The Great Reset

Most people have at least heard the term “Great Reset” by now. It surfaced hard in 2020 and has been in the background of public conversation ever since, sometimes treated as a serious policy framework, more often dismissed as conspiracy thinking. I’ve been turning it over for a while, and what’s brought it back to the front of my mind recently is the ongoing military conflict in the Middle East and what it illustrates about how global events eventually land at home.

We’re watching governments attack energy infrastructure as a deliberate military strategy. We’ve seen mass blackouts in Cuba, a country that was already under severe economic strain, accelerate social collapse. These things happen somewhere else, to someone else, until they don’t. There’s a particular kind of American confidence, hubris, really, that says “it can’t happen here.” That it’s different, that the infrastructure is too robust, that the institutions are too stable. I think that’s naive. Not because collapse is inevitable, but because the assumption of immunity tends to prevent people from thinking clearly about risk. History doesn’t grant exceptions based on geography.

That framing, global instability eventually becoming personal, is the lens I want to apply to the Great Reset specifically. Not as a doomsday argument, but as a practical one. The phrase refers to a real set of stated goals, real institutional actors, and real changes already underway. You don’t have to speculate. You can just read what they wrote.

This is an attempt to do that, to look at what has actually been said, by whom, in what contexts, and what it points toward. And then to think about what an appropriate individual response looks like.

What Was Actually Said

The term was popularized by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum in 2020, but the ideas behind it have a longer history. Schwab’s book COVID-19: The Great Reset laid out an argument that the pandemic represented an opportunity to restructure global systems, economic, social, and political, in ways that would otherwise have taken decades to accomplish.

The stated goals include things that sound reasonable in isolation: reducing inequality, transitioning to clean energy, increasing global coordination on shared challenges. The language is technocratic and optimistic. What’s worth paying attention to is the frame around those goals, who decides, how, and with what mechanisms of accountability.

Some of the specific language that drew attention:

“You will own nothing and be happy”, attributed to a 2016 WEF piece predicting life in 2030
“Stakeholder capitalism”, a model in which corporations take on social and political roles traditionally held by governments or civil society
“Fourth Industrial Revolution”, Schwab’s framing of the convergence of digital, physical, and biological systems, including surveillance infrastructure, AI governance, and digital identity

These aren’t fringe ideas. They’re the stated agenda of an organization that convenes heads of state, central bankers, and the CEOs of the world’s largest companies every year in Davos.

The Institutions Behind It

The WEF is one node in a broader network. Understanding the full picture means looking at:

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of central banks, coordinating monetary policy across nations outside of democratic oversight
The IMF and World Bank, which condition loans on structural reforms that often include privatization, reduced sovereignty over currency, and alignment with global standards
The United Nations’ Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals framework, which is voluntary in name but functions as a coordinating mechanism across governments, NGOs, and corporations
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which together hold ownership stakes in a significant fraction of all publicly traded companies, creating a concentration of economic power with no historical precedent
The Gates Foundation and related philanthropic infrastructure, which funds global health, agriculture, and education policy in ways that often align with the same agenda

None of these organizations are secret. Their reports are public. Their meetings are documented. The coordination between them is explicit. What’s less visible is the degree to which national governments, media organizations, and academic institutions have become financially dependent on this network.

The Dollar and the Petrodollar System

If there’s a single thread that ties the Great Reset conversation to concrete geopolitical reality, it’s the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the accelerating movement away from it.

To understand what’s at stake, you have to understand how the current system was built. After Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold in 1971, the US made a series of agreements with Saudi Arabia to price oil exclusively in dollars. Since every country in the world needs oil, and oil could only be purchased in dollars, every country in the world needed to hold dollar reserves. This created permanent global demand for the currency and gave the US what French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege”, the ability to run persistent trade and budget deficits, export inflation, and finance its government at lower cost than any other nation. The entire global financial architecture that followed, dollar-denominated commodity markets, SWIFT, US Treasury bonds as the world’s reserve asset, was built on top of this arrangement.

The system held for fifty years. What’s changed is that a growing coalition of countries has decided they want out of it, or at minimum, wants alternatives.

The most visible signal is BRICS. What began as an informal grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa has expanded significantly: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia joined in 2024, with dozens more countries in various stages of membership discussions. This coalition now represents a majority of the world’s population, a substantial share of global GDP, and, critically, a large fraction of global oil and gas production. The expansion of BRICS is not primarily an economic story. It’s a statement about dollar dependency and the desire to reduce it.

