If, as the Buddhists suggest, we should ‘drive all blames into one,’ we may as well blame the Great Reset for our dystopia

 

Michael Rectenwald

is an author of 11 books, including the most recent, Thought Criminal. He was Professor of Liberal Arts at NYU from 2008 through 2019. Follow him on Twitter @TheAntiPCProf

21 Feb, 2021 11:59

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FILE PHOTO: A demonstrator holds a sign depicting World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab during a protest amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in Zug, Switzerland, February 6, 2021 ©  REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind – or should be. It can be blamed for woke madness, cancel culture, Covid lockdowns, Antifa/BLM riots, Big Tech censorship, and the endless propaganda coming out of mainstream media.

There’s a Tibetan Buddhist practice called “lojong” (mind-training) that uses short slogans for training the mind to lessen daily suffering. I’ve found that one of the most useful of the slogans is “drive all blames into one.”

We are faced every day with inevitable troubles, and often go about looking for their sources – not only to solve the troubles but also to find likely targets for blaming them on. The point of driving all blames into one is to short-circuit our suffering. Rather than looking for someone or something to blame for each and every problem, this slogan suggests that we blame one thing for all of them. Tibetan Buddhists might blame suffering itself. In our contemporary dystopian predicament, I suggest blaming everything on the Great Reset.

And why not? Focusing on the Great Reset really can be good mental training for dealing with the political and social malaise that afflicts us. Therefore, if we can define this one target, we will go a long way toward lessening our suffering. My job here is to convince you of the horrors of the Great Reset so that it can become the sole object of all your blaming.

So, what is the Great Reset?

Rather than yielding to the comments below, or to the so-called “conspiracy theories” bandied about on the web, let’s take the language of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) at face value and go from there. We shall see that our concern about the Great Reset is not, after all, as the New York Times would have it, a baseless conspiracy theory. The Great Reset is the decades-old brainchild of Schwab and company. But only within the past year has the Great Reset gained a foothold in public consciousness and become the almost universally recognized agenda of the WEF, and, by extension, of corporations and world governments.

In their book Covid-19: The Great Reset, WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret write that the Covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.” See that? The Great Re-setters have been there all the time, just waiting to seize on something to justify their plans. If climate change didn’t work, then Covid damn well better. And they are working night and day to make sure that it does. But just how do they mean to go about this Great Reset?

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The Stakeholder Economy

To usher in “fairness,” the Great Reset aims to reset the economy to “stakeholder capitalism,” as a replacement for “shareholder” capitalism.

Stakeholder capitalism involves the consideration of “customers, suppliers, employees, and local communities” in addition to shareholders in the business operations of the world’s major corporations and governments. A stakeholder is anyone or any group that stands to benefit or lose from corporate behavior – other than competitors, we may suppose. Stakeholder capitalism involves changes to the behavior of corporations with respect to carbon use but also in terms of the distribution of benefits and “externalities” or detriments that corporations produce.

By fairness, the Great Reset means much more than the “equitable” distribution of goods and detriments in terms of “environmental justice.” According to the WEF, corporate responsibility must be redefined in terms of “social justice” as well. This includes compensation to black people, the indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). BIPOC are special stakeholders in stakeholder capitalism. In addition to BIPOC, special stakeholders also include LGBTQ+ persons as well. Guess who is going to pay for all this environmental and social justice? That’s right – you. But don’t worry – you’ll just have to give up your property.

Corporate Socialism

I can now name the evil socio-economic system aimed at by the Great Reset: corporate socialism. “Fairness,” you see, means an “equality” without property for the masses.

“Welcome to my city – or should I say, ‘our city,’” writes a blogger for the WEF. “I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.” This report from 2030 is “not a utopia or dream of the future,” we are told. Yet the future just so happens to meet all the criteria of the Great Reset. Moreover, this propertyless future “makes perfect sense” to the city dweller of 2030, when property has become unnecessary due to the conversion of most goods into “services.”

