My Thoughts on the World Economic Forum

A View Through the Lens of the Nervous System’s Quest for Safety

In my previous post,

Why the Need to Control Other People is a Self-Defeating Behaviour

I mention that, since the Davos meeting is occurring this week, I would look at the worked example of the WEF through the lens of my axiom :

“our Nervous System is constantly trying to keep us safe and alive, and is driving us towards behaviours, actions and thoughts which are intended to make us more safe, both in the present and for the future.”

Here we have a small group of the most wealthy and powerful people, comprising CEOs of big corporations, Government ministers, academics and technologists, the “secret” services [who are openly in attendance], the media, and regulators [including the head of the UK’s Ofcom], who are gathering ever more power and wealth [resources] to themselves. In order to achieve this, they have become obsessive-compulsive about trying to control what the rest of us say, do, and even think, and deciding what is "best" for us.

Indeed, their colluding and, yes, conspiring [from the combination of con-, meaning “together,” and spīrāre, “to breathe”] represents a “pinnacle” of some humans seeking to completely control and dominate all other people in order to keep themselves and their acquired resources safe. This hubris seems to extend to them even being obsessive-compulsive about making themselves safe from death itself, at least according to their openly stated technocratic and transhumanist agenda.

While those at the very top of that structure clearly score very highly in psychopathy, by any measure of Prof. Kevin Dutton’s criteria for this, I see the rank and file members, who enable those people at the top, as being seduced and corrupted by the power and money on offer, and not least by the protection [safety] that comes with being a member of the club. The behaviours of the middle and lower ranks are hence also clearly, in my view, ultimately driven by their Nervous System’s quest for safety.

That this is self-defeating behaviour is also clear, because here is a case where they can never ever feel anything like having safety in numbers, as they are the very, very few protecting themselves and their resources from a perceived, and initially imaginary, threat that the vast sea of the rest of humanity pose to them. Yet, through their own low regard for humanity, I see them as creating their own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more extreme and obsessive-compulsive they are about trying to control the rest of us that they become, the more a threat our own Nervous Systems will perceive them to be. Hence the more driven our own behaviours and responses will be to push back, in order to feel safe from the dangers we begin to perceive them to actually represent. As we start to stand up for ourselves more and more in larger numbers, and, especially, increasingly ridicule and deride them, they will in turn, feel increasingly perilous about themselves and the resources they have hoarded. As we go around this vicious circle, this will lead them, in turn, to coming up with ever more draconian and contemptuous plans to control us. As, ultimately, we do have the numbers, this arms race for safety cannot end well for them.

Unfortunately, our own Nervous System level quest to feel safe, can easily be gamed and manipulated, especially through fear mongering, manufacturing dangers, and then offering “solutions” through which we imagine we will be made safe, even at the cost of giving up our rights. By manufacturing a constant state of emergency [the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the Climate Crisis, the War on Viruses, the War in Europe, and now the War on Misinformation, and the War on Domestic Terrorism], they seek to drive us into our own self-defeating obsessive-compulsive behaviours via our Nervous System’s quest to feel safe in the presence of a constant spectral “enemy”. We must not give in to the manufactured fear.

The fear of other people, and the dehumanization of other groups, is also a primary target for manipulation of our need to feel safe at the Nervous System level, through which control can be maintained for longer via divide-and-rule tactics. In particular, these divisions create the illusion that we don’t actually have safety in numbers. The WEF and related groups are masters at this, with their access to “nudge units”, and we need to be very mindful of this. We cannot allow ourselves to become divided, nor fall into the trap of dehumanizing one another.