Because, as Chris Bray points out, there’s no point in restructuring the non-structural structures or something…
The G20 leaders flew to Bali this week to cosplay social repulsiveness and to hear from Klaus Schwab, who has no government position or formal place in the G20, making the G20 gathering a kind of executive committee meeting for something that rhymes with “Morld Meconomic Morum”.
The terrifyingly vacuous Bond villain said that ve must fundamentally restructure ze vorld, flattering the geniuses like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden who will now use their personal wisdom and strength to do the restructuring.
(That’s an excerpt — the whole thing is here, if you want to punish your mind.)
There’s so much to love in this babbling, starting with the fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world can’t manage to deliver decent audio. But listen to what the man says:
1.) Looking out into an audience of the world’s major national leaders, he says that we face a global “multi-crisis”, made up of “economic, political, social, and ecological, and institutional crisis”.
Accepting the premise for the sake of argument, who caused all that crisis? Hello, leaders of the ruined world, I honor your wisdom and clarity, and turn to you to fix your broken countries that you’ve been leading.
2.) “But actually, vat ve haf to confront is ze deep, systemic, and structural restructuring of our world. Und zis vill take some time! Und ze vorld vill look differently, after ve haf gone through zis transition process.”
This is all of Klaus Schwab in three sentences: We must do structural restructuring, see, not non-structural restructuring. And after we have completely, deeply, systematically restructured literally everything in the entire world, the world will look — wait for this, because this is insight from the most renowned of all the experts, a deep mind who you may struggle to follow — different. Yes, changing things a lot makes them not be the same. Und zis is vy Klaus Schwab receives ze big bucks! You and I could not think at this level! Stand at attention!
3.) “Politically, the driving forces for this political transformation, of course, is the transition into a multipolar world, which has a tendency to make our world much more fragmented.”
Political fragmentation, then — the transition into multipolarity — causes fragmentation. The fragmentation into multipolarity makes the world fragmented, thereby, you see, fragmenting it. Careful, Klaus, you’ll accidentally write a whole Thomas Friedman column with your mouth.
The man is like a novelty gift with a pop-up clown inside it: You press the button, and it makes nonsensical streams of word-sounds. Fortunately, however, Klaus was speaking to an audience of Joe Biden, so I’m sure it sounded deep in the room.
