There is a particular kind of theatre that takes place at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It is a place where the “Land of Make Believe” usually goes to renew its vows. It is a mountain retreat where the global elite gather to reaffirm their faith in a “rules-based international order.” They often bypass these rules themselves. But this year, the tone shifted. Mark Carney, the former governor of the central banks of both Canada and England, stood up. He delivered a speech. It sounded less like a sermon and more like a tactical briefing for a siege.
Carney invoked Václav Havel. Specifically, he invoked the greengrocer from Havel’s 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless. You know the story: the shopkeeper puts a sign in his window that says, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe the slogan. Nobody does. But he puts it there to signal compliance, to buy a quiet life, to avoid the friction of the state. Havel called this “living within a lie.”
Carney’s point was blunt: for decades, middle powers like Canada have been the greengrocers of the international system. We put the “Rules-Based Order” sign in our window. we praised the WTO, the UN, and the principles of liberal integration. We knew the story was partially false, that the strong exempted themselves and the rules were enforced asymmetrically, but the fiction was useful. It provided public goods. It gave us a quiet life.
But now, Carney says, the bargain is dead. The great powers have stopped pretending. They are weaponizing the very integration we relied on. They are using tariffs as leverage and supply chains as nooses. The “rules” have become a source of subordination. Carney’s conclusion was a call to arms for the middle powers: It is time to take the sign out of the window. We need to stop pretending the old order exists and start building “strategic autonomy.” We need “value-based realism.”
I sat in my flat in Cambridge, reading the transcript of this speech, and I felt a jolt of recognition that had nothing to do with international trade and everything to do with the math I used to do at my kitchen table in Bradford.
Carney is right. But he is missing the most brutal part of Havel’s lesson. The greengrocer can only take the sign down if he is prepared for the consequences of the state shutting his shop. Truth is a material luxury. Sovereignty is a capacity. And for the “edge case” individual, just like the “middle power” nation, the right to live in truth is something you have to buy, pound by agonizing pound.
My first experience with “Strategic Autonomy” happened when I was sixteen. I was born in London. I had lived in the UK my entire life. But because of the complexities of my heritage – the US passport I inherited from my mother, the Chinese-Vietnamese lineage of a father who was a spectre in my life, and a legal system that views “minority” status as an administrative hurdle – I was not a British citizen.
I was an “edge case” in the Home Office’s database. To fix it, to gain the “rules-based” security of a passport, I had to pay. At the time, the fee was over a thousand pounds.
At sixteen, a thousand pounds is a ransom. My mother didn’t have it. My stepdad, working the warehouse floor, didn’t have it. So, I went to work. I spent my evenings and weekends tutoring mathematics to other kids in Bradford for £10 an hour.
Every hour of tutoring was a tiny brick in the wall of my own sovereignty. I wasn’t doing it out of a love for the Pythagorean theorem. I was doing it because I realised, very early on, that the “rules-based order” of my country did not automatically apply to me. It was a “Land of Make Believe” that I could only enter if I had the cash to pay for the ticket.
When you spend your teenage years literally buying your right to exist in the place where you were born, you lose your appetite for naive multilateralism. You learn that “living in truth” – Havel’s great ideal – has a price floor. If I hadn’t tutored those kids, I would have had to keep the “sign” in my window. I would have had to stay quiet, stay small, and hope that the system didn’t notice my lack of papers. I would have had to live within the lie of a citizenship I didn’t legally possess.
This is the material basis of truth. You earn the right to a principled stand by reducing your vulnerability to retaliation. Canada can talk about “taking the sign down” because it has the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world and a trillion dollars in pension funds. I can talk about “taking the sign down” because I can write code that people are willing to pay for.
In my day job as a software engineer, we understand the concept of “Strategic Autonomy” through the lens of technical debt and vendor lock-in. If you build your entire infrastructure on a single provider’s “hyper-scaler” (like AWS or Google Cloud), you are at their mercy. They can raise prices, change the rules, or deprecate the tools you rely on. You are living within their lie of “partnership” until the moment it becomes a source of subordination.
Engineers spend a vast amount of energy building “redundancy” and “interoperability.” We want the ability to pivot. We want “Variable Geometry”. Different coalitions of tools for different tasks.
Carney’s speech is essentially an argument for applying software engineering principles to the nation-state. He talks about “buyers’ clubs” for critical minerals, “diversifying” supply chains, and building “domestic industries” in AI and energy. He wants Canada to have its own “stack”, if you like. He wants the ability to say “no” to a hegemon without the whole country crashing like a poorly written program.
This resonates with me because I’ve spent my adult life building my own personal “stack.”
