The Admiralty, with the sort of bluff, blundering enthusiasm for which Britain has long been famous, took him up on it in the stupidest possible way: they ordered any ship that meant to pass Ascension Island to pick up some plants at the last harbour they left and plant them once they got there. As a result, the island ended up with a dog’s breakfast of invasive species scooped up from half the world’s coastal ecosystems.

In theory, that should have produced ecological chaos. In practice, in just a few decades, much of Ascension Island turned into a green tropic paradise with lush upland forests. Current theory insists that this is impossible, and that a stable tropical forest requires millions of years to adapt and grow. Nobody told the plants about current theory, though, so they just went ahead and did it. Not only did Ascension Island get a tropical forest in an eyeblink of geological time, it got one of the more delicately balanced forms — a cloud forest, which thrives on water vapour condensing on the leaves of trees at high elevation. Oh, and Darwin was quite correct: the forest changed the local climate, yielding adequate water, and Ascension Island became an important naval base.

Rather than letting plants work things out for themselves, however, scientists have tried repeatedly to plan and create ecosystems. Those attempts reliably fail because ecosystems are too complex to plan rationally.

The same principle can be applied more generally to explain the cascading failures of the managerial elite. Those failures continue to happen because the world is too complex: it is so full of unpredictable variables and intricate feedback loops that no degree of human expertise, no set of abstract principles, no concept of world order can provide accurate predictions and allow the creation of a viable and productive order on a global scale.

That doesn’t mean that human beings can’t co-create a relatively stable, successful, thriving order in the world. It just means that this project is best pursued on a local level, relying on personal experience, folk wisdom, and close attention to local conditions. That’s exactly what the managerial aristocracy can’t provide — and why world domination keeps slipping through their fingers.

All this partly explains why Yuval Noah Harari is shrieking like an overwrought six-year-old. The world isn’t just refusing to follow the abstract models he brings to it, it’s refusing to follow any abstract models at all. Educated to think of the world as a passive medium that privileged intellectuals can shape at will, he’s being confronted with the terrifying discovery that the world literally couldn’t care less about him, his credentials or his ideas. Admittedly, he’s not handling it very well, but then few people can deal gracefully with the flat disconfirmation of their most precious beliefs.

The fact is that a great many ordinary people are sick and tired of the pompous pretensions of the class for which Harari speaks. They know that when Harari talks about global order, what he means is that he wants them to be ordered around by his rich friends, according to some set of fashionable abstractions detached from local realities. They believe that letting ordinary people live their lives and pursue their own self-defined goals — like Chernobyl wolves or Ascension Island plants — will have better results than leaving the world in the hands of an incompetent elite. And the evidence suggests that they’re right.

A great many of these people are prepared to take matters into their own hands. As Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said, wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves. Quite a few people in the United States have figured things out for themselves, and many of them seem quite willing to use Donald Trump’s monumental ego as a battering ram to knock some sense into a system that’s given them nothing but misery for too many decades. If that fails, they’ll simply reach for some other instrument, and it’s worth keeping in mind that their next choice may be even less welcome to Harari and his rich friends.

Meanwhile, the wolves of the Chernobyl zone roam unharmed through a radioactive landscape. Those wolves are laughing at us.  We may want to listen to them.

“When they’re dried and ground into powder, it smells like a mixture of mushroom, soil and macadamia nut,” says Keiran Olivares Whitaker, 39, founder and CEO of Entocycle, the leading British tech company farming these larvae. “And when you taste it, it’s like pork scratchings.”

But you can’t taste Entocycle’s end product yet, because the sale of farmed insects for human consumption isn’t allowed in the UK (though several applications to the Food Standards Agency for black soldier fly protein to be allowed on sale, as a “novel” food, are expected to be approved soon). Instead, it is intended as a high-protein, low-carbon replacement for animal feeds currently based mainly on soya or fish meal, the sourcing of which is causing rampant deforestation and declining seafood populations.

The race to embrace insect farming has never seemed so urgent. According to the World Economic Forum and its post-Covid “Great Reset” initiative, insects are an overlooked source of protein whose consumption will help limit climate change. Last year, the global market for insect protein was worth around $1.5 billion — and, according to “Food Revolution”, a report by Barclays Research, it will grow to $8 billion by 2030.

Certainly, the environmental drivers for insect farming are powerful. Producing insect protein requires one-tenth of the feed, water and land needed for beef production, and it results in only 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions. This is because the food needed to produce all this sustainable insect protein could come largely from waste — the black soldier fly can live off almost anything — and we’ve never wasted more food.

So why not let insects use that waste and bring it back into the food chain? Well, because some scientists and animal welfare groups argue that farming insects could be cruel. And if it is, the sheer numbers of creatures affected by it would be enormous.

