From Davos to DARVO

The dominant archetype of our era has shifted, and with it a new – more blatant – world of power, dominance and deceit has emerged.

During the post-Cold War era the defining human archetype has been that of “Davos Man”. Taking his moniker from the alpine Swiss town where the World Economic Forum holds its annual meetings, this was a person who was not just a wealthy elite, but also those cosmopolitan and urbane, a citizen of anywhere, comfortable within any culture, but having no genuine commitment to any. A technocratic tinkerer, whose approach to politics is one of uninspiring problem-solving through the application of expertise. Davos Man corresponded with Francis Fukuyama’s “last man”, from his book The End of History and The Last Man. A vision of what humans may become if peace and prosperity became universal.

Davos Man may still exist, but as the dominant figure of our current period his power has been weakened. In his place a new era-defining archetype has risen – one we can call DARVO Man.

DARVO is a concept developed by the University of Oregon psychologist Jennifer Freyd. It stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender, and describes the behavioural patterns Freyd observed studying interpersonal abuse. Perpetrators frequently deny their own actions, attack anyone who provides evidence of these actions, and claim that they are the real victims in the given scenario.

It’s not difficult to see how these behavioural patterns scale up from the interpersonal level to political actors or state-level actions. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are all masters at using DARVO as a tactic. Wherever you find authoritarian impulses you’ll find DARVO behavioural patterns. It is a mode used to exert power in its most brutal sense – to make truth inconsequential.

Rather than composed and distant like Davos Man, DARVO Man is a maelstrom of unrestrained emotion, driven by a fragile, needy ego. Someone who doesn’t see national or global problems, only personal ones. At a political level he may wrap himself in national symbols, and claim to be working in the national interest, but this is only ever a subterfuge used to advance blunt personal interests.

While Freyd may have mapped out this behaviour in relation to modern interpersonal belligerence, the psychological drivers of DARVO were recognised by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes as he grappled with the major disruption of his lifetime – the English Civil War (1642-1651). Hobbes designated these impulses as “vainglory”, and saw it as the primary source of the chaos that political institutions should seek to overcome. As discussed in The End of History… – and then expanded upon in his book Identity – Fukuyama highlighted this same impulse as “megalothymia” – the desire to be recognised as superior to others, and to dominate over them.

Both liberal democracy and the liberal international order emerged as an attempt to both maximise human freedom while constraining vainglory through mutually beneficial institutions. But institutions are not perfect, and can easily be captured by both bad ideas and nefarious actors. The charge against Davos Man has been that under the guise of rational and neutral universal goods global institutions born from the ashes of the Second World War entrenched elite interests and status. DARVO Man, by contrast, kills the pretence – shamelessly demanding loyalty and submission from institutions.

Both these approaches can be understood through Freyd’s subsequent concept of “institutional betrayal”. Where the behaviour of an institution becomes divorced from its initial purpose – creating harm to those who rely on it. The more the credibility of institutions erode, the greater the cynicism towards the idea of mutually beneficial rules accelerates. It is within this environment of wholesale cynicism where DARVO Man thrives.

As a tactic, DARVO is often successful in family courts or in cases of sexual assault because justice systems sympathise with perpetrators, embracing the idea that they are actually victims. That is, perpetrators are seen as victims of laws or social expectations that have no right to constrain or hold them to account for their behaviour. This is because institutional betrayal creates a new set of values – one where belligerence is a positive attribute. Where it is deemed a demonstration of rightful power, with a display of ambition that should be rewarded, not punished.

At a national or international level we can call this values shift – the soft power of hard power. Where people project their own megalothymia up into actors like Trump, Putin or the CCP, and find their belligerence to be admirable and thrilling. This is the world we are moving towards. A bizarro world where truth and justice have no authority – where appeals to decency are mocked mercilessly. It’s a world women often have to navigate, and now one where broader societies and non-great powers are joining them.

Yet we are not without agency to resist this world. How we respond to institutional betrayal is through Freyd’s third concept of “institutional courage” – the commitment to truth and moral action regardless of the cost. While institutions can often seem impersonal, they rely on the integrity of those who work within them. We each bear personal responsibility for our own conduct, whether it be interpersonal, in our place of work, and in our communities and nations.

