The truth about the “Great Reset”

An honest review of a very, very stupid book.

Once a year, the uppermost echelons of the global elite fly their private jets to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the exclusive conference where the ultra-wealthy discuss the day’s big issues. Who put these people in charge? What qualifies them to lead? Why should the fate of humanity be entrusted to a bunch of unelected CEOs? Such questions will wisely be left unexamined at Davos, where your future is decided for you, without you, and your opinion isn’t requested.

Wikipedia describes the WEF as a “non-governmental and lobbying organisation”. Its members are mostly gigantic corporations, and its public output renders conspiracy theorists obsolete. In one widely-shared clip, WEF chairman Klaus Schwab brags on stage in his thick German accent of using his WEF Young Global Leaders to “penetrate the cabinets” of elected governments. “More than half” of Justin Trudeau’s inner circle, Schwab tells the crowd, are WEF stooges - a stretch if ever there was one of the meaning of “non-governmental”. If this is a conspiracy it’s an inept one, since conspiracy implies you’re trying to keep it secret.

There are, to be fair, some genuinely nutty ideas out there about Schwab and the WEF, as can be seen every time they trend on Twitter. Schwab himself stands accused by Internet randos of having family ties to both the Nazi party and the Rothschilds - spot the contradiction? - but neither claim is credible.

Other accusations place Schwab and the WEF at the centre of the “Great Reset”, a supposed plot to achieve world domination by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic. The precise details depend on whom you ask, but most theorists will tell you that it’s not even a conspiracy: Schwab had the audacity to lay out his plans in a book! The man idolises Lenin, for God’s sake! And I mean c’mon, just take one look at the guy:

One of these men looks like a parody of a Bond villain, and the other is Dr. Evil

It’s true: Schwab really does keep a bust of Lenin in his office. And he really did write a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset, published in mid-2020 while the virus was raging. “The Great Reset” was also the name the WEF gave to its conference that year, held online for obvious reasons.

Against that backdrop, The Great Reset is one disappointing read. When a German-speaking egghead convenes a cabal of billionaires to plot a global “reset” at the height of a once-in-a-century pandemic, you’d expect his accompanying manifesto to be an epoch-defining masterwork of evil. Or at least, you’d expect it to contain a faint trace of intelligent thought anywhere in its 250 pages - but COVID-19: The Great Reset isn’t an evil masterplan, it’s an idiotic pile of nothing, and Schwab’s no Bond villain, he’s a Monty Python punchline.

The basic premise of The Great Reset is unoriginal: never let a crisis go to waste. COVID-19, Schwab writes, is a “window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world” - sorely needed, as it’s clearer than ever that our economic and political structures aren’t working for the great majority of people. Past pandemics have been catalysts for change, so why not this time? Might COVID-19 bring about a world that’s, in Schwab’s words, “more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature”?

He might have a point. The basic assumptions of society have been reset before - just ask Louis XVI - and another reset feels overdue, but there are many things wrong with The Great Reset, firstly that if you gathered in one room the worst possible people to be lecturing anyone else about inclusion, equity and respect for nature, you would be at the World Economic Forum. Besides, vague dreams of a better world are worthless without a coherent plan for what it looks like in practice, and The Great Reset is a vacuous mish-mash of buzzwords and platitudes that’s as coherent as a pattern pissed in snow.

What’s Schwab trying to achieve? The man wastes words like an earthquake at a Scrabble tournament, puffing his prose with such endless verbiage that the most basic points drag on for chapters - like Part 1.1.1, “Interdependence”, in which Schwab makes the mundane observation that our modern world is highly interdependent, then does little more than define that word recursively (“the dynamic of reciprocal dependence among the elements that compose a system”) then prattle on for three pages listing its synonyms. The world isn’t just “interdependent”, it’s also “interconnected”, in fact “hyperconnected - a variant of interdependence on steroids!” and also full of “systemic connectivity” (a doublet used three times in two paragraphs) and even “concatenated”, that is, “linked together”! Having exhausted his thesaurus Schwab then blathers a little about what interdependence is not (“isolating and containment cannot rhyme with interdependence”) and caps it off with a meaningless diagram. Subsequent sections do a similar number on “velocity” and “complexity”, which is to say you’d lose no information if you only kept the titles.

p25. Someone at the WEF was probably paid thousands of Euros to create this.