According to a paper authored by some of the world’s most prominent biologists and bioethicists published last year and entitled “Can insects feel pain?”, evidence is growing that some insect species (only a tiny fraction has yet been researched) are sentient, to a greater or lesser degree, and so can experience some feelings, including pain. And if they can, the argument goes that they should be brought into line with other farmed animals when it comes to welfare regulations governing the way they are reared and killed. At present, there is none.

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“All of the cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and sheep slaughtered each year amount to about 80 billion animals, whereas there’s already well over a trillion insects being slaughtered every year,” says Dr Andrew Crump, one of the paper’s authors and a lecturer in animal cognition and welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. “There are 300 million beef cows slaughtered every year, but 300 billion mealworms. The numbers are huge, so the issue is that if we get it wrong with welfare, we’re leading to suffering on this absolutely gigantic scale. The problem is that the basic kind of welfare knowledge just isn’t there. With insect farming, we’re basically where we were with conventional farming more than 50 years ago.”

Determining whether an insect feels pain is not as easy as it may sound, because behaviour that might look as if a creature is experiencing it could be put down to a physiological reaction called nociception. The paper on insect pain, published last October in Advances in Insect Physiology, explains: “Nociception does not require pain: hand withdrawal from a hot stove is a nociceptive reflex controlled by neurons relaying signals from the nociceptors in the hand, to the spinal cord, and back again. All this happens before nerve impulses reach the brain (where pain is experienced). Thus, when animals display nociception, this does not necessarily demonstrate that they can feel pain.”

One experiment conducted by Dr Crump and his colleagues found clear evidence that bumblebees can feel pain. (There is no likelihood that bees will be farmed for food other than honey, but that doesn’t make the experiment any the less significant.) Describing the findings, the academics wrote: “We gave bumblebees four feeders: two heated and two unheated. Each feeder dispensed sugar water, which bumblebees love. When every feeder had the same concentration of sugar water, bees avoided the two heated feeders. But when the heated feeders dispensed sweeter sugar water than the unheated feeders, bumblebees often chose the heated feeders. Their love of sugar outweighed their hatred of heat. This suggests bees feel pain, because (like humans) their responses are more than just reflexes.”

They also concluded that flies could experience pain, again because of their reaction to heat. “Hungry flies are less likely to jump away from extreme heat than satiated flies,” they wrote. “Decapitated flies can still jump, but they do not display this difference, demonstrating their brain’s involvement in heat avoidance. Communication between the brain and the responsive body part is also consistent with pain.”

Last year, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act included the first invertebrates to be given farming protections: decapod crustaceans, including crabs, lobsters and prawns, and cephalopods, including squid and octopuses. Their inclusion came largely as a result of a sentience framework drawn up by a team of researchers led by Dr Jonathan Birch, associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and principal investigator on the university’s Foundations of Animal Sentience project.

The framework has eight criteria ranging from whether an animal has nociceptors and integrative brain regions to whether it can trade off threat of injury against opportunity for reward, or whether it responds to local anaesthetics or analgesics. No single criterion is proof that it can feel pain, but combinations of some of them may suggest that it can. Octopuses satisfied seven out of the eight criteria; squid and cuttlefish satisfied four; crabs five; and lobster three.

The “Can insects feel pain?” paper, of which Dr Birch was a co-author, concluded that flies and cockroaches satisfied six of the criteria, which amounts to “strong evidence” for pain. Other insects met fewer of the criteria, yet the researchers concluded that there was “substantial evidence” they could experience pain. Ants, wasps and bees met four criteria, and crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and moths met three.

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Perhaps surprisingly, not all environmentally conscious and animal-friendly groups support insect farming, in spite of its many obvious advantages. When I asked People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) what they thought of it, they simply replied that we could get all the protein we needed from plants. Elsewhere, Phil Brooke, Compassion in World Farming’s research and education manager, argues that feeding animals protein from insects makes the food chain less efficient: “Less than 40% of the protein you feed to a chicken ends up in the meat you eat. If you feed a salmon, it’s only 28%. If you feed a pig or a trout, it’s just over 20%. And it can be lower for other species. It’s the simple law of ecology that at each stage in a food chain, you lose energy. So if you’re feeding flies on waste food, we think it would be better to simply feed that waste food directly to animals, like pigs, and miss out a layer.”

Back at Entocycle, tucked away in a railway arch a stone’s throw from London Bridge, I put all of these points to Olivares Whitaker, who has a degree in environmental design and conservation. He seems unfazed: “The phrase ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is a complete fallacy. The latest data says we have exhausted more than 51% of all fish. We have destroyed the coral reefs, the nurseries of the ocean. By messing up the coral reefs, you mess up the juvenile fish populations, and if you mess up the juvenile fish populations, you mess up all the seabirds, you mess up the seabirds, you mess up the ecosystem.

“Our rainforests are being cut down for large monoculture crops. What most people don’t realise is that 90% of all soy that’s brought to the UK doesn’t go into your soy burger or your soy milk. It goes straight in to feed the cow, straight in to feed the pig, straight in to feed the chicken. And it’s really unhealthy for most animals to be eating this stuff. They’re being force-fed rations which are the lowest cost to the highest value.

