After more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all its global consequences, producing predictions and prognoses on how the world would look like after this storm is over proves to rather be a race of suppositions and uncertainties. The fight against this disease strongly depends on unpredictable and instable factors.

How long will it last and how many waves will there be? How deep and long-lasting will the aftermath of the containment measures be? What sort of instruments will we use to assess the loss of human lives, unemployment, bankruptcies, educational unbalance? How far will the political governance systems infiltrate societies, economies, fundamental rights and liberties? These are just a few basic questions on how our immediate future will look like either on a global level, or on a national level, and how will societies cope. The magnitude and rhythm of these actions is yet unknown.

What we can assume, without the fear of making mistakes is the – already present – reality that all the shortcomings, failures, missteps and flaws in the global security system that fights against the rising tide of the pandemic and its adjacent crises, will be sensed directly and gradually by all economies, policies and societies. They will also make the recovery more difficult and more expensive when it comes to institutions, structures, systems and entities that have not had the ability to join the global apparatus that manages the challenges of the pandemic, challenges which are still here and will linger.

An institutional reset and revival involve and will require rethinking and redefining priorities in the field of international relations.

Source: dailymotion.com

Such a process does not come easy; however, it is vital and it must include a joint will and effort to re-establish the balance of the way the political decision-making and the implementation of these decisions in relation to relevant threats (from threatening conflicts, to bio-security of the global human community and climate change) are prioritized and done.

Except for the two world wars, the coronavirus pandemic can be regarded as the most serious crisis that has hit this planet simultaneously, without discrimination and from all sides in all sectors –social, medical, economic, communicational, educational and governmental. Under such circumstances, concerns and uncertainties are justified. Also justified is the insidious pressure that makes us wonder about a world order where “the world after” will be forced to survive and protect its existence, values and identities.

Anticipating the Global Future

For the past decade the world has faced a series of crises more or less dramatic, which all had in common an unpredictable (and ipso facto), shocking occurrence that came with the inability or unwillingness to predict and anticipate prevention measures.

Looking back at the last century and excluding the apocalypse of the two world wars, we can safely say that the coronavirus pandemic is the most serious crisis that has occurred so far, a sad series of events that the generations of this historical period are forced to experience, a period that viral voices of our time accurately call “postmodern era”.

Let us recall – just to refresh our memory – some of the shock-waves that have impacted us recently:

- The crisis that in 2010 affected the entire European area, with a huge impact on the security systems and a high degree of austerity and social and institutional alienation.

- The popular riots that, one year later and under the name of “The Arab Spring”, took over the entire Middle East and Northern Africa and produced, at the same time the reconfiguration of the regional system, when national and nationalist interests emerged and when foreign powers widely intervened because of the swift rise of jihadi Islam.

- The migration boom in 2015 and the increase of the flow of refugees that was accompanied, on the most part of Europe, by the rise of populist and nationalist-chauvinistic national political current which challenged the liberal international order and favoured a nationalist separatism that was highly prejudiced.

- The start, in 2016 of the mandate of the Donald Trump administration, which meant four years of American isolation disguised under nationalist slogans, such as “America First” and “Make America Great Again”, and a turbulent foreign policy strategy uncooperative with the global community, international organisations and treaties.

The fact that the world is under pressure, along with the scepticism that often makes political decision-makers ignore prediction efforts should not mean that the prognosis and prediction endeavour is to be abandoned. On the contrary, it should be regarded as priority for all joint global multidisciplinary efforts. Analysing the future does not mean predicting concrete events and evolutions, but rather drawing the attention of the decision-makers on possible evolutions and trends, which, at some point, can become challenges and threats.

But even the accuracy of these prognoses and warnings will be affected and lose value as long as the recipients of these prognoses – political planners and decision-makers – are influenced by subjective or mercantile factors, such as ideology, the power and influence struggle, or the tendency to make decisions based on the rapacious need for personal or clan gains, at the expense of fundamental values, such as: equal opportunities, liberty, justice, the benefit of the entire social construct, or lack of discrimination.

Looking forward to a post-pandemic world whose construct can only be imagined or left to our expectations and ambitions, the efforts to draw a near future as accurately as possible will have to focus on rethinking and reinterpreting the need to appeal to the potential of prediction and introspection of non-state actors from various cultural backgrounds, actors who are really familiar with realities that are usually masked and hidden behind official political discourses. Such efforts, if associated to cooperation, inclusion and global perspectives, would only bring a valuable contribution to improving paradigms and narrowing down the rifts, cleavages and conflicts that divide the contemporary world, and to smoothening the road towards the “normal world” of tomorrow.

