Resetting the Great Reset: a Book Review of: Against the Great Reset
Resetting the Great Reset: a Book Review of Against the Great Reset.
Against the Great Reset - Eighteen Theses Contra The New World Order
Edited by Michael Walsh
480 pages
Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-630-3
ISBN(eBook): 978-1-63758-631-0
Contents:
Part I: The Problem
Introduction: Reset This by Michael Walsh
The Great Regression by Victor Davis Hanson
China, COVID-19, Realpolitik, and the Great Reset by Douglas Murray
Part II: The Political
Sovereignty and the Nation-State by Roger Kimball
Resetting the Educational Reset by Angelo M. Codevilla
Big Tech: Sacred Culture or Cyborg Rapture? by James Poulos
Part III: The Economic
The War on Capitalism by Conrad Black
Socialism and the Great Reset by Michael Anton
The Economic Consequences of the Great Reset by David P. Goldman
Part IV: The Personal
The Great Reset, Feminist-Style by Janice Fiamengo
The Shape of Things to Come: The Tyranny of Covid-19 by John Tierney
You Will Be Made to Laugh: Humor Under the Great Reset by Harry Stein
Part V: The Practical
Green Energy and the Future of Transportation by Salvatore Babones
The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Martin Hutchinson
The Great Reset and "Stakeholderism" by Alberto Mingardi
Part VI: The Ineffable
History under the Great Reset by Jeremy Black
Dueling Faiths: Science and Religion under the Great Reset by Richard Fernandez
"What an Artist Dies in Me!" by Michael Walsh
The Great Reset was contrived at the Davos World Economic Forum under the pretentious premise that participants could make the world a better place for the world's unenlightened masses.
Author Michael Walsh writes that:
At its heart, the Great Reset is a conceited and self-loathing central-European blitzkrieg against the cultural, intellectual, religious, artistic, physical, and, most of all, moral inheritance we have received from our Greco-Roman forebears.
It's a deeply repellent principle that masquerades as a perversion of Jeffersonian democracy but is in fact a simultaneous attack on individuality and merit that seeks to roll back the scientific and cultural advances of the past two millennia...The goal, as always, is power - the eternal fixation of the socialist Left.
Whether you know a lot about the Great Reset or want to learn more, this book is highly recommended. The authors represented are top-notch. They cover the Great Reset from multiple perspectives, providing insight into the elitist, globalist, and immoral agenda that no one has voted for.
The articles contained in the book discuss aspects of the Great Reset, and several include adequate historical context to frame this misdirected effort.
This book is an engrossing and engaging tour-de-force that I couldn't put down.
Here are some brief reviews and excerpts from some of the articles:
The Great Regression by Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson notes the parallels between the Great Reset and Lyndon Johnson's failed "Great Society" and Mao's genocidal "Great Leap Forward." All are centrally planned, with little regard to the impact on the working class. He notes that the adjective "great" is code for radical attempts at restructuring society:
Hanson notes that in all its green and "woke" glory, the Great Reset remains faith-based rather than a scientific effort. He discusses how the COVID-19 China Virus offered "a singular opening for transnational elites to reset a frightened and insecure world."
Founder Klaus Schwab envisioned three primary Great Reset agendas: first, "steer the market toward fairer outcomes" via tax changes, with "fair" of course, being defined by Schwab and the Davos elites. Wealth redistribution is a significant component of the Great Reset. The ultimate consequence, Hanson notes, is that:
Hanson notes that while the intent is to establish new rules, existing international law can't even be adequately enforced, especially with the likelihood that Western elites are compromised by Chinese financial influences (the Biden regime comes to mind).
The second Great Reset component is to embrace ESG - the "Environmental, Social, and Governance" fad, which Hanson says "threatens to redefine free-market capitalism in quasi-religious terms."
The third priority of the Great Reset is to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution to "support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges." Hanson remarks ominously that:
He concludes that: "In sum, the same old, same old Great Reset is better envisioned as the Great Regression.
China, COVID-19, Realpolitik, and the Great Reset by Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray recommends caution when everyone in a position of authority says exactly the same thing. Regarding Covid-19 (the China Virus), he points out two disturbing aspects: abandoning all careful analysis as to how the virus escaped from Wuhan, and the immediate agenda of restructuring the global economy.
The new, reset view of capitalism conflicts with its historical success. Murray notes:
Murray also points out the hypocrisy of the climate change agenda, which is intent on preventing India and China from industrializing to raise themselves out of poverty as America and Europe have done.
Murray disagrees with the common premise that the global elite have used the pandemic to force their unrivaled power upon the world. He contends that:
He states that in order to effectively oppose the reset agenda, it is important to expose members of the Western elites who have been subjugated via "elite capture" to China. He concludes that the Great Reset:
... aims to replace national government with world government...
