Fully Automated Luxury Serfdom
Carl Benjamin
Published 7th Dec, 2020
Part 1
"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy," was the opening gambit of a 2016 promotional video from the World Economic Forum, highlighting their 8 predictions for mankind in 2030.
This video resurfaced in 2020 in conjunction with a slate of world leaders and international institutions promoting the "Great Reset", the brainchild of Dr Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. Though not a new idea on his part, it seems to have been given new life as he sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to bringing about his new economic world order.
Owning nothing is the proposed communistic end state desired by Schwab and his supporters; it is a future in which property ownership is monopolised in the hands of international corporations and the class of billionaire owners and their accompanying retinues of experts. The general population are to be merely transient renters who live like high-class serfs which have their necessities and luxuries delivered by drone at the pleasure of their feudal line managers, working under the command of King Bezos.
The purpose of this project is to address “wealth inequality”, improve the “state of our world”, and save us from the apparent catastrophe of a changing climate, according to Schwab and others. A technocracy shall ensure that “everyone has a role to play” in this great unified plan for the future of the human race.
It is only natural that this proposed future should prick the instincts of those people who do not wish to become an atomised, interchangeable cog in a giant unaccountable world-machine. To those people who do not view rights as being provided by governments, but protected by them, it is with great insistence that the following question arises:
If I own nothing, who owns me?
The foundation of the English liberal tradition is that “every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself,” as John Locke formulated it in his Second Treatise on Government. This is the Enlightenment philosophy that informed not only the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States, it is also the moral principle that has governed political, social and economic progress in the wider English-speaking world and beyond.