Posted on by winter oak

A brief overview (also available as printable pdf)

Life has become very strange indeed for billions of people since March 2020.

We are no longer allowed to do what we always did, see who we want to see, live freely in the way we fondly imagined we were entitled to do.

Everything has changed. Now we have to check the latest restrictions on our movements and activities. We can’t go to concerts, football matches, pubs or cafés. We are told to avoid other people and to wear masks to cover our faces when we do share the same spaces.

Nobody knows what the future holds for them or their family. Insecurity and anxiety are rife.

To start with, these were supposedly emergency measures, but the weeks turned into months without any end in sight.

Now we are being told that it could be years before we are allowed to resume our lives and even then we are going to need a “vaccine passport” to carry out even the most basic activities.

So what is this all about? What are they trying to do to us?

The official story, of course, is that is all because of a virus, a contagion so deadly that everything had to be put on indefinite hold.

But more and more people are latching on to the fact that something is not quite right in all this, that we have been “played” for some hidden purpose.

While they might still disagree over the exact origins or severity of Covid, they are coming together in the realisation that it has been used as an excuse to usher in a new type of society – the New Normal that the authorities have been going on about since the very start.

What kind of world is it that they want to force us into?

Some significant clues come from reading and analysing the words of Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland, whose annual Davos conferences have for decades been bringing together business leaders and politicians from all around the globe.

Schwab has long been promoting something called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is basically a digital society where absolutely everything, and everyone, is connected to the internet (“inclusivity”).

In his 2016 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, he describes it as “unlike anything humankind has experienced before”, (1) “a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another”. (2)

He enthuses about “billions of people connected by mobile devices”, and about robotics, 3D printing and nanotechnology which would all “build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds”. (3)

Schwab also looks forward to more online education, involving “the use of virtual and augmented reality” to “dramatically improve educational outcomes”, (4) to sensors “installed in homes, clothes and accessories, cities, transport and energy networks” (5) and to smart cities, with their all-important “data platforms”. (6)

Some of what Schwab describes is frankly very disturbing, such as when he talks about technological devices becoming “implantable in our bodies and brains” and about us being able to “manipulate our own genes, and those of our children”. (7)

“Where do we draw the line between human and machine?” asks Schwab. “What does it mean to be human?” (8)

Most of us, of course, know perfectly well what it means to be human and have no desire whatsoever to be merged with a machine!

Schwab is well aware that his transhumanist vision is an unpopular and minority one and mutters darkly in his books about “societal resistance” (9) and how to advance “if technologies receive a great deal of resistance from the public”. (10)

So imagine his delight when, a few months after his WEF hosted an event acting out an imaginary global pandemic, (11) the Covid crisis provided the perfect excuse to sweep aside all that inconvenient public resistance!

Now was the ideal time to launch what Schwab himself calls “The Great Reset” and he immediately rushed out a book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, to celebrate his good fortune. (12)

Strangely enough, Schwab and co-author Thierry Malleret admit that Covid-19 is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced over the last 2000 years”, adding that “the consequences of COVID-19 in terms of health and mortality will be mild compared to previous pandemics”. (13)

They add: “It does not constitute an existential threat, or a shock that will leave its imprint on the world’s population for decades”. (14)

Yet, incredibly, this “mild” illness is simultaneously presented as the excuse for unprecedented social change under the banner of “The Great Reset”!

“It is our defining moment”, they crow. “Many things will change forever”. “A new world will emerge”. (15) “The societal upheaval unleashed by COVID-19 will last for years, and possibly generations”. (16) “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never”. (17)

For Schwab, Covid-19 means full steam ahead for everything he has been wanting to foist upon us for years under the label of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

He and Malleret report with satisfaction that “the pandemic will fast-forward the adoption of automation in the workplace and the introduction of more robots in our personal and professional lives”. (18)

They are delighted with the “accelerating growth of e-commerce”, (19) with the “ever-more powerful expansion of e-sports”, (20) with the boom in online banking transactions (21) and with the fact that, thanks to Covid, “the world of education, like for so many other industries, will become partly virtual”. (22)

They declare chirpily: “Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus (COVID-19 or another) will thus speed the relentless march of automation, particularly in the fields most susceptible to automation”. (23)

But why is all this so important for Schwab? What is it that makes him and his WEF pals so eager to push through the Great Reset, the New Normal and the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the back of Covid?