...the experience of the Corona era is not an opportunity. It is a warning.
Sovereignty and the Nation-State by Roger Kimball
Ronald Reagan memorably stated:
Kimball points out the important difference between national loyalty and nationalism, which has spurned world wars. He also points out the naiveté of favoring transnational rule, which requires that governments cooperate with each other absent direct benefit to themselves. So far, the results of the E.U., U.N., and "world courts" are ominous. As a case in point:
As John Fonte explains in his book Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?, "transnational progressivism" describes the antinationalist desire to transfer power to supranational institutions.
Kimball points out how the Covid-19 crisis was used to attempt to transform national economies to bring about a "Great Reset of capitalism," and that this attack on the nation-state continues on multiple fronts.
He notes that "Aristotle thought democracy the worst form of government, all but inevitably leading to ochlocracy or mob rule, which is no rule." Yet today the term has been usurped. Even totalitarian regimes like to refer to themselves as "democratic republics." Patriots in America today are slandered as a threat to "our democracy" by entrenched Leftists politicians.
An ever-expanding body of rules serves to hamper initiative and stifle originality, as pointed out by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. However, Kimball notes that the real villain is not the state per se but rather the bureaucracy that maintains and manages it. In other words, the "deep state." Kimball writes:
Kimball writes that:
Kimball observes that the rise of "populism" in America revolves around the location of sovereignty. He continues:
Kimball observes that the traditional view of liberty looks to the nation-state as the guarantor of rights. He concludes that:
Resetting the Educational Reset by Angelo M. Codevilla
Codevilla writes that the Great Reset initiative:
... is an attempt to induce, cajole, perhaps force nonstakeholders (i.e., ordinary people), into letting their lives be reordered according to the stakeholders' judgment...
Their authority lies solely in their claim to authority.
He notes that regarding Covid-19:
Regarding Western Civilization, Codevilla makes the interesting observation that:
Any civilization is the totality of the language, habits, and ideas in which people live and move...
And yet all who are part of Western civilization carry with us, among other things, a musical heritage based on mathematics and melody that also sets us apart from other civilizations.
He points out that "over about a half century and average IQ has dropped by some fourteen points." And that:
... by 1900, the progressive movement was already devaluing the inculcation of knowledge as the foundation for moral and practical independence.
... having grown up largely as an arm of the Democratic Party, this wealthy class wields education as a weapon in political and social controversies.
Regarding Critical Race Theory and the growing trend for parents to place children in private schools:
Codevilla makes an important observation regarding political power:
Our time's primordial fact, however, is that, led by the Democratic Party, though the ruling class may be very much in power, it is also in disarray. Its members, having gained prominence as the American Republic's stewards, violated the basic law of regime longevity by failing to restrain their own desires for self-aggrandizement.
As our century dawned, this turned America into an oligarchy. But the ruling class, composed as it is of "intersectional" groups incapable of self-restraint, pushed the oligarchy into a war against the rest of American society. That happened quickly, without warning. The struggle is without prospect of resolution and gives no sign of abating because it is driven by the ruling class's loss of internal coherence.
Big Tech: Sacred Culture or Cyborg Rapture? by James Poulos
Poulos observes that "The age of print was the age of not simply reason but reasonableness," while "the medium of electricity unleashed an Age of Occultism."
He notes how American and British "Five Eyes" intelligence agencies work so closely together that they can be considered a single sovereign entity. But:
He also comments that China has aggressively acquired Five Eyes data sets, with all of the commensurate consequences.
Under the growing Covid-19 disaster, the Great Reset emerged:
Like a deus ex machina, "the virus" became, more than a symbol, a stand-in for everything the technoethical elite feared it could not say about its responsibility for such a swift end to American greatness and world order...
In the new post-Covid end times, dreams would give way to dogma, dynamism to domestication, vitality to sterility.
He continues that:
Poulos concludes that:
This is the purpose of the Great Reset - to rearchitect digital technology and consolidate its control in a manner that eliminates even the possibility of human opposition to the further pursuit of globally institutionalized revolutionary post-humanity...
At the end of the theological road laid out by the would-be priests of our digital form of life, there is no more American civilization, Western civilization, or human civilization.
The War on Capitalism by Conrad Black
Black begins by observing that:
The Great Reset, a Davos expression, is massively ambitious and is largely based on the seizure and hijacking of recognizable capitalism, in fact and in theory...
Davos is for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world...
capitalism was to be overborne by economic redistribution; all concepts of public policy were to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality, or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity under the escutcheon of ecological survival and the reduction of abrasive distinctions between groups of people...
