_ Dr. David Engels, professor, Instytut Zachodni. Posen, 3 August 2021.
In August 2020, the Christian Orthodox publicist Rod Dreher wrote in the American Conservative: “Many conservatives are still working in a very outdated way of thinking that considers big business fundamentally conservative. The idea, a Randian one, is that the economy is the government’s antagonist. And so, for a long time, the conservatives naturally sided with business. But guess what? Big business is now on the other side. It is probably a bigger threat to conservative values than the state.”[1]
Indeed, those corporations that are most likely to serve the liberal ideal of the “self-made man”, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon or even Ikea, are clearly in favour of a culturally and politically left-wing worldview. They are currently the most important forces behind the pseudo-socialist “Great Reset”, i.e., the “long-awaited” transformation of our society, which has now been accelerated with the help of the Corona crisis and cloaked in fine words such as climate protection, tolerance, multiculturalism, self-liberation, and equality.
Liberalism and socialism go hand in hand
I am deliberately writing “pseudo-socialist” here, since liberalism and socialism in their actually existing form are no longer to be thought of as fundamental opposites, but rather as converging forces that argue from different starting points, but ultimately because of their materialistic image of man are attributable to the same ideological school.
This is becoming abundantly clear today, when extreme individualism and extreme collectivism flow into one another, as do left-wing regulation frenzy and big-capitalist lobbying.[2] Marx already predicted, with good reason, that capitalism in its pure form would have to tend towards monopoly and authoritarian structures; he was only wrong when he saw socialism overcoming this state of affairs: in fact, both forces now operate complementarily, not antagonistically.
The result is a new form of government, which Oswald Spengler could call “billionaire socialism”, and which is based primarily on the elimination of the middle class, the classic bearer of bourgeois and democratic ideals.[3]
The “Great Reset” is not a utopia
All that remains is a “liberal” elite, rich beyond imagination, which controls governments, deep state and media through their financial resources and systemic relevance, and the impoverished and disenfranchised masses who is kept happy in a “socialist” manner with bread and games is deprived of a feeling of solidarity and resilience through political indoctrination, ethnic-cultural fragmentation and, last but not least, fear of terrorism or pandemics.
It should by no means be denied that at least some actors in the left as well as in the liberal camp see with horror where their own ideology ultimately leads and accordingly seek to “return” to earlier aggregate states such as the social market economy and classical social democracy.
However, this does not change the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people of both camps misunderstand the “Great Reset” as a utopia and therefore, unanimously and enthusiastically, commit themselves to the fight against conservative social- and thought structures as the allegedly “greatest danger” for the West and thus not realize that by doing this they are undermining the last dams that hold back the chaos.
Planned economy for the masses
Because the Great Reset will hardly be peaceful. In fact, it does not only mean the implementation of a planned economic reality for the overwhelming mass of citizens on the one hand and the consolidation of a previously almost unimaginable abundance of power of the elite on the other, but also the actual end of progress and capitalism, as computerization, robotization, AI and transhumanism threatens to turn the masses into insignificant henchmen in a self-sustaining cycle, which after the extinction of the middle class is based on stagnation instead of expansion.
But stagnation will hardly remain as long as there is competition between the actors in the new system. And this exists in abundance: not only between the big power blocs such as China, the USA, Europe, Russia or even India or Brazil, but also between the various economic competitors and the demagogues and governments they support.
A new age is dawning
Admittedly – the upcoming conflicts, as in the late Roman Republic, are increasingly being fought out not for ideological goals, but for purely power-political issues, but here in spite of everything the changeability of public opinion, the limits of the population’s ability to suffer, the hunger for transcendence and finally the ultimate self-destruction of any “culture of death” bringing unexpected factors into play.
In any case, we have to come to terms with the fact that the old world is irretrievably lost. The wheel of history is likely to advance to its starting point sooner rather than being turned back by a few years. In the West, too, analogous to the Augustan reform in Rome, which tried to legitimize the Caesarist revolution in a mythical-archaic way, will it amount to a kind of “Carolingian” turn as the only way to put billionaire socialism in its place?
Notes
[1] Dreher R. (2020). Woke Capitalism’s Tired Treads. The American Conservative. URL: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-capitalism-tired-treads-goodyear-discrimination/
[2] Lindhoff H. (2018). Zum Schutz der Konzerne – gegen die Freiheit. Junge Freiheit. URL: https://jungefreiheit.de/debatte/kommentar/2018/zum-schutz-der-konzerne-gegen-die-freiheit/
[3] Engels D. (2021). Oswald Spengler: Werk, Deutung, Rezeption. Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Forschung. URL: https://www.kohlhammer.de/wms/instances/KOB/appDE/Geschichte/Neuere-Geschichte/Oswald-Spengler-978-3-17-037494-2
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