“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
— Ronald Reagan
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
— James Madison
“You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
— Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
— Winston Churchill (via George Santayana).
“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Our world is an extremely large, almost impossibly complex system, or reality. Who truly understands it? Maybe the folks who are leading the Great Reset charge from the UN, Davos, and the WEF – along with their many government accomplices, globally? Umm … maybe they just think they are in charge. Who is really in charge? That’s a very interesting and important question.
The answer is of course “nobody”. Or more accurately, almost “everybody”. I should probably explain, yes?
At last count, the wannabe global leaders and their immediate followers number in the thousands. Globally. We, who populate the great masses of “everybody else”, number around eight billion, give or take a bunch. We are in a noticeable majority, so maybe we do in fact “rule”. Sure doesn’t feel like we rule.
Grandiose schemes of world domination have been around forever
Is the “Great Reset” just one of these endlessly-parading great ruler schemes or is it something entirely different? In the Monty Python sense, at least. Until very recently, the whole world was mostly too big to rule entirely so rulers wrapped their arms around whatever big chunks they could at the time.
Genghis Khan did a pretty good world domination job with his Mongol Empire (9.3 million square miles) of the early thirteenth century. Alexander the Great of Macedonia ruled much of the “civilized” world in the fourth century BC but his grand domination plans soon unraveled and ended rather badly for poor Alex at age 32. Biggest empire of all was the 13.7 million square mile British Empire of the early 1900’s. It also ended badly, with two World Wars messing up that empire’s plans pretty much completely.
Despite great pain and suffering during empire-buildings and subsequent empire-unravelings, the great masses continued on with life as best they could. Rulers almost always made life worse in the end despite their “greatness” and their grandiose plans.
Most of the populace survives no matter what the rulers are up to. Always.
Disease seems to have had the upper hand quite a bit more often than rulers. The Black Death of the 1300’s killed off an estimated 75-200 million people (17%-54% of the global population). The Plague of Justinian was almost as bad, killing 15-100 million in the mid-6th Century. No ruler even comes close to having such an impact on their worlds. Death-wise, at least.
So, maybe world rulers are mostly froth on the brew of our ongoing life. They will always be around somewhere causing various degrees of mischief and misery but those of us who reside in the brew live on. Somehow. Mostly.
Grandiose schemes of world domination have been failing forever
Why might this be? There have been so many great empires over the millennia but all are mostly gone. Empires appear in general to have a fairly short shelf-life in historical terms. They don’t tend to crash but instead to decline slowly and painfully over centuries. Historians helpfully explain that there are many reasons for the fall: economic, social and cultural, environmental, political. Did they miss anything? Probably.
The lesson in all of this failure seems to be that grandiose schemes and empires come and go and will continue to do so forever or longer. This is not good news for the current crop of empire builders, like the WEF, the UN, and various globalist factions. Odds are very high that their efforts will end up shortly on the scrapheap of history. Perhaps not “shortly” enough, but surely.
So, what does this mere historical fact set mean for us of the currently-non-ruling masses?
Who needs leaders (aka rulers) anyway?
Well, just think about roughly 8 billion people all going off in different directions. With the vast majority having no clue about where they are headed or why. Scary thought.
That is of course why they invented herds. Not the disorganized milling-about kind of masses but instead large groups of people moving more or less together, with a common direction and apparent purpose. Inventing herds led almost immediately to inventing herd leaders, probably like that done most recently by the Great Reset folks at WEF and their illustrious supporters. So – where you got herds, you got herd leaders. That’s just how life works.
What do herd leaders do in practice? Besides “leading”, whatever that may mean in practice. The fact of the matter is that a few billion folks moving about in a self-directed manner is chaos. Random motion. Nothing much gets done by an undirected herd. Leaders, rulers, or other self-appointed top folks rise up out of the herds to bring some kind of common order, purpose, and direction. They are actually very necessary kinds of people.
If herd leaders are so important, why do so many of their herd collections (aka empires) fail?
I’ll bet you guessed immediately that, while herd leaders may be vital, the leader selection process leaves much to be desired. And has, almost forever. Too many leaders are self-selected – nearly always a recipe for some kind of disaster.
We-the-herd have tried electing herd leaders many times but this nice concept seems so often to get badly mucked up in practice. It typically ends up with the leaders effectively electing themselves. You may have noticed a few recent examples. Everywhere.
What is the alternative to leader elections? Well, Napoleon among many others favored dictatorship. Which works, for a while anyway. It seems that there simply is no leadership selection process that works reliably (for the herd, not the transient herd-leaders). That is, to say the least, a serious bummer.
