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During the past several years, a plethora of articles, blog commentaries and books have warned about the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset agenda to reimagine the international community as techno-hierarchy controlled by a stakeholder elite. The Forum’s president Klaus Schwab is the exemplary archetype of what Samuel Huntington in 2004 defined as the “Davos Man” and ”gold-collared workers.”
These “dead souls,” Huntington states, have been denationalized. Writing for Harpers in 1994, Christopher Lasch remarked that this elite “cancelled their allegiance to America.” They regard the planet as their financial playground and have no national allegiance to any border or flag. CNBC later defined the stereotypical Davos Man as rich and powerful, perhaps out of touch, but most of all representative of the global elite.
Technically, we have been charging blindly into the Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Globalization 4.0, for over three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the near silencing of anti-globalization protests after 911. When this new revolution began is relatively unimportant. However, two events at the close of the first Bush administration seem to have inadvertently catapulted its onset. First was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which decimated the older geopolitical landscape dividing the world between two military superpowers. With US military supremacy escalating towards global hegemony, the era of neoliberal globalization entered hyper-drive as the Clinton administration’s new generation of neocons seemed determined to keep Cold War mythologies alive through NATO. Second was the aftermath of the first Gulf War. In 1993, the World Wide Web went public, effectively launching the digital age and the era of big tech and social media.
There is an amateurish assumption that the Great Reset is the brainchild of Schwab. There is nothing theoretically new about many of the Great Reset’s underlying principles. Technologies such as 5G telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence, data collection and surveillance, block chain applications, biotechnology and genetic engineering and transhumanist visions were already forging ahead and becoming exponentially more complex and sophisticated.
A dozen years ago, a popular urban theorist Richard Florida published his book The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. Well, before Schwab’s blathering about the great opportunity before us to reset human civilization as the Covid-19 pandemic overturned “life as normal,” Florida’s Reset already promised a better life free of “ownership of real estate, appliances, cars and all manner of material goods.”
Several of his predictions are coming to pass, notably the shift away from home ownership to a renter economy. Florida believes this is particularly crucial for larger urban cities because of populations migrating away from rural areas. This in turn was outlined in the United Nation’s Agenda 20, which has much in common with the WEF’s futurist strategies. In 2014, Dutch economist Willem Middelkoop proposed The Big Reset in his book with the same title.
Surprisingly since its inception in 1971 the WEF has achieved little as an international institution. Despite the enormity of its global public face, by itself the Forum is a lot of smoke and mirrors, a climax of human hubris and self-deception.
Left to itself, it is a rather lame institution. Schwab himself has stated that his organization’s sole purpose is to initiate “dialogue between stakeholders” and doesn’t engage in negotiations for treaties and policy decisions. “Elites have always existed,” Schwab once stated, “We bring together people of influence, and we hope they use their influence in a positive way.” Speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, when asked whether the WEF could replace the multilateral institutional international structure Schwab replied it was not the Forum’s goal; instead the WEF’s strategy is to initiate reform from within the existing institutions.
The Forum is largely a huge clearing house that internalizes enormous amounts of analytical reports, public and private symposia, geopolitical analyses and scenario exercises from a wide network of governmental, multilateral organizations, transnational corporations and financial firms, banks, think tanks, NGOs and no doubt intelligence entities and elitist institutions such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc.
It has never truly succeeded in anything monumental or earthy shattering other than serving as the premier incubator for the Davos Folk, corporate multinational and financial elite and their well funded think tanks and NGOs, to network behind closed doors and conjure new ways to preserve and advance a post-capitalist technological agenda without overly disrupting the parasitical neoliberal agenda upon which these entities depend. Yet it is also in the WEF’s DNA to advance a template for socio-economic progress defined by a technologically driven regime that will not trigger earthquakes throughout the ruling elite class.
More worrisome is the younger generation who willingly and eagerly become incentivized by the market value of infinite technological innovations and progress despite their egregious applications for surveillance, social restructuring and behavior modification. Corporate techno-nerds pursue means to artificially mechanize human biology and dream of transhumanist futures when human cyborgs yearn for terrestrial immortality. They believe the miracles of CRISPR engineering to easily manipulate any species’ genome offers the technological future infinite Promethean possibilities.
At our peril, the WEF’s harshest public critics may be placing too much weight on Schwab as the mastermind for a unipolar world ruled by elite stakeholders. Schwab is simply a useful idiot, a comic decoy for the real movers and shakers who spearhead the globalist agenda. Remove Schwab, WEF and the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will proceed unscathed.
However, one elite mover and shaker who barely goes noticed is the French economist and social theorist Jacques Attali. Attali was a senior consultant to French presidents Mitterrand, Sarkozy and it is claimed he opened doors for Emmanuel Macron’s election. He founded the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1989 with a mission to rebuild the former Eastern European Soviet republics into functioning capitalist democracies, which he was later accused for having grossly mismanaged. Nevertheless, the prestigious journal Foreign Policy lists him as among the world’s top global thinkers.
