This is the controligarchy (as US author Seamus Bruner calls it) at play.

John Leake of Courageous Discourse, a substack account he shares with Peter McCullough, draws us back to UK/Polish novelist Joseph Conrad.

SAVAGE

The following passage is from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which a character reflects on a pamphlet that Kurtz (the head of an ivory trading station in the Belgian Congo) wrote for The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs:

“It [the pamphlet] gave me the notion of an exotic immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’.

The final line expresses Kurtz’s disintegration from physical and mental illness, resulting in a fit of irritation and loss of patience.

One might see parallels between the trajectory of the fictional Kurtz and that of the World Economic Forum and corporatist capitalism generally, from benevolence of sorts to hubris, then to madness and evil. Like Kurtz, the ruling elites have gone rogue (as the Wikipedia writer of the Kurtz entry styles his decline).

SANATORIUM

Leake continues: “Thirteen years after Heart of Darkness was published, Thomas Mann started work on his novel The Magic Mountain, which tells the story of Hans Castorp (from a well-to-do family in Hamburg) visiting his cousin Joachim at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. The residents of the sanatorium constitute a microcosm of Europe on the eve of World War I.

“A recurring observation in the novel is that – even though Europe is enjoying a period of great prosperity at the time – its societies seem to be pervaded by a loaded aggression, irritation, and readiness to be angry. A funny scene occurs when a young student who is a resident of the sanatorium flips out when he is served what he perceives to be cold tea in the dining hall…”

Two things are noteworthy from the Mann reference. First, now the whole of Davos is a globalist sanatorium, full of loonies. At least for one week each year. Who knows what the locals are like?

Second, again, we face an era of loaded aggression, just as it was a century ago. Last time, it led to the killing fields of northern France.

Could it be that the rulers are getting a little nervous?

The controligarchy probably senses there is a bit of aggro building among the plebs. Loaded aggression, you might say. We might even vote for a few deplorables in this, the year of elections.

SURVEILLANCE

Well, the Davos annual tourists are, this year, branding their confab “rebuilding trust”. As substack writer Jordan Schachtel has remarked, rebuilding trust through increased censorship and surveillance.

At what he termed “another gathering of the ghouls”.

Schachtel caught the big point: “Rebuilding Trust” was the theme of the conference, but nobody admitted to any wrongdoing.

Oops. The lack of trust we feel towards our betters is, I suspect, in their view, our fault.

Schachtel’s highlights package revealed the following nuggets: “The 2024 program was one for the ages. Attendees watched Pfizer’s Albert Bourla talk about his company’s embrace of Artificial Intelligence (AI).