Michael Rectenwald
The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind – or should be. It can be blamed for woke madness, cancel culture, Covid lockdowns, Antifa/BLM riots, Big Tech censorship, and the endless propaganda coming out of mainstream media.
There’s a Tibetan Buddhist practice called “lojong” (mind-training) that uses short slogans for training the mind to lessen daily suffering. I’ve found that one of the most useful of the slogans is “drive all blames into one.”
We are faced every day with inevitable troubles, and often go about looking for their sources – not only to solve the troubles but also to find likely targets for blaming them on. The point of driving all blames into one is to short-circuit our suffering. Rather than looking for someone or something to blame for each and every problem, this slogan suggests that we blame one thing for all of them. Tibetan Buddhists might blame suffering itself. In our contemporary dystopian predicament, I suggest blaming everything on the Great Reset.
And why not? Focusing on the Great Reset really can be good mental training for dealing with the political and social malaise that afflicts us. Therefore, if we can define this one target, we will go a long way toward lessening our suffering. My job here is to convince you of the horrors of the Great Reset so that it can become the sole object of all your blaming.
So, what is the Great Reset?
Rather than yielding to the comments below, or to the so-called “conspiracy theories” bandied about on the web, let’s take the language of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) at face value and go from there. We shall see that our concern about the Great Reset is not, after all, as the New York Times would have it, a baseless conspiracy theory. The Great Reset is the decades-old brainchild of Schwab and company. But only within the past year has the Great Reset gained a foothold in public consciousness and become the almost universally recognized agenda of the WEF, and, by extension, of corporations and world governments.
In their book Covid-19: The Great Reset, WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret write that the Covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.” See that? The Great Re-setters have been there all the time, just waiting to seize on something to justify their plans. If climate change didn’t work, then Covid damn well better. And they are working night and day to make sure that it does. But just how do they mean to go about this Great Reset?
The Stakeholder Economy
To usher in “fairness,” the Great Reset aims to reset the economy to “stakeholder capitalism,” as a replacement for “shareholder” capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism involves the consideration of “customers, suppliers, employees, and local communities” in addition to shareholders in the business operations of the world’s major corporations and governments. A stakeholder is anyone or any group that stands to benefit or lose from corporate behavior – other than competitors, we may suppose. Stakeholder capitalism involves changes to the behavior of corporations with respect to carbon use but also in terms of the distribution of benefits and “externalities” or detriments that corporations produce.
By fairness, the Great Reset means much more than the “equitable” distribution of goods and detriments in terms of “environmental justice.” According to the WEF, corporate responsibility must be redefined in terms of “social justice” as well. This includes compensation to black people, the indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). BIPOC are special stakeholders in stakeholder capitalism. In addition to BIPOC, special stakeholders also include LGBTQ+ persons as well. Guess who is going to pay for all this environmental and social justice? That’s right – you. But don’t worry – you’ll just have to give up your property.
Corporate Socialism
I can now name the evil socio-economic system aimed at by the Great Reset: corporate socialism. “Fairness,” you see, means an “equality” without property for the masses.
“Welcome to my city – or should I say, ‘our city,’” writes a blogger for the WEF. “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” This report from 2030 is “not a utopia or dream of the future,” we are told. Yet the future just so happens to meet all the criteria of the Great Reset. Moreover, this propertyless future “makes perfect sense” to the city dweller of 2030, when property has become unnecessary due to the conversion of most goods into “services.”
But what of the corporate producers of goods and services? We must assume that their ownership will not be disrupted. After all, corporations still need to produce the services that the city dwellers “enjoy.” While the city-dwellers will own nothing, they will still need to pay for the services made available by what can only be a corporate oligarchy, which will hold a veritable monopoly over production. After all, where could competition come from when the majority owns nothing? This is corporate socialism.