Page 67 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

unemployed, worried, miserable, resentful, sick and hungry will
have swelled dramatically. Personal tragedies will accrue,

fomenting anger, resentment and exasperation in different social
groups, including the unemployed, the poor, the migrants, the
prisoners, the homeless, all those left out… How could all this
pressure not end in an eruption? Social phenomena often exhibit

the same characteristics as pandemics and, as observed in
previous pages, tipping points apply equally to both. When
poverty, a sense of being disenfranchised and powerlessness
reach a certain tipping point, disruptive social action often

becomes the option of last resort.

In the early days of the crisis, prominent individuals echoed
such concerns and alerted the world to the growing risk of social
unrest. Jacob Wallenberg, the Swedish industrialist, is one of
them. In March 2020, he wrote: “If the crisis goes on for long,

unemployment could hit 20-30 per cent while economies could
contract by 20-30 per cent ... There will be no recovery. There will
be social unrest. There will be violence. There will be socio-

economic consequences: dramatic unemployment. Citizens will
suffer dramatically: some will die, others will feel awful.” [62] We are
now beyond the threshold of what Wallenberg considered to be
“worrying”, with unemployment exceeding 20% to 30% in many

countries around the world and with most economies having
contracted in the second quarter of 2020 beyond a level
previously considered of concern. How is this going to play out
and where is social unrest most likely to occur and to what

degree?

At the time of writing this book, COVID-19 has already
unleashed a global wave of social unrest. It started in the US with
the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George
Floyd at the end of May 2020, but it rapidly spread around the

world. COVID-19 was a determining element: George Floyd’s
death was the spark that lit the fire of social unrest, but the
underlying conditions created by the pandemic, in particular the

racial inequalities that it laid bare and the rising level of
unemployment, were the fuel that amplified the protests and kept
them going. How? Over the past six years, nearly 100 African

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