By Rob Verkerk PhD, founder, executive & scientific director

The twin forces of globalization and technology are transforming our economies, workplaces, communities and families. In advanced and emerging economies, decelerating growth, job disruption, rising inequality and a broken social contract are creating unrest and instability. Yet there has never been a better time to mobilize technology and to unleash the human capability to address these challenges and shape a new socio-economic system that provides opportunity for all.
- The World Economic Forum

If it were possible, wouldn’t we all love to witness the arrival of a new socio-economic system that “provides opportunity for all”? Trouble is, it’s never been done before. Marx and Engels thought they would try it – but every communist system the planet has witnessed has been controlled by a cabal of sorts. Is the new system still going to be a capitalist one, with the means of production still being privately owned? Or is it going to be some kind of re-imagined form of capitalism, green socialism or a socialist-capitalist, public-private, hybrid system governed by a global corporatocracy built out of a fusion between governments and mega-corporations? Rather than speculating, is there anywhere we can go to get more granular information on what this new socio-economic (and therefore political) system might look like?

KEY POINTS

• What will post pandemic socio-economic systems look like and how will they affect individual autonomy to choose the way we look after our health?
• The World Economic Forum is among the leading think tanks suggesting ways to use the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” of covid-19 to transform society and the way we live our lives under the headline of ‘The Great Reset’
• The Great Reset is viewed by the WEF as a ‘re-imagination of capitalism’ but it involves social contracts and stakeholder shareholding that could significantly change autonomy over our lives, including health choices
• Many different interpretations and critiques have been offered about the Great Reset but when they are critical they are generally labelled as conspiracy theory
• Some objectives for the Great Reset are laudable, others – mainly linked to the technologies described in the Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution book (2017) – are concerning
• The pandemic has aligned UN agencies, major governments and big corporations with the Great Reset in ways that have never been seen before
• It is difficult to predict what the future holds, but we cannot afford to become complacent. Especially during the very unusual circumstances we find ourselves as we emerge from a pandemic.

Before looking at how we might gather information in an attempt to answer these questions, I should point out why a non-profit like ours – focusing on natural, sustainable and regenerative health – has such a keen interest in the kinds of future socio-economic-political systems that might be in preparation for us. The short answer is that the prevailing system, whatever form that might take, has a huge influence on how most people are able to control their health. At ANH, we deeply value personal responsibility and autonomy in health care choices.

We also know that there is a great need to disrupt the status quo that has controlled the delivery of healthcare since WWII and if we continue to find ourselves in a democratic society, we need to play with the strings of that system to garner influence on how we go about managing human health. For us – that vision is set out in our blueprint for health system sustainability.     

WEF focal point for world order transition

There is no question that the starting point would have to be the non-profit, World Economic Forum (WEF) that describes its mission as being “committed to improving the state of the world”. Why? Because this organisation – that has been building its connections and influence through successive annual meetings in Davos over many years – is without doubt the ringleader of any new control system for human societies on planet Earth. It has masterminded a global process that aims to bring about the transition from what is considered to be a failing capitalist system that has brought about everything from gaping social and economic inequalities and ecological devastation through to geo-political and social instability. Characterised in that way – any rational person would have to agree we need to do things differently.

The masterplan that is presented to us by the WEF is called the Great Reset. We drew attention to it in our video and transcript, The Great Reset or the Great Divide, in mid-October. Perversely, despite referencing authoritative sources, mainly the WEF itself, the video was censored by YouTube within minutes of going live. It seems the bots were ready for us – and probably anyone else that wasn’t deemed to have the right (no pun intended) leanings.

Source: World Economic Forum

Nothing will ever return to the “broken” sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory.​- Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, “COVID-19: The Great Reset” (2020). Apple Books.

So what have we learned since October?

One of the most remarkable shifts is that this masterplan is now being labelled by many mainstream sources as a conspiracy theory. That’s probably because the WEF hadn’t correctly anticipated how the public would react once its views were communicated more widely.

It seems that so-called conspiracy theorists are viewed as having corrupted a wonderful idea that could save us all from unfair and dirty capitalism. The conspiracy theory apparently now blends “legitimate critiques with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism”. As you dig into the area (type in ‘Great Reset conspiracy theory’ in Google) you’ll find there isn’t just one ‘conspiracy theory’ about the Great Reset; there are many, depending on world view, political persuasion, and depth of research, among other factors.

The BBC – increasingly a journalistically unbalanced mouthpiece for the status quo – fact checked the Great Reset back in November.