“I couldn’t sit back and just watch that, so I began looking at insects. How do insects currently act in the food web? Because the rotting apple falls from the tree, the insect eats the apple, the bird eats the worm, and off we go up the food web. It’s just normal. Every single animal on this planet, including humans, has been eating insects for millions of years.”

While Entocycle used to farm larvae for the pet-food industry, its focus today is on designing insect farms that ensure the greatest ratio of “protein in” to “protein out” – and, yes, to achieve the highest levels of welfare based on the company’s own research. And, so far, this mission is selling well. It has, for instance, recently attracted £4.2 million in funding from US investors and £3.3 million from Innovate UK, a government-backed body that provides money and support to industry. Meanwhile, Olivares Whitaker’s team of 35 engineers, designers, computer specialists and entomologists have contracts to design facilities in the Middle East and the UK that will produce thousands of tonnes of protein each year. And, as a welcome by-product, almost half of each farmed larvae contains excrement that can be used as a rich fertiliser.

“We are now facing a fertiliser crunch,” Olivares Whitaker says. “People don’t realise that the fertiliser industry is screwed since the war in Ukraine, and prices have quadrupled. Here, we have a perfect, organic and sustainable way of producing high-quality fertiliser using black soldier flies feeding on waste.”

But what about welfare concerns, and the claim that farming insects is inefficient? “Waste isn’t perfect,” he says. “You can’t just feed any waste to animals — for example, we saw with cows and BSE what happened when we fed them waste derived from other animals. Farmers need to know exactly what is in the protein they are feeding their animals. You can’t just feed anything to, say, pigs. But black soldier flies could feed off anything and turn it into high-quality protein.”

At present, however, UK rules don’t allow flies to be farmed that have been fed on excrement, but they could be — and the end product would be perfectly safe for animals and even humans. In developing countries with sewage disposal and protein security problems, governments are already looking at the possibilities of farming with insects.

So, what about the welfare side of the argument? I direct Olivares Whitaker to a paper written by Dr Meghan Barrett, another co-author of “Can insects feel pain?”, entitled “Challenges in farmed insect welfare”, in which she argues that farmed black soldier flies are susceptible to five welfare issues: nutritional inadequacies, larval overcrowding and overheating, unmet needs for mating behaviour, starvation, and inhumane slaughter.

But he’s having none of it. “If you get any of those five requirements wrong, your farm simply won’t work. If you starve your flies, they’re not going to breed your next generation of larvae. If you don’t meet their needs for mating behaviour, you’ll have nothing to farm. The welfare of the insects goes hand in hand with how successful and productive your operation will be.”

What if the government legislated to include insects in farming welfare regulations — would the industry comply? “I personally would welcome welfare regulations,” says Olivares Whitaker. “If you didn’t care for every aspect of their needs, your farming system simply wouldn’t work and you’d be out of business.”

I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if it had any plans to bring insect farming into line with other types of animal farming welfare, but it didn’t reply. Perhaps ministers are concerned that the public isn’t ready for insects to be deserving of concern. That might be true, but it’s hard to argue in a protein-insecure world that Olivares Whitaker is wrong. And one day soon, it won’t just be animals being fed on insects — we’ll be eating them, too.

The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules. While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

Given the irrational nature of the policy, many protesting farmers believe it can’t simply be blamed on the urbanite “green elites” currently running the Dutch government. They suggest one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants who recognise the immense value of the country’s land — not only is it highly fertile, but it is also strategically located with easy access to the north Atlantic coast (Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe). They also point out that prime minister Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, which is well known for being corporate-driven, while his finance minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Employment are also tied to the body.

The struggle playing out in the Netherlands would seem to be part of a much bigger game that seeks to “reset” the international food system. Similar measures are currently being introduced or considered in several other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Britain (where the Government is encouraging traditional farmers to leave the industry to free up land for new “sustainable” farmers). As the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy sector, agriculture has naturally ended up in the crosshairs of Net Zero advocates — that is, virtually all major international and global organisations. The solution, we are told, is “sustainable agriculture” — one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which form their “Agenda 2030”.

This issue has now been pushed to the top of the global agenda. Last November’s G20 meeting in Bali called for “an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains” to “ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change”. Just a few days later, in Egypt, the COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit launched its initiative aimed at promoting “a shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets”. Within a year, its Food and Agriculture Organization aims to launch a “roadmap” for reducing greenhouse emissions in the agricultural sector.

The endgame is hinted at in several other UN documents: reducing nitrogen use and global livestock production, lowering meat consumption, and promoting more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050. Other international and multilateral organisation have presented their own plans for transforming the global food system. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy “aims to accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. Meanwhile, the World Bank, in its climate change action plan for 2021-2025, says that 35% of the bank’s total funding during this period will be devoted to transforming agriculture and other key systems to deal with climate change.

