It's The End of the World as We Know It
Introduction to a new series of inquiry
I had a good laugh the other day when my wife—who has done a remarkable job at promoting my writing—told a friend that I write about politics and conspiracy theories. To paraphrase Richard Milhous Nixon:
I welcome this kind of examination, because my wife has got to know whether or not her husband is a kook. Well, I am not a kook.
I have my arms extended over my head flashing the peace sign with both hands.
I am not a kook.
Anything about the World Economic Forum does, in many a mind, shout out conspiracy! They seem to be hellbent on world domination but are they just a group of live action role-playing (LARP) nerds or do they really think they are masters of the universe?
These WEFers (pronounced “wee-fers”, a new word I just made up) do seem to have a god complex. I began looking at these self-important Eurotrash and their crazy notions of 2030, the Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or 4IR, Herr Schwab’s cutesy acronym), ESG, DEI, stakeholder capitalism, so on and so forth. Then I realized that these guys are really just run-of-the-mill fascists. Once I realized that, I also realized that their disease had already crossed “the pond” and infected the U.S. with multi-national corporations merging with federal government agencies and their policies: crony capitalism (or, fascism).
A year ago, a reader emailed me to ask if I could write a piece on what drove these Global Elite to do what they do. It was a challenge and so I thought it through and wrote two pieces that I believed did a pretty good job of explaining what drove these WEFers to do what they do.
I utilized Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer that examined the nature of revolutionary mass movements, written from the shadows of the end of World War II. My conclusion on why these WEFers do what they do? Antisocial personality disorders: the official diagnosis for sociopathy/psychopathy. They’re all psychopaths. Case closed.
I see the WEF as the James Bond villainous foil SPECTRE. They are certainly organized in the same way: a corrupted leadership structure bent on world domination with minions infiltrating all of the world’s major governments, institutions, and corporations to spread their wicked intentions. SPECTRE was certainly psychopathic in their actions and so too the WEF. And the arch-villain, His Galactic Majesty Herr Doktor Klaus Schwab is particularly an ideal bad guy—much like Ernst Stavro Blofeld—with his delusions of grandeur and comic German accent. Sieg heil! Again, case closed.
My wife has always been critical of minions in the movies who would rather die for their criminal organization and criminal mastermind leader than run away. The pay can’t be all that good, right? Psychopathy. Psychopaths, after all, attract psychopaths. True believers will fall on their sword if so ordered. Finally, case closed.
However, psychopaths don’t act because they are psychopaths or sociopaths—their passive aggressive brothers and sisters in arms—they act the way they do because of ulterior motives. So, I’m missing something.
The whole story has not been told. But what is the whole story? Why subjugate the whole of Western civilization into cramped hi-rises, eating bugs, with no personal property other than one’s underwear (I hope they aren’t expecting us to rent that as well)? I don’t know.
But maybe I’m starting down a path to figure this out.
I just finished reading two books of significance. The first is by Professor Michael Rectenwald, a fellow at Hillsdale College. The book is entitled The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty. It is a comprehensive examination of the WEF and the stated goals for meeting the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The year 2030 is prominent in the cataclysmic lexicon of the far Left, as in We will be burned to death by 2030 if we don’t do something about Climate Change! now! Eat ze bugs, give up what you own, and we will all be saved!
The WEF has shown itself to be incredibly dangerous, for example, by pushing Sri Lanka into ecological destruction with cataclysmic results. Yes, the only cataclysm we seemingly face is at the hands of the WEFers.
If you want to come to grips with this globalist movement, I do suggest Rectenwald’s book as well as his website as he has several commentaries and interviews reflective of his research.
But again, we come back to: Why do they want global domination? Just because they can? Because it is about the survival of the elites and our destruction is their deliverance?
Globalization, Kaput!
There was one quote from one of the squirrelliest of the squirrelly WEFers, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who, in a March 24, 2022 letter to the CEO’s of the companies in which his firm owns large stakes, proclaimed that globalization was dead:
…the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.
Ukraine was invaded by Russia on February 24, 2022. So, in one short month—to the day—the evil Russians ended globalization?
Chris Rupkey, a chief economist at FWDBONDS, stated after Fink’s earth-shattering declaration:
“There is a lot of talk about countries going back to local production and the era of globalization and [that] long overseas supply chains [are] over… But that economic model has one gigantic stumbling block in the U.S.A. because there is no one to work the factories to produce the goods here on American soil.”
Maybe that’s why border patrol is standing on the banks of the Rio Grande like Walmart greeters.
But why aren’t Fink and associates crying in their beers? Globalization, after all, is their economic engine to conquer the world’s economies.
Unless the end of globalization is the goal.
The Population Bomb (I read it in college and can’t say I remember much from it) was a cataclysmic prediction from 1968, written by Paul Ehrlich, professor emeritus at Stanford University. The book suggested that earthlings would overpopulate the world and cause massive ecological damage which, in turn, would bring about the most horrific of deaths for humans: mass starvation. In the first edition of the book, Ehrlich stated:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
Of course, in subsequent editions, that cataclysmic prediction was removed since, well, humans developed technologies to greatly increase food production and distribution utilizing globalization.