When I left Bradford for Oxford, I entered a world that was almost entirely “signage.” Oxford is a city built on the performance of a rules-based meritocracy. The tutorials, the gowns, the formal dinners: all rituals of compliance. They signal that you belong to the elite, that you have accepted the “rules” of the establishment.
But as I wrote in my previous notes, the “shifty” part of that world is that the people teaching you the rules are often themselves on insecure, short-term contracts. They are the academic precariat, performing sovereignty while accepting subordination. They have the “sign” in the window – the aura of timeless scholarship – but they don’t have the “material basis” to take it down. If they stop performing, they lose their job, their visa, their housing.
I saw that, and I made a choice. I would do the philosophy. I would learn the “knowing that” of metaphysics and Kant. I would engage with the “Land of Make Believe” with total rigour. But I would also double down on the “knowing how” of computer science.
I didn’t want to be a philosopher who had to pretend the world was a brain-in-a-vat while worrying about a landlord’s email. I wanted the sovereignty that comes from being able to provide a service that the world cannot easily automate or ignore. I wanted “boots on the ice.”
Carney calls his new approach “Value-Based Realism.” It’s an attempt to marry the “principled” (Havel’s morality) with the “pragmatic” (Thucydides’ power). He admits that “not every partner will share all of our values.” He’s talking about Canada negotiating with China and Qatar while still supporting Ukraine.
In the parlance of the Oxford seminar room, this is a betrayal of moral consistency. In the parlance of a warehouse, this is just how you survive the week.
There is a deep arrogance in the Western “activist” left and the “Effective Altruist” bubbles I’ve encountered. Both assume that they can dictate the terms of reality from a position of total insulation. The activist demands a total boycott of any “unethical” entity, ignoring the fact that the person they are “saving” might need the trade to eat. The EA often calculates the “expected value” of a billion future lives while ignoring the immediate, visceral need for energy and security today.
Both groups are still “living within the lie.” They believe that the “Rules-Based Order” is something that can be fixed with a better slogan or a more efficient spreadsheet.
Carney’s “Value-Based Realism” is a recognition that the world is different, but also dangerously different. We have to engage with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We have to recognise that “Hegemons cannot continually monetise their relationships.” If you squeeze your allies too hard, they will eventually build their own fortresses.
I see this in the way I navigate my own “Variable Geometry.”
I hold a US passport, an Oxford degree, and a Bradford accent. I am a Muslim by conversion (via my mother) but a software engineer by trade. In a world of “Great Power” identities, I am a “Middle Power.” I don’t have the luxury of total ideological purity. I have to make “strategic partnerships” with institutions I don’t entirely trust. I have to work for corporations to pay for the “strategic autonomy” of my family.
But – and this is the crucial part – I am no longer just relying on the “strength of my values.” I am relying on the “value of my strength.”
The “strength of my values” didn’t get me my British citizenship. The “value of my strength” – my ability to tutor maths, to work 15-20 hours a week while finishing a Master’s, to debug a system under pressure – is what paid the fee.
So, what does it mean to “take the sign down” as an individual?
First, it means naming reality. It means admitting that the “meritocracy” is often just a pattern-matching algorithm for privilege. It means calling out the gap between the Land of Make Believe and the warehouse floor.
Second, it means building “domestic strength.” For a person, this means skills. It means the “knowing how” that I’ve argued is being eroded by AI. If you outsource your judgment to a machine, you are handing over your sovereignty to a hegemon. You are putting a “sign” in your window that says “I am a compliant processor of input,” and eventually, the hegemon will decide you are an inefficient one.
Third, it means “diversification.” Don’t let your identity be anchored in a single institution. Don’t let your worth be defined by a single degree or a single job title. Build a “dense web of connections” across different worlds. Be the person who can talk to the professor in Oxford, and the guy in the pub in Bradford.
The most rebellious act in a world of “great power rivalry” is to refuse to be a “core” case for any one system.
Carney’s speech at Davos was impressive because it was honest. It admitted that the healing part of being different is that it forces the system to stop pretending. When Canada says “we are building our own fortress,” the illusion of the old order cracks. When a scholarship kid from Bradford says “I am not just a ‘minority’ statistic; I am a highly skilled agent with my own agenda,” the institution is forced to see the man, not the category.
We shouldn’t mourn the “Rules-Based Order.” It was a useful fiction, but it was still a fiction. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
Whether you are a nation-state or a person standing on the margins, sovereignty is something you earn. It is the ability to withstand pressure. It is the capacity to say “no” because you have built the “material basis” to survive the fallout.
It’s about £1,330 plus VAT. It’s about a trillion dollars in pension funds. It’s about the “boots on the ice” and the “semicolon in the code.” It’s about the quiet, relentless work of building a life that doesn’t need a sign in the window to be real.
The powerful will always have their power. But we have something, too: the capacity to stop pretending. And once you stop pretending, the real work begins.
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