1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Plans Of A Technocratic Elite: 'The Great Reset' Is Not A Conspiracy Theory

https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-vi-plans-technocratic-elite

In previous installments, I introduced the Great Reset idea and
treated it in terms of its economic and ideological components. In
this installment, I will discuss what the Great Reset entails in terms
of governance and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR), closing
with remarks about the overall Great Reset project and its
implications.

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the
World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR follows the first, second, and
third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital,
respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab
sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing
and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence;
machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and
robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and
biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately
challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and
the world, including “what it means to be human.”

The specific applications that make up the 4-R are too numerous and
sundry to treat in full, but they include a ubiquitous internet, the
internet of things, the internet of bodies, autonomous vehicles, smart
cities, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials
science, energy storage, and more.

While Schwab and the WEF promote a particular vision for the 4-IR, the
developments he announces are not his brainchildren, and there is
nothing original about his formulations. Transhumanists and
Singularitarians (or prophets of the technological singularity), such
as Ray Kurzweil and many others, forecasted these and more
revolutionary developments, .long before Schwab heralded them. The
significance of Schwab and the WEF’s take on the new technological
revolution is the attempt to harness it to a particular end,
presumably “a fairer, greener future.”

But if existing 4-IR developments are any indication of the future,
then Schwab’s enthusiasm is misplaced, and the 4-IR is misrepresented.
These developments already include internet algorithms that feed users
prescribed news and advertisements and downrank or exclude banned
content; algorithms that censor social media content and consign
“dangerous” individuals and organizations to digital gulags; apps that
track and trace covid suspects and report violators to the police;
robot police with QR code scanners to identify and round up
dissenters; and smart cities where everyone is a digital entity to be
monitored, surveilled, and recorded, while data on their every move is
collected, collated, stored, and attached to a digital identity and
social credit score.

That is, 4-IR technologies subject human beings to a technological
management that makes the earlier surveillance by the National
Security Agency look like child’s play. Schwab lauds future
developments that will connect brains directly to the cloud, enabling
the “data mining” of thought and memory, a technological mastery over
experience that threatens individual autonomy and undermines any
semblance of free will. The 4-IR accelerates the merging of humans and
machines, resulting in a world in which all information, including
genetic information, is shared and every action, thought, and
unconscious motivation is known, predicted, and possibly even
precluded. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind. Yet Schwab
touts brain-cloud interfaces as enhancements, as vast improvements
over standard human intelligence, thus lending them an appeal not at
all imaginable for soma.

Many positive developments may come from the 4-IR, but unless it is
taken out of the hands of the corporate-socialist technocrats, it will
constitute a virtual prison.

Under the Great Reset governance model, states and favored
corporations form “public-private partnerships” in control of
governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely
unaccountable to the constituents of national governments.

The cozy relationship between multinational corporations and
governments has even aroused the scorn of a few left-leaning critics.
They note that the governance model of the WEF represents at least the
partial privatization of the UN’s Agenda 2030, with the WEF bringing
corporate partners, money, and supposed expertise on the 4-IR to the
table. And the WEF’s governance model extends well beyond the UN,
affecting the constitution and behavior of governments worldwide. This
usurpation has led political scientist Ivan Wecke to call the WEF’s
governmental redesign of the world system “a corporate takeover of
global governance.”

This is true, but the obverse is also the case. The WEF model also
represents the governmentalization of private industry. Under Schwab’s
“stakeholder capitalism” and the multistakeholder governance model,
governance is not only increasingly privatized, but also and more
importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions to
governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby
extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous
corporate assets. These include funding directed at “sustainable
development” to the exclusion of the noncompliant, as well as the use
of Big Data, artificial intelligence, and 5G to monitor and control
citizens. In the case of the covid vaccine regime, the state grants
Big Pharma monopoly protection and indemnity from liability in
exchange for a vehicle by which to expand its powers of coercion. As
such, corporate stakeholders become what I have called
“governmentalities”—otherwise “private” organizations wielded as state
apparatuses, with no obligation to answer to pesky constituents. Since
these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes
global, whether or not a “one-world government” is ever formalized.

