Pandemic-leveraging ‘Great Reset’ Is Hardly a Myth

COMMENTARY

PARIS — Mainstream media outlets have spilled copious amounts of ink dismissing the “Great Reset” — the notion that the global COVID-19 pandemic is being exploited by global decisionmakers to usher in a self-serving agenda — as little more than a figment of active imaginations. The New York Times, BBC, Canada’s CBC, France’s Le Monde and other prestigious media outlets have called it a baseless conspiracy theory.

In the strictest sense, they’re not wrong, but they may be relying a bit too much on semantics in their assessment. The dictionary definition of “conspiracy” is a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act. The Great Reset is anything but secret.

The Davos World Economic Forum website openly lays claim to the notion on a page labeled “The Great Reset”:

“There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

Just because it’s not a secret conspiratorial plot doesn’t mean it’s a myth. The Great Reset is indeed real. You only have to ask those involved in promoting it and they’ll tell you all about it.

Just because far-right reactionaries and naive social media users who believe everything they read on the internet are paying attention to the Great Reset doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who are. The media can’t dismiss these people as crazy or delusional without also slapping the same labels on prominent world leaders.

“This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a recent United Nations meeting. “This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”

At a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum in June, Prince Charles said: “We have a unique but rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path.”

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in August: “In all crises, an old world disappears, a new one appears. This crisis can be an opportunity.”

The idea that a crisis can serve as an accelerator isn’t new or alarming. What is, however, is that those who view the pandemic as one such opportunity seem to share a particular worldview. The same themes keep popping up: climate change, sustainable development, increased digitization and inequality. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which predates the pandemic, also focuses on these themes.

The pandemic is a rare opportunity for the global deciders to move the ball farther down the field while the opposition is shackled by government-imposed rules under the pretext of the crisis. But who are these global deciders?

Mostly, they’re the people who run global multinational enterprises. The World Economic Forum’s website has a long list of corporate “partners” that have provided big-money donations. These are companies that can benefit from telework, digitization and increased globalization, facilitating their search for the cheapest labor and lowest possible taxes.

These certainly aren’t the types of businesses being forced to shut down during the pandemic. The small, independent businesses are the ones that are suffering. They’re merely trying to survive while playing by the rules. You won’t find them forking over massive donations to global governance entities and hobnobbing with heads of state at Davos in order to advance a self-serving agenda.

The perversion of capitalism on a global scale and its transformation into a game reserved only for the select few who can afford the entry fee that provides exclusive access to government officials is institutionalized in entities like the World Economic Forum. The fact that all of the players have the language of “Global Reset” on the tips of their tongues while the rest of us are focused on basic survival and hoping for little more than a return to pre-pandemic normalcy is difficult to ignore.

Just because they haven’t all signed off on a specific list of actionable agenda items doesn’t mean that they aren’t signing from the same hymn book — or that those who draw attention to the existence of common interests are crazy. It’s hard to deny the existence of a Great Reset when they keep talking about it.

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