Kerby Anderson
Is the idea of “The Great Reset” merely a conspiracy theory? That seems unlikely given the fact that if you type in those three words in a search engine, you will find more than 900 million hits.
Last year the founder of the World Economic Forum co-authored and published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. The authors see the current situation in the world as a means of dealing with the “weaknesses of capitalism” supposedly exposed during the pandemic.
But to understand the history of “The Great Reset,” you need to go back to 2010 when urban studies scholar Richard Florida wrote a book with that title. He argued that the 2008 economic crash was the latest in a series of great resets that included the Great Depression of the 1930s. A few years later, the book and its ideas became the basis for wanting to “push the reset button” on the world economies.
Today, it is probably fair to say that the phrase “The Great Reset” means different things to different people. Environmental groups want to reset how we use resources and focus on sustainability. Business leaders want banks and corporations to use an ESG index (environmental, social, and governance index). Globalists want to reset the economy and move us toward what has been called “stakeholder capitalism,” or what others have called “communist capitalism.”
Critics talk about some of the other factors associated with “The Great Reset.” That would include such things as the promotion of uncontrolled immigration along with significant money printing. That results in problems like open borders and uncontrolled inflation.
The phrase “The Great Reset” may mean different things to different people. And as you can see, some of the ideas associated with it are bad for our country and us.

Kerby Anderson
Let me introduce you to a word that is probably new to you but will probably be used much more in the future. Decades ago, when I talked about concepts like “secular humanism” or the “New Age Movement” on radio, I think most listeners wondered why I was talking about such philosophical concepts. But they soon learned how important they were.
The word is “panopticon.” It is used in two YouTube videos I’ve seen and is used many times in one of the books I am reading. The idea was formulated by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to construct a way in which a watchman could keep an eye on lots of prisoners in a prison. A central tower was surrounded by cells with a bright light shining from it, so the prisoners were unable to see the watchman. Therefore, they had to assume they were always under observation.
The word panopticon is now being used to describe our world of digital surveillance. You might think that this is merely another way to describe “Big Brother” in the book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but there is a significant difference. The primary tools in that totalitarian state were posters and huge “telescreens,” which were a constant reminder you were being watched.
The Big Brother metaphor fails to capture what is happening in our current age of surveillance. We never know who is listening or when they are listening. People in China know the government is watching and listening and even giving them a social credit score. In this country, we know government and corporations are watching and listening to us through our phones, computers, smart watches, and even through security cameras. But we are never sure who is watching and when because we live in a digital panopticon.