The annual migration of the world’s most expensive suits to the Swiss Alps has once again commenced, proving that if you have enough money, you can indeed buy an invitation to watch the world burn from a scenic, high-altitude overlook. This year’s theme at the World Economic Forum isn't officially 'How to Profit from the Apocalypse,' though it might as well be. Instead, the gray-matter-depleted analysts and the vultures of venture capital are whispering a new mantra: 'adaptive normalcy.' It is a linguistic shroud wrapped around the rotting corpse of political stability, a desperate attempt by the global elite to pretend that the erratic, orange-tinted wrecking ball currently occupying the White House is just another manageable variable in their quarterly projections.

Observe the spectacle with the appropriate amount of nausea. On one side, we have the self-anointed Masters of the Universe—tech moguls who think they’re philosophers because they read a summary of Marcus Aurelius, and bankers who think they’re saints because they donated a rounding error to a literacy program. They arrive in Davos on private jets, emitting more carbon in a single weekend than a mid-sized African nation does in a year, all to attend seminars on 'Sustainability' and 'Equity.' They are 'on edge,' we are told by the breathless press. They are worried. But they aren't worried about the degradation of democratic norms or the fact that the leader of the free world treats international diplomacy like a segment of a low-rent reality TV show. No, they are worried that the volatility might slightly complicate their offshore tax havens. Their 'anxiety' is a performance, a way to signal to their shareholders that they are Very Serious People while they secretly calculate the dividends of the next round of corporate deregulation.

On the other side, we have the 'Trump Show' itself. It is a masterclass in the grotesque. The American President arrives at the shrine of globalism—the very 'globalism' he rails against to his base of rubes and forgotten men—and proceeds to brag about how he has conquered the economy through sheer force of ego. It’s a perfect circle of stupidity. He claims to be the enemy of the Davos crowd while standing at their podium, and they claim to be his victims while their stock portfolios reach stratospheric heights thanks to his tax cuts. It’s not a clash of civilizations; it’s a business meeting between a loudmouthed salesman and his most hypocritical clients. Both sides are getting exactly what they want: he gets the spotlight, and they get the loot. It is a symbiotic relationship between a wrecking ball and the people who hold the insurance policies on the rubble.

This 'adaptive normalcy' is nothing more than the institutionalization of Stockholm Syndrome. The world’s leaders and corporate titans have looked into the abyss of populism and realized that as long as the abyss offers a capital gains reduction, they can learn to love the view. They have moved from shock to bargaining, and finally, to a numb, profitable acceptance. They talk about 'managing the disruption,' which is just a fancy way of saying they’ve decided to stop caring about the fire as long as they can roast marshmallows over it. The 'trading partners' who are supposedly trembling are the same ones who will be seen clinking glasses at the nightly galas, laughing at the sheer ease with which they can manipulate the levers of power while the masses bicker over tweets and culture war distractions.

The tragedy, if one can even call it that anymore, is the utter vacuum of integrity across the entire spectrum of this mountain retreat. The Left-leaning technocrats in the audience will go home and write sanctimonious op-eds about the 'danger to our institutions,' ignoring the fact that those institutions were built to facilitate the very inequality they now lament. They love the drama because it makes them feel relevant and morally superior. Meanwhile, the Right-wing cheerleaders will frame this as a victory for the 'common man,' as if a billionaire shouting at other billionaires in a Swiss ski resort has anything to do with the price of gasoline in Ohio. It is a theater of the absurd where the actors have forgotten their lines and the audience is too heavily medicated on greed and self-interest to notice the script has no ending.

In the final analysis, Davos is a microcosm of our collective intellectual and moral bankruptcy. We are watching the consolidation of a world where 'normalcy' is whatever chaos is currently profitable. There is no moral core, no long-term vision, just the desperate, frantic scrabbling for relevance in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the need for these over-inflated egos. 'Adaptive normalcy' is the final stage of a dying civilization—the point where we stop trying to fix the engine and just start getting used to the sound of it exploding. It’s not a strategy; it’s a white flag. And as the snow falls on the Alps, burying the hypocrisy for another year, the only thing we can be sure of is that the next 'normal' will be even more deranged than the last. We are all passengers on a ship captained by a madman, with a first-class cabin full of people who are too busy admiring the icebergs to bother turning the wheel.