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Alongside these intergovernmental and multilateral bodies, a vast network of “stakeholders” is now devoted to the “greening” of agriculture and food production — private foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and corporations. Reset the Table, a 2020 Rockefeller Foundation report, called for moving away from a “focus on maximising shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders”. This may sound like a good idea, until one considers that “stakeholder capitalism” is a concept heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, which represents the interests of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation has very close ties to the WEF, which is itself encouraging farmers to embrace “climate-smart” methods in order to make the “transition to net-zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030”. The WEF is also a big believer in the need to drastically reduce cattle farming and meat consumption and switch to “alternative proteins”.

Arguably the most influential public-private organisation specifically “dedicated to transforming our global food system” is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is largely modelled around the Davos “multistakeholderist” approach. This is based on the premise that global policymaking should be shaped by a wide range of unelected “stakeholders”, such as academic institutions and multinational corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments. This network, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, consists of UN agencies, world-leading universities, and corporations such as Google and Nestlé. EAT’s founder and president, Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian philanthropist who is married to one of the country’s richest men, has described her intention to organise a “Davos for food”.

EAT’s work was initially supported by the World Health Organization, but in 2019 the WHO withdrew its endorsement after Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, questioned the scientific basis for the dietary regime being pushed by EAT — which is focused on promoting plant-based foods and excluding meat and other animal-based foods. Cornado argued that “a standard diet for the whole planet” that ignores age, sex, health and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations”.

Perhaps more important, said Cornado, is the fact that the dietary regime advised by the commission “is also nutritionally deficient and therefore dangerous to human health” and “would certainly lead to economic depression, especially in developing countries”. He also raised concerns that “the total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin” would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products. Despite these concerns, raised by a leading member of the world’s top public health body and shared by a network representing 200 million small-scale farmers in 81 countries, EAT continues to play a central role in the global push for the radical transformation of food systems. At the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which originated from a partnership between the WEF and the UN Secretary-General, Stordalen was given a leading role.

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This complete blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private-corporate spheres in the agricultural and food sectors is also happening in other areas — with Bill Gates standing somewhere in the middle. Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

As with many such super-policies — including the now-moribund “globalisation” for whom Davos 2023 served as a five-day, open-casket wake — answers regarding ESG have been handed down from on high before those most affected by it ever asked the questions. These are the basics: what is ESG? What does it mean for us? And, guided as it is by the very visible hand of the Davos elite, where is it taking us?

The Environment, Social and Governance movement grew out of a late 20th-century approach that used capital as a means of fighting for social and moral causes. The boycott of Apartheid South Africa is frequently cited as a landmark case, with businesses pulling out of the country in response to the regime’s brutal and racist policies — a progenitor of today’s approach to Russia. But the watershed moment for ESG came in 2004, when a UN initiative called the Global Compact released a report called “Who Cares Wins”. Issued by some of the world’s biggest (and most financially aggressive) banks, the report laid the groundwork for how the financial world can “integrate environmental, social and governance issues in analysis, asset management and securities brokerage”.

Since then, the global capitalist ecosystem has been able to “integrate” ESG issues to an extent the movement’s founders could have only dreamed of. Today, ESG is more a pledge of corporate legitimacy than it is a framework of ethical guideposts, with some of the world’s most corrupting, polluting, and abusive firms taking up the green standard of the movement with an alacrity that’s at times unnerving.

Today, companies from tobacco giant Philip Morris to BP — whose Deepwater Horizon platform dumped 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — don’t just tout their ESG bona fides but have devoted millions in crucial resources to the endeavour, building entire corporate departments to purpose. Even Gazprom, the Russian oil giant that feeds Putin’s coffers with petro-dollars, puts out an impressive “Sustainability Report” that notes the company’s commitment to ESG. “As a globally significant energy company, Gazprom always conducts business in a considered and responsible way,” Gazprom chairman Alexey Miller writes in the report’s introductory message.

This is nowhere more apparent than at the World Economic Forum’s annual confab at Davos, which I attended this year not as a member of the WEF, but as the guest of a New York-based think tank. At Davos, even small fry like me could hear the watery murmurings of ESG coursing through the currents of power. It was everywhere — in every break-out meeting, every wine-drunk dinner, and each trudge through the snow-lined streets towards the next event.

Like many global ideologies, ESG bears a kernel of truth. After witnessing the predations of successive financial scandals, the exploitation of vulnerable people in sweatshops and mines, and the wholesale destruction of natural environments, it’s hard to argue that capitalism does not need a broader system of checks and balances to reign in humanity’s perennial tendency towards excess. This idea became excruciatingly apparent during the early 2000s, when neoliberalism gallivanted around the world, exploiting labour, sucking up resources, and generally sowing economic chaos, including in Russia whose economy was “privatised” by WEF headliners and darlings of the global ESG fan club, such as former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers. Out of the ashes of neoliberalism’s “naughty Noughties” came a new impetus for capitalism to clean up its act.

