Things have been moving quickly after weeks of just listening to Trump. Last week it was Davos and the other world leaders suddenly had something to say. Carlo Iacono rather neatly skewered them in advance with his Snow Globe of the Reasonable piece. As he says:

I keep returning to a phrase from the coverage: “globalization triage.” It captures something true. The old story, the one that said integration and openness would lift all boats, has been bleeding out for years. What is happening at Davos is not a recommitment to that story. It is an attempt to stabilise the patient long enough to extract remaining value before the next configuration emerges. The conversations about chips and data centres and export controls are not about innovation in any innocent sense. They are about who will control the commanding heights of the next economy, and the language of cooperation is the anaesthetic administered while the surgery proceeds.

And then, lo and behold, was Mark Carney, equally at home leading central bankers in 2008, appearing in thick jumpers on election night in Canada and now presenting Canada to the WEF as the enlightened way forward in the wake of Trump, without mentioning him once. He signalled Canada’s break with the rules-based order with a story told by Vaclav Havel about a greengrocer who put out a sign saying “Workers of the world unite” without believing a word of it. He says:

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

He argued against the impulse for every country to look after itself, while finding it understandable:

A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

Instead he argued for what he calls “variable geometry”:

…different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.

And in what, for me, was the most eye-catching part:

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

This was Carney staking a claim to leadership in a world working around the United States. And he sounds so reasonable within his snow globe that you can almost forget the impact of his last attempt at global leadership. Ann Pettifor, in her excellent review of the 2008 crisis 10 years after and its aftermath, quoted Professor Vogl of Princeton University:

the crisis has proved itself as a way to solidify the existing economic order…One can thus argue that the financial and economic state of emergency in recent years has given rise to …action that resembles a continuous coup d’Etat.” (INET Berlin, 2012.)

And as Iacono concluded his article:

The room in Davos is warm. The rooms beyond it are getting colder. The spirit of dialogue, whatever it once meant, now means the management of decline through the performance of concern. This is not a conspiracy. It is an emergent property of a system that has learned to stabilise itself by absorbing its critics and converting their language into its own. The only dialogue that would matter is the one that questions the room itself. That conversation is not scheduled.

The solutions proposed from within the Snow Globe will always sound measured and reasonable. The actors were mainly polished and impressive, all the better to contrast with the ramblings of Trump. The lines were well known. After all, as Samuel Miller McDonald’s Progress tells us, they have been delivered in one form or another for 5,000 years, when Mesopotamian cities came together to form the world’ first empires. McDonald describes the new approach as “parasitic energy capture”, both concrete in terms of resources required to survive and abstract in terms of the power structures within these new types of societies. As McDonald notes:

When the limits to their extraction of resources are exceeded, the parasitic systems must either suffer a crash or must invade and take the energy of a more distant ecology or society.

This type of parasitism was both justified and celebrated by the progress myths which accompanied each society: The Epic of Gilgamesh for the Babylonians, Zoroastrianism for the ancient Iranian kingdoms and empires, the creation myth of Judaism where, as McDonald puts it:

The book of Genesis provides the theological basis for dominion, but it also contains the promise of progress, which takes the shape of frontiers, or living space set aside for God’s chosen people, to be found in new land.

And on to the Greeks, with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars seeing Athenian civilisation as the pinnacle of human achievements. Sure enough, Carney was quoting him last week:

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Then on to the Roman Empire, legitimised by Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Jupiter says:

To the Romans I assign limits neither to the extent nor to the duration of their empire; dominion have I given them without end.

Then Rome embraced Christianity, with Constantine reasoning, according to McDonald, “that a monotheistic empire would be more effective at both unity and continued expansion than a more pluralistic or polytheistic one”.

Alongside Christianity, a new progress narrative was born in the 7th century to power an Islamic empire. As McDonald says:

Perhaps more than any that came before, the Islamic society that arose during this period mixed mythic forms of the progress narrative formula with secular ideas…that presaged those that would follow in the European Enlightenment.

And of course the European Enlightenment followed the expansion of parasitism from around 1400 from “a primarily regional, contiguous form to a global, disparate form”. As McDonald goes on to say:

This change was made possible first by the large oceanic vessels that could move goods, weapons, messages and colonists rapidly across large waterways, and then again by the deployment of fossilised energy in machines that could speed up extraction, communication, transportation and manufacturing even more.

What we are talking about here is global capitalism. And this brings me to one of the great mysteries, often referred to by Steve Keen, which I think I now have an answer to, of why economists have failed to properly incorporate the role of energy in production for so long. If mainstream economics now performs the role of the progress narratives of the past in justifying our continued parasitic expansion beyond all boundaries in pursuit of economic growth (which is now even acknowledged in official UK government documents like this one), then it needs to hide the role of parasitic energy capture from us in order to keep us doing it.

Which brings us back to the Snow Globe. I will leave the last word to Carlo Iacono:

The problems are structural, and I am not in a position to restructure them. The powerful will keep meeting, and the meetings will keep producing the facsimile of progress that forestalls the real thing. What I can do, what any of us can do, is refuse to be fooled by the snow globe. To name what is happening even when the naming has no immediate effect. To remember that legitimacy is not conferred by eloquence or venue, that a room full of billionaires discussing inequality is not the same as addressing inequality, that dialogue without the possibility of transformation is just noise arranged pleasingly.