We start with the revival of the baseless conspiracy theory, known as the 'Great Reset', which claims a group of world leaders orchestrated the pandemic to take control of the global economy.
- BBC News, ‘The coronavirus pandemic 'Great Reset' theory and a false vaccine claim debunked’, 22 Nov 2020

The only nuggets in the BBC’s fact check from last November that shine any light on issues that are of concern to us are unsupported by evidence. The BBC news report states:

“But the suggestion that politicians planned the virus, or are using it to destroy capitalism is wholly without evidence.

So too is the notion that the World Economic Forum has the authority to tell other countries what to do, or that it is coordinating a secret cabal of world leaders.”

While there may be no hard evidence that politicians are wanting to destroy the existing capitalist system in the West, there is plenty of evidence for an interest in transitioning the world order. Angela Merkel (Germany), Emmanuel Macron (France), Justin Trudeau (Canada) and Joe Biden (USA) have all repeatedly stated this, often referencing the associated ‘build back better’ slogan.

In fact, ‘build back better’ and all that goes along with it, is a product of the thinking emerging from consecutive annual summits in Davos convened by the WEF meetings each January (this year the summit was virtual). But the idea of switching to a new control system for humanity hasn’t just been concocted in 2020. It’s been years in the making.

It was considered after the global financial crisis of 2007-8 with its “Shaping the Post-Crisis World” (2009) to “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild”(2010). Then there was “The Great Transformation” (2012) and “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” (2018).

The Great Reset of 2020, brought to life in WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s 2020 book, ‘Covid 19: The Great Reset’, is largely a reiteration of the re-imagination of capitalism expressed in these previous WEF reports. The candy that WEF uses to draw us in is, superficially at least, and as one would expect (for candy!), quite appealing. Boris Johnson – like Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and many other world leaders – is all in for the Great Reset, promoting the build, back, better’ slogan and committing to “create a fairer, greener and more prosperous future” as he prepares for the G7 in Cornwall in June.

There are three main components to the planned Great Reset:

1. World governments should commit to “improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements and create the conditions for a ‘stakeholder economy." The pandemic-induced recession is being used as the justification for this.
2. Investments should advance the shared goals of equality and sustainability. This would incentivise green futures and socially and environmentally focused “ambitious economic stimulus plans.” Including the building of "’green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics.”

3. The third and final component would be to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” This includes fast-tracking the health-tech interface that includes everything from mass screening, synthetic biology vaccines, implantable mobile devices and even – if you work your way to the penultimate technology (Shift 22) discussed in Schwab’s 2017 book, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the creation of designer beings “whose genome was directly and deliberately edited”. If that’s not enough for you, you can progress to the final technology, labelled drily as ‘Neurotechnologies’, but referring explicitly to humans with implanted artificial memories.

How do you do all of this? The WEF give us the road map. It involves social contracts, stakeholder capitalism and global governance (this latter term tends to be conveyed in different words, for example as strategic partnerships both with UN agencies, with the OECD) and with the big corporate world.

Not everyone likes this. FIAN International, a non-profit that works to expose social injustices that interfere with food security, something the WEF professes to want to fix, condemn this new partnership between the WEF and UN. This is because they know that transnational corporations will be given “preferential and deferential access to the UN system at the expense of states and public interest actors.”

Many of us are concerned that the Great Reset isn’t in the public interest. We see the honey coating, but are concerned it’s something of a decoy. It’s the soft centre that we’re concerned about. Even if you think differently, perhaps because you think the world is in such a tenuous place, you may think it’s worth the risk of doing something radically different. So what’s the chances of these wild ideas that have been imagined and re-imagined for well over a decade ever seeing the light of day?   

Why it might just happen (unless we stop it)

It would be easy to be complacent. It would be plain lazy, in my view, to uphold that the planned installation of a new order of global governance has, as yet, never happened, so it will never happen.

