Double Life
Critical reading: Here’s a link to the transcript of a special address by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, delivered during the 2026 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Excerpts:
“So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. …
“Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
“And we have something else. We have a recognition of what’s happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. …
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. … This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
The references to the sign in the window are from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, where Havel writes:
“The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.”
Milan Kundera, writing in The Art of the Novel, illuminates the connection between the self and the real world of life:
“The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.
The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”
Once elevated by Descartes to “master and proprietor of nature,” man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man’s concrete being, his “world of life” (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.”
So: How do we maintain our connection to the real world of life, to our humanity, sanity, empathy, privacy, and security in the face of corruption, corrosion, and coercion?
Re-evaluate ideas that are uncritically adopted from the system in which we are embedded. Develop a critical awareness of the bureaucratic rationalization of everyday life, dispense with its abstractions, and resist its colonization of being in the world.
Or, to make it simplier still, at least for myself: Breathe. Meditate. Practice mindfulness and resistance. Move. Go outside. Travel. Read literature. Play.
Between the City and the Mountain: Burnaby, Brentwood, and All. December 2025. Photograph by Steve Hoenisch.
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