Your dumb "Great Reset" conspiracies are self-defeating distractions
Your dumb "Great Reset" conspiracies are self-defeating distractions
So you think the wealthy elites have too much money and power? Great. Me too. Stop attacking them with bogus lies if you actually want anything to change.
As you may have heard, the World Economic Forum (WEF) met in Davos this past week. The WEF brings together representatives from over 130 countries, including fifty-two heads of state, as well as leaders from many of the world’s largest corporations. For a hefty fee, those in attendance can have high-minded discussions about influencing global politics and the future direction of the world. The whole spectacle is a rather absurd display of obscene wealth. Many of the WEF’s chosen speakers use the opportunity to offer platitudes about climate change, equity and ending world hunger. They may even put forth unrealistic agendas purportedly to achieve those goals and use flashy titles such as the “Great Reset,” which sounds like the title of a sci-fi thriller where five minutes into the movie things go very, very wrong. The CEO of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, presented the Great Reset as a mission statement for the future that could emerge after the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic changed our world as we knew it for good. The initial outline for Schwab’s “Great Reset” can be read here. His argument lists the changes he thinks will lead to a better world for all by making improvements in the way countries handle issues like equity, climate change and social welfare programs.
But there’s no single unifying message coming out of the WEF
Everyone who attends the World Economic Forum has an agenda. They’re there to lobby other influential people on behalf of whatever country, corporation or cause the attendees represent. They allow authoritarian rulers like Xi and Putin to speak at the event. The WEF also allows dissidents of authoritarian regimes to speak as well.
They also allow some pretty cringeworthy and unhelpful statements, but that’s the thing about this get together in Davos. There’s no single unifying theme or idea. It’s a place for competing ideas to compete. It’s ostentatious and frequently absurd, and it always has been. Those who pay for the privilege can say whatever they want once they're there. It doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to them. Klaus Schwab can promote a “Great Reset,” but does he even mean it? Even if he did, what power does he have to enforce any of his ideas?
As Naomi Klein wrote for The Intercept back in 2020:
The Great Reset is merely the latest edition of this gilded tradition, barely distinguishable from earlier Davos Big Ideas, from “Shaping the Post-Crisis World” (2009) to “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild” (2010) to “The Great Transformation” (2012) and, who can forget, “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” (2018). If Davos wasn’t “seeking a better form of capitalism” to solve the spiraling crises Davos itself systematically deepened, it wouldn’t be Davos.
And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.
Confused? That’s not on you. Less a conspiracy theory than a conspiracy smoothie, the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism. I’ve been doing my best to ignore it for months, even when various Reset “researchers” have insisted that all of this is an example of the shock doctrine, a term I coined a decade and a half ago to describe the many ways that elites try to harness deep disasters to push through policies that further enrich the already wealthy and restrict democratic liberties.
Two years later, not much about the (primarily) right-wing conspiracies around the “Great Reset” has changed. The conspiracy has grown deeper and more complex as these things do, and it seems a rather pointless exercise to spend an entire article debunking the various false claims floating around the internet. This often has the opposite of the intended effect on the people who have bought into the conspiracies already.
What strikes me as the dumbest part of all the conspiracy theories that have emerged in response to the WEF is that they are the most effective way of ensuring the wealth inequality of the elites who are gathered there this week persists indefinitely. Why? Because the criticism which often gets heard of the Davos crowd is that which is the loudest. By making unhinged conspiracy theories the primary criticism of the WEF, it makes it easier for the elites, the media and casual observers to dismiss all criticism of the participants in Davos as simply the product of crazy people everyone should ignore.
Why aren’t we talking about their obscene wealth instead?
Income inequality remains a real and growing problem not just in the United States but around the world, and rather than leading to a “Great Reset”, the COVID-19 pandemic only ended up increasing the divide between the haves and the have nots.
As Judd Legum writes for his newsletter, Popular Information:
A new report on global wealth inequality by Oxfam, an international non-profit, reveals how lucrative the last two years have been for people who didn't need any more money. The report, Survival of the Richest, finds that over the last two years, "the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth – nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population." Since 2020, billionaire wealth has increased by $2.7 billion every day. This massive increase comes after decades of rapidly accumulating wealth for billionaires.
Today, just 81 billionaires "hold more wealth than 50% of the world combined." And while the elite enjoyed an unprecedented windfall, those with the fewest resources saw their material conditions stall or worsen. Oxfam estimates that "at least 1.7 billion workers worldwide will have seen inflation outpace their wages in 2022."
It’s thoroughly shameful that the richest among us not only don’t seem to care, but they’re actively fighting against reforms that would change the rampant inequality we see in the world today. But this is not the reality they’re confronted with when these elites gather together in Davos after forking out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege. They’re not confronted with the faces of those suffering from extreme poverty in Yemen, Haiti or the African Congo. There are not angry pickets of single mothers who have to work two jobs to make ends meet in America’s cities. They’re not forced to explain the world’s reliance on Chinese supply chains while the Chinese Communist Party commits a genocide against the Uighur Muslims in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Instead, they’re badgered in the street by right-wing media performers with lies about the COVID-19 vaccine like this man working for the notorious junk news outfit Rebel News.
Even as someone who follows these groups daily, I’d never heard of Australian-based Avi Yemeni, but this past week, he was the main character for the very online right-wing media space. He may prove a fixture for them in the future, or he may be as forgettable as a hundred other guys who went viral and quickly faded into obscurity. The individual isn’t the issue here. It’s the performance that sucks all the air out of the room.
Lost in the midst of all this is a discussion about a lack of opportunities for the less fortunate in this world we should be having instead. Lies about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines make for great viral content, but it’s not based in real science, data or any real quantifiable fact-based metrics. Does this mean the CEOs of Pfizer and AstraZeneca should avoid all scrutiny and can do no wrong? Absolutely not. Quite the opposite, in fact. After all, both companies have obtained record profits in large part thanks to the distribution of their highly effective COVID-19 vaccines which easily saved tens of millions of lives globally. Should all of that extra revenue have gone straight into their pockets? Probably not, but those types of questions aren’t the ones that went extremely viral on social media this past week. We see lies which can easily be mocked and dismissed by those who are hoarding more and more of the world’s wealth.
You either want things to get better or you don’t
The influencers driving the “Great Reset” conspiracy discussion are not trying to make the world a better place. They're doing a job and after clout with an extremely online ecosystem. The messaging is predetermined. Facts are usually irrelevant, and thus, their arguments are easily dismissed and even ridiculed to the delight of those they're supposedly opposing with these types of social media stunts. It’s such an emphatic self-own that one might even ask if the conversation is shifted to the unhinged extreme intentionally. Doesn’t the formerly richest man in the world’s obsession with the WEF world domination conspiracies ring a little hollow?
In any case, this is where the divide between right-wing performers and their audiences is most pronounced. That everyman normal conservative you watch on The Daily Wire because you think he has your back and knows your struggle? That struggle is well in the rearview mirror for him when you consider his current salary.
Remember, when it’s this lucrative, there’s a line of guys a hundred or more long begging for the same opportunity. Their primary concern is not exposing the truth. It’s increasing their audience and marketability. Viral stunts can make or break a career here.
If we want a better world someday—and I know many on the right and left very much do—let’s figure out a way to steer the conversation back to the promises of a better world the elites in Davos only seem committed to maintaining for themselves. Take their lofty ideals and ask them why they refuse to follow through with their promises made at the WEF year after year. The answer to that question—because they can—is one they will forever hope to avoid. Keep it simple. The richest among us hold too much of the world’s wealth. Make them explain why that is.