Page 62 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

and from capital to labour. Second, COVID-19 is likely to sound
the death knell of neoliberalism, a corpus of ideas and policies

that can loosely be defined as favouring competition over
solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and
economic growth over social welfare. For a number of years, the
neoliberal doctrine has been on the wane, with many

commentators, business leaders and policy-makers increasingly
denouncing its “market fetishism”, but COVID-19 brought the coup
de grâce. It is no coincidence that the two countries that over the
past few years embraced the policies of neoliberalism with most

fervour – the US and the UK – are among those that suffered the
most casualties during the pandemic. These two concomitant
forces – massive redistribution on the one hand and abandoning
neoliberal policies on the other – will exert a defining impact on

our societies’ organization, ranging from how inequalities could
spur social unrest to the increasing role of governments and the
redefinition of social contracts.

1.3.1. Inequalities

One seriously misleading cliché about the coronavirus resides
in the metaphor of COVID-19 as a “great leveller”. [56] The reality is
quite the opposite. COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing
conditions of inequality wherever and whenever it strikes. As

such, it is not a “leveller”, neither medically nor economically, or
socially or psychologically. The pandemic is in reality a “great
unequalizer” [57] that has compounded disparities in income,

wealth and opportunity. It has laid bare for all to see not only the
vast numbers of people in the world who are economically and
socially vulnerable, but also the depth and degree of their fragility
– a phenomenon even more prevalent in countries with low or

non-existent social safety nets or weak family and social bonds.
This situation, of course, predates the pandemic but, as we
observed for other global issues, the virus acted as an amplifier,
forcing us to recognize and acknowledge the severity of the

problems relating to inequality, formerly brushed aside by too
many for too long.

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