We seem to need leaders but we can’t seem to select more than a very few good ones. More often than not, the problem gets “resolved” by leaders selecting themselves despite our concerns and despite the historical track record here.
Nobody voted for WWII but it sure did happen regardless
A bunch of stuff is happening these days almost everywhere that nobody seems to have voted for. Instead, they seem to have “voted” in some manner or other for leaders who are making this whole bunch of often-scary stuff happen.
The WWII mess began to emerge during the 1920’s boom time, which was cured shortly thereafter by the Great Depression. Kind of snuck up on the majority of folks trying not to starve meanwhile. So, really bad wars can not only happen with great leaders in charge but they can also happen almost unannounced.
Like today, for example: Are the emerging leaders likely to succeed?
Not sure where you come on this one but my take right now is that the new Great Reset leaders are going to work out just about as well as their historical predecessors. Not a happy prospect for us herd-people, absent a serious flow of major miracles.
So, what are we to do? Just sit back and try as best we can to survive whatever comes along? Just as the herd-people have done at least forever?
Have we learned anything that might help us herd-people survive, and perhaps even prosper, despite whatever mischief and misery our current Great Reset flavor herd-leaders manage to create?
Some good news here, I think: We are living in a really special time that just may hold the answer. An actual, lasting answer even, if we are lucky. One based on communications and technology. And major changes in nearly everything, recently kicked off by our never-ending COVID-and-kin nastiness.
If this is the case, then the Great Reset schemes of our current herd-leaders are going to stumble and fade away, just like all the others. This means that we should already be seeing evidence of the Great Reset (of 1971 vintage) itself getting reset, perhaps even greatly.
Evidence of The Great Reset getting reset
Vaxx mandates these days are getting ripped up, then unripped, by the courts. Off now to the Supreme Court for … let’s see, is ripping or unripping next up? Who knows. Either way will not be welcomed by about half the country.
Omicron is beginning to look like a standard, boring, head-cold kind of critter. People are getting really tired of variants that the vaxx or whatever can’t prevent. Cornell University, with 97 percent of the campus fully vaccinated and a mask mandate in place, has just announced that it would return to online-only instruction after a massive Covid outbreak (among the massively vaxxed and masked students and faculty, yet). Something is wrong with this picture, yes?
Many people, even those fully onboard initially with the COVID responses, are starting to push back hard – globally – against another round of scary predictions. Like those predictions from 2020 that didn’t work out so well for the COVID seers and their leaders. Credibility in government, the medical systems, much of the media, … seems to be crashing. Not good news for the Great Resetters.
Major protests are beginning to occur all over the world. Very hard to reset things when the herds are getting restless. Being a herd-leader is a tough job. Always.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, people are getting mad
Getting angry hardly ever solves anything beyond temporarily relieving individual angst. Like screaming at the wall, or the cat. What angry does best is to make things worse.
But of course angry people may very well cause WW-III to happen no matter what the rest of us non-angry folks think or do. Life does that sometimes, as you may have noticed.
Misery created by the Great Reset efforts will eventually cure itself as it has done so often in history. Meanwhile, not fun, or even possible in too many cases, to live through, but many billions of people have indeed done so. The odds are heavily in “our” favor – the “our” referring to those of us herd-people who do survive whatever is going on.
So the solution to the Great Reset is simply to wait it out, surviving meanwhile? Exactly how might we go about this?
What if they held a Great Reset and (almost) nobody showed up?
The Great Reset happening is already happening. Globally. Pushing back against the great forces behind the Great Reset seems unwise. They are likely to prevail for some period and in many aspects, no matter what the herd-people want. But history gives us much better odds of getting our way in the long run, if we are so fortunate as to be around to see the long run. Surviving the Great Reset seems to be a much more promising objective.
In other words, we should not treat the Great Reset gang as an enemy but instead find ways to work around them and their machinations while the inevitable decline of empires handles the rest. What might this mean in practice?
The Great Resetters want to change the world. Such efforts have been met with almost universal failure historically. But the world changes mostly when and how it wants – the “world” being the vast majority of us non-Resetters. So, why not let the current Great Resetters learn this the hard way, while we manage around whatever it is that they do.
Although it may be more satisfying to challenge these folks head-on, it is probably not going to succeed and will almost certainly result in great pain. These are very powerful people at the moment but they will undo themselves in due course if we let them thrash around long enough in their own relatively small, transient-leader realms.
