I have been considering several critical remarks made by high ranking members of two of the more important leading groups on the global scene at the annual congress of global leading forces, the World Economic Forum held in Davos Switzerland. I have to this point considered the remarks of Chinese Premier Li Qiang (here), and those of EU Commission President Ursula von de Leyen (here). The focus of these remarks turned on the theme for the 54th annual conference--Rebuilding Trust. Today I consider the somewhat remarkable address (Spanish version here; English version here) presented by Javier Milei, President of the Republic of Argentina, a newcomer, and member of the global South (though not of what the leading forces of the global North generally stereotype as orthodox Global South).
The remarks are fascinating (in the ancient sense of bewitching) and thus remarkable (in the sense of especially worth of remark), if only for their quite useful way of drawing more fully the contrasts of perception very much on display this year--especially around the concept and symbolism of "trust" (as belief, confidence (eg Latin: fiducia; Old Norse traust "help, confidence, protection, support," but also faith and faithful (eg Latin: fides). The contrasts were stark:
Chinese Premier Li Qiang (here) offered trust in a vanguard state representing global leading forces dedicated to the realization of normatively identifiable objectives;
EU Commission President Ursula von de Leyen (here) offered trust in a techno-bureaucracy guiding a rationalized process embedding normatively infused values.
Both infused those abstract proffering with meaning heavily dependent on the way each rationalized the world through the premises of their respective political-economic-social models. Despite the differences, both visions converged around the need for guidance, correction, and shaping as a function of objectives overseen by a shepherding collective.
In contrast Argentine President (
Spanish version here;
English version here)
offered an oracle of distrust in the form of a warning: trust no collective other than the capitalist collective.
President Milei shifted focus of trust away from the constitution of leading forces guidance collectives to the masses; and from control/nudging organs and vanguards or techno-bureaucracies, all of which he asserted were structurally untrustworthy. While he might have placed his trust in consumers of economic productivity or in labor as a factor in its production, both driving a wobbling collective movement representing the infinitely iterative consequences of individual human interaction, he did not. Instead, and like his peers in China and the EU he also sought refuge in a vanguard--the more rationally anarchic vanguard of global so-called capitalists. Again, like his Chinese and EU counterparts, the focus was on oracular totems: concrete expressions of the essence of the signification of trust in human collective social relations. China and the EU spoke to political vanguards and institutionalized techno-administrative organs. Their totems were the legitimacy of leading forces vanguards and the disciplinary normativity of administered risk. For China the signifying totem was socialism represented by the new prosperous state as a guardian of the global order in the new historical era; for the EU the signifying totem was democratic administrative supervision overcoming the threats of risks (especially Russian militarism and the corruption of AI). Both were unified by the fundamental objective of ordering from a center. For President Milei, that totem was capitalism, represented by the anarchy (an ordering without a center) of the market but driven by capital. Its unifying effects, in turn, are conceived as ordered around the consequential effects of individual pursuit of personal interest within networked collectives of political, social, religious, and cultural power manifested through institutions also maximizing interests within competitive markets of their own. For Milei, then, trust was centered on the self, and the self is primarily the capitalist self, personal and aggregated productive forces pursuing their own interests disciplined by the aggregated interests of others; everyone else follows.
It follows that though Milei appears to deliver a radical critique of the traectories of social organization of economic activity, he conforms to the premise of collectivity. The radical turn, perhaps, lies in what President Milei understands as difference between the untrustworthy coerced public collectivity of public vanguardism and public administrative supervision, on the one hand, and the trustworthy collectivity built around aggregations of individual choice--even where that choice may be severely constrained by contextual circumstances. It is in this sense, then, that President Milei, like Premier Li Qiang and EU Commission
President von der Leyen share a point of convergence in the context of
trust. All three of them point to collectives for trust leadership--and
in the process suggest those collectives not worthy of trust. Where
Premier Li Qiang focused trust on a vanguard; where von der Leyen
focused on the process of risk guided by a techno-bureaucracy, President
Milei focuses trust on production undertaken driven by capital (human and otherwise) and tested in markets
substantially free of the state and its vanguards.Trust in leadership, trust in oversight, trust in production--these are the manifestation of trust on offer. One focuses on the trustworthiness of a collective entrusted with a collectively shared embrace of a human trajectory towards something ultimate; the other focuses on the trustworthiness of a collective that is meant to safeguard within a collectively defined pen the fences around which are meant as much to keep things out as to keep those protected in; and the last focuses on the trustworthiness of those who hold economic capacity, an anarchic collective of productive forces that drive institutional ecologies from the sides (not the bottom).