Regarding the overarching agenda of climate change, Black notes that:
The objective evidence is that to the extent that it can be measured at all, the overall temperature of the world has risen by one degree centigrade in the last hundred years and will rise by another centigrade degree this century. This is not in itself harmful, and it is not outside normal historic climate cycles. There has been no rise in the in the world's temperature in this century, and the whole task of gauging the world's temperature including thermometers at various depths of the oceans and all over the surface of the earth is quite imprecise.
Black states categorically that:
While the climate change agenda is used as a tool to facilitate the Great Reset,
Socialism and the Great Reset by Michael Anton
Anton observes that pundits who coalesce around the World Economic Forum:
While the Great Reset has been called a form of socialism, that terminology really doesn't apply to our current situation. He states:
This is why a strict or literal definition of "socialism" - public or government ownership and control of the means of production in order to equalize incomes and wealth across the population - is inapt to our situation. The Great Reset quietly but unmistakably redefines "socialism" to allow and even promote wealth and power concentration in certain hands.
In the decisive sense, then, the West's present economic system - really, its overarching regime - is the opposite of socialistic.
Common manifestations of socialism such as high taxes, the welfare state, and nationalization of health care are what Marx and Engels derided as "bourgeois socialism."
Anton observes that capitalism drives the trend toward globalism and the pressure to globalize markets and labor is inexorable:
He comments that by marginalizing and alienating workers, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Anton notes that true Marxist theory contends that the fundamental problem capitalism addresses is distribution, which central planning can accomplish.
Anton continues, by pointing out what Marxism got wrong:
He also discusses Universal Basic Income (UBI), which essentially makes bottom classes dependent on the ruling elite. UBI gives a stake in the system to those who formerly did not have one.
He observes that:
Notably, the ruling class believe their paradise can be attained via technology, since outright revolution would displace them.
Marxism requires an enemy, which historically was class-based. Anton discusses modern wokeness: how it is designed to demonize the (white) middle class as the enemy. He explains how this drives the need for endless immigration as well as for endless grievance politics.
He writes regarding true socialism:
... oligarchs have no intention of equalizing individual wealth. To the contrary, they are constantly doing everything in their power to take yours and increase theirs. That's what the Great Reset is all about.
To deflect attention from this goal and the methods used to further it, and also to hold their coalition together, the oligarchs promise instead "equity": the equalization of demographic groups. The new term signifies the altered goal and transformation of "socialism."
The Economic Consequences of the Great Reset by David P. Goldman
Goldman states that:
The Great Reset proposes to:
- Make large sections of the U.S. population permanently dependent on government subsidies and education or employment quotas;
- Give central banks virtually unlimited authority to print money;
- Subject private corporations to rigid controls on business operations through ESG standards; and
- Redistribute wealth through punitive taxation of economic success.
Goldman notes how far the Great Reset already has progressed:
Regarding the true cost of the Climate Change agenda, he observes that:
As a utopian experiment, the Climate Change agenda is doomed to failure. In reality, Western nations do not operate in their own bubble. In fact, they are in direct competition with China:
Goldman discusses monetary policy, inflation, and quantitative easing. He states that:
Indeed:
Goldman discusses the role of 5G broadband as a driving component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, yet America's implementation is dwarfed by China's 5G speed.
He observes that China is promoting digital currency that will replace centuries-old methods of financing. As a result:
Goldman concludes that:
The Great Reset, Feminist-Style by Janice Fiamengo
Fiamengo writes that:
The Shape of Things to Come: The Tyranny of Covid-19 by John Tierney
Tiemey observes that if you:
In the 1930s, the British espoused their centrally-planned wartime economy. Yet a downfall of central planning is that planners must make decisions according to their own, non-ideal values.
Tiemey remarks that regarding the Covid-19 crisis:
Indeed:
Tiemey asks:
He concludes that:
You Will Be Made to Laugh: Humor Under the Great Reset by Harry Stein
While discussing the leftist mass media and touching upon the humorous side of our political situation, Stein makes the acute observation that:
Stein discusses the reformed radical David Horowitz, writing:
Green Energy and the Future of Transportation by Salvatore Babones
Babones remarks regarding the Climate Change agenda:
When a single technological approach is imposed by government fiat, catastrophic failure is almost assured...
... diversity in experimentation is the key to discovering the technologies of the future.
Yet under Schwab's model:
Babones discusses conventional mass transit systems that addresses the mobility needs of the past two centuries. He posits that battery electric robotaxis could act as mobile batteries while providing personalized transportation.
