World Leaders should not gather at Davos. It's too risky.

It's very risky. Davos attracts the world's business and political leaders. It brings them all into one place to discuss the problems affecting our world and come up with solutions. It is such a noble endeavor. But what could go wrong? Plenty!

As a world, we can't afford to have most of our leaders gathered in one place. Maybe I excessively binged on Resident Alien but if there is a chance that a malevolent alien specie exists, having most of our leaders concentrated in one small geographical area gives them an unparalleled opportunity to strike and make the greatest impact. The aliens can wipe out most of our political and business elites in one strike.

We lose a generation of leaders, their expertise, their contributions, institutional memory, and valuable relationships. Aggregated over business and politics, the losses will be gargantuan.

Of course, new leaders can arise, and the world doesn’t end, but we still lose a lot, and it takes so much time to recover.

If the Davos was a gathering of sports and entertainment elites, the loss would be devastating still but the ramifications would not be as deep as losing business and political elites. In terms of reach and popularity, sports and entertainment elites have a wider audience, but they don't make any policies, they don't govern, and they are not entangled in institutions that govern life as we live it on earth.

A gathering of sports and entertainment elites under one roof is okay because these have very few enemies. Aliens would not even think about destroying these. Why? Because their power is via the influence of the masses, unlike political and business elites who have real direct power. Aliens probably love our sports and entertainment elites and would capture them alive for their amusement.

Forget about the aliens. The real threat is within us, earthlings. Davos, as inclusive as it is in terms of business and political elites, excludes guests from “undesirable” countries such as Iran and North Korea. Recently, Russia has been on that list.

An ambitious bureaucrat, an eager securocrat, or any resourceful high-up person, with an overbearing “us-against-the-world” mentality can decide that everyone at Davos is “them” and worth perishing, with some collateral damage. It doesn’t even have to be Putin or Kim Jung Un or Ayatollah. It can be anyone close to them.

Yet still, it can also be sanctioned at the highest level, the Putin-KimJung-Ayatollah level. If these fellas are truly the egomaniac warlords that we are led to believe, then it doesn’t make sense to gather world leaders at Davos, regardless of the level of security you have there. The meetings are just not worth it, not when you are faced with more than one bitter excluded man-child with nuclear and biochemical capabilities.

Yes, Davos is a hub, that brings us together, but the problem with a hub is that it's also a single point of failure.

Forget the aliens and rogue states and look closely among us. Think of the extremists, extreme leftists, extreme right, utopianists, extreme religionists, and different extreme ideological groups. These folks have ideals that have not yet been attained. They would like to attain those ideals, and the hurdle in front of them is ‘ ̶s̶p̶o̶r̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶t̶a̶i̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶e̶l̶i̶t̶e̶s̶’. Of course not. The hurdle is, no prize for guessing the correct answer, business and political elites.

Take business elites for example, they are blamed by both the far right and the far left. By the far right for pushing for globalization and by the far left for corporate greed, exploitation and not paying a fair share of taxes.

Business and political elites are the heart of Davos. These would be the target. Academics, Intellectuals, Religious and Civil Society Reps, and the Media would then be viewed as either sellouts and co-opts or collateral damage.

Sooner or later, one of the “far” camps will incorrectly identify Davos as a mini-reset opportunity.

The reasoning will go like this:

The business and political elites that gather at Davos masquerade as part of the solution, but they are not. They are part of the problem. They are the problem. The world is in a mess (less than ideal state) because of these folks. Since they are part of the problem, they cannot be a part of the solution. Any solution they recommend, or implement is our next problem.

This type of reasoning can fit into any extreme group whether religious, economic, or political. In fact, it might be very much a widely held view.

Business and political elites are not loved, of course, they are not sportspersons and entertainers. Business elites are hated, more so than political elites. We vote for the latter (though a significant fraction doesn’t vote), we don't vote for the business elites. Regardless of the unfavorable public opinion for both, we still require leadership of some sort in those spheres, hence their existence is both justified and necessary.

If you want to know what happens when you lose a generation of leaders, look at Africa. Vacuums, chancers, dictators, clueless men at the top, it's a mess though you can find a few spots here and there with good leaders. Colonization, neo-colonization, slavery, and tribal wars have robbed the continent of great leaders, and society in general is still trying to come up with ways of elevating good leaders to leadership positions.

If you are a leader invited to Davos, and you refuse to attend Davos for reasons cited here, you will be branded paranoid (of course you are paranoid) but then again “only the paranoid will survive”.

Ciao!