1. Collectivism is the root of all evil; "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" (Marx, Communist Manifesto Chp. 4). Milei's discursive style appears deliberately to avoid the elegance and subtleties that high level officials tend to adopt, like the poetry of the 16th and 17th century Spanish Hapsburg court in Madrid, as a sign of solidarity with their global peers. of the high level officials. It is meant to function like 20th century brutalist architecture (once much prized, then despised, and now in old age prized if only for its nostalgia for an age impossible to recapture). It is, in this sense, as brutally effective, and discursively aligned with, Marx's Communist Manifesto. But where Marx and the Communists reified Communism, the "spectre haunting Europe" into the totems of class struggle collectivization against feudalism and bourgeois error, Milei reanimated the the spectre of Capitalism haunting the West into the totems of proletarian struggles against the institutionalized feudalism of post-Marxist collectivization which enriches the vanguard and the techno-bureaucracies while it impoverishes those in whose service they operate.
Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty. [hoy estoy acá para decirles que Occidente está en peligro, está en
peligro porque aquellos, que supuestamente deben defender los valores de
Occidente, se encuentran cooptados por una visión del mundo que –
inexorablemente – conduce al socialismo, en consecuencia a la pobreza.] (Milei Remarks Spanish version here; English version here).
The villain, collectivism: "We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. [Nosotros estamos, acá, para decirles que los experimentos colectivistas nunca son la solución a los problemas, que aquejan a los ciudadanos del mundo, sino que – por el contrario – son su causa.]" Ibid. The motives are mixed--either from seeking to do good in a disastrously bad way, or more pragmatically, from the desire to "belong to a privileged caste" [de querer pertenecer a una casta privilegiada]" (Ibid.). One has now flipped hierarchies of exploitation and their object. At the same time, one has satisfied the ancient desire of the human within collectives--to aspire, as Nietzsche suggested in the context of norm controlling religion, to the role of priest (Twilight of the Idols). It is, in fact neither the vanguard, nor the revolutionaries, nor the techno-bureaucrats that one ought to trust; one ought to trust oneself.
Yet one might stop here to consider what exactly is the nature of the collectivization that so irks President Milei. He has no fear of coordinated action, or of aggregation of human resources toward a shared objective (especially if that objective is wealth enhancing). He objects, instead to coercive collectivization--collectivization from outside. To that end, to enhance collectivization driven from the bottom, it is necessary to unmask the forces of coercion, and then to de-fang them. And for President Milei, the primary source of coercive collectivization in the current era is the state. That coercion can be as readily manifested through the operations of a vanguard in the process of socialist "communization", as it can be manifested through the process of indirect nudging of a regulatory techno-bureaucracy. That can be no trust in the face of coercion. But there can be trst in coercion that is generated by (self) interest. The result may be the same--the trajectories toward that result start from very different places. It is to that argument that much of the rest of President Milei's remarks turn.
2. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"(John 8:32 (KJV). Milei's brutalist realism, the response to a perceived oracular warning, is attached to a factual universe that the President of Argentina elaborates at length. They are grounded in conclusions from an analysis of per capita DDP growth from the end of the Roman Republic through 1800 AD. (essentially flat as described in the remarks), compared that thereafter which grew at an accelerated rate. The root cause: capitalism. The precipitating cause, industrialization. Marx, of course, would view this as an inevitable stage necessary for the movement of a society advancing through industrialization to the richness required for the establishment of a communist society--a view with Chinese characteristics elaborated for for example Deng Xiaoping. But in the West (and President Milei focuses on the West where the great error is at its most noxious) the complex of social relations elaborated in the constitution of society after the Industrial Revolution produced the greatest alleviation of aggregate poverty in that region of the world. "Far from being the cause of our problems,
free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we
have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. The
empirical evidence is unquestionable. Therefore . . . there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is superior in productive terms" [La conclusión es obvia: lejos de ser la causa de nuestros problemas, el capitalismo de libre empresa, como sistema económico, es la única herramienta que tenemos para terminar con el hambre, la pobreza y la indigencia, a lo largo y a lo ancho de todo el planeta. La evidencia empírica es incuestionable. Por eso, como no cabe duda de que el capitalismo de libre mercado es superior – en términos productivos] (Milei Remarks ).