So, how do we avoid showing up – participating – in the Great Reset?
First, we are in the Great Reset’s machinations, like it or not. Their efforts are global and hugely-funded. This forms our current environment. Sort of a given that seems unchangeable by any realistic measures. It will do its own thing. But …
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
— Charles Darwin
Most adaptable to change – whatever “change” happens to be at the time. You can’t generally predict or control such “change” but only your ability to adapt to it, to work around it effectively. While COVID and the Great Resetters seem to be largely in control of generating changes at the moment, our turf is the adaptability we have or can build.
Because this blog is directed toward businesses and organizations, and not individuals, the “prepping” ideas offered here are concerned with operating unit survival and resilience-building. Great Reset activities as they appear to be rolling out today seem likely to impact almost every organization and operating unit in some significant manner.
While each organization will have its own particular set of strengths, situations, and challenges, there are some common threads that might apply more generally. Here is my shortlist of these:
1. Resilience
This ability, as described in earlier posts (for example, see this), means that you can recover quickly from serious difficulties and setbacks. It is toughness. You don’t break but instead come back post-impact to more-or-less full functionality. Maybe you are changed from the experience but you are effectively back in business. Becoming resilient other than through painful experience requires the identification and mitigation (or elimination) of your most important vulnerabilities. Ahead of impact preferably.
Lockdowns are still a major impact for many today. But, technology and work-workplace redesign are making great headway at minimizing future lockdown damage. For some, this may require changing the business or organization entirely. Not something that you can do quickly. Yesterday is a good time to start.
2. Small scale
If you are a large organization, getting smaller is not something that you might normally think about. But we are not anywhere near “normally” these days. Anything big has a high inherent vulnerability. Big is often not very adaptable or agile – both vital to Great Reset survival.
Operating as much as possible as a collection of relatively diverse, self-sufficient entities makes it less likely that an impact will be fatal. Previous posts have addressed this approach. In the Great Reset context, large organizations make big targets. Breaking a large organization into a number of smaller, mostly-independent operating units may help you adapt to Reset changes and impacts.
3. Communication-based
Technology developed over the least few decades has allowed many organizations and individuals to operate with location- and time-independence. This affects primarily “office” workers but over 40% of the workforce falls roughly into this category (for example, see this). We are in the midst of a major revolution in workers, work, and workplaces – all enabled by recent communication technology advances and driven strongly, inexorably by COVID happenings.
Organizations today are being redefined in extent and functionality by these communications advances. They are in effect becoming “virtual” in this respect, no longer structured and managed by physical offices and geography. A virtual organization can be reconfigured quickly and set up around teams rather than departments and functions. Perfect structure for resilience and adaptability.
4. Creative and innovative
This is obviously a fundamental capability set for any effective adaptation. It cannot be developed easily or quickly, unless you acquire an organization that already has these strengths and you can transfer them – somehow.
What works in a world that is being greatly reset today may not work well enough in reset-decline or post-reset. The adaptations required may not be apparent until the change-driver impacts are well along – leaving little time to develop and implement suitable adaptations. Your creative (ideas) and innovative (execution) resources must be in place and fully-functioning well ahead.
5. Location diversity
Concentrations of anything tend to create both brittleness and impact vulnerability. Potentially a high price to be paid for efficiencies gained this way. In times when major events and situations seem likely to occur without warning, you need to be diverse – especially in locations. Fortunately, technology and COVID have made this much easier to do.
As noted above, communications advances have made it possible to implement location diversity almost instantly and to adapt it to new situations, Reset-wise, as these appear. This requires physical location diversity as well as functional diversity. Physical concentrations of any kind are difficult to adapt quickly or in any major way – greatly reducing resilience in many cases.
6. Micro-organized networking
There must be a better term for this concept but it involves building small-scale networks of people and units that must work closely together long-term. These are functionally interdependent, a basic organizational structure formerly handled via centralization, departments, and large monolithic communication networks.
To survive a Great Reset impact, you have to be more than just location-diverse. A hybrid workforce, working from many locations, that uses collaboration and coordination software tools to provide essential interaction capabilities seems vital. This seems like a kind of team structure where team members are anywhere and able to interact as needed without physical presence.
7. Essential products and services
Lockdowns hit “non-essential” businesses especially hard. Non-essential seems to have been defined differently and arbitrarily in each jurisdiction but the real test is whether a local society can function without these. Think electricity, water, food, medical services, and similar real essentials. Hard to imagine any Great Reset doing its thing without protecting such truly essential organizations and functions.