The weaponization of the dollar accelerated this. When the US and its allies froze approximately $300 billion in Russian sovereign reserves following the Ukraine invasion, it sent a message to every country holding dollar assets: those assets can be confiscated. Countries that are not US allies, and many that are, took note. If dollar reserves can be frozen, they are not truly reserves. The incentive to diversify into gold, other currencies, and alternative settlement systems became immediate and practical rather than theoretical.

Saudi Arabia has publicly discussed pricing oil in yuan. Russia and China are settling bilateral trade in rubles and renminbi. India is buying Russian oil in rupees. The share of global trade settled in dollars has been declining. These are not dramatic events individually. As a trend, they represent the slow-motion unwinding of the petrodollar arrangement that has underpinned American economic dominance.

What this means for the reset is that the transition isn’t just ideological, it’s structural. The dollar losing reserve currency status would be among the most significant economic events in modern history for Americans specifically. The US has been able to consume more than it produces, finance its deficits cheaply, and project military power globally in large part because the world needed dollars. If that changes, the adjustment is severe: import costs rise, interest rates rise, the government faces fiscal constraints it has never operated under, and living standards decline. This is not a distant hypothetical. It’s a transition already underway, with a timeline that most serious analysts put at somewhere between ten and thirty years.

The IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR), a reserve asset valued against a basket of currencies including the dollar, euro, yuan, yen, and pound, is one candidate for what comes next at the institutional level. A BRICS-backed commodity currency is another. A system of bilateral CBDCs that bypass dollar settlement entirely is a third. What replaces the dollar matters enormously, and the institutions shaping that transition are the same ones that show up throughout this discussion.

The Pattern

The consistent theme across all of these is centralization, of decision-making, of infrastructure, of identity systems, of money. The direction of travel is toward fewer chokepoints with more control.

There’s a secondary pattern worth naming: when you see sweeping systemic changes rolled out at speed, especially during a crisis, it means the planning was done well in advance. Crisis creates the political and social conditions for changes that would otherwise take decades or face significant resistance. But the changes themselves don’t get designed in the moment. Think tanks, policy white papers, tabletop exercises, simulation events, the playbook gets written years ahead of time. Event 201, the pandemic preparedness simulation run by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the WEF, and the Gates Foundation in October 2019, is probably the most cited example: a tabletop exercise simulating a global coronavirus pandemic, held two months before COVID-19 emerged. Whether that’s coincidence or something else is a question people will disagree about. What isn’t disputed is that the simulation existed, that its participants overlapped significantly with the institutions that shaped the policy response, and that the response itself moved with unusual speed and coordination across countries that don’t typically move in lockstep. Speed at that scale requires pre-existing frameworks. The frameworks exist. That’s the thing to understand.

Some specific areas worth watching:

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

Digital money issued directly by central banks, programmable, traceable, and potentially subject to conditions on use. Multiple countries are in advanced development stages: China’s digital yuan is already in broad circulation, the EU is actively developing a digital euro, and the U.S. Federal Reserve has published research on a digital dollar. The difference between a CBDC and current digital money isn’t just technical, it’s the ability to set expiration dates on funds, restrict purchases to approved categories, or freeze access without going through a commercial bank. No intermediary. No appeal. When the infrastructure exists to attach conditions to money itself, the definition of financial freedom changes substantially.

Digital Identity and Health Sovereignty

A convergence of government ID, health records, financial accounts, and potentially social behavior scores into a single credential. The stated case is convenience and security. The unstated implication is that access to services becomes conditional on the credential being in good standing.

The COVID-19 vaccine passport programs were the clearest test of this so far. Multiple governments tied access to travel, employment, restaurants, and public venues to proof of vaccination status, either through a digital certificate or a QR code linked to a health database. Whatever your view on the vaccines themselves, the structural precedent is worth examining separately: the machinery of conditional access based on medical compliance was built, deployed, and normalized in a matter of months. The infrastructure doesn’t go away when the emergency does. Health sovereignty, the principle that what you do with your own body is your own business, runs directly into this architecture. If a credential system can restrict travel, employment, or financial services based on health status, the leverage over personal medical decisions becomes very large. The question isn’t whether that was the intent in 2020. It’s whether the precedent exists. It does.

