What Is the Great Reset?

How some dry prose on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic has been misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists

“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less” - Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland

"NJ Hot Air Balloon Festival 2013 - Humpty Dumpty" by Bob Jagendorf is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

The friend of mine who is trying to convert me to his conspiratorial religion over WhatsApp is very concerned with conspiracy theories about the Great Reset. These speculative accounts of how a sinister elite is allegedly changing the world after the COVID-19 pandemic often repeat antisemitic tropes.

As often happens with conspiracy nonsense, we can find Alex Jones of Infowars at the scene of the crime holding a matchbox. He is so worried about the Great Reset that he has actually written a book on the subject - his first. The first couple of chapters are available as a free sample on Amazon, and no, I’m not linking to it.

Jones posits a long-standing war between freedom and tyranny. His narrative is based on the idea that Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum that meets in Davos, is a force for evil in the contemporary world.

Jones’ methodology, if we can use such a big word for work quite this underwhelming, is the same as Humpty Dumpty’s approach in Alice in Wonderland. He takes words and then completely changes their meaning. This makes banal passages of Schwab’s book, The Great Reset, seem significantly more sinister than they really are.

Jones writes: “Every time you hear the expression ‘public-private’ or ‘partnership,’ I want you to replace it with the word ‘fascism.’ Because you see, fascism, as practiced in both [Benito] Mussolini’s Italy and [Adolf] Hitler’s Germany, was a public-private partnership.”

As always with pseudo-researchers, Jones has skipped the literature review. What is the history of the words “public-private partnerships”? How has the meaning developed over the years? What is the rationale for turning the meaning upside down? Are there any actual links to fascism? And what exactly is fascism anyway?

Of course, a deep dive into the academic literature on fascism would make troubling reading for Jones. The late, great Hannah Arendt showed in great detail how Hitler’s project was based around the conspiracy theories that Jones loves so much.

The conspiracy entrepreneur has also said that he finds it “hard to find fault” with Russian dictator and warmonger Vladimir Putin, who is undoubtedly significantly closer to the fascists of the 1930s than a man who organizes a talking shop on sustainable capitalism in the Alps.

In Jones’s Humpty Dumpty world, war crimes and genocide are fine, but business executives who worry about how much carbon is produced by their supply chains are somehow a force for evil. This is strange worldview, to put it as politely as humanly possible.

One reviewer notes that later in the book Jones says that the word “stakeholder” really means “a weapon Schwab and company will use to deprive a person of their rights.” Jones also speculated that “more agile forms of governance” might really mean “summary execution by firing squad without the benefit of a trial.” I’m sorry for my friend, but this is weak and unconvincing at best, complete bullshit at worst.

A serious lack of empathy comes across in Jones’ wacky thoughts on Schwab’s work. He has decided that the Swiss conference organizer is evil and then will take everything he says as evidence to support this thesis. There is no attempt to try to understand Schwab’s intentions, which are much more about preserving constitutional democracy during a pandemic and its aftermath, as well as helping the business community take climate change seriously.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the case psychologist in Jones’ child custody case in 2017 testified that the conspiracy entrepreneur had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Lack of empathy is one of the main defining features of NPD. Jones’ legal difficulties, which stem from repeatedly defaming the families of murdered children, are almost certainly due to his lack of insight into what is going on in other people’s heads or hearts, which is on full display in his book.

The publishing firm that put the book the out, Skyhorse Publishing, has a reputation for publishing questionable material. One can only hope that it has good lawyers if it wants to remain in business. Accusing Schwab of fascism just because Jones is in revolt against the dictionary seems like a position that might be a little difficult to defend in court.

Open source

When my friend first started telling me about the Great Reset on WhatsApp, he sent me a photo of the cover of Schwab’s book to defend the idea that something was afoot. I asked him if he had actually read the book. Of course, he never replied to my question. I assume he never did.

In recent years, intelligence agencies have become increasingly drawn to open-source intelligence (or OSINT), which involves paying a lot of attention to newspaper reports and speeches and so on. Any expert in OSINT will tell you that if you want to understand the Great Reset, it will be much better to read Schwab’s book on the subject instead of Jones’ sloppy work. Primary sources are much better than strange interpretations by unqualified third parties.

Conspiracy theorists, who often tend to over-emphasize secret knowledge, will probably scoff at the basic principles of OSINT. However, a prediction expert called Philip Tetlock has shown that gifted analysts can make better predictions based on public information than many people with access to confidential material. The trick is to run multiple models at the same time and constantly update the weighting you give each hypothesis. By contrast, someone like Jones, who only has one conspiratorial model, which he defends with utter certainty without ever installing any updates, will lose bet after bet.

So, if you really want to understand the Great Reset, there are two steps you must take. First of all, do some background reading. Schwab’s defence of stakeholder capitalism is part of a debate that dates back to the 1970s on whether companies should just make a profit or whether they have a wider role in society. I covered the debate here.

The second step is to follow OSINT principles and actually sit down and read Schwab’s book. I have done this for you. I must warn you that he isn’t a very talented writer - his prose is as dry as sandpaper. Those of us who read the financial press every day will probably cope better than those who don’t. On the other hand, if you have difficulty sleeping, a few pages of The Great Reset just before your bedtime should knock you out in no time.

The book was written in June 2020 when Schwab was trying to work out what the pandemic would mean for society. He says that the exponential nature of the disease made it particularly dangerous, “creating a dangerous and volatile period on multiple fronts - politically, socially, geographically - raising deep concerns about the environment and also extending the reach (pernicious or otherwise) of technology into our lives.”

Some of the proponents of Great Reset conspiracy theories think that the pandemic was planned. Schwab’s view is more reality-based. He says that “human beings have been around for about 200,000 years, the oldest bacteria for billions of years and viruses for at least 300 million years. This means that, most likely, pandemics have always existed and been an integral part of human history since people started travelling around; over the past 2000 years they have been the rule, not the exception.” He notes several cases of previous pandemics acting as turning points in human history.

Schwab says that confinements and lockdowns have been common practice for handling pandemics for centuries, as has the unfortunate practice of looking for scapegoats whenever new diseases emerge - something that contemporary conspiracy theorists have been quick to do. He argues that COVID-19 would accelerate some systematic trends that were already underway, as well as potentially provoking changes that would have seemed inconceivable before. He says that societies could develop more solidarity or become more individualistic as a result. He provides arguments why he sees solidarity as being better than individualism.

Although Schwab’s book covers a wide range of different scenarios, he is no prophet. There is no mention of Ukraine, although he does note in passing that wars can drive interest rates higher, as indeed happened after Putin’s Russia invaded a European country on completely imaginary grounds.

Having read Schwab’s book, I can see that some ultra-liberals, anarcho-capitalists and defenders of tax breaks for billionaires on the far right might disagree with the author’s case for more solidarity. Meanwhile, the dryness of Schwab’s prose makes it easier for Humpty Dumpty commentators like Jones to deliberately misinterpret his arguments. Some people like my friend who can’t be bothered to read the book will find anti-globalist scare stories about its contents emotionally appealing.

If, however, you actually sit down and read Schwab’s book and try to understand what he means by terms like “stakeholder capitalism,” you will find it much less sinister than you might expect. Good luck staying awake, though! The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

News story on open-source intelligence from 2008

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