“The Great Reset” – A New World, the Same People?

In 1992, the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama shook the intellectual and cultural world with his best-seller The End of History and the Last Man.

The main idea developed by the author is that the end of the Cold War and the Fall of the Berlin Wall marked the victory and the absolute and irreversible supremacy of liberal democracy and capitalism, over all other political ideologies, as well as economic and governance systems. Despite the acclaim it gained, Fukuyama’s book was not deprived of criticism. One of those critics, who was very direct, was the French philosopher of Algerian origin Jacques Derrida (the main advocate of the deconstruction theory), to whom, “The End of History” is nothing but a depiction of the very decorative display of a prevailing capitalism (especially the American capitalism) where the “New Man” lives - a “New Man” that Derrida sceptically and sarcastically compares to the new man promoted by the Marxist communist avatars.

If Fukuyama’s theory succeeded a historical crossroad – the world ceasing to be divided in two hostile halves – the European East on one side and the “free world”, the Western hemisphere on the other, the crisis of the COVID-19 global pandemic set the ground, ever since its outbreak, for the ante factum spread of the cold and triumphant theory regarding “the end of history” and the fundamental “reset” of a new world. And we are referring to the viral theory called The Great Reset for the English-speakers and La grande réinitialisation for the French speakers. The Great Reset theory and the ideas it includes were, at least during the past few years, at the top of the topics of the annual sessions of the World Economic Forum, whose founder and executive chairman is the German economist Klaus Schwab. The Forum is also known as the Davos Economic Forum, after the Swiss city bearing the same name, where the first annual reunion of this organisation took place, a non-profit organisation/foundation dedicated to continuously improving the world order, while focusing on its economic sectors and mechanisms.

Klaus Schwab

The 2021 session of the Davos Economic Forum which took place in January as a webinar (because of the pandemic) was different because of its online format and because the participants were for the first time presented an agenda of guidelines for global reset, just like the one included in Klaus Schwab’s most recent book COVID-19 the Great Reset, which joins three other works on the same subject: Stakeholder Capitalism – A Global Economy, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Stakeholder Capitalism – A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet. All these volumes are visibly under the sign of the slogan of the author himself, who said that “the COVID-19 outbreak is the first step towards an unprecedented control over mankind”.

After all, what does The Great Reset really calls for, as its theorists and supporters claim?

In short, according to Klaus Schwab, this process is seen as a cluster of global reform strategies and practices meant to create a better economic, social, political and environmental world, that is less divided and destructive, more inclusive and just.

Nothing could be better, critics say, if the road to hell had not been paved with good intentions. Moreover, even before these experts, those who started questioning this theory were leaders taking part in the Forum, future managers of the Great Reset, as well as prestigious newspapers. Let us hear what they had to say:

- Wall Street Journal wrote: „To claim that great businessmen could, besides making profit, build a better world, means listening to counter-arguments eventually leading to the conclusion that business leaders could actually make the world worse than it already is – which is exactly what Mr. Schwab wants.”

- Manuel Macron, the French President said: “We should focus on inequalities caused by capitalism, as they provide the solution to come out of the pandemic”.

- The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel stated: “Do we really need Schwab’s Great Reset? Yes, or no?”

- To Vladimir Putin, “Klaus Schwab’s theory is simple and hypocritical, similar to a dark anomaly”.

This dystopia where the elements of a living organism are chaotically rearranged has led, for the time being, to the spread of the criticism aimed at Klaus Schwab’s vision, who is being accused of wanting to praise “the triumph of capitalism” that Fukuyama was referring to, and to plot “a conspiracy of the global elites”, that would eventually lead to a new system of global governance.

Those who, without being accused of conspiring, disagree with a new world order, insufficiently defined and not so convincing, wish to know the answer to this vital question: “Who are those who will execute the Great Reset and who or what are those who will fall in the category of the resetees?” The question is all the more relevant as it is related to Schwab’s claim we mentioned above: “the COVID-19 outbreak is the first step towards an unprecedented control over mankind”. Nevertheless, hasn’t this first step or half of it been already taken before the days of the pandemic?

