Mark Carney stood in Davos and borrowed a character from Václav Havel. A greengrocer opens his shop each morning and puts a sign in the window. “Workers of the world unite.” He does not believe it. Nobody does. He hangs it anyway, not to persuade, but to comply. To get along. Havel’s point is brutal. The system does not survive on truth. It survives on participation. Ordinary people perform belief in public while privately living elsewhere. Havel called this “living within a lie.”
Carney’s move was to scale the greengrocer up from a shop window to the world stage. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what they called the rules based international order. They joined its institutions, praised its principles and benefited from its predictability. Then Carney says what polite speeches usually avoid. “We knew the story of the international rules based order was partially false,” that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. We knew. And we placed the sign anyway.
Why? Because it was useful. The order provided coordination, public goods and predictable lanes to trade and growth. It worked well enough that the performance felt cheap. The sign cost little and bought peace.
This is how paradigms function. Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not progress by steadily accumulating truths. It cycles between normal periods and revolutionary ones. During normal periods, practitioners solve puzzles within the reigning paradigm. They are not seeking novelty. They are bringing theory and fact into closer agreement, proving the framework works. The rules based order had its own version of normal work. Negotiate trade deals. Resolve disputes through institutions. Extend the framework to new members. Each success reinforced the paradigm.
But anomalies accumulate. Kuhn observed that puzzles sometimes produce results the paradigm cannot absorb. At first these are set aside. Then they cluster. Then they form a crisis.
Carney names the anomalies directly. Great powers exempted themselves when convenient. Trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. These were tolerable when integration delivered growth. But the anomalies deepened. Integration itself became a weapon. Supply chains became leverage. Data flows became surveillance. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration,” Carney argues, “when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
This is the crisis. The paradigm that once provided utility now extracts it. You can keep performing, but you are no longer buying stability. You are buying dependence. Carney names the moment directly. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
A paradigm shift is not a committee decision. It is a contested redefinition of the world. In science it looks like bitter arguments about what counts as evidence. In geopolitics it looks like tariff wars, technology restrictions, sanctions, proxy conflicts, and sudden demands for loyalty. The mess is not a temporary glitch. It is the price of replacing the rules of the game while the game is still being played.
Rupture, not transition. That is Kuhn’s language. A paradigm shift is not a linear improvement on the old framework. It is a new way of seeing everything. The old puzzles get reframed. The old successes get reinterpreted. What looked like progress now looks like path dependence.
And because we cannot operate without frameworks, a new paradigm emerges. Value based realism. Middle power coalitions. Strategic autonomy. Sovereignty, territorial integrity and human rights as anchoring commitments. Carney is not abandoning frameworks. He is proposing a replacement that resolves the crisis while preserving what still works. This is exactly what Kuhn described. The new paradigm wins when it can absorb the anomalies the old one could not, while retaining most of its useful capabilities.
Here is where Trump becomes the stress test. The day after Carney spoke, Trump addressed Davos. He talked about tariffs, NATO and a new defense project, then turned to Canada. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also, but they’re not. I watched your Prime Minister yesterday, he wasn’t so grateful… Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
No shared fiction. No pretense. Just leverage. Trump did not create this logic. He is its clearest expression, the moment the pretense dropped.
If paradigms are just useful fictions, why not let raw power decide which fiction prevails? Why bother with frameworks at all? This is what paradigm collapse looks like. Not a better theory replacing a worse one, but the abandonment of theory altogether. Pure leverage. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. When there is no shared rulebook that both sides feel obligated to follow, the only thing that reliably coordinates behavior is who can impose costs on whom.
Carney’s response is to propose a paradigm that can hold. Value based realism does not pretend the world is fair. It acknowledges power asymmetries. But it insists that frameworks still matter because coordination still matters. Middle powers need each other precisely because they cannot dictate terms alone. The napkin with more utility wins. And in a world where great powers have weaponized the old napkin, a new one becomes necessary.
Throughout this project, I call these frameworks napkins. Sketches of reality we place on a table too vast to see whole. We adopt them not because they perfectly describe what’s beneath but because they compress it into something navigable. A napkin gives identity, belonging and coordination. It tells you what counts as fact and what counts as noise.
The mistake is treating napkins as truth rather than tools. The rules based order was not true. It was useful. When its utility inverted, it became a liability. Carney is not revealing some deeper truth about international relations. He is naming a paradigm shift in progress and proposing a replacement framework better suited to current conditions.
The greengrocer takes down his sign when it stops buying what he needs. Not when a truer ideology arrives. When a more useful one does. That is how paradigms change. Not by disproof, but by displacement.
The table beneath the napkin does not care which framework we choose. But we do, because some napkins navigate reality better than others. The one that holds is the one that works.