Schwab’s tactics are familiar to anyone who’s ever half-assed a school assignment: when you have nothing to say, stretch things out with redundancies like “an accident or an aberration might occur and propagate” (p33) or jumbled clichés like “the first domino or the last straw that marked a momentous tipping point” (p243), replace simple words like “speed” with pointless obscurities like “celerity” (p127, p174, p175), add gratuitous Latin (which, hilariously, he gets wrong: “status quo ex ante”, p113) and hope the reader mistakes verbosity for substance.

On page 199 we get another meaningless diagram, this time to illustrate the “potential implications of spending more time at home”:

As you can see, all these “implications” are embarrassingly obvious. But even if they weren’t, nothing is gained by arranging them in graphical form, except to give simple-minded readers the false impression that they’re reading something smart.

Trying to pick the most poorly-written sentence in The Great Reset would be like trying to pick the most overpaid mediocrity at a Davos afterparty, but here are some contenders:

[R]esilience will need to be better measured and monitored to gauge the true health of an economy, including the determinants of productivity, such as institutions, infrastructure, human capital and innovation ecosystems, which are critical for the overall strength of a system. (p59)

[The pandemic] does entail worrisome perspectives for all the reasons already mentioned; in today’s interdependent world, risks conflate with each other, amplifying their reciprocal effects and magnifying their consequences. (p247)

Let us consider, in an arbitrary and non-exclusive fashion, some of these potential changes whose likelihood of occurrence, it seems to us, even if not very high, is nonetheless greater than commonly assumed. (p233)

True to the notions of interconnectedness and complexity, outbursts of social unrest are quintessential non-linear events that can be triggered by a broad variety of political, economic, societal, technological and environmental factors. (p87)

This is profoundly pointless nonsense, but on the rare occasions when Schwab says something that means anything, you’ll wish he hadn’t tried. On page 224, we learn that “an epidemic of mental health has engulfed the world.” Great news! Let’s hope it keeps spreading - but perhaps Schwab meant to say we’re engulfed by an epidemic of mental illness?

On page 70 Schwab writes that “it is hard to imagine how inflation could pick up anytime soon.” Schwab wrote those words at a time when governments were shutting down supply chains while printing trillions to pay people to not work, so it’s hard to imagine how he could be less imaginative. I’m sure he now blames the war in Ukraine - that ever-convenient distraction - for the inflation he failed to predict, but I haven’t forgotten that inflation in both the US and UK had already quadrupled in the 12 months before Putin invaded.

Page 78 makes a prediction so preposterous that I snorted coffee out of my nose when I read it, and I was drinking tea: “the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.” I’m not sure of Schwab’s reasoning, and neither is he, since he doesn’t make it a page before contradicting himself: “COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing conditions of inequality … The pandemic is in reality a “great unequalizer” that has compounded disparities in income, wealth and opportunity.”

The Great Reset is full of this kind of equivocation. Schwab can never seem to decide what point he’s trying to make. Was lockdown worth it? What lessons can we learn for the next pandemic? Should we accept increased government surveillance? Will China replace the U.S. as the world’s dominant superpower? How many tenuous ways can we relate everything back to climate change? Schwab doesn’t know: he just dances around both sides of the debate, stating the obvious, shoe-horning in quotes from more serious thinkers with no indication that he understands what he’s writing.

