High in the Swiss Alps, where the air is as thin as the policy proposals, the World Economic Forum continues its tireless mission of making the ultra-wealthy feel like they are the thin line between civilization and the abyss. This year’s standout performance in the theater of the absurd featured former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—a man whose entire political career has been a series of high-resolution PR shoots—and Katy Perry, a pop star whose intellectual proximity to global governance is roughly equivalent to a balloon’s proximity to the stratosphere. Together, they ascended the stage in Davos to discuss the virtues of 'soft power,' a term that essentially serves as a linguistic safety blanket for leaders who have run out of actual ideas or the courage to implement them.

Trudeau, the world’s leading practitioner of the empathetic head-tilt, delivered a speech that was a masterclass in vacuity. Soft power, in the lexicon of the Davos elite, is the art of getting people to do what you want without the messy business of coercion, or, more accurately in this context, without the exhausting labor of effective governance. It is the diplomacy of the aesthetic. It is the belief that if you are charming enough, photogenic enough, and can secure the endorsement of a woman who once performed with a mechanical lion, the structural rot of the global economy will somehow harmonize into a chorus of progress. It is a philosophy for the Instagram era: if it looks like leadership on a 6-inch screen, then the reality of the situation is irrelevant.

Then there is the inclusion of Katy Perry. One must admire the sheer, unadulterated gall of inviting a pop star to an economic forum to discuss 'values.' It is the ultimate cynical pivot. When the peasants are restless because they can’t afford bread or heat, the Davos strategy is to give them a spectacle of celebrities nodding solemnly at PowerPoint slides. Perry’s presence at Trudeau’s side was not a bridge between culture and politics; it was a white flag. It was an admission that the political class has fully merged with the entertainment industry, creating a singular, amorphous mass of 'content' designed to distract the masses while the billionaires in the back row figure out how to automate the rest of the workforce out of existence.

The Right-wing pundits will, of course, foam at the mouth about this, seeing a 'globalist plot' where there is only a vacuum. They will scream about the 'woke' infiltration of international relations, failing to realize that their own preferred avatars are just as addicted to the same brand of performative celebrity worship. On the other side, the sycophants of the Left will herald this as a 'meaningful dialogue' that 'bridges the gap' between popular culture and policy. They are both wrong. There is no plot, and there is certainly no dialogue. There is only the preservation of the status quo through the deployment of maximum shimmer.

'Soft power' as described by Trudeau is a euphemism for the managed decline of the West. It is the polite way of saying that we have no solutions for the existential crises of our time—housing, climate, the slow-motion collapse of the social contract—so we will instead focus on being very, very nice to each other while the foundations crumble. It is the politics of the participation trophy. If we can just get everyone to agree on a set of vaguely progressive platitudes delivered by a charming man and a famous singer, then we don't actually have to do the hard work of redistribution or regulation. We can just 'soft power' our way into a future where the only thing that grows is the gap between the people on the Davos stage and the people who have to live in the world they’ve built.

The tragicomedy of the situation is that neither Trudeau nor Perry seems to realize they are the jesters in this court. They are the entertainment provided for the real power brokers—the hedge fund managers and tech oligarchs who find these discussions about 'values' to be a quaint, necessary tax on their time. They listen to the speech, they take the selfie, and then they go back to the hotel to discuss how to further consolidate the world's resources.

In the end, the Davos gathering is a monument to the endurance of human vanity. It is a place where the phrase 'changing the world' is used as a synonym for 'protecting our interests.' Trudeau and Perry are simply the most recent faces of this grand delusion. They represent the final stage of a civilization that has replaced substance with style, and conviction with celebrity. As they discuss the virtues of soft power, the rest of the world is feeling the very hard power of economic reality. But don't worry—I'm sure there’s a catchy anthem being written about it as we speak.