At the crossroads: Utopia or Dystopia?

In a very long meditation at American Greatness, Roger Kimball puts the decline of the West today into a vivid historical context.  And the extract below ties it all into the “Great Reset” a/k/a the New World Order – the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) stated objective.

. . . When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power. “Of all tyrannies,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own  good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Mr Kimball concludes:

All of which is to say that modern technology has upped the ante on hubris. Our amazing technological prowess seduces many people into thinking we are or, with just a bit more tinkering, might become “as gods.” The first step in that process is to believe that one is exempt from normal moral limits: that “if it can be done, it may be done”—i.e., the capacity to do something brings with it the moral sanction to do it. It is a foolish thought, a dangerous thought. But it is a thought with which we will all find ourselves having to contend as we continue to surprise ourselves with our strange cleverness. It is part of the crossroads at which the West finds itself today.

It’s a very long read, but worth a look.

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