Most people associate social credit with China, which is accurate, China’s system is the most developed and explicit example. It aggregates data across financial behavior, social media activity, legal records, and reported conduct to generate scores that affect access to travel, education, employment, and loans. Citizens with low scores have been publicly listed, banned from purchasing plane and train tickets, and had their children barred from certain schools. The system is real, documented, and operational.

What’s worth watching in the West is how similar mechanisms are being built through different channels, less visibly, more incrementally. Insurance companies already use behavioral and lifestyle data to set rates. Banks use algorithmic risk scoring that incorporates non-financial data. Social media platforms deplatform, demonetize, or shadow-restrict content and accounts based on opaque criteria. Credit card companies have explored flagging purchases at certain legal retailers. None of these individually constitute a social credit system. Together, across enough domains, the functional effect converges. You don’t need a government-run score if private institutions, coordinated, incentivized, or pressured, are each applying their own slice of the same logic. The infrastructure for soft social credit already exists in the West. It’s just distributed.

15-Minute Cities and Smart City Infrastructure

The 15-minute city concept is framed as an urban planning ideal: everything you need within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Presented that way, it sounds reasonable, even appealing. What gets less attention is the infrastructure required to enforce it, and the fact that several implementations have moved from design principle to movement restriction. Oxford’s traffic filter scheme created zones that residents needed permits to move between by car, with cameras monitoring compliance. The framing was environmental. The mechanism was surveillance and restriction of movement. Portland, Paris, and several other cities have implemented or are piloting similar schemes.

Smart city infrastructure more broadly, sensor networks, connected traffic systems, facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, digital payment systems, creates a data layer over physical space that can be used to monitor, incentivize, or restrict movement and behavior. When combined with a digital identity system and a programmable currency, the ability to manage population behavior without explicit laws becomes significant. You don’t have to ban something. You just make it inconvenient, expensive, or eventually impossible within the system. The city becomes the control mechanism. The question worth asking about any smart city initiative isn’t whether the stated goal sounds good. It’s what the infrastructure enables once it exists.

Land and Food

Global farmland is being consolidated at an unprecedented rate. Bill Gates has become the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, a fact that received little mainstream coverage relative to its significance. Regulatory pressure on small and independent farming is increasing across the developed world, particularly in the Netherlands and Ireland, where governments have moved to forcibly reduce livestock numbers under emissions targets, triggering significant farmer protests that were largely ignored by international media.

The transition to synthetic and lab-grown protein is being heavily funded and promoted by the same network of foundations and investment vehicles that show up across this agenda. The “eat the bugs” meme is easy to dismiss as internet absurdity, but it has a real origin, the WEF and UN Food and Agriculture Organization have both published material promoting insect protein as a sustainable alternative to conventional meat. The meme caught on because it compressed something real: a global elite advocating dietary changes for ordinary people while their own habits remain unchanged. Whether insect protein becomes mainstream is almost beside the point. The question of who controls food production, what alternatives get funded versus suppressed, and what pressure gets applied to conventional farming in the name of climate policy, these are not small questions. Food is the most fundamental dependency there is.

Dependence and Sovereignty

The thing worth sitting with isn’t whether any particular conspiracy theory is true. It’s a simpler question: how dependent are you on systems you don’t control and don’t fully understand?

Most people in the developed world are dependent on:

A financial system they can be removed from
A food supply they couldn’t replicate
An energy grid they have no backup for
Information networks controlled by a small number of private companies
A medical system with significant conflicts of interest

This isn’t alarmism. It’s just an accurate description of the situation. The degree to which that dependence is a problem depends on how stable you believe those systems to be, and how much you trust the people running them.

Preparedness as a Posture

Before getting to the practical list, it’s worth sitting with some direct questions. Not rhetorical ones, actual questions worth having answers to.

If the power went out for an extended period, not a few hours, but days or weeks, what would you do? How would you keep food cold, heat your home, charge anything, pump water if you’re on a well? How long could you actually function?

If the internet went down, no GPS, no online banking, no digital communication, no access to anything cloud-based, what breaks in your life immediately? Most people haven’t thought about this because it feels inconceivable. That’s exactly the problem.

