The Great Reset. Middle Nation Podcast (E:14)

(S) Assalamu Alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. This is Shahid Bolson and the Middle Nation podcast episode number 14. This is going to be sort of a continuation of the same theme as the last couple of podcasts. Because someone asked me to comment on what's referred to as the great reset. The great reset, I believe, is a term that was coined by the World Economic Forum for the transformation of the global economy ostensibly necessitated by COVID-19. But it refers to something that was always going to happen and has been in the works for a long time. The pandemic simply provided an opportunity to drastically accelerate the process. Now, there are a few key elements to this transformation, in my opinion. One is demographics, one is technology, and one is transportation or more specifically fuel. Let's start with demographics because it impacts everything. Demographic trends are in the process of depopulating many of the world's most developed countries. As I've talked about in the last couple of podcasts, baby boomers are getting old. And for one thing that explains the recent upsurge in the power, importance, and influence of the pharmaceutical industry. But not only are they getting old, they are retiring. Except for in the United States, the baby boomer generation didn't have a lot of kids. This is left most of the Western world with a rapidly evaporating labor supply and shrinking consumer base for their economies. This means that they urgently need to restructure their models for productivity and growth. They don't have enough young people to carry on the models that they have been following for the last, well, forever. Smaller populations mean lower productivity and less consumption, less consumption of everything, including energy. I think a great deal of climate change/green-new-deal type agendas have much more to do with demographic changes than any real alarm about the environment, at least among policymakers. But I'll get into that in a moment. One of the solutions to the evaporating population is technology. With the rise of the economic and accompanying political influence of big tech, we have been moving steadily towards a massive renovation of the economy whereby automation, artificial intelligence and robotics will slash roughly half of all jobs out of existence. But this, of course, cannot be perfectly timed to coincide in sync with the actual depletion of the population. So there must inevitably be a huge rise in unemployment. And that's dangerous. This, therefore, requires methods for distracting, controlling and marginalizing millions upon millions of people. COVID-19 lockdowns, which had no measurable usefulness in terms of public health or the actual spread of the virus, have been helpful, though, in making the public used to varying degrees of deprivation, passivity and redundancy, all of which make it easier to transition into the new economic model in which huge swathes of the population are going to be superfluous. As I said, energy consumption is inevitably going to dwindle, not only because there will be fewer people in the countries that consume the most energy, but because the new economic model will also require less traditional transportation, people will work remotely more than ever before. Goods can be delivered by drone and so on and so on. So this represents a major threat to the fossil fuel industry and to those economies that depend upon it. The world under COVID-19 lockdowns saw energy demand dropped by at least 30%. And this gave us a sneak preview of what we can expect from the new global economic model. Fossil fuels have to be phased out, not necessarily because they are bad for the environment, which they are, but because in the long term, they're not going to bring a viable return on investment. According to the latest studies, the time, energy and expense of fossil fuel production is currently on par with production of renewable energy options, but it's expected to get worse over time while production of renewables is expected to become increasingly more efficient. So we are seeing a move to limit fossil fuels and traditional methods of transportation. This includes policies that deliberately increase the costs of fossil fuels to decrease consumption and eventually to literally reduce even private car ownership. I believe all of this is being done as I said in anticipation of the eventuality of the devastating demographic decline in the Western world. And it is an agenda designed by elites who will themselves be insulated from the incredibly harmful short to midterm impact. They want to structure a world that will be suitable for a smaller population over the next century, but which will preserve their own status and position. This transition will incur widespread collateral damage and could very likely result in severe suffering for hundreds of millions of people, including starvation, brutal repression, extreme poverty and war. But they believe it is ultimately necessary and correct for the long term future of humanity and they believe that they are qualified and entitled to make those decisions. They are not, however, driven by a genuine concern for humanity or the best interests of the population. They are driven by greed and an inability to think beyond the prime objective that has always guided Western economic theory, which is coincidentally the same existential imperative of a cancer cell, perpetual growth. They are also not, of course, thinking about our societies or anyone outside of Western countries. And they are not particularly concerned about how the policies they are pursuing as a response to their own conditions will affect the rest of the world. Obviously, the move to greater reliance on technology and the phasing out of traditional transportation and fuel sources will predictably hit countries in the developing world very hard. This again emphasizes the importance of trying as much as possible to decouple our countries from whatever the Western nations do and to not just blindly follow their approaches, because they are not designed to address conditions in our parts of the world. We should not have, for instance, gone along with the lockdowns over the pandemic. All we did was sabotage our own economies without having any quantifiably positive impact on public health. The birth rate in the Muslim world, as I have said repeatedly, and with only a few exceptions, remains at or well above the replacement rate necessary to guarantee a stable or growing population. But this is even more meaningful than merely the assured propagation of our people into the future. I mean, reflect on the fact that a nation with few children is also a nation in which few citizens are parents. That changes the whole character of a society. It is a society full of people who have never had to think of anyone besides themselves, who never became responsible for someone else, who do not have really anything at stake in the future beyond their own lifetimes. It will unavoidably be a society characterized by short-term thinking and immediate gratification. That is a society that is, in a word, doomed. Western solutions are for Western problems that we do not have. It is important for us to recognize this and to forge our own path and policies that address our own needs. We should not partake in the great reset, but instead try to anticipate the repercussions of the reset that is taking place in the Western world to minimize the damage it may cause to our societies while also exploring any opportunities that their reset might create for us. It is vital, again, for Muslim countries and our people as a whole to liberate ourselves from the instinct of acquiescence, even if that brings short-term recriminations from Western countries. The philosophy, worldview, and lifestyle of the West has led them to the abyss that they are now poised to fall into, if it could have been arguably prudent to attach ourselves to them when they were rising. It makes no sense whatsoever to remain attached to them when they plummet. We are seeing, if we choose to look, the intrinsic failure of Western society, the path they followed created a spectacular but short-lived success. It is truly an anomaly in history, but we are in a better position now than ever to assert our independence. And doing so will be the best way to secure our independence in the future. This is something we have to do first on an individual level, then on a community level, a national level, and ultimately among the ummah as a whole. Jazakum Allah wa reheirin wa as-salam wa alaykum.