When I was in high school, Václav Havel was cool. It’s hard to imagine now that he’s dead and the memory of the fall of the Eastern Bloc has largely ended with my generation. But when I was, say, 14 or 15, when the wall fell, and afterwards, Havel was a rock star. He apparently hung out with the Rolling Stones. Very cool.

Many years later, I saw a piece of correspondence he’d handwritten. It was in the course of my work, when the institute I worked for was in the planning stages for an event that would include the Dalai Lama and other world leaders. Havel had been invited, and a letter with his signature indicated his intention to attend. Which he, ultimately, did not; but the fact that he might was enough to make me excited to come face-to-face with the legendary dissident who’d made Czech a very cool place in my mind, and Prague a place to visit (where I still have not been).

Invoking Havel’s name in his Davos speech was enough for Mark Carney to give me that warm-and-fuzzy feeling. It came a few days after Carney had been to Beijing, looking lonely and exhausted and uncomfortable. Maybe it was the plane ride(s), maybe it was an existential crisis. Maybe Mark’s head was filled with the phrases he would eventually deliver at Davos, and he was conflicted about whether or not he should actually say them.

But to be fair, the Davos speech isn’t that far off from the underlying ethos he expressed in Values (the parts I read). It’s very likely the speech had been kicking around in drafts of his follow up book, which was due out last year but hasn’t yet been released. The ideas about the rupture, the resorting of the world order, are ones Carney has been touting regularly since he first stood for office about 12 months ago. He also invoked another current elected leader, Alexander Stubb, and his “values-based realism.” So it’s not like Carney had a bad trip (of any kind) in Beijing and spontaneously decided to express, in academic, high-language terms, the need to lift the veil of illusion and name truths everyone knows but everyone hides. It’s been kicking about awhile.

That leads me to another story. Several years ago I saw a psychic, a tarot reader. I asked her about a job that had just ended. (Note: it’s the one I talked about here). My question was what had gone wrong: was it the work, or the people? She responded: “it was the timing.”

So as I struggled the last couple of days about what to write about that Davos speech, which I’d watched on YouTube, casually over coffee, a couple of hours after it occurred, I thought about timing. More precisely, Mark Carney’s knack for timing. Like how he became governor of the Bank of Canada just shortly before the global financial crisis, and was on hand when the UK navigated Brexit. That his long-held ambitions to run for office finally came to fruition just when Canada faced its most serious external threat perhaps in our history.

Now, here was Mark deciding to name reality just when the world was finally ready to hear it.

Of course, that’s arguable. Some would say naming reality had already been achieved by others, activists, opposition leaders, years ago; and the idea that the world is listening to Mark feels maybe not totally accurate. Mark has a lot of friends he’s gathered over decades, and my intuition about the vast majority of non-Canadian talking heads who are including mention of his speech in their Davos wrap-ups is that most of them know Mark, so they’re more inclined to talk about and agree with what he had to say.

That’s not to say it didn’t have an impact beyond our borders. I think it did. Janis Ian posted about it on Facebook. When people who don’t commonly post about Canada start talking about Canada, the walls of information silos have become a bit dented, a bit more porous. It’s getting out there, but slowly, and largely because Mark is who he is. The movement of the message is because of Mark’s networks, not necessarily Canada’s, even if the argument many make is that the speech was so significant because it came from Canada, a country so economically connected with the U.S.

When it comes to timing, of course, you can look at it from various angles and conclude that Mark doesn’t have spectacular timing; every person in every story has a perspective of a range of experiences. Maybe all those cases of timing that allowed Mark to show his capacity to… what is it that he does, really?… let’s say, bring calm, were terrible timing for other people in his life. Maybe Mark has a secret best friend anonymous to the public who always wanted to go on vacation, and Mark kept promising them that vacation. But it was always sidelined by a financial crisis or a trade war. Timing was never great for that person.

But he also doesn’t seem to make many public missteps. Of course, that’s going on limited information. There’s a difference between being a UN Special Envoy or central banker and an elected politician. So much of what happened in his previous jobs was, and continues to be, shielded from public view. So if he really fucked up in any of his former roles, only a limited number of people would know about it, and right now would have little reason to talk about it, if they even had the ability to do so.

My train of thought here is that Mark Carney looks like someone who is a pretty perfect public figure, always arriving at the right time to do the right thing, and with little evidence that he’ll lead anyone astray. But that could be a bit of an illusion too. I’m conflicted by the fact that it wasn’t too long ago that I was incensed at Carney’s M.O.U. with Alberta. Now after his Davos speech I’m all starry-eyed again.

The words he said at Davos are the brave ones we need, and that the world needs. But they might not have been said out of a place of moral conviction; they might have come from mere pragmatism. “This fiction is no longer useful,” is not the same as “this fiction is morally repugnant.” If we had made a solid and “good” deal with the U.S. months ago, if the fiction of the rules-based order was still functional, Carney likely never would have made that speech at all, even if he had it in his back pocket for that time in the future when the timing was right.

From that perspective, the Davos speech feels a bit like a hail mary pass. We’ve gotten to the end of the line and we’ve run out of plays. So let’s make a pitch for a new world order where middle powers are not subordinate but gather together to find a common agency. That word, subordinate, is a strong word for me. Saying economic integration is a vehicle of subordination is as emotion-invoking in me as saying the name Václav Havel. Subordination. Subordinate means lesser than, under the control of, lacking freedom and choice. We are not just economically weaker than the U.S.; we are subordinate to the U.S. That is a potent way of naming an ugly reality.

It’s hard to tell what Mark’s ultimate objective is; pragmatism is an empty concept when not connected to a goal. So what is Mark’s goal, exactly? What is his goal for Canada? In a weird way, this doesn’t worry me, because I feel like Mark doesn’t have it all planned out. But I do believe he’s in it for us, he’s in it for Canada, and he believes in the ideals of Canada, our sovereignty, the commitment to equality and human rights. That combined with his weird knack for timing, and I’m willing to just be, ok, we’re with you Mark. I’m with you. Not on every issue, not on every day. But sign me up for your new world order if you can get other countries on side.

My suspicion is that Mark Carney has very strong intuition, and he might rely on his gut feelings more than his intellectual ramblings might betray. He has strong intuition and accurate intuition. It’s hard to argue with intuition and it’s hard to explain to others who don’t rely on it. But I feel like Mark’s intuition comes from the right place, a place I am on board with. And as the US dollar is dropping and I’m trying to decide when I should sell my currency, I’m relying on intuition as well. No one knows how this is all going to play out, and pragmatism based on a gut feeling might be the best we’ve got to navigate it.