The Greater Reset

Reclaiming Human Sovereignty Under Natural Law

Michael D. Greaney, Dawn K. Brohawn

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781505122619
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion, politique et État

From a hidden spark in the early days of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic soon roared across every nation, decimating lives, economies, and social norms. Rather than uniting people to defeat a common enemy, the pandemic has widened economic, political, and social divisions everywhere. It has pitted faith against reason and inflamed the global scourges of poverty, racism, war, and environmental destruction.

The pandemic has also surfaced proposals to remake the global economy and society. Most notable—and notorious—are a set of recommendations from the 2020 World Economic Forum calling for "the Great Reset." Blending welfare state socialism and monopoly capitalism, this would systematically eliminate a fundamental bulwark of personal independence and freedom—the universal right to, and rights of, private property.

Is the Great Reset the scheme of a vast global elite to control the lives of ordinary people or a well-intentioned but dangerously misguided approach to correct systemic ills? Regardless, there is a question we all must ask: How will the dignity, freedom, and power of each human person be protected and promoted when universal human rights and their Transcendent Source have been rendered irrelevant?

In The Greater Reset, Greaney and Brohawn trace the historical, religious, political, and economic roots of humanity's perilous condition and how returning to God-given, universal principles of natural law, with equal access to the institutions of the common good, can help build a more just, liberating, prosperous, and hopeful future for every person.

CHAPTER 1

The Great Inversion

1.1. Role Reversal

Why is there a growing chorus of global leaders today calling for a “Great Reset” while more and more citizens angrily denounce it? What is happening with the world that so many people would even consider changing virtually every aspect of society? What has led us to this moment of crisis—and truth—for all of humanity?

For much of human existence, life for most people has been filled with toil, want, disease, and war. There has never been a time in history when everyone enjoyed equal dignity, freedom, and opportunity, with equal access to the means to live a good life.

Instead, what we have had during the best times is hope that life would improve—or continue to improve—for everyone. However, when enough people lose hope for a better future, chaos and destruction are sure to follow. Societies start turning to dictators, demagogues, capitalism, socialism, Great Resets, and so on to restore order.

How did this state of affairs arise when incredible technological and medical advances are being made daily and the potential exists for everyone on earth to lead a good life? One simple answer is that we put ourselves and our own creations in the place of God and made something other than the good of every human person the goal of life.

The Great Inversion

In God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), his doctoral thesis published nearly a century ago, Venerable Fulton J. Sheen examined how the basis of modern society—both civil (State) and religious (Church)—had shifted from reason to faith. While this might sound ideal to those who believe in God, results have proved otherwise for people of all faiths and philosophies, not to mention non-believers.

In his study, Sheen noted that there has been what we can call a Great Inversion in the order of creation. This has completely overturned the meaning and purpose of life. God’s role and man’s have been reversed, turning God into man’s servant. A distorted supernature has replaced nature. Of course, when we use the term “supernatural” in this book, we are using it in its literal sense as that which is above nature and human nature—that is, über-natural or divine. We do not mean the popular notion of vampires, ghosts, and so on.

Distinguishing nature from supernature (and vice versa) is vital, even though both are integral and complementary parts of reality. Confusing them, ignoring one in favor of the other, or absorbing one into the other effectively nullifies or even abolishes a significant part of reality.

Jesus Himself noted that natural and supernatural matters should be kept in their proper place. When He stated that what belongs to Caesar—this world—should be given to Caesar and what belongs to God should be given to God, He was giving commonsense guidelines for keeping matters in the right order.¹

At the same time, Jesus also reminded us that while the natural and the supernatural orders each have their own rules—so to speak—they necessarily go together, each one completing and fulfilling the other. As He said, man does not live by natural things (“bread”) alone but by the spirit—the “Word of God”—as well.²

Unfortunately, however, because much modern thought attempts to impose supernature on nature or absorb nature into supernature, the meaning and purpose of life has been changed. Instead of every human being becoming more fully human—that is, virtuous—we have created a system in which man becomes God.

With self-deification, the goal is to gain enough power to impose one’s personal vision on others. This will establish “the Kingdom of God on Earth,” the “consistently recurring objective of American messianic movements.”³

As Sheen noted, such an approach ultimately seeks to create a terrestrial and temporal paradise in which the abstract concept of “humanity” replaces the supreme (highest) actuality of God. Individual human beings, and even God, are relegated to second or third place, and eventually no place at all. As Sheen concluded:

There is “an alteration in the seat of authority.” It is a transfer of the seat of authority from God to man, and a transfer of the measure from God to man. “The earth of things, long thrown into the shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.”⁴

“In the beginning God made man to His own image and likeness.”

In the twentieth century man makes God to his own image and likeness.⁵

Despite the grimness of his conclusion, Sheen did give a little hope. At least by the first quarter of the twentieth century, not everyone had succumbed to the urge to play God or had yielded to the temptation to restore the temporal paradise through the power of deified collective man.

According to G. K. Chesterton in his introduction to Sheen’s book, there remained at least one bastion of common sense against the flood of irrationality: the Catholic Church. As Chesterton wrote, “In this book, as in the modern world generally, the Catholic Church comes forward as the one and only real champion of Reason.”⁶

Despite the complexity of God and Intelligence, Sheen’s main point is very simple. The modern world is suffering from an abandonment of reason and common sense. Tremendous problems have been caused by discarding basic and universal truths of human existence, as well as rational methodologies for determining what is “true.” As Sheen said, “There are many who, not lacking either wisdom or penetration, find such a ‘kingdom of God’ no more than a travesty, and who, through their love of truth, cannot listen to these prophets. The wisdom of the ages and the epitome of our experience is given in the simple truth understood by the simple and forgotten by many a philosopher, that we are not ‘God-makers but God-made.’”⁷

What Sheen observed about the inversion of the roles of God and man has ramifications far beyond the confines of academic studies or even religious belief. Confusing the natural and the supernatural means that we render to God what is man’s and to man what is God’s. Faith and reason become separated, as are charity and justice, the intellect and the will, and the natural and the supernatural.