I mean, just look at this flaming bollock of stupid:

“We think that observation and measurement define an “objective” opinion, but the micro-world of atoms and particles (like the macro-world of geopolitics) is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics in which two different observers are entitled to their own opinions (this is called a “superposition”: “particles can be in several places or states at once”). In the world of international affairs, if two different observers are entitled to their own opinions, that makes them subjective, but no less real and no less valid. If an observer can only make sense of the “reality” through different idiosyncratic lenses, this forces us to rethink our notion of objectivity. It is evident that the representation of reality depends on the position of the observer. In that sense, a “Chinese” view and a “US” view can co-exist, together with multiple other views along that continuum – all of them real!” (p120-121.)

Pass the aspirin. This word salad means nothing; it’s just an unintelligent man’s idea of what smart thoughts sound like. In that respect The Great Reset is unremarkable; hundreds of half-baked pseudo-intellectual nothingburgers like this are shat out onto the Kindle Store every day.

What makes Schwab’s babble noteworthy is that people apparently take it seriously. Davos is Burning Man for billionaires, and it’s hard to name a world leader who hasn’t shaken Schwab’s hand. We’re ruled by people who find meaning in Schwab’s gibberish, and that’s much scarier than a respiratory virus.

Two years since Schwab wrote his screed, it’s safe to say that if there was ever an opportunity for the pandemic to change anything for the better, it’s been missed comprehensively. To protect us from a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, lockdown made everyone poorer, sicker, unhappier and lonelier - everyone, that is, except the world’s most rich and powerful. Everyone, in other words, who doesn’t get invited to Davos. The elite had a great pandemic, and they’ll have a great time with the next crisis, which is probably why Schwab is so obsessed with climate change: large-scale resource distribution problems are the perfect excuse for the further centralisation of power.

The Great Reset is full of lamentations about the sorry state of our world - inequality, market failure, climate destruction - and it sounds agreeable until you remember who’s writing it. “We value least economically the individuals society needs the most” (p81), writes a man whose WEF salary is a reported 1,000,000 Swiss Francs (~1,000,000 USD) a year. “Inclusive” and “inclusivity” appear 19 times in the book from an organisation that costs up to 600,000 CHF to join. “Inequality”, “inequalities” and “unequal” appear 32 times; WEF members collectively control more wealth than the rest of humanity combined. Letting these people “reset” the world economy would be like letting Al Capone rewrite the tax code.

When you’re done here, make sure to check out the “Virginity Lounge @ Davos” sponsored by Charlie Sheen.

Schwab’s solution to everything is so-called “stakeholder capitalism” - an ESG-compliant future where corporations make decisions for the benefit of everyone, not just for their profit-hungry shareholders. It’s a beguiling idea that ignores how we already have a system for protecting society’s stakeholders from the predatory instincts of the profit motive, and it’s called government. Herr Schwab would apparently prefer that we fix capitalism by ceding even more decision-making power to the same neoliberal tyrants that got us into this mess in the first place. No wonder they fund him so handsomely.

Anyway, it’s not clear what any of this has to do with a virus. Schwab wants to relate everything back to his hobby horses (ESG, stakeholder capitalism, climate change) and the need for better “global governance” because the globalised outfits who’d do that governing are the same ones who pay his salary. Unfortunately for him the pandemic didn’t go as hoped: national or sub-national governments led their own COVID responses while globalists watched from the sidelines. In that context the Great Reset can be seen mostly as a pathetic, failed attempt to remain relevant during a crisis that exposed Schwab et al. for the empty suits they are.

The only thing I learned from The Great Reset is that the conspiracy theorists are wrong. Schwab’s a terrible writer and a worse thinker, but he’s not some kind of Illuminati Lizardmason hellbent on destruction. Au contraire, he’s an ordinary man: not particularly smart or talented, not the least bit insightful, and not remotely qualified to lead humanity through the colossal challenges we face - but that’s not going to stop him from trying. In that respect maybe he’s the perfect figurehead for the Davos class.

As badly as my own government bungled COVID, there’s no doubt it would have been worse under WEF rule. Team Schwab would happily have made us slaves to China-led “zero COVID” insanity, and we’d still be sealed in our homes today. We do need a great reset, but it’s one where Schwab and his enablers are removed as far as possible from the levers of power.