But what of the corporate producers of goods and services? We must assume that their ownership will not be disrupted. After all, corporations still need to produce the services that the city dwellers “enjoy.” While the city-dwellers will own nothing, they will still need to pay for the services made available by what can only be a corporate oligarchy, which will hold a veritable monopoly over production. After all, where could competition come from when the majority owns nothing? This is corporate socialism.

ALSO ON RT.COMIf the ‘Great Reset’ really is so good for us, let’s hold a referendum on it, so it can have a democratic mandate (or not)

Wokeness and Cancel Culture

This brings us to the first element explained in terms of the Great Reset. As defined by true believers, wokeness is enhanced awareness of social and political injustice and the determination to eradicate it. But what could wokeness have to do with the Great Reset?

First of all, wokeness is not aimed at the sufferers whose complaints, or imagined complaints, it means to redress. Wokeness works on the majority, the supposed beneficiaries of injustice. It does so by making the majority understand that it has benefitted from “privilege” and preference – based on birthplace, skin color, gender, sexual proclivity, gender identity, and the domination of nature, etcetera. This majority must be rehabilitated, as it were. The masses must understand that they have gained whatever advantages they have hitherto enjoyed on the basis of the unfair treatment of others, either directly or indirectly. The “privilege” of the majority has come at the expense of those minorities designated as the beneficiaries of wokeness, and wokeness is the means for rectifying these many injustices.

And what are the effects of being repeatedly reprimanded as such – of being told that one has been the beneficiary of unmerited “privilege,” that one’s relative wealth and well-being have come at the expense of oppressed, marginalized, and misused Others? Shame, guilt, remorse, unworthiness. The solution is to give up your property.

Cancel culture is a tool of wokeness, a weapon for debunking the “privileged,” a levelling perfectly aligned with stripping you of your property. Cancel culture not only reduces the status of its victims but also serves a premonitory role for others, the onlookers of cancellations. They learn that they counter woke ideology at their own peril. Cancel culture keeps the majority in line as wokeness erases their “privilege,” drawing down the majority into the propertyless future.

The Lockdowns and Riots

The Covid-19 lockdowns, and to a lesser extent the leftist riots, have been moving us toward the corporate socialism of the Great Reset. The draconian lockdown measures employed by leaders of nation states, regions and cities, and the destruction perpetrated by the rioters, just so happen to be doing the work that corporate socialists like the WEF and their collaborators want done. In addition to destabilizing nation-states, these policies are helping to destroy small businesses, thus eliminating competitors.

As small businesses have been crushed by the combination of draconian lockdowns and riotous lunacy, corporate giants like Amazon have thrived like never before. As BBC News noted, at least three of the tech giants – Amazon, Apple and Facebook – have appreciated massive gains during the lockdowns, gains which were abetted, to a lesser extent, by riots that cost at least $1 billion to $2 billion in property damages. During the three months ending in June, Amazon’s “quarterly profit of $5.2bn (£4bn) was the biggest since the company's start in 1994 and came despite heavy spending on protective gear and other measures due to the virus.” Amazon’s sales rose by 40 percent in the three months ending in June.

Likewise, the lockdowns and riots have done much work toward resetting the economy in the direction of the Great Reset. They have eliminated competition for the corporate-state oligarchs and moved us in the direction of the two-tiered, neo-feudalistic, “corporate socialist” economy.

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Big Tech Censorship and Media Propaganda

As would-be monopolists, Big Tech stands to gain directly from the Great Reset agenda. The Big Tech cartel’s attempts to eliminate competition and competing views is of a piece with these monopolistic consolidation efforts.

Big Tech and mainstream media aid the Great Reset agenda through censorship and the dissemination of propaganda. Mainstream and social media censor all views that run contrary to the promoted, official narratives regarding climate change, Covid, systemic racism, transgenderism, woke ideology, cancel culture, and all the other essential narrative elements for the Great Reset. And it openly gaslights those who seek and find evidence that runs contrary to these narratives.

Conclusion

If you aren’t yet convinced that the Great Reset is the source of all your suffering, you should be. For the Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory; it’s a conspiracy fact, and you, my friends, are the ones having your lives reset according to its precepts. So, drive all blames into one. Blame the Great Reset for everything that ails you. Even if you are mistaken, you will decrease your suffering by doing so.

 The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.