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But the core question swirling around ESG is who, exactly, is supposed to do the scrubbing? The “Who Cares Wins” report was published in 2004, just months after the “Oil-For-Food” scandal struck the UN, which saw billions in humanitarian funding to Iraq siphoned off, using the UN as the (very much reusable) financial straw. The scandal was so gargantuan it drew in the UN Secretary General, founder of the UN Global Compact, the founding bureaucracy of the ESG movement. On the social front, the UN also saw horrific allegations that some of its peacekeepers were running child sex and sex trafficking rings in the very places they were supposed to protect.

In this sense, ESG might appear to be more of a feint; public relations wrought to its utmost. But even when not tied to reputation-tainting financial scandal, it’s precisely the involvement of supra-democratic global organisations such as the UN and WEF — which are accountable to no electoral constituency — that puts people on edge. For those who don’t get to spend $250,000 on a five-day-long conference, ESG can seem like a network of interlocking policies that are never put to a democratic vote.

And the corporate and governmental advocates of ESG appear to be optimising it to startling effect. Much the same way that organised global power was able to sidestep Apartheid South Africa’s electorate by degrading the country through economic might until the government became untenable, the same international elite is learning to do the same on the level of the individual. Thus, when Canada’s truckers protested in response to vaccine mandates, it didn’t take legal action to break up the protest, but concerted economic action that simply made the lives of the truckers untenable.

While the trucker protests seemed to align on the axis of nationalism vs globalism, the response — including shutting down some of their bank accounts — was a play from the ESG handbook. As the issue of vaccine mandates arose in the US, the gaze of enforcement turned from government to corporate actors. Michael Peregrine, a corporate lawyer who focuses on governance wrote in Forbes that: “if the government, including state and local leadership, is unable or unwilling to adopt such measures [as vaccine mandates], the burden may fall on private enterprise to step in, as a matter of social responsibility.”

While there is a heavy critique of market capitalism associated with ESG, there is also a faint echo of its core tenet: that capital should reign supreme. The difference is that while for neoliberalism, capital was the ends to achieve at the cost of (almost) any means, for ESG, capital is the means that’s justified by a moralistic end. In this sense, it’s the later term of the moniker, “governance”, that is the most salient. In the ESG setting, governance is about how companies are run. The notion here is simple: Enron — an American energy company that practiced only a thinly-veiled cronyism as it committed fraud and ultimately failed — is the definition of bad; BlackRock — driving profit as it pledges to invest only in causes accredited by ESG — is good.

Such a Manichaean division, however, obscures the fact that, however exquisite the window dressing, corporations cannot play the role of ethicist, priest or prophet, and the more they try the more we risk corrupting those essential roles. Not just that, but it also calls into question the judgment of companies entrusted with a fiduciary responsibility to their stakeholders, including employees. “The contradictions and apparent hypocrisy of BlackRock’s actions have… politicised the ESG debate,” wrote Bluebell Capital Partners, a BlackRock activist investor, in a scathing letter. “The reputational damage of being dragged into this politically charged debate, in our view, is very significant because it calls into question the independence of BlackRock as an asset manager.” Bluebell noted that despite its rhetorical largesse, BlackRock still makes lots of money from fossil fuels, raising legitimate questions about the “G”, governance, at work in the world’s most vocal corporate supporter of ESG.

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On a global scale, the term speaks much more to what many feel ESG has as its true objective. As the WEF helpfully puts it: “Global governance is a means to manage issues that cut across national borders — whether it is a war, a pandemic, a financial crisis, climate change, or a geo-economic dispute.” In this sense, ESG has rapidly filled the void left by the death of globalisation. If the latter was an imperative to spread capitalism laterally around the world, ESG can be seen as an effort to vertically consolidate the power accumulated by globalism, which is now available — for a price, that is — to weigh in on our most pressing ethical, moral, and epistemological concerns. It’s capitalism not in your life, but as your life: Ask not what your global governance movement can do for you, but what you can do for your global governance movement.

There is little doubt that ESG is a tool of the elite. It’s nominally aimed at constraining the excesses of globalised capitalism, but in effect it’s just as much a means of entrenching those excesses, codifying them in a moralistic power structure. After all, who gets to decide what makes for good environment, social and governance practices?

What’s certain is that ESG is here to stay. At Davos this year, perhaps the second-most discussed subject was the great wealth transfer taking place around the world — that is, money moving from the previous generation of families whose slogan was “preserve the capital” to the current generation of the ultra-wealthy whose priority is “preserve the planet”. For this new generation of wealth, as well as for the decision-makers whose careers and policies they fund, and the activists whose messages they carry, ESG is not a passing trend but very much the moral engine driving the rise of a new approach to power and economics. What it means for the rest of us, however, is decidedly less certain.