One might consider, though, the semiotics of free and enterprise. Free here does not appear to be contextless. President Miñei might imply, but it might be naive to suggest, that choices are absolutely free. Every action is undertaken in context--and context can be quite complicated. In that sense, one's free choice (whether "one" is an individual or collective) is undertaken within and is the consequence of the weighing of the factors within which action or inaction is taken, beliefs are formed, and views of the world are applied. One is free, in that sense, only as a function of the circumstances in which freedom may be exercised. And those circumstances can significantly constrain the range of "free" choice. President Milei, if he is to be taken seriously, then, must be referencing (or ought to in any case) freedom of a different sort: that is freedom as an autonomy to decide for oneself how the balance of circumstances may be factored into action (or inaction) and to suffer the consequences of that choice. Vanguard freedom delegates that freedom of circumstantial choosing to a collective organ. Administrative supervision offers protection of risk of consequences in return for delegation of choice. Milei would reject both, that is he would reject the delegation of choice or choice constraining based on exogenous risk assessors and controllers, and return trust to those who bear the risk. That is all very well in the economic sphere, from a perspective of role differentiation in social complexes. Yet it does not speak to the residuum--the responsibility of the collective for taking care of its own, at least enough so that, in resident Milei's world view, risk and innovation (and with it wealth creation and poverty reduction) may be enhanced. And that is a pity.
3. Social Justice is a Chimera; "libertarianism"holds the key to the future. President Milei then turns to the internal demons that plague what had been the course of Western democratic free market capitalism from its inevitable road toward the augmentation of individual economic welfare (what the Marxist-Leninist would call the necessity of developing productive forces to a stage where communism is possible). Those internal demons are the alignment of collectivist values with free market economics (what in China would be understood as the alignment of moral/cultural values within socialist modernization that had been unbalanced by privileging productive development).
In the West one does not speak to Core Socialist Values to be embedded in social life by the vanguard; one speaks to social justice as a cluster of value-objectives that must be achieved through the guidance of the techno-bureaucracy and to those ends embedded in the development of economic productive forces.
the left-wing doxa has attacked capitalism, alleging matters of morality, saying - that's what the detractors claim - that it's unjust. They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic. Of course, with the money of others. So they therefore advocate for social justice. But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn't contribute to general well-being. [la doxa de izquierda ha atacado al capitalismo por sus cuestiones de moralidad, por ser – según ellos - dicen sus detractores, que es injusto. Dicen que el capitalismo es malo porque es individualista y que el colectivismo es bueno porque es altruista, con la ajena. En consecuencia bregan por la justicia social, pero este concepto que – desde el Primer Mundo – se ha puesto de moda, en la última época, en mi país es una constante del discurso político, desde hace más de 80 años. El problema es que la justicia social no es justa, sino que tampoco aporta al bienestar general;] (Remarks, supra)
But President Milei cannot mean that free markets and liberal democracy is amoral, or put otherwise that the system lacks social justice. Instead, President Milei is going after another totem--social justice as the concretization of a set of abstract values propositions that serve an ideology inimical, in values, to those on the basis of which capitalist free market liberal democracy is framed. President Milei understand social justice as a consequential tactic of collectivist ideology. "Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda: they left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life and to economic growth." [Dado el estrepitoso fracaso de los modelos colectivistas y los
innegables avances del mundo libre, los socialistas se vieron forzados a
cambiar su agenda. Dejaron atrás la lucha de clases basada en el
sistema económico para reemplazarla por otros supuestos conflictos
sociales igual de nocivos para la vida en comunidad y para el
crecimiento económico.] (Milei Remarks, supra).
In the process President Milei also demonizes core concepts of contemporary liberal democratic organization in favor of the structures of his vision of libertarianism. First President Milei speaks to the consequences of the the objects of social justice--to use the collective pot of national wealth extracted through taxation for their own ends. "This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom." [Lo cual significa que el Estado se financia, a través de la coacción y a mayor carga impositiva mayor es la coacción, menor es la libertad.] (Remarks, supra). President Milei highlights two cases in point: radical feminism and
radical environmentalism. The radical in both has produced state
intrventions that hinders economic progress "giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society." (Milei Remarks, supra).
Then in a passage that reminds one of Jack Ma's now infamous Bund Finance Summit Speech (24 October 2020), President Milei speaks to the adverse consequences for innovation of a taxation system used to fuel an ideologically specific social justice agenda.