Most grocery stores carry approximately three days of food inventory at any given time. This isn’t a secret, it’s a known feature of just-in-time supply chain systems, which are efficient and extremely fragile. A supply chain disruption, a trucker strike, a regional emergency, or a simple panic-buying event can empty shelves in hours. If that happened in your city tomorrow, what do you have at home? How long could you feed your family without a grocery run?

If you had a medical emergency or a security situation and called 911, but the system was overwhelmed, offline, or simply slow, what then? In a serious grid-down or civil disruption scenario, emergency services are among the first things stretched past their limits. The assumption that help is always one phone call away is one of the most deeply held and least examined beliefs most Americans carry.

These aren’t designed to be scary. They’re designed to be honest. Most people in the developed world have outsourced almost every basic function of survival to systems they don’t control and have never thought about. That’s a reasonable way to live when everything works. It’s a liability when things don’t.

Reducing dependence doesn’t require going off-grid or believing the worst. It’s more of an orientation, a preference for optionality and resilience over pure convenience.

Some things worth thinking about:

Financial, hard assets, multiple currencies, some portion of savings outside the banking system, understanding of how monetary systems actually work
Food, at minimum, 30 days of non-perishable food on hand; ideally some capacity to grow, preserve, or source food outside supermarket supply chains; relationships with local farmers
Water, stored water or a reliable filtration system; most people haven’t thought about this at all
Energy, backup power, some capacity to heat and operate without grid dependency for extended periods
Medical, a meaningful first aid kit, basic training, prescription stockpiling where possible, knowledge of what to do when you can’t immediately get professional help
Communication, a way to communicate and get information that doesn’t depend on the internet or cell networks; a hand-crank or battery radio is a start
Skills, practical skills that are valuable independent of economic conditions: growing food, basic medicine, building, fixing things
Community, probably the most important one. Local relationships and mutual aid networks are more resilient than any individual preparation. You can’t stockpile your way to security, the people around you matter more than almost anything else

There’s another dimension to preparedness that most people don’t think about: optionality of location. Resilience where you are matters, but in scenarios involving serious civil conflict, infrastructure collapse, or state overreach, sometimes the best option is simply to be somewhere else. History is full of people who saw trouble coming and left, and people who stayed too long because they couldn’t imagine things getting bad enough to justify leaving, or because they lacked the means.

Not everyone has that option, and acknowledging that matters. International mobility requires resources: a valid passport, savings in accessible forms, some knowledge of where you’d actually go and what that would require. Dual citizenship, if you can obtain it, is one of the most underrated forms of personal sovereignty, a legal right of exit that no single government can unilaterally revoke. Some countries offer residency or citizenship by investment. Others have bilateral agreements that make relocation more accessible. This isn’t about abandoning your country at the first sign of difficulty. It’s about not being trapped by circumstance if the situation genuinely deteriorates. The people who have options tend to fare better than the people who don’t, across almost every historical scenario of serious instability.

The goal isn’t paranoia. It’s not building a bunker because you think the world is ending. It’s closing the gap between where you are and where you’d need to be if the systems you depend on stopped working, even briefly, even partially, and having more than one path available to you. That gap is worth knowing.

A Note on How to Think About This

There’s a temptation, once you start looking at this material, to move into either full belief or full dismissal. Both are mistakes.

The elite coordination is real and documented. The stated goals are publicly available. The direction of travel is observable. The intent, at this point, is not particularly hidden, it’s in the papers, the speeches, the simulations, the policy frameworks. What’s genuinely uncertain is timeline and outcome. Plans don’t always execute. Systems resist capture. People within institutions push back. The future isn’t determined.

The useful posture is something like: take the stated goals seriously, watch the actual mechanisms, reduce your exposure to the chokepoints, and don’t let the complexity of it become a reason for passivity. You don’t have to understand everything to make good decisions about your own situation.

Vigilance isn’t the same as fear. Fear is passive, it waits for something bad to happen and then reacts. Vigilance is active, it pays attention, stays informed, notices when the stated reasons for a policy don’t match the mechanisms being built, and doesn’t look away because the subject is uncomfortable. It asks who benefits. It reads the primary sources. It keeps asking the question even when the official answer sounds reasonable.

The systems described in this article are not finished. They’re being built incrementally, often under benign-sounding names, often during moments of crisis when scrutiny is lowest. The best time to understand them is before they’re complete. That’s what vigilance is for.