Given the almost cartoonishly elitist nature of this jamboree, it seems only natural that the organisation has become the subject of all sorts of conspiracy theories regarding its supposed malicious intent and secret agendas connected to the notion of the “Great Reset”. In truth, there is nothing conspiratorial about the WEF, to the extent that conspiracies imply secrecy. On the contrary, the WEF — unlike, say, the Bilderberg — is very open about its agenda: you can even follow the live-streamed sessions online.

Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.

While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.

Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). The composition of the WEF’s board is also very revealing, including Laurence D. Fink, CEO of Blackrock, David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé. There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.

Perhaps the most symbolic example of the WEF’s globalist push is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the organisation signed with the UN in 2019, which many view as having drawn the UN into the WEF’s logic of public-private cooperation. According to an open letter signed by more than 400 civil society organisations and 40 international networks, the agreement represents a “disturbing corporate capture of the UN, which moved the world dangerously towards a privatised global governance”. The provisions of the strategic partnership, they note, “effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions embedded in public interest and transparent democratic procedures”.

This corporate takeover of the global agenda, aided and abetted by the WEF, became particularly apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Global health policy and “epidemic preparedness” have long been a focus of the WEF. In 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) — an initiative aimed at securing vaccine supplies for global emergencies and pandemics, funded by government and private donors, including Gates — was launched in Davos. Then, in October 2019, just two months before the official start of the outbreak in Wuhan, the WEF co-sponsored an exercise called Event 201, which simulated “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic”. In the event of a pandemic, the organisers noted, national governments, international organisations and the private sector should provide ample resources for the manufacturing and distribution of large quantities of vaccines through “robust forms of public-private cooperation”.

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So, it is safe to say that when the Covid pandemic broke out, the WEF was well-positioned to take a central role in the pandemic response. It was at the 2020 gathering in Davos, on January 21-24 — a few weeks after the novel coronavirus had been identified in China — that CEPI met with the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, to establish plans for a Covid-19 vaccine, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. Later in the year, CEPI was instrumental in setting up Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax), in partnership with the WHO, and in providing funding for several Covid vaccines.

These public-private and corporate-centred coalitions — all with ties to the WEF, and beyond the reach of democratic accountability — played a crucial role in promoting a vaccine-centric and profit-driven response to the pandemic, and then in overseeing the vaccine rollout. In other words, the pandemic brought into stark relief the consequences of the WEF’s decades-long globalist push. Again, it would be wrong to view this as a conspiracy, since the WEF has always been very candid about its objectives: this is simply the inevitable result of a “multistakeholderist” approach in which private and “philanthropic” interests are given greater voice in global affairs than most governments.

What is troubling, however, is that the WEF is now promoting the same top-down corporate-driven approach in a wide range of other domains, from energy to food to global surveillance policies — with equally dramatic consequences. There is a reason governments often seem so willing to go along with these policies, even in the face of widespread societal opposition: which is that the WEF’s strategy, over the years, hasn’t just been to shift power away from governments — but also to infiltrate the latter.

The WEF has largely achieved this through a programme known as the Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative, aimed at training future global leaders. Launched in 1992 (when it was called Global Leaders for Tomorrow), the initiative has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers and business leaders. Tony Blair, for instance, was a participant in the first event, while Gordon Brown attended in 1993. In fact, its early intake was packed with other future leaders, including Angela Merkel, Victor Orbán, Nicholas Sarkozy, Guy Verhofstadt and José Maria Aznar.

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In 2017, Schwab admitted to having used the Young Global Leaders to “penetrate the cabinets” of several governments, adding that as of 2017, “more than half” of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet had been members of the programme. More recently, following Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s proposal to drastically cut nitrogen emissions in line with WEF-inspired “green” policies, sparking large protests in the country, critics drew attention to the fact that, in addition to Rutte himself having close ties to the WEF, his Minister of Social Affairs and Employment was elected WEF Young Global Leader in 2008, while his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag is a contributor to the WEF’s agenda. In December 2021, the Dutch government published its past correspondence with representatives of the World Economic Forum, showing extensive interaction between the WEF and the Dutch government.

Elsewhere, the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe — who last year was forced to resign following a popular uprising against his decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, “climate-friendly” alternatives — was also a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF. In 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.) Once again, it seems clear that the WEF’s role in forming and selecting members of the world’s political elites is not a conspiracy, but rather a very public policy — and one which Schwab is happy to boast about.

Ultimately, there is no denying that the WEF wields immense power, which has cemented the rule of the transnational capitalist class to a degree never before seen in history. But it is important to recognise that its power is simply a manifestation of the power of the “superclass” it represents — a tiny group amounting, according to researchers, to no more than 6,000 or 7,000 people, or 0.0001% of the world’s population, and yet more powerful than any social class the world has ever known. Samuel Huntington, who is credited with inventing the term “Davos man”, argued that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. It was only a matter of time before these aspiring cosmocrats developed a tool through which to fully exercise their dominion over the lower classes — and the WEF proved to be the perfect vehicle to do so.

