It looks extremely rocky for the world at large today
The Doomsday Clock’s near midnight
New Problems here to stay
Hi.
It stops rhyming now.
Some of you may be relieved, but I suspect it will be short lived when you see I am really writing about The Great Reset.
Still here?
What more can there be to say? Why should you spend even a few minutes reading my thoughts about the Catch-All Phrase, attacked from all sides, which expresses an aspect of our post-pandemic predicament very well?
There needs to be a Reset.
Everyone knows this. Just like everyone knows we’ve been ignoring problems and letting them build up for decades so now they are much more difficult to deal with. This fact is widely and deeply understood by almost everyone, even if it is not openly expressed or even internally acknowledged.
With the title of this piece and the image above, I am linking our shared need for epic Heroes to our shared need for some epic Heroic intervention in the bottom of the ninth here on Earth.
They always strike out.
In the late 19th century and into the 20th, a man named DeWolf Hopper, who we would now refer to as a performance artist, recited Casey at the Bat before live audiences over 10,000 times.
Casey struck out every time.
Did you know there are poems recounting the Son of Casey at the Bat, the Daughter of Casey at the Bat, and the Return of Casey at the Bat?
They all strike out.
Most people in the United States have some awareness of Casey at the Bat unless they are total newcomers. It is one of the most well-known expressions of Americana, crossing lines that creativity usually doesn’t — and it is about Striking Out.
Actually, it’s about more than striking out. Look at Casey in the drawing Now that’s a Hero, not an ordinary person like the rest of us. His attitude is so clear and recognizable you can see it in a line drawing.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped;
That ain’t my style, said Casey. Strike One the Umpire said.
You only have three strikes in baseball, so you’d think that would get his attention, but no. That’s not how heroes act.
He signaled to the pitcher, once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it — the umpire said, "Strike two!"
Having two strikes isn’t the end if you’re smart, like Tony Gwynn, the best two-strike hitter in baseball history, who used his strikes to learn about the pitcher, not to cop an attitude.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
they knew he wouldn’t let that ball go by again.
The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clinched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
Is that a mind-set or a bodily posture likely to lead to success?
Casey struck himself out by not paying attention and then by getting mad. Plenty of stories about Gods and Goddesses in every cultural tradition are about Heroes screwing up by copping an attitude and then getting mad.
We’ve been warned.
Still, the World Economic Foundation is presenting itself as the Hero, with the Great Reset Solution that will save us and Win the Game.
I do think a Great Reset is needed, but I believe the Heroic WEF version will strike out as they always do.
Giving power to heroes through beliefs about them and emotional investments in them diminishes something personal and individual. It diminishes exactly what we need to touch and reset in ourselves, by ourselves. It is what this unrequested interval creates not just the opportunity to do, but the necessity of doing it.
Just to get a bit more complicated: Please imagine the stick figure above as a real person, even, say, a billionaire. But not Bill Gates. This is not Bill Gates.
Because if Bill Gates were somehow deeply involved in the World Economic Foundation version of a Great Reset, that would just be crazy. He is the symbol of everything smug and arrogant and also looked up to and almost deified because of some definition of success he has achieved.
The Great Reset would be seen as a self-serving boost for capitalism in its final battle with the planet if it’s really a Bill Gates project No one wants that, right? This theme has been worked and re-worked. Naomi Klein did a great job as you would expect, especially on this topic.
Bill Gates confuses the issue. Bill Gates or no Bill Gates — the only possible planet-level plan would have to come from some network of tech geniuses and military-intelligence overlords.
If you wouldn’t mind looking at the stick figure again I think you might recognize the faceless person who you vaguely hope might figure out something.
I know I do.
I always have. Decades of science fiction reading have given me a library full of solutions for problems our species hasn’t even encountered yet.
Techno-Optimism is not a mental framework that is easy to let go of when you have bought into it for so long. We are deeply conditioned to believe in the power of Science to solve the biggest and scariest problems.
They’ll figure out the climate stuff, come up with something, just in time
They won’t.
In this case, the They really isn’t Bill Gates — they’re the unknown inventors, or the task force that Hits the Homerun that will save us all. Even though the psychopaths who own the inventors and fund the task forces could care less.
It’s hard to let go of Them solving this.
Bucky Fuller was optimistic about technology, which was very attractive when I was a young man. I made him into a Hero. I wrote and asked if I could come and work with him. He wrote back and said do it yourself.
It sounds strange but he considered himself to be an ordinary person. In 1927, at the age of 32, he felt like a total failure and prepared to take his life. Instead, he had an epiphany and dedicated himself to humanity and to showing what an ordinary person could do to help everyone.
His personal Great Reset propelled him through forty years of astonishing creativity and inventiveness, while humanity mostly ignored his dedication. Then, in 1968 he was featured in the the first Whole Earth Catalog and suddenly, in his 70s, simulation modeling was all the rage and geodesic structures were everywhere.
For the next 15 years he became the kind of hero who wouldn’t let us diminish ourselves, who insisted that we roll up our sleeves and do anticipatory design projects in the world.
He still inspires me — not to sit in the stands and cheer for him, but to work with things and ideas that might help humanity succeed.
I do not expect that each of us through our own Great Resets will end up with unusual forms of matter named after us, as Bucky has with Buckminsterfullerenes.
I also anticipate that the top-down changes we will experience in the name of security and stability in the WEF’s Great Reset world will be difficult to accept and dangerous to resist. Non-compliance will draw unwanted attention. A non-conforming life will require a high level of personal responsibility.
The personal Great Reset we each need to make is about accepting who we are and acting responsibly. Not offloading the heroic parts to superstars or vague forces that might save us. We have to notice the top-down changes going on around us and continue with our own projects, knowing that what we do matters because we are ordinary people.