Think INSIDE the OODA loop: We are the ‘Great Reset’

Think INSIDE the OODA loop: We are the ‘Great Reset’
A rally in Orlando kicked off Trump's 2020 campaign. CBS News video, YouTube

This will be short(-ish). It’s an important point and it needs to stand on its own.

Most people by now know what the “OODA loop” is. Observe; orient; decide; act.  It’s a schematic representation of the sequence in which cognition leads to decision and action.

Thinking “inside” an OODA loop means recognizing and anticipating things faster than the pace at which someone else – could be an opponent, could just be the culture you live in – is demonstrably reacting.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

It’s desirable to do it if you can, for a list of obvious reasons.  And in the matter of what’s being called the “Great Reset,” we can.  We can think inside the OODA loop.

The agency and momentum of the Great Reset have been misidentified.  Thinking inside the OODA loop is necessary to see that, but once you’ve seen it, you can’t go back to accepting the conventional definition of the Great Reset.

The Great Reset is presented as the effort of a cultural “elite” to railroad all of humanity into a post-national world, one in which the nation-state doesn’t afford the protections it now can to its people’s rights, livelihoods, and lives.

That effort has been underway for some time through numerous institutions (government, NGOs, international bodies, media, academe), often flying under the radar and leaving much unsaid about its end-state goals.  It baffles public perceptions by putting emphasis on “democracy,” “elections,” and “rights,” which sounds familiar and unalarming.  But even a cursory examination of what it says about those emphasized values shows that it doesn’t really mean the same thing that’s in our minds when we hear them.  In the lexicon of the Great Reset, those values actually function as leverage to subvert democracy, make elections meaningless, and use “rights” not to protect the rights-holders but to enslave others in service to mandates based on those so-called “rights.”

The expression “Great Reset” is used to signify this effort to undermine the classically liberal civilization of the modern West – call it the West since Westphalia in the mid-17th century – with its civic nationalism and Judeo-Christian ideas of limited government, separation of God and Caesar, and authority to establish nations and not live under the heel of empire.

Most people, I think, have awakened to this Great Reset only in recent years.  It has actually been in progress for at least a century, and we may count it back further if we look to the intellectual roots of some of its prominent systematic thinkers (e.g., the “Frankfurt School”).  As a practical matter, in the United States, its career got a rocket boost with the Progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and the proto-socialist agenda of FDR.

There is a great deal of nuance and detail that must be held in abeyance to make a point briefly.  Consider the comments section open for all such discussion.  Here, now, is the main point:

The Great Reset, by this definition, has been reaching its realization for at least the last two decades.  We aren’t waiting for it.  To a significant extent, it has already happened.

That’s why free enterprise, for example, has been struggling so mightily to perform in the last 20-30 years: because it ceased being truly free long ago.  We’ve been talking about it as if it’s still our reality, when the truth is we haven’t really had it since before most people walking around today were born.  People under about 45 have never lived under genuinely free enterprise.

The same can be said of many aspects of life and culture which today’s college students are taught to hate with a burning, psychotic fever.  What they see around them isn’t even the object of their theoretical hatred.  They wouldn’t know the genuine object if they found it dead in their lunchbox.

That Great Reset has been in sight of its goal line for years.  It is not the revolutionary development anymore.  It’s the reality around us, affecting our national policies, our state laws, our local ordinances, our school curricula, the news and entertainment we consume.  It’s  a major reason why people have grown so fretful and unhappy.  It has largely taken down the culture, in the media-packaged form we navigate by.  It has lacked only the last formal levers of government power.

Holding the media, it enforced a perception of sleepy seemliness during the extremely activist Obama years, when those formal levers were used prejudicially in every conceivable way.

But then something unexpected happened.  Instead of a mainstream politician being duly handed the U.S. presidency in 2016, Donald Trump won.

That is the real Great Reset.  You, the Trump voter, are the true Great Reset.  Those who had in sight the finish line of their vision for a Great Reset have been scrambling desperately since 2016 to recover their position on the racetrack.  That’s the disruption, the source of the mentally exhausting cacophony we’ve been witness to for the last four-plus years.  Their trend was in place and moving along as hoped for, embedding itself as indelible reality everywhere – and then it wasn’t.

Think faster than the cultural OODA loop.  We’ve moved past the “Great Reset” of imperial, collectivist transnationalism.  That’s the institutional past.  The revolutionary momentum now is with those who want to throw it off and reinvigorate civic nationalism and its care for peoples (of all races and creeds), precisely because it protects those peoples against transnational bureaucrats and voters in distant lands who have no skin in the local game.

Seize the title and raise it as a banner.  Arbitrary transnationalism should be thrown off.  And it’s already being done.  The throw-off is the actual Great Reset that’s in progress, and each advance it makes is breaking more and more of the previously attempted “Great Reset.”

The game is already ours.  Don’t be transfixed by theirs; it’s disappearing in the rearview mirror.  You – we – are the Great Reset.  Don’t lose heart.  There’s nothing to go “back” to; people sense that in their spirits.  The only way now is forward, and the old “Great Reset” crowd has only the same old material from an exposed and debunked backward.  It has no vision for forward.  You do.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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