The ultimate perceptual divide: the Great Reset
A lot of people see the Great Reset as an existential threat, still more have never even heard of it
Last week I covered the Twitter ban of Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent who had been writing and tweeting about the Great Reset. As I wrote in the inaugural installment of this newsletter, there is a great perceptual divide in our society, and perhaps no topic serves as a better case study of this phenomenon than the Great Reset, which a large segment of the population views as an existential threat while a likely larger segment has never even heard of it.
On that note, two interesting pieces on the Great Reset have come across my feed in the past week or two. I recommend reading both in full, but will excerpt here a few key passages from each. The first is an essay by Michael Rechtenwald titled: "What is the Great Reset?" It is a very good summary/explanation of what the Great Reset could entail.
The Great Reset, according to Rechtenwwald, would combine “resets in all conceivable domains of human life: economic, environmental, geopolitical, governmental, industrial, technological, social, and individual."
He traces the project’s inception to the creation of the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded as the European Management Forum in 1971. The WEF, Rechtenwwald writes, is the source for the “stakeholder capitalism” concept and public-private partnerships and policies embraced by governments, corporations, NGOs, civil society organizations and international governance bodies worldwide.
Rechtenwald claims that “stakeholder” capitalism is a euphemism for “a bewildering economic amalgam, what I’ve called ‘corporate socialism’ and ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics,’ or what Giorgio Agamben later called ‘communist capitalism.’”
He continues:
The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political class began with a socialist political system and introduced privately held for-profit production later, the West began with a degree of capitalism and is implementing a socialist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.” This Chinese-style system includes vastly increased state intervention in the economy on the one hand, and the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control the population, on the other.
Rechtenwwald then turns his attention to the futuristic (or technologically dystopian) dimension of the project: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here are a few snippets:
As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological reset reads like a dystopic sci-fi novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR). The 4-IR, we are told, follows the first, second, and third industrial revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential take-off and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence (AI); machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”
The specific applications include a ubiquitous Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB), autonomous vehicles, smart cities, 3-D printing, robots, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and more.
In short, 4-IR technologies subject human beings to a technological management that makes surveillance by the NSA look like child’s play. And Schwab lauds developments that connect brains directly to the cloud and enable the “data mining” of thought and memory, a technological mastery over decision-making that threatens autonomy and undermines any semblance of free will. The 4-IR accelerates the merging of humans and machines, resulting in a world in which all information, including genetic information, is shared, and every action, thought, and unconscious motivation is known, predicted, and possibly even precluded. Naturally, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind. Yet Schwab touts brain-cloud interfaces as enhancements, as vast improvements over standard human intelligence.
Rechtenwald predicts, however, that this ongoing attempt by elites to transition Western societies towards the Chinese model will ultimately fail:
In partnership with Big Tech, Big Pharma, the legacy media, national and international health agencies, and compliant populations, hitherto “democratic” Western states are being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China, seemingly overnight. I need not provide a litany of the tyranny and abuses. You can read about them on alternative news sites—until you can no longer read about them.
The Great Reset, then, is not a conspiracy theory; it is an open, avowed, and planned project, and it is well underway. But because capitalism with Chinese characteristics or corporate-socialist statism lacks free markets and depends on the absence of free will and individual liberty, it is, ironically, “unsustainable.” The vast majority will not accept the Great Reset’s attempts to lock them away in an economic, governmental, and technological prison. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to fail.
The second piece that I am highlighting this week is a written summary of a video interview given by the German economist, journalist, and author Ernst Wolff, which focuses on one of the mechanisms through which the WEF could be orchestrating the Great Reset. The piece begins with a question: How is it that more than 190 governments from all over the world ended up dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in almost exactly the same manner, with lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination cards now being commonplace everywhere?
The answer, according to Wolff, "may lie in the Young Global Leaders school, which was established and managed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, and that many of today’s prominent political and business leaders passed through on their way to the top."
In 1992 Schwab established a parallel institution, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow school, which was re-established as Young Global Leaders in 2004. Attendees at the school must apply for admission and are then subjected to a rigorous selection process. Members of the school’s very first class in 1992 already included many who went on to become important liberal political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Tony Blair. There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations. Four of them are former and current health ministers for Germany, including Jens Spahn, who has been Federal Minister of Health since 2018. Philipp Rösler, who was Minister of Health from 2009 until 2011, was appointed the WEF’s Managing Director by Schwab in 2014.
Other notable names on the school’s roster are Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand whose stringent lockdown measures have been praised by global health authorities; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Sebastian Kurz, who was until recently the Chancellor of Austria; Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission; and Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the German Greens who was the party’s first candidate for Chancellor in this year’s federal election, and who is still in the running to be Merkel’s successor. We also find California Governor Gavin Newsom on the list, who was selected for the class of 2005, as well as former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, who is a very recent alumnus, having been selected for the class of 2019. All of these politicians who were in office during the past two years have favored harsh responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which also happened to considerably increase their respective governments’ power.
But the school’s list of alumni is not limited to political leaders. We also find many of the captains of private industry there, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and the Clinton Foundation’s Chelsea Clinton. Again, all of them expressed support for the global response to the pandemic, and many reaped considerable profits as a result of the measures.
Wolff believes that the powers behind the WEF and the Global Leaders school determine who will become elected leaders, and he doesn’t believe that Schwab himself is the one making these decisions, but is merely a facilitator. He further points out that the school’s alumni include not only Americans and Europeans, but also people from Asia, Africa, and South America, indicating that its reach is truly worldwide.
Another thing that the Global Leaders graduates have in common is that many of them have lean resumes apart from their participation in the program prior to being elevated to positions of power, which may indicate that it is their connection to Schwab’s institutions that is the decisive factor in launching their careers. Wolff contends that their roles are only to act as mouthpieces for those “in the shadows behind them.”
Wolff believes it is possible that these elected leaders were selected by elites due to their willingness to do whatever they are told, "and that they are being set up to fail so that the subsequent backlash can be exploited to justify the creation of a new global form of government."
Graduates from the Young Global Leaders school, and Global Leaders for Tomorrow before them, find themselves very well-situated given that they then have access to the WEF’s network of contacts. The WEF’s current Board of Trustees includes such luminaries as Christine Lagarde, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and current President of the European Central Bank; Queen Rania of Jordan, who has been ranked by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world; and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest investment management corporation internationally and which handles approximately $9 trillion annually. By tracing the connections between the school’s graduates, Wolff claims that you can see that they continue to rely on each other for support for their initiatives long after they participated in the Global Leaders programs.
Here is Wolff's conclusion:
The ultimate conclusion one must draw from all of this, according to Wolff, is that democracy as we knew it has been silently cancelled, and that although the appearance of democratic processes is being maintained in our countries, the fact is that an examination of how governance around the world works today shows that an elite of super-wealthy and powerful individuals effectively control everything that goes on in politics, as has been especially evident in relation to the pandemic response.