There’s a plan afoot – and not everyone will like it. What are the implications of a new concept of global governance?
Human Rights and Human Wrongs
Relatively few have heard of ‘The Great Reset’, but already it has the backing of the Davos elite. Its the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) plan to reshape the post- Covid world. And it’s top of the agenda at the next Davos conference. Whether or not we like its ideas, they are presented as if they have already been decided on our behalf. On the Great Reset website, we are confronted with visions of apocalypse. Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, shares his views:
‘Covid-19 has shown us that our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century. It has laid bare the fundamental lack of social cohesion, fairness, inclusion and equality. Now is the historical moment, the time, not only to fight the virus but to shape the system for the post-corona era.’
This plan follows hard on the heels of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which purported to make migration a human right and therefore attracting human rights protections under international law. Officially non-binding, it “puts migration firmly on the global agenda. It will be a point of reference for years to come and induce real change on the ground…” according to Jürg Lauber, the Swiss representative to the UN, who led the work on the agreement together with the representative of Mexico. The Global Compact represents a certain appetite for supranational governance. Biblically we seem to see the establishment of global governance structures under the Antichrist ……
Reverting to ‘The Great Reset’, among those involved are Prince Charles, the secretary general of the United Nations, the managing director of the IMF, the CEOs of Mastercard, BP, the president of Microsoft, an official from the People’s Bank of China, and other global players. Recent UK attendees have been a politically diverse group. Tony Blair, Sir David Attenborough and Prince William, for example. Greenpeace, the WWF and trade unions regularly rub shoulders with bankers, big oil, and officials from regimes with highly questionable human rights track-records.
What’s not to like?
The Great Reset calls on a huge global network – thousands of global leaders from business, politics and civil society. Each share variants of the Davos philosophy, and are supported by a vast income from corporate membership fees. Davos has a youth wing – the Global Shapers Community. 9,655 ‘shapers’ work from 428 ‘hubs’ in 148 different countries.
So what’s not to like? The Great Reset wants to fight against nasty things like racism, nationalism and climate change. And they want more ‘good’ things like equality, inclusion and help for the poor. They like Big Tech, too. But it may not be quite as simple as this. We are faced with a vast and unaccountable combination of big business and big government. These elites have a homogenous worldview and tend to get their own way. Remember Brexit? This same group spent the past four years trying to overturn democracy in response to the referendum result. With that thought in mind, their ideas must be worthy of proper scrutiny.
Merger mania and Wokeness
Those behind The Great Reset have decided that ‘capitalism and socialism will need to merge’. It’s hard to know precisely what they mean, but we may assume it’s the worst of both worlds – think of China, not Sweden. This is also where we encounter their doublespeak. They acknowledge that privatisation has delivered poor public services. But the WEF is an organisation full of corporations growing fat on public-sector contracts. So their answer is ….. more of the same, including dubious public-private financing. The Great Reset has thought of an imaginitive way of compensating us for poor public services: Universal Basic Income. We will pay for this by taxing wealth and passive income. But before we celebrate, that means the ‘middle class’ in the West will eventually be crushed by a double whammy of tax and inflation.
The Great Reset is ‘woke’, too. Its advocates think it is ‘important to acknowledge “white privilege”, often distilled down to white males! The Great Reset has embraced Black Lives Matter without qualification. Ironically at most academic levels in the UK, white working-class boys have fallen behind black and Asian boys, and girls from all ethnic groups. Evidence suggests they are failing equally in life outcomes, too. But the global elites who run Davos think that somehow they are privileged.
Permanent Covid Crisis?
The Great Reset envisages the Covid crisis as permanent. The breathless updates on its website present a fire-and-brimstone vision of the pandemic. But it is just as true to say that the panicked and irrational responses to Covid have caused the current crisis. And even though the UK, for instance, experienced fewer excess deaths in July 2020 than in July 2019, the crisis is never allowed to end. It is not hard to see the threat to civil liberties that perma-hysteria on Covid might lead to. The WEF has even floated the idea of ‘Health Passports’.
But if the Covid situation does burn itself out, then The Great Reset has the climate crisis to fall back on. That won’t do much good for any jobs we may have left! Essentially, the Great Reset wants action in every part of our lives. Its ‘Transformation Map’ covers everything from the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ from information technology to sustainable business, justice, gender, blockchain, human rights, biodiversity and taxation. Everything in the Great Reset; nothing outside The Great Reset, it seems!
What price Democracy?
It’s not just the ideology that’s problematic — there are moral and technical issues, too. First, the failed ‘systems’ of which they speak are the very ‘systems’ they own! Davos has played host to the world’s governments since 1971. So much that has gone wrong was on ‘their watch’. Of course, it hasn’t all been bad news. Since 1990, the number of people in poverty around the world, mostly in China and India, has fallen from 1.9 billion to around 0.7 billion. But this shift of wealth from West to East has played a large role in hollowing out the middle class in the USA and in Europe. This, along with mass migration and the erosion of traditional values, has led to widespread disaffection. Hence Trump, Brexit, populism and so on.
The Great Reset is a good example of not letting a crisis go to waste. But will those on the receiving end of these proposed transformations in every area of life get a say? That is unlikely. The Great Reset doesn’t do democracy. In fact, you are hard put to find the word democracy anywhere on the website. Instead we are told, chillingly, that Covid is ‘changing the traditional context for decision-making’. Respect for democracy is a good proxy for the kind of people you are dealing with. People who don’t like democracy want power – without accountability.
Real leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi, lived the changes they believed in. The hallmark of the Davos elite appears to be ‘do as I say, not as I do’. That way their leaders won’t worry too much about equality or tax on their family homes as they blow millions on hospitality in the exclusive Davos resort!
Finally, the language of The Great Reset conforms to type. It is opaque, Blairite, and shape-shifting. There are ‘historic crossroads’, ‘purpose-driven communities’, ‘collaborative solutions’, ‘key stakeholders’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘solidarity’. These words can have any meaning their users want, which can be changed as they so please.
The WEF clearly wants to change the world without asking the electrorate. It wants to do so on the back of Covid, which has been tragically mismanaged. And it has adopted all the thought-crushing, woke ideas of today as handy off-the-shelf ‘weapons’ with which to fight off objections. But what it fails to understand is that Brexit and populist reactions against the globalist agenda happened for a reason. Hundreds of millions of people had their lives damaged. They were unhappy with the way the world was being run. Even Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson boycotted Davos last December in recognition of this.
The Great Reset is a sobering reminder that, even in spite of the ballot-box revolts, we are probably going to get a lot more of the Davos agenda. From a specifically Christian viewpoint, it perhaps goes without saying that the upshot of the Covid situation is prefigured. We have only to think of the mark of the beast system, global government and the antichrist. The ability to question and complain is today being eroded. Even to question to Covid narrative is leading to potential legal sanctions and to being considered a heretic! “Covidism” is a new social reality and a fresh fault-line in the public space: https://mercatornet.com/covidism-as-an-ideology/65253/
This article is based on original material by Spiked Magazine (hence the links). We have sought to incorporate some biblical context into this polemic.
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