If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. They will do well and produce more if they make a good quality product at an attractive price. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward. But if the state punishes capitalists when they're successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less. The pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole. Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price. [Si el bien o servicio que ofrece una empresa no es deseado, esa empresa quiebra a menos que se adecúe a lo que el mercado le está demandando. Si genera un producto de buena calidad a un buen precio, atractivo, le va a ir bien y va a producir más. De modo que el mercado es un proceso de descubrimiento, en el cual el capitalista encuentra sobre la marcha el rumbo correcto, pero si el Estado castiga al capitalista por tener éxito y lo bloquea en este proceso de descubrimiento destruye sus incentivos y las consecuencias de eso es que va a producir menos y la torta será más chica, generando perjuicio para el conjunto de la sociedad. El colectivismo - al inhibir estos procesos de descubrimiento y al dificultar la apropiación de lo descubierto - ata al emprendedor de las manos y le imposibilita producir mejores bienes y ofrecer mejores servicios a un mejor precio.] (Remaks, supra).
Compare what might be the more elegant and nuanced version by Jack Ma:
I think there is another phenomenon. Many regulatory authorities around the world have become zero risk, their own departments have become zero risk, but the entire economy has become risky, the whole society has become risky. The competition of the future is a competition of innovation, not a competition of regulatory skills. Now, each country’s regulation is more ruthless than the next, all the development is a mirage, but by not allowing it, each cut is bloody. Based on my understanding, what President Xi said about
“enhancing governing ability” means to maintain healthy and sustainable
development under orderly regulation, not no development due to
regulation. It is not difficult to regulate. What’s difficult is to
deliver regulation that achieves the purpose of producing sustainable
and healthy development.
(Jack Ma Bund Finance Summit Speech supra)
This then provides the foundation for an extended discussion of the value of libertarianism as a better basis for harvesting the benefits of capitalist free market liberal democracy.
Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on freedom in Argentina, Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defence of the right to life, liberty and property. Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price. [Ahora bien, para entender qué venimos a defender es importante definir de qué hablamos nosotros cuando hablamos de libertarismo. Para definirlo retomo las palabras del máximo prócer de las ideas de la libertad, de Argentina, el profesor Alberto Benegas Lynch (h) que dice: “el libertarismo es el respeto irrestricto del proyecto de vida del prójimo, basado en el principio de no agresión, en defensa del derecho a la vida, a la libertad y a la propiedad, cuyas instituciones fundamentales son la propiedad privada, los mercados libres de intervención estatal, la libre competencia, la división del trabajo y la cooperación social”. Dicho de otro modo, el capitalista es un benefactor social que, lejos de apropiarse de la riqueza ajena, contribuye al bienestar general. En definitiva, un empresario exitoso es un héroe.] (Milei Rearks, supra).
It is against this model that President Milei sees deployed the cadres of the techno-administrative organs advanced by EU Commission President von der Leyen. "And I say this precisely because in countries that should defend the values of the free market, private property and the other institutions of libertarianism, sectors of the political and economic establishment are undermining the foundations of libertarianism, opening up the doors to socialism and potentially condemning us to poverty, misery and stagnation." [
Digo que occidente está en peligro justamente porque en aquellos países que debiéramos defender los valores del libre mercado, la propiedad privada, y las demás instituciones del libertarismo, sectores del establishment político y económico, algunos por errores en su marco teórico y otros por ambición de poder , están socavando los fundamentos del libertarismo, abriéndole las puertas al socialismo y condenándonos potencialmente a la pobreza, a la miseria y al estancamiento.] (Milei Rearks, supra). And not only against the West, but also of socialism in general.
There follows a longer exposition of the value of neoclassical economics from a libertarian perspective, one that understands markets as a mechanism for social cooperation and market failures are evidence of coercion. Milei ascribes the primary engine of coercion, and thus of markeyfailures in the state. In effect, Milei suggests is that when leaders like Ursula von der Leyen propose the construciton of economies managed by techno-bureaucracies, they are effectively developing the structural elements of unceasing market failures. He, in effect, conflates the trajectories of Marxist-Leninist states with those of techno-admnistrative liberal democracy.