Taking a closer look at the ideas of the German theorist of the universal “reset”, we will see that we are facing a conundrum that is neither newly born, nor conceived overnight. We are referring to the adapted version of an older obsession. The concept of global governance is old, and has been altered through the ages and given different names. The famous magnate John Rockefeller ardently supported the idea of a “world government”, Zbigniew Brzezinski focused on the “grand chessboard” and foretold the “disappearance of the national sovereign state”, George Bush launched in the ‘90s the idea of a “new world order”, and the 46^th US president, Joe Biden plans a “recalibration” of the international relations.

Yet, in this euphoria of resets, restarts, recalibrations, and cyclical pretences, where do people fit in?

“…The Measure of All Things”

Whether we find ourselves in the mythical chapter of the Genesis, or in Darwin’s materialistic evolutionist discourse, man’s road through existence was built on two fundamental coordinates that were, at the same time, two long and ascending processes of evolution – the hominization process of biological development, and the humanisation process, of cultural development. Many ages passed before the ancient philosopher Protagoras uttered his famous dictum, according to which Man is the measure of all things. Going through the phases of our evolution we proudly thought ourselves to be centrum mundi, homo faber, homo erectus, and homo cogitans, before discovering that this anthropocentrism proved to be a conceited illusion of a bipedal living in a universe that changed from a geocentric one to a heliocentric one, he himself travelling through space together with a piece of galaxy, lost in its turn in chaos, alone among thousands and thousands of universes that we know very little about. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas (Vanity of vanities, all (is) vanity: earthly life is ultimately empty.) decided the Ecclesiastes long before the occurrence of these successive revolutions – Renaissance, Enlightenment and Humanism – the ages of homo nudus, homo invictus, of the rebellion against the almighty, centuries-long, theocratic tyranny, the times of reason and unleashed free-will.

The numerous stages of our anthropological chronicle have been summed up in an obsessive suffix, added at the end of the basic word: -ism. Its dynamic spread did not spare mankind, and, on its way to evolution and self-improvement, everything that we have known to be human, humane, every value, aspiration, the positivity of the universal message that “man is the measure of all things” ended up being known as “humanism”.

Humanism, Transhumanism, Posthumanism, the Human Cyborg

In the history of ideas and civilisation – mostly Western – humanism was divided in two fundamental ways of expressing itself, known as two co-existing trends. We are foremost referring to the humanism that depicts the human being as the master of the world and of the universe, sometimes becoming God, the measure of all things, the source of all values, the supreme purpose of the evolution. Secondly, we are referring to the humanism described by Montaigne (“Every man is my compatriot.”) and improved by Montesquieu, who stated that “should I choose between my country and mankind, I choose the latter”. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen defined humanism’s universality, stating that every member of our species is a human, proclaiming mutual respect for each other and establishing the principles of brotherhood and love as the basis of our human identity.

Today, when the –isms took over the ideational speech, harmoniously linked to the very evolution of our society, and projected us into postmodernism, and its current theories – many utopians, and others managing to start trends and schools – the mere essence of anthropological values is being questioned, values that apparently have lost their appeal and usefulness. This implies the complete conceptual reset of the human being and their humanism. Therefore, we are currently living in the age of transhumanism, posthumanism, and even hyper-humanism, which are only conceptualised at the level of visionary imagology.

Transhumanism, just as its name suggests, represents a stage in a transitional process – from a historical anthropological state to a post humanistic one, which inspired by science fiction and nourished by the tumultuous progress of futuristic sciences and technologies intends to “reset” the human being and slowly turn them into a machine, into the human cyborg, the machine-man, an artificial intelligence, the man-god, the digit-man, a uniform mass (the pandemic advertised the idea of the “mob”, adopted from “reformist” theories as the archetype of the future structure of the “recalibrated” society), and in the end, into a dehumanized man.

If transhumanism considers the human condition as being the age of the absolute interference of high-end science and technology in the intimate circle of the anthroposphere, posthumanism claims to be the most ardent critic of the humanism built on anthropocentric beliefs, and proposes the removal of all hierarchies and boundaries that separate the thinking man and his technological environment, until he becomes the machines’ uncensored employee.

Applied to the theories of the Great Reset and to those of the fourth industrial revolution ideologically founded by Klaus Schwab, the above aim at an anamorph globalisation where the individual becomes a number, a docile entity free of “daily concerns”, such as feelings, free-thought, sense of ownership, sense of identity, and without human rights and liberties. A state of things that Klaus Schwab himself put into words as follows: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy about it”.

Instead of conclusion, a question addressed to future Davos participants: How many of the citizens of this planet will rush to give up their own identities, their own wealth and domestic “bliss”, in exchange for the great happiness promised by Klaus Schwab?