The problem with most apocalyptic predictions for mankind, like population explosions, is that simplistic, or naïve, data models always predict continual exponential growth or decline, based upon shady expectations of the world around the prognosticators. You can look at the original prediction of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW), for example, and realize that none of the predictions about the end of the world have even remotely come close to what we observe in reality. In Ehrlich’s world (just another Malthusian hustle), humans populate like rabbits—or feral hogs—and the best way to deal with it is to get rid of the damned rabbits (enter Elmer Fudd).
In the true function of the material world—the real world—nothing is forever increasing or decreasing. Existence is cyclical. Something goes up, it comes back down. Then it goes back up again. Our climate is ruled by this reality as is our population.
It seems that at the heart of all WEF arguments is that the world is overpopulated and we must do something to reduce population so as to save us from climate catastrophism. The current population trends actually show that if human population growth hasn’t yet peaked, it will do so soon enough. Maybe they want to speed it up a bit?
This is where the second book I’ve recently read comes into account:
The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by geopolitical strategic consultant Peter Zeihan.
He paints a pretty bleak future starting in… wait for it… 2030 and beyond. And it’s not just bleak but it is devastating for our world going forward, especially in Europe, Africa, and most of Asia—and in particular China.
He posits that population collapse, not exponential growth, as being the driving catalyst for our demise. These are real world numbers. “In 2019, the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.” -The End of the World, Zeihan, p.73 [emphasis from quote]
Perhaps the best way to describe what is happening is from the Berkeley Forum on Aging and the Global Economy (BerkeleyAGE) (independent from Zeihan):
[The below graphs] shows the demographically-driven portion of economic growth in the prior 1990-2015 period, then shows the naive projection of future demographically-driven growth if the past demographic trends were incorrectly assumed to continue in 2015-2040 (blue line), and compares it to our improved estimate of demographically-driven growth in 2015-2040 (red line). By comparing the naïve (blue) estimate with our improved (red) estimate, we find that in 2040 the global economy is projected to be 20% smaller than if we had ignored the upcoming changes in the rate of population growth and aging between 1990-2015. High income economies, which are transitioning to a period of accelerated aging and slowing population growth, have a 19% reduction in predicted growth. The reduction will be only slightly smaller in the United States, at 17%. Middle and low income economies, which are transitioning from a period of very high population growth to lower growth, will experience an 18% reduction in the size of the 2040 economy compared to what it would have been if their 1980-2010 demographic trends continued, though again this will differ in countries such as Nigeria which is predicted to have 9% higher growth in our model as compared to the naïve model. Once again the most dramatic difference is in China: we project a Chinese economy in 2040 that will be 41% smaller than under naïve backward-looking projections that ignore the effects of China’s slowing population growth and rapid aging. [emphasis mine]
Of note, the graphs represent a demographic study beginning with 2015 data. The 100 on the graphs is representative of 100% of population at 2015 with the addition to 2040 representing the percentage growth or decline.
By comparing the two current largest economies in the world and a representative of the best of the low-end developing countries, Nigeria, we can see that real world population-driven economies, going forward, won’t be as rosy as simplistic, naïve models predict. In Nigeria’s case, it looks good but when economic slowdowns—some quite drastic—occur worldwide, Nigeria won’t be in the position to take advantage. Keep in mind that China imports far more energy and food than they create in raw and manufactured goods and so China’s population collapse will actually destroy supply chains, thus further eroding globalization.
This isn’t something that can be reversed. We can’t just stop everything and begin acting like rabbits (or feral hogs), regardless of Hungary’s efforts.
This collapse feeds into Zeihan’s geopolitical analysis for each nation and region, global industries, de-globalization trends, and the effects it will have on a retrenching world. He doesn’t simply chart out in graphs as exponential trends and say, voila, the world is over.
His book is highly accessible to even morons like me and so if inclined, I would recommend you read it in order to gain a fresh observation of the world around you. Likewise, the below interview is definitely worth the hour of your invested time and offers an overview of his assertions.
Convergence
Zeehan’s predictions align with outcomes that the WEF suggest, however, the real downturn is from population collapse not Climate Change!
I have always thought that the globalists are either incredibly stupid or have a different agenda than just saving us from our own demise because of our “addiction” to oil. As I suggested above about the cataclysmic prognostications involving exponential trends in only one direction, the science behind climatic doom is naïve in its nature and obfuscated by false climate models and manipulated observations to support their contentions. They validate their science by stating that the science is settled! They then prove it by declaring everything under the sun is happening because of Climate Change! (Speaking of the sun, that is the primary climate driver for Earth.)
What if the developed world is collapsing regardless of climate? Would global elites sit back and watch or would they interject themselves into the “solution” in order to wield power over you and save themselves? These are the questions I want to examine in the coming months.
I want to delve into the WEF and its creation, as explained by Rectenwald, to hopefully expose its operations and its convenient Climate Change! agent of world apocalypse. I want to examine Zeihan’s assertions and validate them as much as possible and then see where there is overlap. Is this all theater of the absurd?
Just as I’ve done with the WEF stories, I am going to keep these in a subsection of my Substack site titled End of the World. (Yeah, it’s tongue-in-cheek melodrama.)
At the end of all this, you may not agree with my assessment and conclude that I am, indeed, a kook. Hopefully, though, we’ll be able to see if the WEFers are delusional fascists or are in fact opportunists (and fascists) trying to keep their high status by gobbling up the scraps from a devolving world.