A wise old friend once said to me that if Christianity died out what would come next would not be atheism but polytheism.
That is, instead of worshipping one God, people would start worshipping a whole range of gods.
I thought of that yesterday while watching a Brazilian shaman called Putanny Yawanawa performing a native spiritual ceremony onstage at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The leaders onstage all managed to keep a straight face — in fact they looked deeply humbled and impressed — as Ms. Yawanawa did her incantations and blew her sacred breath into their faces.
All behaved as though this was a well-known and totally normal way to start a meeting about economics.
Though I would guess most would have recoiled in embarrassment if a Christian priest had offered them a communion wafer.
But Davos today worships many gods — old and new.
As well as these native incantations, attendees in the Swiss ski resort also heard from an ancient shaman called “John Kerry.”
This ageless deity issued his traditional annual warning about hell-fire and the end-times.
According to the long-faced one, the past year has seen the worst weather in history. Which is the sort of thing you wouldn’t hear from even the grumpiest New Yorker.
Shaman Kerry described 2023 as “literally the most disruptive, climate-disrupted, most climate consequential, negative year in human history.”
After which dire warning he disappeared into the clouds on his private jet.
And in doing so, he once again illustrated what has become one of the main themes of the World Economic Forum.
It is a time when the world’s elites meet in a ski resort to tell everyone else on the planet that we should really rein it in.
This has become the signature tone of Davos. Poverty for thee but not for me.
But this year there was a party-crasher. And what a great crasher he proved to be.
Just six weeks into his time in office, Argentinian President Javier Milei landed in town.
The 53-year old’s rise to power last month confused much of the world’s media. Certainly it threw a spanner in the works for glossy international groups like the WEF.
At the time of his election in November Milei’s brand of politics were variously described as “far-right libertarianism” and — perhaps inevitably — “Trump-like.”
In fact if his speech this week was anything to go by, Milei is just the sort of free-market capitalist that places like Davos used to like.
But like many other such organizations, Davos has today become something it was not.
It is in the same position as almost every hereditary energy fortune in the United States.
Look at all the big American fossil fuel and industrial fortunes, like Rockefeller or Ford, and you will see a pattern.
The money that was made in the great heat of capitalism is today dedicated — through legacy foundations — to campaigns against fossil fuels and economic growth.
It is as though after making their billions they should tell everyone else not to make theirs.
The same applies with the WEF.
It may have been founded on free-market principles but it has ended up worshipping very different gods.
So Milei’s speech this week was something like a call back to the organizations’ supposed roots. On Wednesday he warned the WEF that “The Western world is in danger.”
And while the other gods of Davos have spent years saying the same thing, they have come to very different diagnoses.
While the gods of Davos have spent recent years warning against climate change and “populism,” Milei has a different prognosis.
He declared that the West 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.”
The world should instead embrace “free enterprise capitalism” to bring an end to world poverty.
It was a refreshing change for the conference.
Western leaders did indeed use to believe in free-market capitalism. That system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history.
It has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty in this century alone. And as Milei presented the figures it was a pretty difficult case to argue against.
This is the inconvenient truth that the proto-Marxists campaigning to bring down capitalism always ignore. Every other system has never come close to matching the social benefit for all that capitalism has driven.
As he said, the history of economic growth flatlined for most of human history until the 19th century. From the moment that free-market economics took off, a hockey stick of human progress took off alongside it.
Global per capita GDP kept doubling at a faster and faster rate, until this century when global per capita GDP doubled in just 23 years. As Milei said, we could do that again if we wanted to.
That being the case the gods of Davos should be celebrating. But no — the consensus of their annual meeting has moved more and more against the free market.
World leaders increasingly talk of the free market as the problem and collectivism as the solution.
Milei comes from a country that tried collectivism in a big way. And in Argentina — like everywhere else — it led to economic and social ruin.
What he offered was a positive way out of current trends. Where the Davos crowd now seem to see human beings as the problem, Milei recognized that we are the solution. And he is right.
There is no reason to see population growth as a negative. Or to think of the world’s resources as some kind of zero-sum game.
Instead of seeing free markets as a challenge, Milei reminded Davos that they are an opportunity.
And he also put his finger on the point when he added that the prevailing religion of “social justice” is mere cover for the old type of socialism.
It is a mindset which is anti-growth as well as anti-excellence, leading to a flattening of society. In the name of making everyone equal, what it does is pull everyone down.
I can’t foretell how Milei’s vision will work for his country.
But I know I’d put my faith in him long before I’d put it with the shamans and doomsayers of Davos.