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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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World business leaders gathered for the annual 2008 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Many news-articles, editorials, and blogs have already been dedicated to it. To repeat their arguments will be both unnecessary and annoying. Official information about the forum, its history, philosophy, and meetings, including the latest, is readily available; it can be easily accessed through its web site. Comments from people taking part in one or another activity are also willingly shared through hundreds of media. The real news about the current forum, however, is seen only in retrospective; are the participants in the same mood as they used to be one year, two years or several years ago? What are their perceptions about the world's priorities? This annual meeting will go under the sign of fears, both economic and non-economic.

'Only thing we have to fear is fear itself', these are words of the former U.S. president F.D. Roosevelt in his first inauguration speech in early 1933, i.e. in the midst of the American Great Depression. Looking at the participants of the WEF'08, anybody could have got the impression that they have either forgotten these words, or haven't learned them from the textbooks in the first place. Like children in the dark, fearing all sorts of monsters, the world business and other leaders made a long list of fears that the future will deliver: economic slump, environmental disasters, global poverty, all sorts of deceases, democratic reversals, all sorts of security threats; in one word, a dangerous world we must fear.

The worst thing about the fear is that it tends to paralyze our ability to think. We don't live in one-way world, preprogrammed to follow only one particular trajectory; just look at all general projections made one or two or three generations ago; how much our world is different from what was projected? How much it has followed a preprogrammed pattern without alternatives? On the other side, the future isn't completely open system where anything goes, or at least where anything goes with equal chances of happening. A poor country X won't become a rich country in the next year with the same chance, as a rich country Y will remain rich in the same period. But nothing prevents the country X of trying to become rich, and there is nothing that stands between it and its bright future save its own fears of trying.

The world, however, desperately needs new leaders that are ready to face its challenges without falling into fatalism. The ordinary people don't need 'dark prophets', but rather they need 'how-to' people, not only capable of identifying the problems, but also to charter possible solutions. The force of ideas shouldn't be underestimated. Our life isn't just a sum of material elements that make us behave in one or another way; in fact, our lives are also the way we look at it, and this perception can be either based on fear and feeling of powerlessness, or based on reflection and feeling of responsibility, for ourselves and for those who come next. We hope that the way our leaders see our world will change soon, and that the general mood of the next annual meetings in Davos will leave less space for the fears.