If the “so-called” Great Reset is a conspiracy theory gripping fevered minds on the far right, why did Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), write a book called 'The Great Reset?'? Indeed, WEF slogans like “shared goals,” “sustainability,” “fair outcomes,” “innovations that support the public good” and best of all a “Great Reset” sound like noble goals. Surely, a reasonable person might conclude, following a debilitating pandemic and looking at all the economic and social challenges facing us, the planet could even do with a reset or two?.Why then should our elites and mainstream media pretend none of this exists? Perhaps because these harmless-sounding slogans mask a sweeping and dangerous agenda. Thankfully there’s a just-published critique, Against the Great Reset, that attempts to answer some of these questions. Its 18 contributors delve into the WEF’s “aspirations, prescriptions and proscriptions and how [the Great Reset] will prospectively affect us,” as the book’s editor Michael Walsh puts it..“Assume the worst,” writes historian Victor Davis Hanson, one of the contributors, “when the adjective ‘great’ appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes.” Hanson continues, “What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed ‘Great Society’ and Mao’s genocidal ‘Great Leap Forward’ was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor.”.Hanson exposes the Great Reset as anti-democratic and essentially leftist: “On examination, it is a kitchen-sink mishmash of agendas that incorporate the U.N.’s long stale ‘Sustainable Development’ plan (‘Agenda 21’), the Green New Deal, tidbits of Black Lives Matter sloganeering, critical race theory, ‘stakeholder’ capitalism that often champions ESG, or forced corporate embrace of ‘environmental and social governance.’”.These agendas operated mainly at local or national levels, but Schwab’s version of steering “the market toward fairer outcomes” takes things to a new level. It would be managed by a consortium of the now-familiar international luminaries who would lobby to change laws and to regulate and tax international capital and income, to cite just a few of their envisioned powers..Michael Anton similarly asserts the catchphrases “Great Reset” and “Build Back Better” simply sugar-coat the harsh reality these programs would engineer the gradual impoverishment of everyone outside the ruling elite..“Perhaps the ultimate expression is the now-ubiquitous WEF slogan ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.”.As Anton notes, the WEF-types never say they’ll own nothing..The Western economic system that emerged in the 18th century was based on individual and corporate freedom and a generally light regulatory touch. But now the WEF advocates “the virtues of universal supranationalism,” writes Conrad Black, which is “for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world.”.Justin Trudeau isn’t alone in his admiration for “basic dictatorships.”.Equally corrosive of individual liberty, economic freedom and meaningful democracy is the administrative/technocratic state that has grown dominant in Western countries. Roger Kimball cites political theorist James Burnham, whose 1941 The Managerial Revolution informed George Orwell’s 1984 and now, apparently, the Great Reset. But while the former regarded managerialism as a component of dystopian horror, the latter apparently sees it as a how-to manual..COVID-19 was a trial run for the Great Reset, asserts John Tierney. He predicts a trend of “more centralized power due to the ‘ratchet effect’ documented by Robert Higgs in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan.” Programs enacted during emergencies are never fully abolished and become a source of permanent government growth. But while plagues come and go, the climate will never stop changing, providing an excuse to expand government control without end, writes Tierney: “Reducing carbon emissions will give bureaucrats an excuse to regulate any human activity. Climate activists around the world are celebrating the COVID-19 response as a ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘blueprint’ for future policies.”.Janice Fiamengo foresees the Great Reset further widening the male-female fault-line opened by radical feminism. She analyzes the #MeToo eruption, “... when thousands of women demanded swift punishment of men accused of sexual misconduct as a flood of allegations, many of them anonymous and most of them made without evidence, began to circulate on the internet and mainstream media.”.The multiple leftist agendas brought together in the Great Reset, Fiamengo notes, operate with similar disregard for facts and evidence..The Great Reset’s economic consequences are already happening, according to David Goldman (who often writes as “Spengler”). “.One-fifth of the industrial nations’ GDP shifted to the balance sheet of governments during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Goldman warns. “The destructive consequences of the Great Reset for the productivity of the Western industrial nations may well hand the leadership of the world economy to China by default.”.The overall message is clear: A world run by unaccountable, faceless technocrats in remote institutions proffering authoritarian “solutions” on a global scale, threatens individual rights and freedoms while placing Western civilization itself at economic and geopolitical risk..To fight back effectively, Canadians need to know what’s happening..Reading Against the Great Reset is a great way to start informing yourself..A longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.Margret Kopala is an Ottawa-based policy analyst and author and was formerly a broadcast journalist based in London, England.
