It’s not often that I read a book which fatally undermines its whole premise in its own introduction, but that’s just what The Great Reset does. Yet its authors have their heads so far up their own arses that they plainly fail to notice the gigantic rake they step on in just their first few pages.
Which is hardly surprising, really: The Great Reset is quite a masterclass in how not to write a book. Its prose is awful, its arguments unconvincing – and its agenda appalling.
For those like New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister, who either haven’t heard of the Great Reset or want to pretend that it doesn’t exist, its essence is that it is a deliberate plan by the global elite to exploit the Chinese virus pandemic in order to implement their own vision of what the world political and financial order ought to be. Contrary to Grant Robertson’s indignant spluttering about “conspiracy theories”, the Great Reset is very real. In fact, its proponents were so helpful as to even write a whole book about it.
Not a very good book, but there it is.
The fatal undermining I referred to in my opening is quite simple: despite proclaiming that the Chinese pandemic is a Xi-given opportunity to enact a Utopian new social order, the book’s authors (the odious World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, and investment adviser to the hyper-rich, Thierry Malleret) admit at the very beginning that pandemics throughout history have tended to do the exact opposite. Pandemics, as they describe, have historically led to panicked and irrational authoritarianism and “fuel[led] fear, anxiety and mass hysteria”. Institutional reactions to pandemics past, they write, were often irrational (previous lockdowns, they write, “ha[d] no medical foundation”) and “helped legitimatize the ‘accretion of power’” by the state.
Yet, despite the authors admitting that the Wuhan plague “doesn’t pose a new existential threat” and even on the “worst-case horrendous scenario…will kill far fewer people” than previous pandemics, they nonetheless insist that it will be transformational – yet, that transformation will be entirely benign.
As an aside, it might also interest BFD readers that New Zealand’s own prime minister is singled out for a special mention by The Great Reset. As an example of the new political-economy agenda the Great Resetters wish to impose, Jacinda Ardern is praised for her notorious “well-being budget”. Ardern’s direction of budget priorities “for social issues, such as mental health, child poverty and family violence” is praised for supposedly making “well-being an explicit goal of public policy”.
Yet, the authors conspicuously fail to make any mention of just how well Ardern’s grandiose policies have managed the transition from virtue signal to reality. In fact, had they bothered to inform readers of their book, every single one of those social issues has worsened under Ardern’s stewardship. In particular, child poverty, which Ardern trumpeted as her personal political priority. Despite Ardern’s “well-being budget”, an analysis has since concluded that “things are worse than previously estimated”. Nearly two years after Ardern’s trumpeted budget announcement, UNICEF placed New Zealand near the very bottom of its ranking for child wellbeing.
This example alone illustrates the yawning gap between The Great Reset’s flowery rhetoric and grim reality.
But what exactly does The Great Reset’s utopian future look like?
Pretty much exactly what the “conspiracy theorists” are warning.
Sometimes, Schwab and Malleret come right out and say it: “the return of ‘big’ government”. The COVID-19 pandemic, they say, will boost the power of the state, high-taxing and big-spending. “Governments have the upper hand”, they gleefully assert. They enthuse about “vastly increased and quasi-immediate government control of the economy”. Governments will “decide that it’s in the best interest of society to rewrite the rules of the game and permanently increase their role”.
Global governance is also a recurring theme of The Great Reset. Put simply, the book not-so-subtly argues for a world government. The fact that, by their own admission, current global institutions such as the WHO have failed miserably, does little to dent their enthusiasm. In fact, they argue that global governance has failed so far because it isn’t powerful enough.
The Great Reset also clearly favours a Chinese-style panopticon state. Digital tracking technologies used in the pandemic will lead to permanent surveillance, state and corporate. Similarly, they argue that our world will become increasingly virtual. “Many of the tech behaviours that we were forced to adopt during confinement will through familiarity become more natural.”
“Dystopian” concerns are airily hand-waved away. Their argument can basically be summed up as: you’ll get used to it, so stop worrying.
In keeping with the assertion made in a WEF video that “you will own nothing and you will be happy”, The Great Reset attacks personal consumption as “at best, out of touch, and, at worst, downright obscene”. Blithely ignoring their own hyper-wealth, the hypocrites of The Great Reset finger-wag that “the ostentatious display of wealth will no longer be acceptable”.
Remind me of that the next time the private jets and gleaming limousines are lined up at Davos.
The Great Reset will also do nothing to allay the concerns of those “conspiracy theorists” who are already foreseeing that the “emergency measures” enacted in response to the Chinese virus will be neatly dovetailed into climate alarmism, creating a permanent “state of emergency” in which “stay home, save lives” becomes “stay home, save the planet”. The Great Reset gleefully anticipates the end of air travel – at least for us proles – and enthuses that lockdowns should give us a taste of what a future climate response “might look like”.
In a telling, golly-gosh-what-if? paragraph, The Great Reset gives the game away: what if we (by that, they mean you) give up our cars, stop flying, stop eating the same things and stop heating our homes? “The climate outcome might be different”.
So, there’s the Great Reset agenda, all wrapped up in one shoddily written polemic:
An all-powerful, high-taxing global government, continually spying on you and telling you what you can eat, where you can go, what you can own and even how you’ll be allowed to work and socialise.
No wonder Grant Robertson didn’t want to talk about it publicly.
COVID-19: The Great Reset is available from Amazon.
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