Professor Valentin Katasonov, Chairman of the Russian Economic Society, has noted that many of Schwab’s strategic plans and goals outlined in his Great Reset coincide with Attali’s ideas. Attali’s Positive Planet Initiative is also part of the WEF’s network. A few voices have called Attali the actual “mastermind behind the Great Reset.”
In his 2009 book The Crisis and After, Attali predicted an “uncontrolled pandemic” and has supported Bill Gates’ pandemic strategies. During a 2021 TED talk, which was removed shortly after being posted, Attali is fully onboard with a technological readjustment of the human organism through vaccination. “We are very capable of creating vaccines,” Attali stated, “that will protect this code [the human genetic code], improve it and defend it against viruses, and that is how it should be.” Embracing the doctrine of radical scientific materialism, Attali believes all human activity – politics, agriculture, transportation, technology, economics, human behavior [from selfishness to empathy], health and medicine, are nothing more than codes. All such codes in Attali’s dystopian future, which govern “sets of rules,” need to be overhauled and rewritten so a “living being “ becomes “an object” and “an artifact.”
A decade ago, Attali praised the possibility of radio-identification chip strategies to be implanted “voluntarily or without it,” to reach “universal traceability.” “The luxury of tomorrow,” he conceded, will be to escape this electronic surveillance prison—hence offering the elite and get out of prison pass. Earlier he indicated that modern medical practice is ideally suited to be the platform for a future surveillance system when “the policeman and the priest fade away behind the doctor.” During the same 1981 interview published in L’Avenir de la Vie, Attali rejected the idea that his technological utopia was Orwellian; rather he believes “in implicit totalitarianism with an invisible and decentralized Big Brother. These machines for monitoring our health,” he continued, “which we could have for our own good, will enslave us for our own good. In a way, we will be subjected to gentle and permanent conditioning.” The Chinese Communist Party’s control is a vague analogy, and during a recent appearance on China’s state media, Schwab proclaimed the Xi regime is one of his role models for a global transformation. In later lectures and interviews Attali recommends a drastic reduction in agriculture, most forms of transportation, mechanical and chemical engineering and widespread decarbonization – all points clearly outlined in Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Throughout Attali’s work we repeatedly discover technological innovation as the final solution for all of humanity’s struggles and failures. True to the ideology of scientific determnism and metaphysical realism, his language characteristically frames humans as broken and imperfect machines. But it is the inherent authoritarian capacity of technology itself — through the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s social networks, data collection, algorithmic surveillance and censorship, and human engineering — that will ultimately give rise to a post-capitalist regime.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the West in general believed a new neo-capitalist era was being born. Fukuyama’s The End of History would have us believe that history was being wiped out by an epoch of neoliberalism engineered by the US and its economic allies.
However, perhaps the events leading to this ahistorical era also marked signs pointing to the end of capitalism altogether. During the 2008 financial collapse the loss of money’s hard value accelerated. The only thing required was a printing press to create value and purchasing power out of nothing.
Neoliberal capitalism could be replaced by a stakeholder surveillance state with technology, and the multinational corporations who develop and control it may emerge as the new sovereign state. Nation states would be reduced to levels of subservience. Rather than technology and many of its wonderful advancements serving humanity and democratic ideals, the human race becomes increasingly enslaved. Humans are then meant to serve technology itself.
Writing shortly before the WHO’s declaration of Covid-19 pandemic, David Baker, a historian at Macquarie University, lists the “big picture” predictions that have been made as the century progresses: “stagnant real wages, altering standard of living for the lower and middle classes, worsening health inequality, more riots and uprisings, ongoing political polarization, more elites competing for limited position of power, and elites co-opting radical movements.” We have been witnessing each of these crises unfolding in spades.
The Great Reset agenda could transform neoliberalist capitalism into a counterrevolutionary movement led by a global elite to destroy capitalism itself in order to usher in a post-capitalist era.
Warnings of such a revolution were described by Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy.
Lasch viewed the elites’ intention to destroy the middle class as a revolt to “unleash a war of all against all.”
Post-capitalism has nothing to do with a new Marxism, an ignorant trope that sadly infects red pill country and many WEF critics. Many call it Marxist, communist, socialist and fascist in a single breath. Yet none of these socio-political constructs accurately encapsulate or describe the Great Reset’s larger vision. Attali, Schwab, and those most closely aligned with the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s techno-economic ideology, invert true Marxism.