However, in a world that has shifted in values this can prove difficult. The courage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, attracts relentless hostility from those whose own vainglory has attached itself to figures like Putin and Trump. This is because while courage can inspire courage in others, it also exposes cowardice. And this exposure can breed defensiveness and resentment. A siloed polity makes this resentment feel like community.

Hobbes understood that stability required more than just strong institutions to create order. That it also required the cultivation of character, and the civic virtues of modesty and humility. It is these civic virtues that form the bulwark of institutions. They are what allow institutions to function for mutual benefit, and to guard against institutional betrayal. They are what Hobbes called our “covenants” to one another, which secure peace and stability.

Yet DARVO Man’s modern ascent is built on a rejection of these covenants. As Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:

To make covenants with brute beasts is impossible, because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right, nor can translate any right to another: and without mutual acceptation, there is no covenant.

This is because DARVO Man doesn’t see humans as social beings – with social obligations. He is antisocial in every sense. He sees security not in norms and rules, but in cowering the world into submission to himself. He is solely motivated by his lusts and the impulse to pursue them at will. The only laws he sees are the calculations he makes with regard to those he perceives as bigger DARVO Men. As we witness with Trump’s appeasement of Putin.

Hobbes’s blindspot was that he failed to see how vainglory could capture the state. That public office could offer the promise of impunity, and therefore attract the worst of us, not the best. Hobbes saw chaos only emerging from the bottom up, not top down. But it is clearly both, and in a democracy, the relationship between them. With the vainglorious striving for unrestrained power – and gaining the endorsement of those who wish to give it to him.

As this relationship reshapes our world into games of deceit and dominance, we should recognise that Davos Man won’t save us from DARVO Man. As much as Davos Man has benefitted from the post-Second World War order, he lacks the courage to stand in its defence. As Fukuyama wrote: “The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause… Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.”

To Davos Man, to throw an elbow in liberal democracy’s defence is seen as no different to its erosion. The paradox at the heart of liberalism is that it breeds complacency towards its own preservation – seeing its principle of tolerance as extending to those who are intolerant.

At his worst, Davos Man sees the protection of his comforts in his own submission to DARVO Man, as we witness with figures Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. The fear that their fabulous, unfathomable, wealth may be even slightly threatened by Trump’s caprice leads these men to bow and scrape before him – in a naïve attempt to seek favour from a man who does no favours.

Alongside these failures of character, the broader structural failures that Davos Man has presided over has fuelled the dangerous rise of DARVO Man. The post-Cold War world accelerated the permanent revolution of economic and social forces that gave us the great wonders of modern cosmopolitanism and convenience, but unmoored us from the norms and obligations of our old maps of humanity. Davos Man drove this acceleration without any awareness of the discombobulation it would bring – or any investment in structures that would ground us within these changes.

This was the weakening of both the nation as a civic institution, and well as the weakening of the community groups where humans cultivate their civic virtues. Men especially have struggled to find a sense of purpose in this more fragmented world. While young women have excelled as they’ve gained greater freedom and opportunity, men require greater direction and social encouragement. Without a sense of positive purpose they convulse out of communities of virtue and reach for grotesque figures like Trump, Elon Musk and Andrew Tate – with their fiefdoms of relentless aggression and megalothymia.

As his era ends, we should recognise that Davos Man’s core failure was one of misinterpretation – of failing to understand the balance of elements humanity needed to thrive. As liberalism didn’t just give us freedom, it also gave us responsibility. Both personal and institutional responsibility. It expected each of us to step-up and grasp these gifts – for us to develop character and accountability as power was decentralised away from absolute monarchs.¹ Liberalism saw capabilities in humanity, but these would need to be fostered and fortified. As the dark emotions of vainglory also lurk within humanity, and they are easily aroused by conditions that undermine our security – there to be exploited by the DARVO brutes who feast on insecurity.

1. And their modern authoritarian replicas