Yet there exist technical problems with current electrical grids. When solar and wind devices comprise a threshold fraction of the grid, the grid loses the ability to self-synchronize line frequency, which can cause grid failures and power outages. He writes:
Simply mandating the transition to smart grids won't work, either: the individual components of smart grid technology do exist, but smart grids are designed to work at the local scale, not the continental scale of existing electricity grids...
A successful energy transition requires a new grid architecture, and that can be achieved only through incremental evolution.
Reflecting on the WEF (World Economic Forum) concept of "stakeholder capitalism", Babones concludes by stating that:
According to the WEF, the four "key" stakeholders with a responsibility for looking out for the rest of us are governments, civil society organizations, companies, and the "international community."
It's a comprehensively patronizing approach to global economic and (lately) environmental management in which ordinary people play only a passive role. In that sense, the WEF's version of stakeholder capitalism might more aptly be characterized as profit-driven communism, or even "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Martin Hutchinson
Hutchinson notes that the "1689 Bill of Rights established English legal freedoms of the individual as a bedrock constitutional principle." This freedom was essential for the Industrial Revolution, which occurred In Britain and not in other European nations.
He points that an intense respect for private property was a distinctive feature of this period. Yet under the Great Reset,
Hutchinson points that the world's governments could have simply implemented carbon taxes to control greenhouse emissions, but instead the WEF has declared an unachievable target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. He observes that:
By combating climate change, the Great Reset seeks to make obsolete - not machinery that has become outdated and uneconomic - but industrial processes that are essential to the world economy, notably in the energy sector...
... it is not fighting Luddism, as was done during the Industrial Revolution, but creating it as an instrument of government policy.
Hutchinson emphasizes that:
The Great Reset and "Stakeholderism" by Alberto Mingardi
In 2004, Samuel P. Huntington christened the World Economic Forum participants as:
Mingardi notes that because of stakeholder involvement, the Great Reset blithely promises "capitalism with a human face."
Yet the flawed narrative of stakeholderism attempts to reconcile conflicting interests that are not necessarily in alignment with traditional capitalist interests. Mingardi notes:
History under the Great Reset by Jeremy Black
Black writes that the Great Reset is:
The destruction of alternative values, of the sense of continuity, an appreciation of complexities, and of anything short of a self-righteous presentist internationalism...
...such a "reset" is part of a total assault on the past, one that is explicitly designed to lead the present and determine the future.
At this point in time, the Left has sadly succeeded with its "long march through the institutions."
Black notes that the religion of Critical Race Theory is thinly veiled Cultural Marxism. He discusses "decolonization," which has become "a catch-all that can be employed to castigate whatever is disliked and then to demand support for a purge." For example, he writes that:
... the tribal conflicts within Africa that were the major sources of the Atlantic slave trade, and what also can be seen as tribal conflicts in Europe...
Blaming violence on Western powers or "capitalism" is a fantasy distraction from the extent to which tribalism is a key element, as it was in the long-standing conflicts that produced the slaves sold to nonAfrican traders, and some of which continue to produce slaves held in Africa.
He continues:
Regarding White privilege, he observes that:
He concludes that:
Dueling Faiths: Science and Religion under the Great Reset by Richard Fernandez
Fernandez writes:
The Great Reset is like an Anonymized Religious Movement...
Since the only way to solve the pandemic problem is to solve everything, the Great Reset becomes a blank check to do everything deemed good while avoiding evil. The obvious problem is identifying what is good and evil.
He continues:
the reality is that twenty-first-century problems are probabilistic and some may actually exceed human comprehension...
Richard Feynman famously warned against looking for human categories of intelligibility in the physical sciences. Regarding quantum physics, he said: "It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as she is - absurd."
The late physicist Freeman Dyson observed that humanity is merely discovering the rules, not creating them. He noted that the universe shows evidence of mind on three levels: physical processes, direct experience by human consciousness, and the universe as a whole.
Fernandez notes that:
Thus he warns that we should learn as we go along and evaluate each next possible step based on most recent experience. He offers an example of shortsighted and misguided effort:
Regarding religion, observes that:
He notes that of new ideologies, the Great Reset is but one, invading the realm of religion. Another such new religion is the church of woke, which:
Fernandez cautions that:
"What an Artist Dies in Me!" by Michael Walsh
Walsh writes that:
He concludes that:
The Great Reset's gambit is to mask and cloak itself, like an obedient handmaiden, in good intentions while stealing you blind and enslaving you...
There is no Reset, neither by gods nor bonzes, but there is always rebirth.
Conclusion
The above reviews and excerpts are brief and perhaps somewhat cryptic, and as such do not do justice to the full depth of material contained in Against the Great Reset. The essays included in the book are indeed highly recommended reading.