Let me list several reasons why I think it’s a high possibility that the Great Reset plan will be initiated in a form that's not in the public interest if the grassroots do nothing to re-shape its intent:

1. The pandemic the provides ‘the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’. During the last 12 months we’ve seen a transition in the world order most of us thought was implausible or impossible. The crisis has enabled a manipulation of the public, the installation of such fear and mass hysteria, that the majority of the public have become malleable. Those who’ve dissented have been silenced and the fundamental right to protest has been conveniently sidelined. As we continue to learn through our work with the World Doctors Alliance, medical doctors who speak out lose their licenses to practise. Social media that contravenes the mainstream narrative around the pandemic is censored. As a result of the actions taken by governments, fully supported and even coordinated by the WEF and UN agencies, we’ve entered the greatest recession of our lifetimes, with millions of businesses being forced to close around the world – especially smaller ones.
2. Signed up and ready to go. In previous iterations of ‘a great transformation’ (i.e. a ‘new world order’, the relevance of this phrase having been downgraded by its relegation to a conspiracy theory), governmental and inter-governmental agencies weren’t fully on board. Many countries had a greater interest in their own sovereignty than they did in giving it up for the greater good. Corporations still felt that their competitive edge might deliver better outcomes for their shareholders than succumbing to a new form of more socialistic, stakeholder capitalism aligned with social contracts among the workers that would force them into a global plan over which they had less control. We now have a unique situation in which societies and economies are deep in crisis – ostensibly because of a single infectious disease (but actually as a result of policies justified as remedies for it). The perfect storm has been created to ensure that corporates and inter-governmental organisations like the UN and OECD are now fully signed up – and ready to press go. Communications are vital to the plan – and this is where it’s important to know that one of the world’s biggest communications groups, Publicis Groupe in France, the mission of which is to “win in the platform world” is also fully onboard.   
3. The bio-techno rollout is already underway. Given that the third component of the Great Reset is the implementation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have to consider just how ready the technocrats are to usurp control over our lives. Short answer: very. Two markers for this are: 1) we’ve seen the seamless introduction of artificial genetic material in the form of covid vaccines introduced via mass vaccination programmes, and; 2) the pandemic year of 2020 heralded an unparalleled launching of objects into outer space (satellites) that will become an increasing mechanism for the global management of human populations and the environment, as set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Figure: Number of satellites launched between 2001 and 2020 as reported by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. Data source: UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.

In case you’re still unsure

Boris Johnson is in. Check out his tweet below.

I look forward to welcoming world leaders to Cornwall for the @G7 Summit in June.

My goal is to work with our friends and partners to #BuildBackBetter from the coronavirus pandemic and create a fairer, greener and more prosperous future.https://t.co/ZIVS07hkjd #G7UK pic.twitter.com/6bmODaLsWS

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) January 17, 2021

McKinsey, one of the world’s leading management consulting firms, is signed up to the Great Reset too (but you may have already noted the company's a signatory to the strategic partnership with WEF).

​The agenda of the Davos summit convened virtually in January by the WEF reminds us the plan is in full swing, despite little reporting in the mainstream media.

To call the Great Reset a conspiracy theory is, dare I say it, a conspiracy theory. Those who are pulling the strings in this pandemic and post-pandemic world will give it their best shot, have no doubt, to reset the control system for our planet – without having consulted any of us. That just ain’t democratic.

Let’s not lose sight of our rights

If there is not a public appetite for the type of Great Reset the Davos crew are planning for us, it will be impossible for them to pull it off. The Great Reset, as it currently stands, while being dressed up as a system to repair inequalities and environmental damage on our delicate planet, is actually a form of favouritism for special interests. It could also be regarded as an extreme form of global cronyism. If you want to see the beneficiaries, check out the big influencers in Davos.

If YouTube likes and dislikes are anything to go by, the very polished WEF video outputs on the Great Reset aren't fairing well. Videos of those critical of the Great Reset do much better. You can see our analysis in table below.

Table. Great Reset related video content on YouTube, showing % likes versus dislikes (World Economic Forum videos in bold)

The biggest danger we face is complacency. The next biggest danger is that that most people are having great difficulty discerning conspiracy theory and fake news from conspiracy fact and real news. That’s deliberate. It’s the oldest trick in the book – it’s a smokescreen.

All we want to do right now, as we continue to evaluate the evidence, is keep you on your toes over what’s going on. Please don’t accept that everything that sounds outlandish and related to the Great Reset is conspiracy theory. It isn’t. Read the Fourth Industrial revolution if you haven’t already. It will inform you of the game plan. If you feel you don’t have a say in helping to shape the political, economic and social system that surrounds you, you know that democracy isn’t enabled. That’s something we all need to rally against – while maintaining a clear vision of a future that has all the honey that the WEF has been teasing us with – but without the bitter soft centre.

Please share widely. Please help awaken those who have not yet taken stock of our current reality.  

 >>> The Great Reset or the Great Divide? The World Economic Forum’s exit strategy from Covid-19 is based on false assumptions (ANH-Intl, Oct 2020)

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