The Great Upset
“A Great Reset was planned – do you remember that one?”
“How could I forget? I was so much a part of it.”
“Well we all were, weren’t we?”
“A few very much more than others, don’t you think – very, very”.
I looked at him more closely, then. He was old and wizened and at the same time grey – he lacked colour or any distinctive features, really. As he was a contemporary of mine, I guessed I must be somewhat like that to his eyes.
“Anyway, you’re looking well after all these years, my friend” he answered “and don’t for a moment imagine that I do not know why – or how – you managed to make it this far. I’m sure that I know a whole lot more about you than you guess about me!”
We’d met at university and studied sciences together. He’d been more focussed than I, and came away with a first in microbiology and organic chemistry – I’d scraped a second in Genetics and playing drums for a punk reggae band. I’d had far more fun and, I always argued, a far better education. But he got the good jobs as I, well, I continued my education.
I connected with most people I met, I networked, from a very early age and always felt each should contribute and be involved in discourse, in projects, in life – so it all took longer. But that was OK as we all had forever, didn’t we? Four – or was it five – years later and I’d finished my PhD and our lead singer had jumped off a bridge a hundred metres into his next life. The band broke up in respect and deep sadness. We’d been there and he’d had his say.
The World expanded. Fortunes were to be made.
You should follow your goals and not just sit in the shade.
So I did but was always that crazy rebel ska percussionist, connecting people and ideas. It worked and I rose to leading research teams and then planning new projects for the company. It was like I was a chef, bringing great flavours together to create superb new taste sensations for my diners or an artist making my canvas sing to its viewers with harmonies unparalleled in their experience.
Perhaps it was not always what the World needed but we gave them this anyway and they thanked us. We were successful and prospered. But always were of the people and not the establishment. That cold, dreary life I could not even start to comprehend. Well, I could see that it was needed – that the country had to have rules and regulations – but their endless committees and formal processes always seemed to take forever and contribute nothing to real life.
This was where he’d gone with his first class honours degree, straight up this greasy pole, into the higher echelons of scientific governance, into the rare atmospheres of closed room mutual back scratching and preferential decision making based upon favours given and waiting to be gained, with foundations built into the fundamentals of administrative goals, set long ago and kept governed by mysterious forces of social conservatism. Societal governance, in truth.
I’d bumped into him from time to time – attending conferences where he might be a breathtakingly bland guest speaker or at trade shows when he might appear at our stand and follow obscure lines of enquiry or sit at the back of the room silent as we debated finer details of our new products with user professionals and journalists. What was he thinking? Why was he there? Our conversations became ever more perfunctory and meaningless and I was always glad to see the back of him. He showed what was through a door I’d slammed very shut early in my life and was ever more pleased that I’d made the right choice.
During those two years when the country – and the whole World – had been maintained under at first a kind of house arrest and, later, martial law he was a frequent face in Government broadcasts. He was there to present a rationale and to be the cool face of logical objectiveness. Knowing him, as I did, I always watched these events with a wry smile of disbelief on my face. He selected partial truths and ignored conflicting evidence, he used biased scales on graphical representations of his anyway questionable facts. His conclusions came from the data he presented, yes, but they bore, in truth, scant connection to reality.
Why did he do this? How far could he sacrifice the good science we had studied together back in our University? Did he simply ignore the truth to generate some obscure other agenda? I did not know but found myself using my networks to circulate critiques of his prognostications of doom. I’d had enough and it was clear the public needed help to fight back. I pointed out errors, I demonstrated bias. I talked almost covertly with long standing, trusted friends and found all as astounded as myself. Our networks strengthened and the weight of our evidence seemed overwhelming but we realised, we knew, that we had not got the stage. The government and their allies had all the major positions of influence wholly in their control.
How to break through this stranglehold?
The answer was so simple and breathtakingly reassuring. Despite all the in depth psychological analysis of population dynamics that had enslaved the people, they did not follow by all the theorems, the graphs and the determinist conclusions written into all the planning. “Rubbish in, rubbish out” we’d learned so early when undertaking computer examination of our experimental results.
All the conclusions my erstwhile friend and colleagues came to were then filtered through a separate panel for psychological analysis to be enabled for action in deeply sinister manner. We’d seen the results of this in the brutally detached communications emanating from central and local government. Soul destroying, heartless and cold blooded. Goal centred and inhuman and all enforced without question by unthinking footsoldiers on the ground.
