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I am providing an honest answer to what I believe was an honest question, “What are your thoughts on this video presentation?“
This response should not be interpreted as an opening for debate, or as a critique of any individual. Only my honest thoughts, based on my own lived experiences and areas of deep study. I don’t know if you are a believer in “Western objectivity” and will be upset that I don’t share the same lens as that part of the videos would be presenting. The video collage was a mixture of lenses I share, and lenses I do not.
I started through the video, but when I started to notice a pattern from the clips from the People's Reset (aka The Greater Reset) conference. I then took a closer look at the conference website.
While I have considerable critiques of what some call the “Western Liberal World Order" (Western Liberal Democracies, Western Market Liberalization, settler-colonialism, IMF/WB/WTO/WIPO, etc), I do not see Western Conservatism (with its even stronger fixations on individualism, individual freedom from responsibility, etc) as the only alternative. I consider that to be a false-binary logical fallacy.
I had a related thread in my notes recently where I was discussing with someone who felt that Western Liberal democracies were the only viable way to govern, from what I could gather largely because they saw Western Conservatism as the alternative that they felt that society needed to be protected from.
In my mind, it is Western worldviews and the silos created by thinking that the full spectrum of political thought fits within Western worldviews that I believe we need protection from.
I’ve been an opponent of the World Economic forum since I first learned about it in the 1990’s, but for what seems to be the opposite reason than a new class of activists oppose it for. I don’t believe that special economic interests and political leaders of allegedly “democratic” governments should be having these forums, and that the fixation on business interests over human interests is what brought us to many of the real problems I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Recent examples:
The “Freedom From Responsibility” convoy that came to my hometown of Ottawa in the context of the responses to the (for decades predicted, but not planned for) COVID Pandemic. These new activists were claiming that they should have some hyper-individualistic “right” to enter everyone else's workplaces in violation of perfectly reasonable PUBLIC health measures. There were no “Vaccine Mandates” as these movements claimed, only perfectly reasonable workplace health and safety mandates.
As an Autistic person, I am hyper-aware of the anti-Autistic (some openly call eugenicist) nature of much of the most vocal anti-vaccination movement, and it was “Autism Moms” (parents of Autistic children who consider their children to be a tragedy) that were behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition to being an anti-vaxxer. While a lawyer doing environmental related work he correctly identified the dishonesty of many corporations in generating harmful pollutants (air, water, food, pharmaceuticals, etc), but deeply stuck within the silo of Western individualistic worldviews has misidentified solutions.
These are not problems which "individual choice” can offer any solutions, as allowing this pollution to be an “individual choice” (with the hyper-Western Capitalistic notion that corporations are humans) is the actual source of the problem. European economic theories (Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc) allow for far too many cost externalities.
I recently wrote a short note about the social dynamic (individualism vs collective health) that I feel is at the core of why there is such a fixation on vaccinations rather than that energy being where it needs to be on food, water and security and other areas that get largely ignored.
This is the same with some of the mythologies presented about Climate Change, something I’ve known about since I was a teen in the 1980’s. It is Western Worldviews, including individualism, Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Extractivism, etc that have brought us to this point.
While we don’t know the exact percentage of Climate Change that is human caused, we do know that economic theories are 100% human – so basic logic and precautionary principles dictate that when there is a conflict between ecological realities and the economic theories of a subset of humans, that it is the economic theories that need to give way.
The WEF being late to trying to do something in relation to climate change is only about conflicts between Extractivist industries in the energy sector (In Canada, the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan as resource-extraction hubs to feed the center of Empire – first the British, then the Canadian – is one example) and the rest of the business community. Their focus is not on the health of human or more-than-human life, but only the health of their Western Capitalist businesses.
I don’t believe the WEF can actually provide solutions to these problems, as the fixation on Western Capitalist ideologies that the WEF represents is the primary source of these problems. The best that forum can offer is harm reduction, not viable long-term solutions.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were impacting the Ozone layer was comparatively easy to solve, as there were not as many narrow special economic (Western Capitalism, etc) interests that were benefitting from the harm.
I hope this was helpful. Sorry it was long, but I wanted to provide a reply to what appeared to be a genuine question.
