Davos is once again upon us as the little gods of this world confab over how to manage us wayward peasants. For decades the men and women who gather annually at Davos have presented themselves as the stewards of progress. They speak the language of the future: innovation, disruption, optimization, resilience, while casting their vision as a humane alternative to the brutalities of nationalism, ideology, and power politics. Yet there is a striking irony at the heart of this self-conception: the philosophy that animates modern technocratic globalism is not forward-looking at all. It is, in fact, a revival of a worldview whose intellectual high point occurred over a century ago.
This is not a novel form of progressivism. It is the resurrection of salvific technocracy. The belief that society’s deepest moral, political, and even existential problems can be solved through expert management, scientific rationality, and administrative coordination. (My friend, Patrick M Wood lays this out clearly in his book Technocracy Rising.) From a personalist perspective, this philosophy is not merely misguided. It is fundamentally dehumanizing.
The Early Twentieth-Century Inheritance
The confidence that suffuses contemporary elite discourse has deep roots in the early twentieth century. This was the era of scientific management, progressive-era reform commissions, and the belief that social disorder resulted primarily from ignorance rather than moral complexity. Human beings, it was thought, could be rationally arranged and optimized if only the right systems were applied by sufficiently enlightened experts.
This worldview gave rise to central planning, social engineering, and “benevolent” coercion. Often in the name of public health, efficiency, or social harmony. It also produced some of the darkest chapters of modern history, not because its adherents were inherently cruel, but because they were convinced they were right. The moral tragedy of that period was not malice but hubris: the refusal to recognize the limits of reason, the irreducibility of the human person, and the dangers of power divorced from humility.
Davos-style globalism inherits this same moral posture. What has changed is not the philosophy, but the scale and the tools. Algorithms have replaced clipboards; global NGOs have replaced national commissions; “evidence-based policy” has replaced overt moral reasoning. Yet the underlying assumption remains intact: human flourishing can be engineered from above.
Progress Without Memory
What makes this inheritance especially ironic is that it is cloaked in the language of progress. Davos elites imagine themselves as having transcended the failures of the past, when in reality they have simply rebranded them. True progress requires historical memory. An ability to learn from error, to incorporate moral insight, and to recognize the tragic dimensions of human existence. Technocratic salvation does none of these.
Instead, it assumes that previous failures were merely technical. If central planning collapsed, it was because the data were insufficient. If social interventions backfired, it was because the models were incomplete. If people resist, it is because they have not yet been properly educated or nudged.
This is not progress. It is repetition.
The Personalist Objection
From a personalist standpoint, the core error of technocratic globalism lies in its anthropology. It treats persons as manageable units rather than moral agents. Human beings are reduced to stakeholders, consumers, populations, or datasets. Objects to be regulated rather than subjects capable of judgment, responsibility, and dissent.
Personalism insists on the opposite: that each person is irreducibly unique, morally accountable, and capable of meaning-making in ways no system can predict or control. Social order does not arise from optimization alone, but from shared moral commitments, cultural inheritance, and freely given consent. No amount of technical expertise can substitute for legitimacy grounded in respect for the person.
Technocratic systems fail not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack a reverence for the unique worth of each person as an individual.
The Myth of Neutral Expertise
One of the most persistent illusions of Davos-style thinking is the claim to neutrality. Decisions are framed as technical necessities rather than moral choices. Trade-offs are obscured by jargon. Coercion is softened by euphemism. Yet every system embeds values, and every policy reflects a vision of the good.
By denying this, technocratic elites place themselves beyond accountability. Disagreement becomes ignorance. Resistance becomes pathology. Moral deliberation is replaced by compliance metrics. The result is not enlightened governance, but alienation, followed inevitably by backlash.
This pattern, too, is not new. It is the predictable outcome of any system that seeks to govern persons without engaging their conscience.
An Old Faith in New Clothes
The crisis now confronting Davos is not simply geopolitical or economic. It is philosophical. The world has changed in ways that managerial optimism cannot absorb. Culture has reasserted itself. Power has returned. Tragedy has intruded. And the old fait, that history bends automatically toward rational coordination, has been exposed as wishful thinking.
In this light, the so-called “turn to the right” observed among global elites may be less a conversion than a reckoning. The question is whether it will involve genuine humility or merely tactical adaptation.
The Apotheosis of the Expert
The philosophical temptation underlying this technocratic mindset is occasionally stated with unusual candor. One of Klaus Schwab’s most prominent intellectual collaborators has suggested, in various public forums, that modern elites are in the process of acquiring powers once attributed to gods, through biotechnology, data control, and artificial intelligence. The claim is usually framed as descriptive rather than theological, but its moral implication is unmistakable: those who design and manage the systems increasingly see themselves not merely as stewards of human affairs, but as architects of human destiny.
From a personalist perspective, this language is revealing. It exposes the latent metaphysics of technocracy: salvation without transcendence, authority without accountability, and power without reverence. When expertise begins to imagine itself as godlike, humility disappears, and with it any meaningful respect for the irreducible dignity of the person. History suggests that this is not the dawn of a new age, but the prelude to a familiar one.
Progress Requires Humility
The great irony of contemporary technocratic progressivism is that it imagines itself as new while repeating an old mistake: the belief that human beings can be saved without being understood, or led without being respected. From a personalist perspective, any vision of the future that does not begin with respect for the irreducible dignity, freedom, and moral agency of the person is destined to fail. No matter how sophisticated its tools.
Progress worthy of the name does not deny its own limits. It acknowledges them. And until Davos learns that lesson, it will remain less a vision of the future than a museum of hubris and conceit.
