You’ve heard about the Great Reset, perhaps. What does it mean? Several interpretations.

Lunatic paranoids think it means a lizard in the shape of Bill Gates is going to microchip everyone with a vaccine so we can be tracked with 6G (5G is a cover story), because the U.N. is deeply interested in how many times you go to the Olive Garden. The lizard men planned this at Davos with FDR and Stalin.

Globalist utopians tell you it means we can — nay, must! — rethink hoary old ideas and systems and move forward with brave, brash speed to usher in a new era of cooperation and interconnectedness. Then all the good things will get done and the planet will be saved for future generations, because the eggs are our future. Sorry, the children. Young children, naturally born from mammals, not coming out of eggs and flicking their tongues to taste the strange world at all, and certainly not adorably iridescent, their scales shining in the new light of day. Children.

Garden-variety liberals: The Reset means we will fix our institutions to eliminate anything problematic that ends with “-ism,” and do so in a way that coincidentally enriches our political class at every turn while ensuring the problem is never solved.

Swampy GOPers: “This is just another government grab for power and taxpayer money to which I am opposed, but I am also pleased to announce that the Department of Resetting has committed to 17 new projects in my district.”

The term “Great Reset” makes me think of a pinball player I knew in college. Mike. Smart guy. Good with the flippers. Bit of a temper. We used to grapple with a table called “Eight-Ball Deluxe,” known for its difficult play. Sometimes if Mike lost, and his mood was particularly hot, he would rear back and kick the machine right in the cashbox with his work boot, hard. The backplate and playing field would go black. Then the machine would collect itself, restart, flow current through the circuits, and reset. Ready for play. Like nothing had happened.

That’s how I see the Great Reset. If Trump was the boot to the old order, they want to restore all the paradigms and privileges and pretend it’s something novel.

Let me back up a bit to explain why the Reset isn’t about change at all. A few weeks ago a fellow tweeted out this merry message: “Who are Mitch McConnell’s neighbors? I’m just saying Rand Paul’s neighbor did what a true Kentucky hero should do. It’s your turn to step up.”

As it happened, the author of the tweet was a grade-school educator. Even better: He was a national Teacher of the Year. What happened next was shocking. People . . . people criticized him.

“I made a Mitch McConnell joke today and the conservative boys are real angry. It’s funny because the joke was made early today and no one said a thing until I promoted black medical awareness.”

Ah yes, the flood of bots, teeming in limitless numbers from over the horizon, gibbering and stabbing. As if people read the tweet and thought, “I’d take that endorsement of political violence for what it’s worth and move along, but he said something positive about an unrelated matter that has a racial aspect, so yeah, I’m going after him.”

The next step: He set his account to private. How the tweeter sees himself: “I am barring the door and sauntering back to my den, where I will enjoy a fine cognac by the fire and read some great literature while there blows rain impotently on the oaken door.” How the rest of the world sees the tweeter: curled up in the basement next to the washing machine with his fingers in his ears, humming and rocking back and forth.

He apologized and that was that. You might think: In a true Great Reset, he’d be canned. If we were really going root-and-branch at the whole rotten forest, the entire educational system would be — what’s the word the utopians love? Reimagined.

COVID, after all, exposed the whole racket. When colleges switched to Zoom, some students realized that sitting in their parents’ basement watching a lecture on a screen — which was indistinguishable from a good YouTube video — wasn’t worth $70,000 a year, and they weren’t buying an education, they were buying credentials. Teachers’ unions declared that reopening the schools was actually rooted in racism, despite the fact that the very students they purported to care about were the least able to adapt to the remote model.

The educational system looked like a senescent sclerotic leviathan, a consensual delusion that worked as long as everyone went to the proper buildings at the proper times and made the marks on pieces of paper. Not even the right marks, mind you.

In short, everything was ripe not for reset but for revision. But no one took to the think pages of the serious newspapers to ask whether the public-school/college model had shown itself inadequate on every level and should be replaced by something smaller, more atomized, nimbler, less laden by levels of bureaucracy that made the Ottoman Empire look like the post office in a North Dakota town, pop. 200.

The Great Reset means slapping the heart-attack paddles on the chest of every government group that flatlined with failure and pumping more juice into the withered muscles. Even Mike, rebel though he was, put a quarter back in the slot when Eight-Ball Deluxe rebooted. It was an infuriating game. But he wanted to play again.

We all did, even though you always drain in the end. Better than no game at all. Or, God forbid, foosball.