The much-circulated slogan “You will own nothing,
and you will be happy” was coined by Danish MP Ida
Auken in 2016 and included in a 2016 essay published by
the purveyors of the so-called “Great Reset”
at the World Economic Forum (WEF) headquartered in Davos,
Switzerland. It is, of course, only half true. Nonetheless,
the phrase is certainly apt and should be taken seriously.
For once the Great Reset has been put in place, we will
indeed own nothing except our compelled compliance.
The world’s
farmers and cattle raisers, deprived of their livelihoods
on the pretext of reducing nitrogenic fertilizers and
livestock-produced methane, will own next to nothing.
Meat and grain will become increasingly rare and we will
be dining on cricket goulash and mealworm mash, an entomorphagic
feast. We will be driving distance-limited electric vehicles
rented from the local Commissariat and digitally monitored
by Cyber Central—assuming we will still be allowed
to drive. Overseen by a cadre of empowered financial managers
who can “freeze” our assets at any time, we
will possess bank accounts and credit ratings, but they
will not be really ours.
Subject to
a conceptual misnomer that is nothing but a vacuous abstraction,
we will have become “stakeholders”—the
WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s favorite word—with
no real stake to hold apart from a crutch. In fact, what
Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” really
means, as Andrew Stuttaford explains at Capital Matters,
is “transferring the power that capitalism should
confer from its owners and into the hands of those who
administer it.”
Should the
Great Reset ever be fully implemented, we will have been
diminished, as Joel Kotkin cogently argues in The
Coming of Neo-Feudalism, to the condition of medieval
serfs, or reduced to the status of febrile invalids, like
those in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,
which, as it happens, was also set in Davos. As Mann ends
his novel, addressing his main character Hans Castorp:
“Farewell, Hans . . . Your chances are not good.
The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last
many a little sinful year yet, and we will not wager much
that you will come out whole.”
Modern-day
Castorps, we will indeed own nothing, and most assuredly,
we will not be happy. As Schwab writes in his co-authored
Covid-19: The Great Reset, people will have to
accept “limited consumption,” “responsible
eating,” and, on the whole, sacrificing “what
we do not need”—this latter to be determined
by our betters.
What strikes
me with considerable force is the pervasive indifference
or cultivated ignorance of the general population respecting
what the Davos cabal has in store for them. A substantial
number of people have never heard of it. Others regard
it as just another internet conspiracy—though it
is not so much a conspiracy since it is being organized
in full sight. The majority of “fact-checkers”
and hireling intellectuals wave it away as a right-wing
delusion.
Others I have
spoken to simply cannot grasp the enormity of so vast,
diabolical, and methodically orchestrated a scheme. “Surely,
you’re joking,” my neighbor said to me. I
was tempted to parrot Leslie Nielsen’s snappy one-liner,
“Don’t call me Shirley,” as a correlative
idiocy. The general state of public stupefaction and complacency
is precisely what may ensure the success of what is nothing
less than a social apocalypse, epically scalable and coercively
networked by an unholy alliance between government, corporations,
NGOs, academia, techno-elites and a coterie of the world’s
billionaires. It is real. “It matters,” writes
Ben Sixsmith at The Spectator World, “that
some of the world’s richest and most powerful people
are so interested in ‘resetting’ the way we
live.”
The evidence
is everywhere though the majority refuse to recognize
it: one pandemic and variant after another, strictly on
schedule: Covid, Omicron BA.4, BA.5, Monkeypox, Bird Flu,
with more to come; vaccines whose deadly consequences
are legion; the creation of a new category of political
prisoners; climate alarmism presaging the end of mankind—an
extinction which is continually deferred; the systematic
suppression of civil rights and Constitutional guarantees;
supply-chain disruptions; currency deflation and its result,
rampant inflation; ballooning taxes of every shape and
form: gas taxes, equity taxes, capital gains taxes, carbon
taxes; and the growing campaign against energy and food,
the essentials of life and prosperity, leading to the
culling of the world’s population—we have
the Malthusian word of Bill Gates on that.
Taken together,
this is the Reset idea in a nutshell, a dystopian blueprint
whose effect will be devastating, and which most people
remain blind to. It is sometimes the glaringly obvious
that is most obscure, the onset of a tectonic shift dismissed
as a mere tremor, until it is too late to prepare and
react.
Yuval Noah
Harari, author of the bestselling Sapiens: A Brief
History of Humankind, represents an interesting case
in the ongoing debate over the nature of the Great Reset.
Often condemned by skeptics as a vigorous promoter of
the movement, he appears to be more of a Cassandra prophetically
surveying the evolution of our political, economic and
technological future, which, he believes, may well be
unstoppable. He suspects that artificial intelligence
(AI) and the algorithmic revolution will generate a “global
useless class.” Disruptive technologies,”
he says in a New York Times interview, “which have
helped bring enormous progress, could be disastrous if
they get out of hand.” These new technologies “could
hijack democracy, and even our sense of self,” which
would spell the doom of “liberal democracy as we
have known it for the last century.”
Harari is
often closely associated with Schwab, but his predictions
should be taken in—not out of—context, as
an insightful foray into what is looming on the horizon,
for better or worse. In referring to “hackable humans,”
he is not advocating for but warning against how the new
technologies, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency's Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool (NEAT) program,
are envisioning the future and how, if we are not careful,
they can go wrong. Harari’s warning is the content
of the Great Reset’s proposed aspirations—but
he seems to be misunderstood rather than heeded.
A new book,
Against the Great Reset, edited by The Pipeline
editor Michael Walsh and scheduled for October, would
doubtlessly enlighten the crepuscular sensibilities of
an apathetic and irresponsible demographic, the incipient
victims of an unprecedented global upheaval. But most
of the people I daily meet at their trades, and enter
into conversation with, do not read anything apart from
the agitprop drivel of the mainstream press. Even so,
such a volume, featuring many of our most prestigious
scholars, needs to be “out there” as a curator
of ideas. One never knows. It may change some minds among
the literate and nudge the news cycle, at least to some
extent, in the direction of sanity.
The only event,
however, that I can see radically forestalling what has
begun to seem inevitable would be the total collapse of
the economies, traditional pursuits, communal trust in
national leadership, and, in effect, the structural cohesion
of nations, as in Sri Lanka, Argentina, and possibly Holland
and Canada in the approximate future. Such convulsions
may serve to rouse the masses. Otherwise, we may be inviting
a fait accompli. Barring the unforeseen, one
thing is certain. The oligarchs and poser-brokers who
are busy installing the insidious measures and manorial
provisions of the Great Reset, should they succeed in
their plans, will have much to look forward to. They will
own everything, and they will be happy. Very happy.