While these are obviously “essential” almost everywhere, many businesses and organizations include substantial numbers of “non-essential” products and services. If your organization is likely to get a “non-essential” label slapped on it by Great Resetters or its acolytes, then you may want to look at adding something clearly “essential” or perhaps wrapping your existing non-essential operations in an essential products or services operation. Much easier said than done of course, but this post may suggest some more practical approaches.
8. Redundancy
You need to know what the core elements of your business or organization are to be sure that each of these is at least somewhat redundant. More costly but essential for survival in Great Reset (and COVID) prime times. Redundancy has a locational component – geographical units – but it also has a single-location design in the form of “parallel structures”.
Organizational units that cannot be geographically separated in practice may be amenable to some sort of functional redundancy. The post referred to above looked at vaxx-mandates as one example of where a formerly consolidated organization might adapt by setting up parallel vaxxed and unvaxxed units in a single location.
9. Plan and act in small steps
It is probably not a great idea these days to embark on any major long-term projects or ventures that are hard or costly to stop once in motion. We used to be able to plan and execute major long-term projects with reasonable confidence in a stable future. No longer. The future is unfolding – emerging – in ways that we can’t foresee or even imagine.
Rapid changes, unpredictable changes can be managed effectively by planning and executing in small steps that can be reversed or abandoned if stepwise results prove strongly adverse under emerging conditions. Being locked-in seems like a recipe for disaster in a time of Great Resetting.
The underlying goal in all of these is to keep as low and diverse a profile as possible so as not to become a Great Reset action target while improving the chances of being around when the Great Reset greatly resets for good. It’s on the way.
Bottom line:
One of the realities of a large complex world is that actions, even the most well-intentioned ones, can have huge unintended and unforeseen consequences. The world works the way it wants, not the way we might hope or plan. The WEF’s Great Reset movement may have many noble aims but it is beginning to appear that the world has other ideas. We looked in this post at the fundamental question of what this means for us few billions of folks who don’t run the world.
Related Reading
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been around since 1971 but it has been mostly over the past twenty years or so that its global reach and ambitions have been rolled out. While I have been aware of it marginally for some time, I had no idea of what it had transformed into and what it was up to until this year.
My guess is that relatively few normal people have any idea what the WEF and its Great Reset programs are planning to reset, and greatly for the most part. Here is a bit of the story and some links if you want to dig more deeply.
“The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum strives to model world-class corporate governance, where values are as important as rules. Legitimacy, accountability, transparency and concerted action are the guiding principles of the Forum.”
“Our Leadership. The Forum is chaired by Founder and Executive Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab. It’s guided by a Board of Trustees, exceptional individuals who act as guardians of its mission and values, and oversee the Forum’s work in promoting true global citizenship.”
“The Board of Trustees comprises outstanding leaders from business, politics, academia and civil society. In their work on the Board, members do not represent any personal or professional interests. To reflect the Board’s multistakeholder status, its membership is divided equally between representatives of the business community and leaders from international organizations and civil society.”
WEF’s website has more detail on the incredible scope of its ambitions. The graphic below, included here in greatly-compressed format, gives an indication of this scope. It certainly fits the “Great” description. The scary part is the “Reset”: this seems to indicate that almost everything is a reset target. Globally.
As noted at the beginning of this post, such grandiose ambitions have a solid historical record of blowing up and failing almost completely. But only after having caused huge amounts of pain, suffering, and similar misery. That’s just what such herd-leaders do. If we survive our present set’s nastiness, there will most likely be another round of grandiose herd-leadership emerging not too far distant in the future.
Being counted among the well-adapted survivors seems like a realistic and optimistic goal for us herd-members.
George Dillard writing in Medium.com had an interesting view on the fall of various empires: “What it Means When an Empire Falls”:
“It’s actually common that what we view with hindsight as the fall of a civilization is not as perceptible and definitive to the people living at the time as we’d think. It often feels more like a slow transition than a big bang. These declines are also not a disaster for everybody, or even necessarily most people.”
“There are groups of people who benefit from the deteriorating conditions, and in some cases, most of society comes out of things just fine. For example, even though the “Golden Age” of Dutch power came and went in the 17th century, it’s still pretty good to be Dutch.”
“The fall of the Roman Empire, when examined closely, was a slow transition. The fall of the Abbasid Empire in the Middle East was not the end of a Golden Age. In both cases, people’s everyday lives may not have changed all that much as their political systems fractured.”