It should be self-evident that the WEF counterrevolution is not about genuine class struggle nor does it in any way favor the proletariat worker’ struggle against an extremely powerful global bourgeoisie ascending to opaque political positions of socio-economic governance as stakeholders. The owners of wealth, instead of average citizens, orchestrate the Reset revolution. Consequently this would be an utterly new creature, an oppressive regime to further the destruction of the middle and upper working classes.
As real estate is gobbled up by banks and large investment firms like Blackrock, tens of millions of homeowners and owners of small and medium sized businesses are going bankrupt and having their property seized.
The Dutch government seizing farmers’ land is another recent example. The long-term goal is to eventually establish a depopulated caste system that favors a liberated elitist class and its privileged constituents. Beneath them resides a socially engineered caste that comprises the masses of useful and expendable “useless” eaters.
In 2018, attendees at the Santa Fe invitation-only conference by the National Security Agency (NSA) voted on their preference and/or likelihood of four future scenarios for humanity to constructively face the global crises ahead.
The first and most optimal scenario portrayed our civilization’s capacity to meet and solve every obstacle and crisis;
the second scenario required a major technological breakthrough in order for modern civilization to successfully confront its most foreboding challenges. The attendees voted against both of these scenarios because of the Western political leadership’s low intelligence level, and, second, that the most law-abiding citizens [i.e., middle and upper working classes] are incapable of taking the responsibility necessary to meet those challenges.
The third scenario received the greatest approval and involves orchestrated and controlled chaos. As an admirer of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” theory propelling innovation as a revolutionizing force, this third scenario is aligned with Schwab’s preferred trajectory.
The second most popular scenario was named “anthropological transition” and refers to the movement towards a new social order with the distinguishing gap between the top and bottom being that which separates two different biological species. This latter scenario is the new caste system, which can be found intrinsically couched within the Great Reset as a kind of Plan B.
However, none of this is really new; we have heard much of this before. In their special report Crisis of Democracy, commissioned by the Trilateral Commission under the directorship of Zbigniew Brzezinski and published in 1975, authors Samuel Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki suggest the US needs to move towards less rather than more democracy. A functioning democracy requires moderation; to reach this goal a large portion of the population must become apathetic and disengaged from civil action. Therefore diminishing civil society’s public influence is essential. Perhaps better would be the destruction of the middle class altogether.
We may not feel inclined to lend much importance to a report written almost half a century ago. However, in the Trilateral Commission’s Summer 2019 report, entitled “Democracies Under Stress,” the 1975 report was resurrected. The 2019 report states, “The Commission will return to its roots and seek to produce content as seminal and lasting [our italics] as Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki’s Crisis of Democracy.”
The globalists’ adrenaline rush during the past years of the pandemic has been an effort to shatter the public’s self-awareness, to squash individuality and dumb down critical thought. Viewed from this perspective, social movements such as the New Woke, environmentalism as an ideology created by the elites’ New Green Deal agenda, and gender insanity were likely very predictable distractors now that we have seen them being co-opted by the same engineers of the Great Rese. The Critical Race Theory movement’s identity politics has replaced a direly needed authentic class struggle. They are synonymous with a system that needs to shatter the public’s conscious self-awareness and replace democracy with idiocracy for mass consumption. This includes abolishing public control over social media networks, as witnessed by the US Democrat and EU governments’ backlash against Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
After Obama’s 8-year term in office, the elite class fully expected Hillary Clinton to rule for the following two terms. Over the course of this aniticipated 16-year reign by hardened corporate Democrats, the politicos of globalist ideology, the neoliberal project for implementing the unipolar regime outlined in the Great Reset had a greater chance of success. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley, the exemplar of a technological autocracy, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
But then there was a “black swan” event. There was the surprising election of Donald Trump. Far from truly representing the average person, Trump represents a different maverick class of elites. As a nationalist, he believes in the country’s sovereignty. However he also stood in opposition to international institutional infrastructures, such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, World Health Organization and their various offspring that impose their will upon nations’ sovereignty. Trump’s presidential predecessors were simply high-ranking clerks.
Trump, on the other hand, stood on the margins. Hyperactive globalists, such as George Soros, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, prefer the demolition of the state and national boundaries. For the global elites, Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism would usher large multinational banks, corporations and cherry-picked NGOs into the ranks of governance over domestic and foreign affairs. Trump’s buffoonery, the uncertainty about what he would do from one day to the next, may be regarded as a surreal blessing to interrupt the globalist agenda and perhaps saved a middle class – or at least lend it a bit more survival time. Trump’s fool’s errand nevertheless brought to public light the underbelly of the globalist class and its ties to the deep state apparatus. Trump would certainly be an inappropriate architect and general for a constructive counterattack against a new global order built upon the Great Reset’s designs.
However, it serves us to pay heed to how his presidency’s burlesque upset the new faux left’s tyrannical forces and the powers of wealth that support it.
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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer for the Progressive Radio Network in Manhattan and an independent journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
