Friday, January 21, 2022

#21 / The Great Reset

 
 
I don't know how many readers of this blog posting will have heard of "The Great Reset." I must admit that I have not been paying much attention to it, personally; however, I am aware that there is such a thing, and it is briefly described in an online article you can access by clicking this link
 
The article I have linked has been published by the World Economic Forum, a group of super rich capitalists, and their political allies, who meet in Davos, Switzerland, on an annual basis, to discuss how best to run the world. People like former president Bill Clinton regularly show up. 
 
Since I don't run in that crowd, I haven't spent a lot of time wondering about what they are thinking or doing. Their most recent effort has been called "The Great Reset." Klaus Schwab, who began the World Economic Forum, has written a book called, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab is a big supporter of new technologies, including the idea of introducing technology directly into the human body. He obviously believes that the only "world" worth thinking about is the world that humans make. Not being of this persuasion, I have not really been lavishing my attention on Schwab, the WEF, or "The Great Reset." 

My information about "The Great Reset" has come, mainly, from a periodic bulletin called The Acorn, an "organic radical bulletin" published by Winter Oak, a nonprofit organization based in Great Britain. Winter Oak bills itself as an organization with "a serious aversion to industrial capitalism and a commitment to social justice." As anyone who has read many of my blog postings will probably realize, I would much rather spend my time with people who identify with Winter Oak than with people who are captivated by the World Economic Forum. 

Winter Oak, and The Acorn, are massively concerned about "The Great Reset," which they see as a capitalist plot to achieve total domination over the planet and all its peoples. An article in a recent edition of The Acorn was titled, "Activating The Power Of Life," and this article is a good example of what I have been hearing about "The Great Reset." Here is what Paul Cudenec has to say in that article in The Acorn:

When an animal, such as a human being, finds itself confronted with a grave and immediate danger to its life, it reacts in a very particular way. 
Understanding the severity of the situation, it releases in itself a reserve of defensive energy which it has held back for such an emergency – this, it knows, is the time to make use of its last-resort capacity. 
I feel we have now reached that point with regard to the transhumanist technocratic tyranny being imposed on us under the so-called Great Reset. 
We have all perhaps spent too much time discussing exactly what label we should apply to this malevolent force. 
Its essence – that of a ruling minority with an insatiable lust for power and control, which it is able to gain by means of money – has until now usually been described as capitalism. 
But it has now gone beyond that phase into hitherto-uncharted territory: old-fashioned capitalism was no more than the egg from which this monster hatched. 
With its ruthless authoritarianism, its shameless use of the machineries of the state for private gain, its obsession with production, technology and a “scientific” remodelling of humankind, it looks a lot like 20th century fascism.
 
As you can see from the above, what I have been learning about "The Great Reset," from Winter Oak, has not been very complimentary. It has also been, I have tended to think, perhaps just a bit hysterical, another reason that I have not spent much time trying to track down the truth of "The Great Reset."
 
Right after reading Cudenec's article, I was surprised to read another quasi-hysterical bulletin about "The Great Reset," this one from Rod Dreher's daily column in The American Conservative.  
 
Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox Catholic. He is very religious, and a right-wing intellectual. Dreher thinks Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungry, is a model political leader; thus, Dreher is far from the kind of anarchist politics that finds a home in The Acorn. Nonetheless, despite his polar opposite position on the political spectrum, Dreher shares Cudenec's concern about "The Great Reset." Here is Dreher's take, from his December 22, 2021, blog posting:

The English novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth started his Substack newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, earlier this year. Subscribing to it is one of the best decisions I’ve made in 2021. In his latest reflection on how the global reaction to Covid is ushering us into a dystopian world, Kingsnorth ponders the meaning of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” project. The latest Kingsnorth post is one he characterizes thus:
I want to look at the story the Machine is telling us about these times. I want to look at the world we are being rapidly steered into, as covid-19 becomes a kind of techno-political sandbox: a testing-ground for new ways of being human in an increasingly post-human world.
Kingsnorth dives into the Great Reset by reading the book advocating it authored by Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF (the Davos people). He writes that the book is both boring and sinister, in the sense that the big plans globalists like Schwab have for the world are dull, yet deeply dystopian. Kingsnorth:
The covid event, explains Schwab, has shown that ‘we live in a world in which no-one is really in charge.’ For plenty of us, this might sound like a good thing, but for globalist thinkers like Schwab it is a problem to be solved. ‘There cannot be a lasting recovery without a global strategic framework of governance’, he writes. Nation states and their kindly allies in the ‘global business community’ must unite to ‘build back better’ (you may have heard this somewhere before). What does this mean? It means that there is no going back. 
While ‘some of the old habits will certainly return’ after the pandemic ends, writes Schwab, ‘many of the tech behaviours that we were forced to adopt during confinement will through familiarity become more natural.’ Home working, digital monitoring of employees by their companies, Zoom meetings and e-deliveries, not to mention the whole structure of the QR-coded ‘vaccine passport’ system: much of this is likely to remain in the new normal that covid has created. In the reset future, we will reconsider things which once would have been second-nature: things like spending time with our loved ones. Why, asks Schwab, would we endure ‘driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend’ when ‘the WhatsApp family group’ (though admittedly ‘not as fun’) is nevertheless ‘safer, cheaper and greener’? Why indeed? 
This is the essence of the Great Reset: the construction of a future which is at once controlled and catatonic, dystopian and dull, monitored and monotonous beyond bearing. A future in which global corporations are free to build the world they have long desired: a borderless, interconnected market technocracy, in which each human individual is a tracked, traced and monitored production and consumption machine – all in the name of public health and safety.

I can definitely say that I am not in favor of a world in which "each human individual is a tracked, traced, and monitored production and consumption machine." I think I better start paying some more attention to this proposed "Great Reset." 

Maybe we all should!
 
Image Credit:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wlrj3ppyk9nzu89/Screen%20Shot%202021-12-23%20at%2010.55.21%20AM.png?dl=0
 
 

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