What should go together, each one completing and fulfilling the other, is put in opposition. The human intellect is split in two, changing the nature of truth and thus reality⁸ as deemed necessary or expedient to gain some end.

Confusion does not end there. Since human beings are far from being gods, humanity, the collective—an abstraction created by man—becomes God. As the representative of the People (as opposed to mere people), the State, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, is transformed into a “Mortall God” that must be obeyed on earth as the immortal God is obeyed in heaven.⁹

This puts the presumed dignity of the collective or some elite before the actual dignity of the human person under God. The implicit totalitarianism inherent in the collectivist or elitist understanding of dignity has caused some to claim we are in the End Times, even though “of that day and hour no one knoweth.”¹⁰

Solutions That Create Problems

While prophets of doom have often been wildly inaccurate, no one can deny that many things are seriously wrong in the world today. While the analyses of critical systemic problems may be largely correct, they have engendered a slew of ill-considered solutions, such as the Great Reset, universal basic income, stakeholder capitalism, inclusive capitalism, democratic socialism and capitalism, and similar proposals.

After even the most superficial examination, one point becomes clear about the various schemes. Taking Sheen’s analysis into consideration, we realize that they are not solutions. Many of the proposals tend to be directed to the wrong goals, and the solutions fall short in one of two ways, often both.

Firstly, to establish God’s (or, more accurately, collective man’s) Kingdom on Earth, such proposals tend to focus primarily on meeting people’s immediate material needs and not on enabling every human being to develop as a sovereign person and special creation of God.

Then there is the issue of funding these proposals. No feasible means is proposed to sustain these programs financially. Simply legislating against greed or mandating redistribution is not practical. “Soaking the rich” only works if there are rich people to “soak.” Once their wealth has been redistributed and their value as persons ignored, they are as poor as everyone else.

Secondly, there is a glorification of the collective, and a consequent vast increase in State power. This erodes, and sometimes eliminates, respect for the dignity of the individual human person, as well as what it means to be a human being and the purpose of life itself.

Both misdirections can be characterized as elevating purely animal needs—the most immediate needs of mere survival—to the level of the most important needs—that of the meaning and purpose of life. Along with the inversion of the natural and the supernatural orders that Sheen noted, the economic order and the personal orders are reversed. Meeting material needs becomes the sole end of existence. If the desired or anticipated end of some program is to secure some material benefit, anything goes. The end justifies the means. This is pure moral relativism. Ignoring human personality, moral relativism relegates human life to the level of any other animal. That the Great Reset takes this for granted may be its most fundamental problem and profoundest error.

1.2. Modern Symptoms of the Decline

The Great Reset did not arise suddenly, but as a response to evils that are as real and pervasive as they are overwhelming. We must not think, however, that these problems—the wealth and income gap, involuntary immigration, joblessness, and so on—bad and immediate as they are, are particularly modern, or that they resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Getting Back on Track

Many people cannot accept the possibility that some problems may have causes other than a hidden conspiracy, or that the cause may be irrelevant to developing a viable solution. A poorly designed system, for example, can mimic a conspiracy down to the smallest detail. Even so, many people will insist that the whole situation is intentional, a way deliberately designed by an elite to control others.

Rather than work to find solutions, such people will argue endlessly over who is responsible. Identifying and punishing the guilty becomes more important than solving the problem. They fail to realize that if there really is a conspiracy or hidden cabal behind what is happening, the best solution is to make it difficult or impossible for the conspiracy to work.

Structuring the system to inhibit wrongdoing and encourage doing right is called “internal control.” Internal control cannot stop all wrongdoing, but it can make it very difficult and the profit too small to bother with.

Ferreting out the guilty or the presumed guilty is a waste of time and resources when there is no clear evidence of wrong-doing. The commonsense—and socially just—approach is to make it difficult for anyone to profit by anything he might do contrary to the rights of others or the common good.

We do not have to agree why particular problems exist, just that they do. If we are truly interested in finding a solution, we cannot get diverted into side arguments or play the blame game. We must identify the problem.

Symptoms must be dealt with, and they must be dealt with effectively. At the same time, any action we take cannot contradict the reason for doing it in the first place. We need to discover the direct causes of the symptoms (not the motives of any conspirators) and present a possible solution that not only addresses the problem—once it has been identified—but considers the demands of individual human dignity along with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”¹¹

Nevertheless, although all people are important and have the dignity that is due to their status as human persons, not all opinions are equal. Respecting other persons does not mean upholding their opinions if the opinions are not worthy of respect. At the same time, we do not insult someone simply because we disagree with that person.

That being the case, we must prioritize problems—or symptoms—recognizing sometimes that a problem simply is not that important. Other times, even if a problem is of overriding importance, it may not be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Great Inversion
• Chapter 2: The Dictatorship of Money
• Chapter 3: The Kingdom of God on Earth
• Chapter 4: The Servile State
• Chapter 5: “A New Pastoral Theology”
• Chapter 6: Economic Personalism
• Chapter 7: A Personalist Proposal
• Select Bibliography
• Index