On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:
Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.
This is not satire. This is the schedule.
1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.
2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.
3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.
4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.
5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.
6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.
7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.
The question is simple:
Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?
Nobody.
He just started doing it.
And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.
Did you choose them?