What was the Great Reset? Why, it was the stark target they’d been working towards for decades, quietly, methodically and seemingly inexorably. Industrial and commercial strategy, portrayed as benevolent and caring, based on the Technocracy movement which burgeoned in the 1930s post depression but pre world war in North America. They? Yeah “they”, the devotees of the ideas, those conscripted to the ideas and those built into the networks they spawned. In my student days, I read The Illuminatus books, about centuries old forces fighting it out for power and glory in a hippy science fantasy earth superficially very much like our own. Technocrats were as from these books but, just like the Catholic Church, they are real and very operational.
Now melded or merged into Global organisations, acting and thinking in these terms with no expression of national loyalties these guys felt (and still feel) they had higher goals, had responsibility to planet, not people and to their long crafted agendas not short term reactive pragmatism. They were not politicians – they were Technocrats.
Drawing together powerful leaders from global industries, influential directors of international NGOs as well as people with resonant status of their own right they formulated systems through which the planet’s control strings could be concentrated into a very few hands. These hands would then control the use of resources going forward and so guide us all to a golden, peaceful and prosperous future.
How totally naive!
What they’d achieved, in horrendously gullible style, was to get the planet to the brink of creating a dynasty of gods, akin to those of ancient Greece. We would have bestowed upon them absolute power and for all eternity whilst at the same time enslaving the rest of humanity and probably consigning half or three quarters to an early grave.
But it did not happen, of course, as I began to describe earlier. For humanity had so much greater depth than their calculations gave us credit. They’d omitted joy and sorrow, excitement and empathy, they did not consider connectivity or history and had not the slightest understanding of love. All these powers started to interact under cover – and were amplified all the more for being so.
Yeah, I found people in my scientific fraternities with long term issues and observations I could not refute, regarding how our discipline had been hijacked by determinist, productivist and frankly very unscientific attitudes, which I had disregarded earlier, whilst caught up in the enthusiasms of earlier prosperities. Over that first winter we drew together and expanded our understandings, whilst building legal, political and social groupings. It was still touch and go, we had felt – witnessing the heavy handedness of police enforcement and with a knowledge that confining the population was a foundation plank of their visions.
Social gathering was early banned but partially ignored at first, however, as time went on, policing grew tougher until the eventual declarations of curfews and martial law. The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act, 2021 enabled extreme pressure to be placed upon our resistance in the UK, and we realised the same structures had been put up on a global basis. They had very nearly made any dissent illegal.
Still my onetime colleague spouted his unhinged distortions from his multi-media pulpits. “Of course the Earth is at the Centre of the Universe” he’d say, and conclude that “anyone supporting this insane idea that we are circling the sun should be locked up”. Kafkaesque. It had got that blatant and all true, objective science was ignored or scorned – because any true, objective science disproved his conclusions and recommendations.
So what was the tipping point? Ah, theories and popular references always try to determine such detail – the last brick onto the Jenga pile, a final straw on that sad, overburdened camel’s back. I do yoga and that is all about balance. Harmony, connectedness and working together sensitively. Here it was resonance, I’ve always felt.
A resonance of empathies, a surge of collective realisation, streams of dominoes, stiff dominoes of conformity, tumbling. It had got so close to a point of no escape, of permanent confinement but instead police threw off their inhuman spaceman riot cladding, medics cried out against the lies, people everywhere just hugged in the streets, celebratory concerts were held in momentous manner, poets shouted celebratory verse in the open air and everybody cheered. There was a global infusion of happiness – which pulses still through all our veins, I think.
Over the fifteen that had passed since that extraordinary climax to “The Affair”, as we now politely describe the whole saga which culminated in those two horrendous years, many new courses had been set and “small is beautiful” had become firmly embedded over “big is best” and “the economies of scale”. True costs now included social and environmental damage and reward was geared to building future proofed policies.
“So you were at the heart of it, Pat? It was either that or a gun at your head – and I could see no signs of that”.
“It grew around me, and I never joined – I was just an integral part. There was no way out – I’d have lost everything and, anyway, I saw no reason to change.”
“But how, how could you live with yourself?”
“They were not lies – they were simply the means to progress. It was all just a mechanism, for us all to move forward”.
“But did you approve of where we were headed? Did it seem….justified?”
“It was not a question of justification. We knew that there was no choice. We KNEW that there was no other way!”
Chris Hemmings
November 29th, 2020
(Happy Birthday, Pa! – you’d have liked this, I imagine so, hey, it’s for you!)
Note: Here’s the Wiki on Technocracy – so not my invention!
greencentre 
It may be observed that it is reported that Mike Yeadon and Patrick Vallance studied sciences together at university.