https://bda1776.substack.com/p/klaus-schwabs-great-reset?token=
Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Forum Publishing, 2020);
Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future (Forum Publishing, 2022).
For all the hype and confusion, “The Great Reset” is the actual title of Klaus Schwab’s take on global government responses to Covid-19, written in mid-2020. “The Great Narrative” is his follow-up, written in 2021 upon consultation with fifty notable thinkers and futurists.
For those keeping score at home, Schwab heads the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its famed Davos confabs. (His co-author, Thierry Malleret, is a long-time collaborator). As such, Schwab does indeed loom large in many conspiracy theories. He also has many adoring fans. These books allow us to see through those filters to the thoughts he most wants to share. They’re important books and relatively readable (as such things go). They’re also deeply disturbing books. They have the potential to do to the twenty-first century what The Communist Manifesto did to the twentieth.
Longtime readers know that I credit The Communist Manifesto with teaching me that the key to understanding radical literature is remembering that diagnosis and prescription are distinct skills. All good radicals have (at least) one thing in common: They’re unconstrained by mainstream thinking and conventional wisdom. Radicals challenge the very basic assumptions that trip up their mainstream contemporaries. That vantage point can let them see what others miss. As a result, the best radical observations and diagnoses of deep, broad societal problems are often far more insightful than anything that their more respectable peers can present.
At the same time, however, smart, untethered radicals tend to flatter themselves into thinking that because they alone can see through the fog of conventionality, they alone know how to solve the world’s problems. From there they tend to become dangerously utopian and authoritarian.
The challenge for readers is thus to appreciate the insightful descriptions and diagnoses at the heart of radical problem identification while rejecting the disastrous prescriptions that these same radicals are eager to sell.
No one exemplified this distinction better than Marx. His discussions of the shortcomings of nineteenth century capitalism are truly perceptive. In one of my favorite passages, he explains (without using the words) that capitalists are addicted to constant growth. For Marx, that addiction was a problem. Like the neurotic green folks constantly worried about resource depletion, Marx reasoned that there had to be “limits to growth.” Once the capitalist system hit those limits—that is, once it found itself unable to replace the pre-existing modes of production with a new and superior set—the entire system would implode.
I’m hardly alone in appreciating that passage. Joseph Schumpeter cited it as the basis of his famous theory of “creative destruction” that has come to underpin our understanding of the innovation economy. It’s insightful in ways that few other bits of nineteenth century economic writing can even approach. And though Marx was wrong in foreseeing those limits as imminent, his analysis provides a dire warning: Whenever a political movement downplays growth, it threatens to undermine the entire capitalist system.
Marx was absolutely right about our addiction. Those of us who have benefited from life under market capitalism—meaning nearly everyone alive today—are indeed junkies. We need our next growth fix. The moment the economy stops growing, we shed our generosity, become belligerent, and threaten to fight anyone who looks like they might take our stuff. When and where that situation persists (Venezuela?) freedom and prosperity crumble into dictatorship, economic planning, and misery.
