Build Back Better -COVID 19: The Great Reset

Readings On the Great Reset
It Turns out to be a Great Reduction, a Great Redistribution, and a Great Resettlement

Alexander Macris
Dec 21

“There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas,” said Thomas Carlyle. “The second edition of that book was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.”

Today there is a man called Klaus Schwab, and he has written another book containing nothing but ideas. The book is called COVID 19: The Great Reset, and it details the World Economic Forum’s agenda for our future - the eponymous Great Reset of the world order.

Conservatives, despite our professed love for history, seem never to learn from it. Like Rousseau’s Social Contract, Schwab’s COVID 19: The Great Reset is not being taken seriously. It should be.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the truth about the Great Reset is obscured by a field of postmodern quantum fluctuations. If left unobserved on the World Economic Forum website, the Great Reset is a globalist agenda for radical change. The moment a right-winger observes it, however, the Great Reset’s authentic existence is erased and it becomes nothing more than a fake right-wing conspiracy theory. The New York Times kindly serves as this delayed-choice quantum eraser.

The last time I encountered such powerful quantum shields was when I read socialist intellectual Fredric Jameson’s book Conversations on Cultural Marxism and Marxist professor Dennis Dworkin’s book Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. After reviewing these volumes on Twitter, I was informed by the leftist intelligentsia that Cultural Marxism didn’t actually exist except as a right-wing conspiracy theory. Powerful stuff, this left-wing quantum magic… it’s able to make entire schools of thought disappear the moment that right-wingers notice them.

I thus acknowledge in advance that no matter what I claim the Great Reset is, I will be told that I’m wrong. Even if I quote actual passages from Klaus’s book and website, I will be told the Great Reset is just a conspiracy theory in my fevered right-wing mind. So be it. Let us march forth all the same to analyze the imaginary agenda discussed by the bestselling book of the same name...

What the Great Reset Purports To Be

What is the Great Reset, according to those who support it when no right-wingers are around to gaslight? According to mainstream left-of-center sources, the Great Reset is “a proposal by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to rebuild the economy sustainably following the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to improve capitalism by making investments more geared toward mutual progress and focusing more on environmental initiatives.” The director of the World Economic Forum is, of course, the aforementioned Klaus Schwab, author of our book and creator of the agenda itself.

The Great Reset’s mission is promulgated with the slogan “Build Back Better”, a phrase first used in this context in an April 2020 article on the WEF website. (A related slogan, “Building Back Better,” has been in use by the UN since 2015.) The WEF article explains:

"As governments develop longer-term economic stimulus packages to combat the crisis, they must be designed around the core principle of building a stronger economy that ensures the long-term health and wellbeing of citizens, job creation, tackling climate change once and for all, and building a more resilient and inclusive society.

We cannot go back to business-as-usual and lock in old habits, pollution, spending and infrastructure that will inflict further harm on the very people, communities and economies that these stimulus packages seek to support."

Explained like that, the Great Reset sounds quite similar to other global environmental agendas proffered by left-of-center capitalists, most of which largely degenerate into demands that Westerners pay higher indulgences - I mean taxes - in order to absolve themselves of the sin of using slave labor to make our sneakers.

However, the Great Reset has captured the attention of policy-makers around the world. Both Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have endorsed it; and Joe Biden has made BuildBackbetter.gov the official website for his presumed transition to US president. That alone would merit a deeper investigation.

What the Great Reset Actually Is

Based on Mr. Schwab’s own words and platforms, the Great Reset can best be understood as a slate of radical solutions offered to solve what Mr. Schwab perceives to be a set of problems of paramount importance.

Implicit in Mr. Schwab’s worldview are the following points:

• 1. The globe is facing three problems of global scale: pandemics; climate change; and resource depletion.
• 2. The underlying cause of all three problems is global overpopulation and global overconsumption of consumer goods.
• 3. The solution to overpopulation is to reduce birthrates while reducing the impact of each person.
• 4. The solution to overconsumption of consumer goods is to change the accepted standards of living in consumer societies.
• 5. The burden of these solutions must fall on the globe’s developed countries, because it would be socially unjust to ask the developing world to bear these burdens.
• 6. Solutions to global problems must be implemented worldwide via global governance.

From these premises, Schwab and his allies at the World Economic Forum derive the following conclusions:

• 1. Inhabitants of developed countries must abandon the nationalist state and embrace global governance with public-private partnership to achieve the Great Reset. They must accept that popular sovereignty must yield to global priorities set at the international level.
• 2. Inhabitants of developed countries must keep their birthrate low to reduce the footprint of their population. Shortages of labor, if they occur, will be made up by allowing immigration from the ample populations of the developing world. Economic, social, and immigration policy must change to accommodate this.
• 3. Inhabitants of developed countries must change their standard of living to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and scarce resources. They must live, work, and vacation locally; eat less meat; travel less by airplane or car; consume fewer goods; dwell in smaller houses with less climate control; share more and own less; and so on. They must accept the government regulation that will be required to achieve this.
• 4. Government and business leaders in developed countries must stop aspiring to growth in terms of GDP and instead consider growth in subjective factors such as working less or being healthier. They must stop focusing on efficiency and instead focus on resiliency. They must accept the government regulation that will be required to achieve this.
• 5. Developing countries must urbanize, industrialize, and democratize. This will bring about an increase in their standard of living (paralleling the decrease in that of developed countries), and will reduce birth rates because urban living, education, jobs, legal abortion, and birth control decrease the number of children born per woman.
• 6. Inhabitants of developing countries must be able to immigrate to the developed countries in order to make up for labor shortages, avoid climate change, and distribute the burden of overpopulation across the globe. Economic, social, and immigration policy must change to accommodate this.

The intended result is a world that is much more level than our old one. There will be far fewer American-style suburbs, lawns, mansions, SUVs, steak dinners, and air conditioners; but also far fewer grass huts and grub in malaria-infested villages. The existing middle classes of the developed world will have less, true; but the greater good will be served because the newly emerging middle classes of the developing world will have much more. The increasingly empty continent of Europe and the still-nearly-empty heartland of North America will be populated with a billion or more migrants from Africa and Asia. The overburdened regions of Africa and Asia will be relieved and recover. There will be de-growth from the excesses of the 20th century as the pace of life changes to a natural and sustainable level.

The Great Reset is thus best understood as a great redistribution of wealth between the developed and developing world, a great resettlement of migrants from Africa and Asia into Europe and North America; and a great reduction in the population and its environmental impact on the globe.

Is the Great Reset a good thing or bad? That remains to be discussed. Here I have merely attempted to convey its ideas from a neutral point of view. If I’ve done that correctly, a left-wing globalist who reads this will find the world I describe a socially just and ecologically sustainable one, even though a right-wing nationalist will think I’ve described a nightmarish dystopia.

I personally view the Great Reset as bad solutions to ill-conceived problems that, if implemented, will be disastrous for our civilization. In future writing, I will make that case, exploring each of the points above in depth, quoting directly from Klaus Schwab’s and the World Economic Forum’s texts to justify the claims I’ve made about the agenda, and explaining why I think the agenda will fail disastrously.