The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it's only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances. [Occidente, lamentablemente, ya comenzó a transitar este camino. Sé que a muchos les puede sonar ridículo plantear que occidente se ha volcado al socialismo. Pero sólo es ridículo en la medida que uno se restringe a la definición económica tradicional del socialismo, que establece que es un sistema económico donde el estado es el dueño de los medios de producción.] (Milei Remarks, supra)
4. Capitalists of the world unite. President Milei ends with a plea in the brutalist style: a plea not to the consumers who drive libertarian economics but to the business people who, by traveling to Davos on corporate expense accounts, become indistiguishable from the internal caste of managerial shepherds against which President Milei hurls his Jeremiad. "I would like to leave a message for all business people here and those who are not here in person but are following from around the world." [quiero dejarle un mensaje a todos los empresarios aquí presentes y a los que nos están mirando desde todos los rincones del planeta.] (Remarks, supra). These were the remarks that provided the fdder for the press coverage (such as it was) that followed:
Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch and unconditional ally. [No se dejen amedrentar ni por la casta política ni por los parásitos que viven del estado. No se entreguen a una clase política que lo único que quiere es perpetuarse en el poder y mantener sus privilegios. Ustedes son benefactores sociales. Ustedes son héroes. Ustedes son los creadores del periodo de prosperidad más extraordinario que jamás hayamos vivido. Que nadie les diga que su ambición es inmoral. Si ustedes ganan dinero es porque ofrecen un mejor producto a un mejor precio, contribuyendo de esa manera al bienestar general. No cedan al avance del estado. El estado no es la solución. El estado es el problema mismo. Ustedes son los verdaderos protagonistas de esta historia, y sepan que a partir de hoy, cuentan con un aliado inclaudicable en la republica argentina.] (Milei Remarks, supra).
The political class is both parasitical and powerful. The state is the problem, not the solution. Making money is the pathway to wealth and innovation. And prosperity is the current stage of the development of the global social order. The simplification is as appealing as that of a Manifesto. The excruciating realities of nuance, of responsibility and its distribution among social collectives where the enterprise is charged with engaging in one act and one act only. All of that is left for another day. But no fault there. This is merely a variation on a theme that marked the addresses of the Chinese Premier and the EU Commission President. What is missing, in the end. . .at least in the remarks of President Milei is the last connection--not with the business people at Davos or their global caste but with consumers rather than producers and to labor rather than capital.
5. Oracles. All of this brings to mind the tragedy of the oracular. Not the tragedy of oracles, but of the human response to the oracular which is both energetic and almost inevitably vitally misdirected for all its fury and sometimes its beauty. As retold by Stravinsky in his opera
Oedipus Rex (1927;
synopsis here), the ancient and well known story of the futility of avoiding oracular pronouncements and the blindness of humans to the meaning of oracles received and interpreted from within the lusts, desires, hopes, perspectives, presumptions, and strategies of the objects of oracles, the arc of the phenomenological expression of the oracular required three oracular pronouncements, a prophetic intervention, and a blocking intervention (too late)--each of which were strategically and perceptually misunderstood or avoided--one prophetic truth; and at last, and despite best efforts to avoid it, the revelation that then recasts the entirely of the oracular pronouncements in new, and tragic, light.
The first of the Delphic oracles was delivered to Laius and Jocasta, the reigning monarchs of Thebes with the warning that their son would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Avoidance required action--the direction to a shepherd to dispose of the infant boy on a mountainside. Instead the child was ultimately delivered to the monarchs of Corinth who raised him as their own. The second of the Delphic oracles was delivered to Oedipus as a young man who, taunted by his friends for appearing unrelated to his parents, set off to Delphi to know more about his origins. There he was warned not to return to his native land because he would kill his father and marry his mother. Thinking his native land was Corinth he set off, meeting and killing Laius at a crossroads.
The third of the Delphic oracles was delivered at the request of Oedipus who sought counsel through his brother in law Creon, many years later having assumed the throne of Thebes and married Jocasta, for ridding the city of a plague to the city. It is here that Stravinsky's opera begins. Creon reports that the oracle commanded that the city seek out the murderer of Laius who resided in Thebes ("Quem depelli deus jubet peremptorem, Peste infikit Thebas. Apollo dixit deus."). In his ignorant hubris Oedipus, in his ignorance, declares he will solve the puzzle in the most ironic way ("Clarissimus Oedipus, likeor divinabo").
The prophetic revelation follows from the interrogation of Tiresias. At first he chooses silence ("Dikere non liket, Dikere nefastum, Oedipus, non possum"). Finally goaded he speaks the absolute truth about the meaning of the oracle (Rex kekidit regem, [A King killed the King]; Deus regem acusat [The Gods accuse a king]).Tiresias speaks precisely true. Yet the precision permits a large space for willful misnterpretaiton.
