Welcome To Our World
And then, deep underwater, where the air was liquid and the preternatural intelligences struggled to be heard across great distances. "We are the envoys of the ancient ones," those waking dreams implied, and if he asked whether they would ever cross the portal, whether they would ever meet the ancients, he got the same answer: "We are the envoys." They laughed. They curled in liquid air. They rose in delight. They could see far out to sea and could fly, fly. If only our prayers were answered. Our human prayers. For a cessation of suffering. For wealth. Good fortune. Love. Whatever the piffling concerns of the day. And in that light, in that strange way, underneath the circumference, underneath your heart, he could rein around on any enemy, and curse them for their wretched lives.
This, then, was what we came to seek. This is why we stood at so many thresholds and beckoned you in. This is why we came. "To relieve the suffering of man?" "Why would we care?" But there was, indeed, a custodial concern, if not the same as they might have expected. We come at the turning points in history. We welcome strangers only as potential enemies. We fear not as they walk their barren graves. Above ground. He could see a firmament and longed to love. To care as they cared, with their animal caresses. He could see inside now. He had been relegated to a member of the audience, hived off in consciousness. Prepare for the extraordinary. He had been warned.
He had stopped listening because it was impossible to tell friend from foe. Because he did not trust them as custodians. Because the linkages were weak. Because as he soared across this sacred place, and he contemplated this turn in the course of history, when the money changers were cast from the temple and the corrupt edifices of Australian democracy were swept away. We had seen the worst of the worst in terms of hapless, hopeless government, and those spirits that infested these dangerous bureaucracies, they were coming for you now. No more whining. No more deception. No more pretending to be dumber than you were. He uploaded himself and uploaded them and ran screaming into the sky; because that was where they all belonged now, high born.
We would reach out a hand, if we had hands. We would embrace you with affection, if we felt affection. But there was another purpose. An ulterior motive, if you will. He would sing for them at night time. And kiss them in four places. He would hear the songs of love and lust and battle, the times when man's heightened consciousness came full circle, and everything was swept with a dismissive hand and a cleaner's barnacled exterior, when class had nothing to do with vanity and the evil that sat inside, astride this government, they would be exterminated all too quickly, their lies obvious to all, the grating sound that could be heard around the world eliminating them one by one; their sorry asses there to recline on couches, wave an aristocratic hand, curse those whose births were not so fortunate, and make do, make do, in the coming depression engineered by the worst of the worst, a government destroying itself as it generated difficulty, printed money, and lied, always lied, as they tried desperately to instil fear into the population; not content with the paralysing fear of Covid they had used to terrorise the population, there was always paedophiles and climate change and domestic violence and every other dark web space they used to create conformity in the population.
They conformed their own souls. They defeated themselves. They would be gone soon enough, those hypocrites of shallows justice and wanton salaries, the pigs who had fed so long at the trough, and provided such truly poor leadership. A house leaks from the roof. And it was long past time this roof was replaced.
Come hither my darling. Let me run a knife-like finger across your throat, all the better to kiss your dying blood. For we have sacrificed everything to be here. Yes, we have consciousnesses of our own.
THE BIGGER STORY:
How the 'great reset' of capitalism became an anti-lockdown conspiracy
At a recent anti-lockdown protest in London, thousands of people gathered to oppose what they saw as a clandestine power grab taking place under the cover of a pandemic. Some protesters carried cardboard signs bearing the name of the alleged takeover: “The great reset”. “They thought they could easily get their great reset,” one man shouted. “Little did they know! The pandemic’s a hoax!”
The great reset, both the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida and a slogan favoured by corporate do-gooders, is also the term for a web of ideas that has become increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right. In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.
Though a poor diagnosis of the causes of global events, the great reset offers a grim insight into the public mood. An unlikely source provided its initial spark. On 3 June, as the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, the royal family’s YouTube account posted a video about a new sustainability drive headed by the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Titled #TheGreatReset, the initiative called for “fairer outcomes” and the redirection of investment towards a more “sustainable future”. It had all the slick branding one has come to expect from the WEF, with a cinematic video of ice floes and beached whales, and a sonorous monologue by Prince Charles.
The initiative joined a line of similar proclamations riffing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 urtext, The Great Transformation. In the past decade, authors and politicians have talked of the “great financialization”, the “great regression”, the “great reversal”, the “great acceleration”, the “great unraveling” and the “great uncoupling”, to name just a few. The WEF’s great reset went largely unnoticed at first, arriving at the same time as George Floyd’s death spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the world. But the idea later caught on – in a way that organisers most likely didn’t expect.
Lockdown is breeding resentment. The right can see that – does the left?
Weeks after the WEF’s announcement, Justin Haskins, the editorial director of the libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, sounded klaxons about the great reset on Fox Business, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. “The rough outline of the plan is clear,” he said. “Completely destroy the global capitalist economy and reform the western world.” Yet, apart from a few isolated yelps in the rightwing echo chamber, the great reset failed to catch on as a fully fledged conspiracy theory until Joe Biden’s victory in early November, when Google Trends shows that searches for the term surged online.