But don’t despair. Instead of the annual jamboree that you probably couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be invited to, there’s an online event called The Davos Agenda. This opened on Monday with a “special address” by Xi Jinping.

What could be more Davos than China’s communist dictator telling a bunch of virtual capitalists that we should “remove barriers, not erect walls”? Inspirational stuff — and I’m sure a great comfort to the people of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.

For Davos-sceptics, however, this will only confirm suspicions that something has gone very wrong with global capitalism — with the World Economic Forum at the centre of it all. The fact that we’ve exported so much of our productive capacity to China and other countries is one concern. But the bigger worry is about what we’re getting back from the globalised economy. 

For Westerners, capitalism is first and foremost a consumer experience. In the 20th century, the system triumphed over its socialist rival because it delivered the goods. After the long, dark centuries of scarcity, we suddenly found ourselves in a time of plenty. We were grateful — but not, let it be noted, pathetically grateful. Indeed, the real clincher for consumer capitalism is that it made us feel strong. 

Motorised transport — above all the car — gave us the ability to go where we wanted, when we wanted. Combined with modern construction methods, our newfound mobility also massively expanded the supply of new housing. Space and privacy, previously reserved for the rich became available to the masses.

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Then there was the food. Today, we romanticise the kitchen table as the heart of traditional family life. But in most homes it was also a traditional — and very necessary — instrument of rationing. Consumer capitalism transformed the situation. Above all, there was the miracle of meat every day, not just on special occasions; the modern world is defined as much by beef and pork as it is by steel and silicon. 

Of course, abundance comes at a cost. There are the obvious downsides of excess; but also our growing distance from the old ways: the rhythms of nature, the bonds of community, the dignity of craftsmanship. Yet we didn’t sacrifice these deep connections in return for mere comfort. Rather, we were offered an alternative form of vitality: the freedom of the road; the mastery of owning one’s home; the visceral satisfaction of unrestricted carnivory. It might seem strange to describe these things as cultural goods, but within a certain set of consumerist values, that’s exactly what they are.  

Beyond its merely material comforts, the consumer society — especially the American version — offered an empowered, independent and, dare I say it, manly way of life. Whether or not one approves, the fact is that it gave birth to a distinctive culture — one to which most of us remain attached.

Nonetheless, it’s now under threat. While the global economy produces more than ever, there’s a growing anxiety that the associated sense of empowerment — what could be called the red meat of capitalism — is about to be snatched away from us. 

That’s literally the case when it comes to food. One only has to look at the effort being made to promote meat-substitutes. Most distastefully, there’s the argument that we should feed the world on insect protein. A quick search of the World Economic Forum website reveals an obsession with the idea. Here’s a small selection of articles from the last few years: “Worms for dinner? Europe backs insect based food”; “Good grub: why we might be eating insects soon”; and “Fancy a bug burger?”

The house journals of global capitalism, the Financial Times and The Economist, take a similar line. Both publications advocate for entomophagy beneath perky headlines such as “Eating bugs: a culinary idea with legs” and “Why eating insects makes sense”.

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Yet a backlash is underway. “I will not eat the bugs!” has become a rallying cry on the alt — and not-so-alt — Right. The golden age of capitalism gave us affordable meat, and there’s a slice of public opinion that’s in no mood to accept substitutes.

We’re not just talking food here, but a whole way of life. Consider the second part of the anti-Davos mantra: “I will not live in the pod!” This refers to the proposition that we should radically rethink how we allocate living space in crowded, unaffordable cities. And by “rethink”, I mean “reduce” — both in terms of floor area and privacy. In place of apartments and houses, a WEF report invites us to consider “tiny homes” (i.e. boxes) and experiments in “shared living” (i.e. dormitories).  

Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people.  

It’s not difficult to see all this as a process of disempowerment — indeed of emasculation. I’m not surprised to see Right-wingers, especially in the US, leading the backlash. It’s as if some alien force has taken control of capitalism, pulling it in a new and unAmerican direction. I’m also not surprised to see the WEF — with its rhetoric around “The Great Reset” — become a symbol of this apparent change of course. 

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it. 

It’s a paradox of productivity. The greater the abundance of goods and services we produce, the greater the number of people who get to enjoy them. Unfortunately, it also means we use up more of the enabling resources that can’t be as easily multiplied. The most obvious example is the car, or rather the space required for cars. There was a time when the freedom of the road really meant something. But as roads fill up, there’s no choice but to impose speed limits, one-way systems, road charging and other measures required to save lives and keep cities moving. Self-driving cars, if and when we get them, are just the next step — a means of reducing driver error and thus making the most of limited road capacity. After all, that’s what free markets are supposed to do: maximise resource efficiency.

