And it was despite all a sobering sight to see how the poorest people on Earth still lived. Time travel to the twelfth century, for sure. That we ourselves had no bathrooms and were a bit hungry no doubt added to the effect of this footage, even when it was completely obvious that this was why they were doing it to us, the intended point of their pointless exercise, some kind of sick aversion therapy.
Often statistics appeared on the big screen; yes, PowerPoint shows, a true punishment. That a tenth of one percent of the human population owned half humanity’s wealth— that was us, yay! That half the human population alive at that moment had no assets except their own potential labor power, which was much weakened by poor health and education, that was definitely too bad. But blaming this on capitalism was wrong, we told these non-listening boring people; there would be eight billion poor people if it weren’t for capitalism! But whatever. The figures kept coming, graph after graph, repeated in ways that were not even close to compelling. Bored, sleepy, hypnotized, we tried to figure out which ideological or ethnic group had assembled such a stew. And the soundtrack! Sad music, jaunty music; horribly unforgettable earworms destined to stick in your head forever; tragically depressing music, like dirges played at one-third their intended speed; and so on.
By now the stresses of living rough and watching PowerPoint were getting to a lot of us, we were about to go into full Lord of the Flies mode. I encouraged people to suck up and deal, to enjoy it as a kind of vacation, it was still glamping I told them, who cares about this shit? But turns out quite a lot of them did care.
These people are communists, they declared loudly. So what, I said. We were in a fucking commie glamping reeducation camp, it was going to be a story we could tell in the bars for years to come.
The finale to all the propaganda was a long lecture telling us that the current world order was only working for the elites, and even for us it wouldn’t work for long. We were simply strip-mining the lifeworld, as one Germanic voice from the screen put it, sounding like Werner Herzog to a lot of us, and I have no doubt he could have been involved, and that in German words like lifeworld would be real words already. Those of us with some German had fun making more examples of this Herzogian English, backtranslating so to speak, Ich bin zu herzgerschrocken! Ich bin zu rechtsmüde! Ich habe grossen Flughafenverspätungsschmerz! which last, for the unGermanic among us, was explained to mean “big airport delay sadness,” a word every modern language should definitely have.
An hour of film was then devoted to young people with wealthy parents. Earnestly apologetic or brashly arrogant, these made a sad fucking crew. It had to be a skewed sample, they had selected for awfulness no doubt about it, and the crowd around me murmured objections, My kids aren’t like that, no way. Although as it went on and on, all kinds of pathetic angry supercilious kids, the room got quieter, and actually it became clear somehow that some of the whining faces onscreen had an actual parent right there in the room. And the graphed statistics charting these rich kids were disheartening as well. If the various kinds of anti-depressants used by them were aggregated, it could be made to look like well over one hundred percent of them were on anti-depressants. Which though clearly artifactual was indeed depressing.
Another chart graphed individual happiness in relation to personal wealth, and as so often that week, and in life generally, it was another damn bell curve. This one showed that poverty made for unhappiness, duh, then people got quickly happier once adequacy was reached; then, at a high middle class income, the very income that scientists usually demanded for themselves— having studied their own graphs maybe, the guy next to me muttered darkly, as if to imply they were rigging either their study or the system of compensation, or both— you got the highest happiness; then, as wealth rose, happiness decreased— not to the level of the poorest people, but far below the happiness of the middle peak. That middle income was the Goldilocks zone, the happy median ha ha, or so the PowerPointers claimed, but we shook our heads knowingly. Statistics can “prove” anything, but they could never beat the obvious truth that more is better. The soundtrack here toggled between “All You Need Is Love” and “Can’t Buy Me Love,” to add ridiculous Beatles wisdom to this part of the show.
It was actually getting pretty annoying at this point. How could it go on for so long? Where were the fucking Swiss police? Were they in on this? Was this a Swiss plot, like the Red Cross or something?
You are one of the Davos Hostages, a voice said at the end of this income comparison film. You will have been a participant at the Captured Davos. What will you do with that? We will be interested to watch you live the rest of your
