Deep in the frostbitten peaks of Davos, where the air is as thin as the moral fiber of the attendees, the global technocracy has found its latest prophet of the obvious. Mark Carney—the man who has pivoted from central banking to 'climate envoy' with the seamless grace of a careerist who never meets a mirror he doesn't like—stood before the World Economic Forum to deliver a speech that was part funeral dirge, part desperate job application for the position of Global Savior. The setting was, as always, a grotesque tableau of irony: thousands of billionaires and their well-groomed lapdogs huddled in Switzerland to discuss 'solidarity' and 'sustainable development' while their private jets idled on the tarmac, collectively emitting enough carbon to boil a small sea. It is the ultimate circus for the intellectually bankrupt, and Carney is its most polished ringmaster.

The core of Carney’s message was a clarion call for 'intermediate powers' like Canada to stop pretending. It is a fascinating choice of words from a man whose entire professional existence is predicated on the performance of prestige. He spoke of a 'rupture' in the world order, a polite euphemism for the fact that the neoliberal consensus is currently being dismantled by the very populists that the Davos set spent decades ignoring. Carney’s big revelation is that geopolitics is no longer submitted to 'limits' or 'constraints.' To anyone living in the real world—the one without a corporate expense account—this is not a 'rupture.' It is simply the historical norm returning after a brief, caffeinated dream of globalist hegemony. The elites are terrified because the rules they wrote to benefit themselves are being ignored by a new breed of orange-hued barbarians who prefer a different, cruder set of rules. For Carney, this is a tragedy; for the rest of us, it’s just watching one pack of wolves fight another over the scraps of a dying caribou.

Carney’s solution to this 'harsh reality' is the usual slurry of high-minded platitudes. He wants a new order built on 'values.' Ah, yes, the 'values.' In the Davos lexicon, 'human rights' is a term used to justify sanctions that starve peasants, and 'sustainable development' is the branding for a new era of corporate greenwashing that ensures the poor remain poor while the 'green' energy sector gets its subsidies. He speaks of 'solidarity' and 'sovereignty' as if these are tangible tools rather than the linguistic confetti thrown by bureaucrats who have lost their grip on the steering wheel. The sheer audacity required to stand in a room full of people who have spent their lives eroding the sovereignty of nations in favor of capital, only to now weep for its loss, is almost impressive. It is a masterclass in gaslighting, delivered with the smooth, unblinking confidence of a man who has never had to worry about the price of a liter of milk.

Then there is the Canadian angle. Canada, the 'intermediate power' that Carney believes can lead this charge of the virtuous. It is a quaint delusion. To imagine that Canada—a country currently struggling to define its own identity beyond being 'not the United States'—could somehow serve as the moral anchor for a new world order is the height of Canadian narcissism. Carney is selling a fantasy where Canada’s 'values' can fill the vacuum left by a retreating American empire. It is a vision of a world led by the polite, the well-mannered, and the utterly ineffective. He wants us to believe that if we just speak softly enough about 'solidarity' and 'integrity,' the hard-nosed realists of the world will suddenly repent and join a knitting circle. It is a childish worldview, dressed up in the expensive suit of a former Bank of England governor.

The truth that Carney refuses to acknowledge is that the 'pleasant fiction' he laments was only ever pleasant for the people in that room. The world order he mourns was a system designed to facilitate the smooth flow of capital while the 'intermediate' people—the ones not invited to Davos—watched their industries vanish and their communities decay. His call to 'stop pretending' is the ultimate hypocrisy. He isn’t calling for an end to the charade; he is calling for a new script because the old one isn’t working anymore. He wants a new way to keep the technocratic elite in charge of a world that has clearly moved on. Whether it’s the greedy morons on the Right who want to burn it all down for a quick buck, or the performative hypocrites like Carney who want to save it with a series of well-worded white papers, the result remains the same. The powerful have their power, and they will use every ounce of it to ensure that the only thing that actually changes is the vocabulary of our exploitation. Carney’s speech wasn’t a call to action; it was a desperate plea for relevance in a world that is finally, mercifully, tuning him out.