In Google Archipelago, I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the
political ideology and modus operandi of what I call Big Digital, and
that Big Digital is the leading edge of an emerging world system. Big
Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of
an emerging corporate socialism. The Great Reset is the name that has
since been given to the project of establishing this world system.

Just as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid crisis has
accelerated the development of the Great Reset’s corporate-socialist
statism. Developments advancing the Great Reset agenda include the
Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money, the subsequent
inflation, the increasing taxation on everything imaginable, the
increased dependence on the state, the supply chain crisis, the
restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect
of personal carbon allowances. Altogether, these and other such
policies constitute a coordinated attack on the majority. Ironically,
they also represent the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset—if we
properly understand fairness to mean leveling the economic status of
the "average American" with those in less “privileged” regions. And
this is one of the functions of woke ideology - to make the majority
in developed countries feel unworthy of their “privileged” lifestyles
and consumption patterns, which the elite are in the process of
resetting to a reduced and static new normal.

Over the past twenty-one months, the response to the covid-19 scourge
has consolidated the monopolistic corporations’ grip on the economy on
top, while advancing “actually-existing socialism” below. In
partnership with Big Tech, Big Pharma, the legacy media, national and
international health agencies, and compliant populations, hitherto
“democratic” Western states are increasingly being transformed into
totalitarian regimes modeled after China, seemingly overnight. I need
not provide a litany of the tyranny and abuses. You can read about
them on alternative news sites—until you can no longer read about them
even there.

The Great Reset, then, is not merely a conspiracy theory; it is an
open, avowed, and planned project, and it is well underway. But
because capitalism with Chinese characteristics, or
corporate-socialist statism, lacks free markets and depends on the
absence of free will and individual liberty, it is, ironically,
“unsustainable,” and doomed to fail. The question is just how much
suffering and distortion will be endured until it does.


    1. Michael Rectenwald, “What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced
Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism,” Mises Wire, December 11, 2020,
https://mises.org/wire/what-great-reset-part-i-reduced-expectations-and-bio-techno-feudalism.
    2. Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate
Socialism,” Mises Wire, December 31, 2020,
https://mises.org/library/great-reset-part-ii-corporate-socialism;
Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part III: “Capitalism with Chinese
Characteristics,” Mises Wire, December 28, 2020,
https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-iii-capitalism-chinese-characteristics;
Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part IV: ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ vs.
‘Neoliberalism,’” Mises Wire, January 26, 2021,
https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-iv-stakeholder-capitalism-vs-neoliberalism.
    3. Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part V: Woke Ideology.”
Mises Wire, February 23, 2021,
https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-v-woke-ideology.
    4. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown
Business, 2016), pp. 6–8, Kindle.
    5. Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, vii.
    6. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend
Biology (London: Duckworth, 2006).
    7. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset
(Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), p. 57, Kindle.
    8. Ivan Wecke, “Conspiracy Theories aside, There Is Something
Fishy about the Great Reset,” openDemocracy, August 16, 2021,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theories-aside-there-something-fishy-about-great-reset/.
    9. Michael Rectenwald, “The Google Election,” Mises Wire, November
10, 2020, https://mises.org/wire/google-election.
    10. Francesco Fuso Nerini, Tina Fawcett, Yael Parag, and Paul
Ekins, “Personal Carbon Allowances Revisited,” Nature Sustainability
(2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00756-w.
    11. Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part V: Woke Ideology.”
Mises Wire, February 23, 2021,
https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-v-woke-ideology.
    12. Lori R. Price contributed the second half of this statement in
conversation.
    13. Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism
with Chinese Characteristics,” Mises Wire, December 28, 2020,
https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-part-iii-capitalism-chinese-characteristics.