That is, precise truth in this case can be misleading--not by the truth
spoken, but by the meaning with which it is invested.
The resistance of those who divine the truth follows. Jocasta understand where this is leading and seeks to avert tragedy by spreading misinformation. Thus her advice to Oedipus: "Semper oracula mentiuntur. [The oracles always lie]; Oedipus, cave oracula [Oedipus, beware the oracles]; Quae mentiantur. [For they lie]). The irony, of course, is that the oracle does not lie--everyone else misperceives. They must. It is an inevitable consequence of the premises and presumptions that they bring to the oracle from which they reconstruct its meaning in terms that align with their own vision of the way things must be.
The essential quality of oracles, its "giveness" as 20th century phenomenology might describe it (here), is that neither the oracle nor the oracular actually has the slightest concern about its subject. That is a given. Oracles exist in a state of perpetual indifference--like the products of an iterative process of data driven analytics by an autonomous generative intelligence. There is another "given" though, that may be of equal interest. In the presence of the oracular, its human (singular or collective) object indifferent to the lusts, desires, perspectives, strategies, impulses, machinations, or semiotic sophistry that chokes the wolrd of the human until, gasping for something sustitaining to breathe, it reaizes the madness of its relationship to the oracular.
And that is what one ends up with--responses to an unseen and oscure oracular wwarning, discerned from the examonation of the entrails of history and the interpretaiotn of the facts that lay decomposing in its passing. Each of these leaders have read the oracles. Each has sought to restate the oracular warning (signs), and in restating provide a path toward the avoidance of the warning or the fulfillment of its promise. Each in turn will also likely shape the oracular material, precisely true, in ways that invite misdriection depending on what the listener brings to the oracle. The three oracles provide direction, each arising from the context from which or to which they are delivered. And each is, in its own way, impossible to decode until after the fact. But each suggests the temporality of the oracle and its context. One can, in each interaction, watch the stage setting for the (Greek style) tragedies that follow--not because of avoidable human failing, but because of their inevitability in the face of the indifference of the given to the circumstances of those to whom the oracle (of history in this case) is provided.
In that sense, like the cascade of oracles in the Oedipus story, the three speeches suggest the subjectivity of the oracular in quite different places, spaces, and times. Premier Li Qang's speech speaks to the initial oracle--self protection as systemic protection that in the process ensures that oracle's ends. President von der Leyen's speech recalls the second oracular intervention, a warning to stay away and the construction of systems that seek to protect, but in the process potentially endanger. President Milei's speech invokes the third Delphic oracle, in the context of plague, a willingness to get to the bottom of its cause, but where the seeker is also the object, and the search for freedom returns one the conseqeunces of collective origen. One speaks to trust but in reality one describes the objects of
Untrustworthiness that drives the construction of trust: for some it is grounded in a deep suspicion of the market as an autonomous force; for others it is an equally deep suspicion of the state as a coercive risk controller without consequence. These suspicions drive trust analysis and the (mis)interpretaiton of the oracular warning percieved and on display in the speeches. Yet one might be inclined to suspect that vangaurds cannot avoid markets by shifting its structres of failure from market actors to the abtracted spaces of vanguard complementarity (discussed
here). One might also suspect that risk cannot be avoided by displacing shifting the control of risk away from risk bearers, one merely reshapes its character and conseqeunces (considered in part
here). And one cannot but suspect the impossibility of doing without the apparatus the state in whatever form it might be manifested (discussed
here).
What is missing? These speech stories, these performances, still require their Tiresias signifier. Though were that function to be fulfilled it as likely that they will find an audience as eager to hear them out as Oedipus listened to Tiresias. And Jocasta. . . Jocasta--well it is possible that the rest of us now serve that role (eg here, here, here, here; here, and here).
The full text of the Remarks in English and Spanish follow below and may also be accessed here: (Spanish version ; English version).
This is the third of the set of reflections on the remarks of Li Qiang, Ursula von der Leyen, and Javier Milei delivered at the 2024 WEF in Davos; each can be accessed here:
Brief
Thoughts and Full Text of Speech by Chinese premier Li Qiang at the
opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024
[李强在世界经济论坛2024年年会开幕式上的特别致辞（全文）];
The
Transformative Consequences of Risk Spirals: "Special Address by
President von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum 16 January 2024";
Trust
No Collective Other than the Capitalist Collective-- "Palabras del
Presidente de la Nación, Javier Milei" [Special address by Javier Milei,
President of Argentina].
