There is something deliciously ironic about a man who has spent the better part of his career navigating the high-thread-count sheets of central banking suddenly standing atop a nineteenth-century stone fortress to tell us we are all lost at sea. Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister and the personification of a spreadsheet that has gained sentience, recently decamped from the rarefied, oxygen-depleted air of Davos to the chilly ramparts of Quebec City. There, in a setting designed for repelling invaders rather than welcoming the wretched refuse of teeming shores, he unveiled what is being called the ‘Carney Doctrine.’ It is a fascinating piece of political theater, a performance of profound geopolitical vertigo that attempts to position a medium-sized country with a housing crisis as the moral north star of a disintegrating planet.

To be an intellectual observer in this century is to be in a state of permanent exhaustion, but Carney provides a fresh jolt of adrenaline through the sheer audacity of his metaphors. By declaring that Canada must be a ‘beacon to a world that’s at sea,’ he isn't just offering a helping hand; he is suggesting that the rest of us are drowning while he stands on a dry, enlightened rock. It is the classic Davos-man delusion: the belief that if one speaks with enough gravitas and uses enough maritime analogies, the structural failures of the neoliberal order will simply dissolve into the Atlantic. He laments the disintegration of the ‘rules-based order,’ a phrase that has become the liturgical chant of the dispossessed elite who can’t understand why the peasants have stopped following the rules they wrote over expensive appetizers in Switzerland.

The setting of the speech—a military fortress—was a stroke of accidental honesty. As Carney spoke of progress and the arc of history bending toward justice, he did so from behind thick walls intended to survive a siege. This is the quintessence of the modern liberal project: preaching openness and internationalism from within a gated community. He speaks of ‘great powers’ using ‘economic coercion’ as a weapon, as if the global financial systems he presided over at the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada weren’t themselves instruments of a very specific, very polite form of coercion. It is only ‘coercion’ when the people doing it have the wrong accent or a different set of geopolitical ambitions. When it's done by men in bespoke suits to stabilize ‘the markets,’ it’s simply ‘prudent fiscal management.’

Carney’s jabs at the looming specter of Trumpian populism were as predictable as a winter in Ottawa. He suggests that the ‘arc of history’ can still bend towards progress, provided we all subscribe to his particular brand of technocratic optimism. But history isn't an arc; it’s a circle, and we are currently spiraling back toward a neo-feudalism where the only thing ‘at sea’ is the middle class. To talk of national unity as a critical defense against a reshaping world order is a quaint sentiment, but it rings hollow when the domestic reality is one of mounting challenges that no amount of ‘doctrine’ can solve. One cannot eat a beacon, nor can one live inside a speech about progress when the rent consumes seventy percent of a paycheck.

The ‘Carney Doctrine’ is less a strategy and more a prayer for the return of a world where people like Mark Carney were the undisputed architects of reality. He views the current global chaos—the rise of ‘great powers’ and the abandonment of the ‘rules’—not as a failure of his own class’s arrogance, but as a tragic misunderstanding by the masses. The world is at sea, yes, but Canada’s lighthouse is currently flickering. If the world looks to this beacon, they might notice that the light is being powered by a dying battery and a desperate hope that the 1990s might eventually come back if we ask them nicely enough.

There is a surgical precision to the way Carney deconstructs the ‘disintegration’ of the world order while failing to mention that he was one of its chief maintenance officers. He find joy, or at least a grim satisfaction, in identifying the bureaucratic incompetence of others while framing his own brand of competence as the only viable exit strategy. It is the ultimate intellectual's conceit: the belief that the world is a broken machine that can be fixed if we just find a smarter mechanic. But the machine isn't broken; it’s operating exactly as intended, and the people at the controls are simply upset that the passengers have started trying to break into the cockpit. As Carney stands on his fortress, looking out over a world he claims to understand, one can’t help but feel that the beacon isn't meant to guide the ships home—it’s meant to distract them from the fact that the harbor is closed.