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The same applies to living space. That too is limited, especially in city centres — and, therefore, we can expect the laws of supply and demand to have their inevitable impact. You may not want to live in a pod, but if that’s all you can afford, then you have a choice: either take the deal or move somewhere less expensive. 

Eating the bugs is a yet another response to market forces. Meat is delicious, which is why demand for it is going up as more of the world’s people get rich enough to afford it. Supply responds to demand, but also pushes harder against natural limits — like the availability of land for feed crops. There are ethical concerns too — and so producers and consumers look for alternatives. If you see supermarkets filling their shelves with an ever wider range of meatless meat products, it’s not because someone at Davos told them to. 

What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing. And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price. 

Of course, that still leaves a lot of good reasons for rejecting the “Davos agenda” — but if you do, then you’re going to have to contemplate a rather more radical break with consumer capitalism. I don’t expect many takers. If the choice is between eating the bugs or eating only carrots, then most people will eat the bugs. 

Isn’t it boring? No wonder people prefer to watch bogus videos about voter fraud, or join their local Black Trans Lives Matter protest, when the alternative is this kind of technocratic tedium. Yes, we need 143-page think-tank reports and ingenious policy wonkery and “cross-government data architecture” and all that. But eventually you want something which inspires, something which treats socio-economic questions with the beauty, drama, tragedy and pathos they deserve. You want something like the historian RH Tawney’s 1926 cult classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

We hear a lot at the moment about the prospect of a more communitarian society, which acknowledges that we have responsibilities as well as rights. In Tawney’s book this is not just a theory, but a vision. For the medieval mind, he writes,

The property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation, and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasise that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptised by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

I too had to Google it: Ithuriel is an angel in Paradise Lost whose spear instantly uncovers the reality behind a disguise – “for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial temper”. For Tawney, the medieval order revealed the truth of social relations. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, are shown to be part of one human society, in which we owe each other justice and love.

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Maybe this makes him sound like one of those sentimentalists who imagine the Middle Ages as an era of cheerful peasants, dignified craft guilds, virtuous monks and splendid cathedrals. Not so. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism describes the feudal system as “exploitation in its most naked and shameless form”. Guilds, Tawney writes, were monopolistic schemes, often corrupt, and the vast majority of workers weren’t members in any case. Catholics who want to praise the glories of Christendom will have to reckon with the fact that the pinnacle of financial immorality was the Vatican. As for the cathedrals, Tawney quotes St Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the greatest spiritual master of the time: “The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”

And yet… there was, Tawney argues, “a certain tarnished splendour” to the Middle Ages. The Church, as its central institution, stood for “the ideal, at least, of social solidarity,” and upheld two fundamental points: “that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding.”

Tawney admits that these lofty notions were endlessly flouted. But not always. Church law levelled heavy penalties, including excommunication, against usurers who exploited the vulnerable. Institutions like the Mounts of Piety enabled the poor to borrow money and goods without incurring ruinous debts. Social stigma and the law often worked on the side of economic justice: businessmen who formed cartels or drove up prices might easily find themselves in the courts — or in the stocks.

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“At every turn,” Tawney writes, there were “limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.” Of course, there are “limits, restrictions, warnings” that set the boundaries of economic life in 2020. But they hardly derive from a coherent moral framework. The World Economic Foundation, home of the “Great Reset”, may believe that neoliberalism should be abandoned, but it is also keen to assure us that “The Great Reset … is not a revolution or a shift to some new ideology.” (The horror — imagine, a new worldview!) “Rather, it should be seen as a pragmatic step toward a more resilient, cohesive, and sustainable world.” Not much moral, let alone spiritual, idealism here. For the WEF economic reform is just another way to “meet systemic global challenges,” to quote the soul-crushing bureaucratese.

The word “reset”, often used this year by both Left and Right, itself makes society sound like an electronic device, not a living, breathing community of people torn between passionate virtues and vices. Like so much political language, it colours the world in grey. Parts of Liz Truss’s speech on inequality the other day were quite sensible. But it was hardly inspiring. The government is committed, apparently, to “delivering fairness through modernisation, increased choice and openness”. Fairness is not an urgent moral demand or a dream of solidarity, but yet another solution to be “delivered” via the most useful apps.

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A different idea of fairness appears in a prayer for landlords, quoted by Tawney, which was included in a prayer book issued by King Edward VI in 1553: “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings; but so let them out to others, that the inhabitants thereof may… be able truly to pay the rents.”

A political question — housing inequality — is here treated both on practical terms, and as part of a cosmos illuminated by spiritual realities.

There are some hints at a moral and spiritual awakening today: in the urgent rhetoric of the new socialists, in the rise of quasi-spiritual leaders like Jordan Peterson, in parts of the environmental movement, in the increasingly blurred lines between religion and politics, even in the furious exchanges of the culture wars. But they are only hints. It’s been rightly said that the big question of politics today is Who are we? Another question lurks around the corner: What kind of universe do we live in?