It is all about money and power, which are essentially the same thing in the degraded modern society in which we live.

On the most basic level, a certain type of business stands to make a lot of money from lockdown culture.

As Schwab and Malleret are pleased to note: “The combined market value of the leading tech companies hit record after record during the lockdowns… this phenomenon is unlikely to abate any time soon, quite the opposite”. (24)

There is also the massive global shift of wealth from public purse to private hands that has been justified by Covid. Another bail-out for the 0.1%.

Schwab and Malleret gloat: “In April 2020, just as the pandemic began to engulf the world, governments across the globe had announced stimulus programmes amounting to several trillion dollars, as if eight or nine Marshall Plans had been put into place almost simultaneously”. (25)

But there is something even more insidious behind all this.

The Great Reset is, ultimately, about resetting the capitalist economy by allowing it to expand into new realms, to privatise and exploit new “products” that it could not previously reach.

Those “products” are us, our lives and our world – human and natural “capital”.

Schwab hints at this agenda in his books when he writes about “new ways of creating value” (26) and looks forward to “an explosion in tradable assets, as all kinds of value exchange can be hosted on the blockchain”. (27)

What he is referring to is “impact investment“, a scam through which hedge fund speculators aim to make phenomenal amounts of money by gambling on people’s lives.

In order to be able to package us all up into “products” that can be processed by the algorithms and data bases of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, everything we do has to be digital.

Our identities and lives have to be constructed online so they can be used as the basis for the new capitalism.

The worst thing about impact capitalism is that it hides behind the pretence of doing good. It clings to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and uses all the correct language to make itself acceptable for people who see themselves as progressive.

So we have the nauseating spectacle of Sir Ronald Cohen, notorious capitalist shark and Tony Blair’s banker, claiming piously that impact capitalism “will lead us to a new and better world” (28) by “helping those in need and preserving our planet”. (29)

This, alongside all the virtue-signalling moral self-righteousness surrounding Covid, makes it hard for people to see the vile reality behind what is being planned.

Those promoting the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset employ armies of “journalists” and “fact-checkers” to hide the truth and dismiss researchers and dissidents as “conspiracy theorists”.

We all know how difficult it is to persuade even friends and family to look beyond the mass media propaganda and find out what is really happening.

But this is what we have to do, in every way we can.

The stakes are too great here, to simply turn away and hope it will all turn out all right in the end.

Schwab, Cohen and the like are herding us into a digital prison camp and if we don’t soon snap out of our collective complacency and make a bolt for freedom, future generations don’t stand a chance in hell of living decent and dignified human lives.

Get informed! Explore our Great Reset online library

1. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: WEF, 2016), e-book. 3% [e-book equivalent of page number]
2. Ibid. 3%
3. Ibid. 3%
4. Klaus Schwab with Nicholas Davis, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to Building a Better World (Geneva: WEF, 2018), e-book. 20%
5. Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. 12%
6. Ibid. 79%
7. Schwab, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 9%
8. Ibid. 9%
9. Ibid. 17%
10. Ibid. 17%
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-FQbhkWYuY&ab_channel=WorldEconomicForum
12. Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: WEF, 2020), e-book.
13. Ibid. 89%
14. Ibid. 89%
15. Ibid. 2%
16. Ibid. 26%
17. Ibid. 2%
18. Ibid. 57%
19. Ibid. 64%
20. Ibid. 74%
21. Ibid. 64%
22. Ibid. 73%
23. Ibid. 55%
24. Ibid. 73%
25. Ibid. 32%
26. Schwab, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 1%
27. Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. 85%
28. Ronald Cohen, Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change (London: Ebury Press, 2020). E-book. 2%
29. Ibid. 78%