The Human Condition: Who is Greta Thunberg
By Daniel Schnee on November 3, 2021.
Several years ago an autistic Swedish teen named Greta Thunberg began asking her parents to make lifestyle changes to reduce their impact on the climate, including her famous mother giving up her operatic career so as not to engage in polluting via extensive travel. Later she would start intentionally skipping school to protest outside the Swedish Prime Minister’s office, culminating in her famous speech shaming world leaders for their inaction and her current global fame. To be clear, Thunberg should be celebrated for her triumphs in what has been a difficult personal life. No one should ever think less of her or denigrate her for who she is, ever. Her sincerity in taking world leaders to task on their perceived faults is admirable, and some of her ideas – like encouraging banks to cease backing climate-negative institutions – are truly great. But no one is beyond criticism, and Thunberg unfortunately is falling prey to both internal and external influences that sour people on her activism. Her rage over human pollution is understandable: things like the massive island of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean are indeed unconscionable. But her fame is mostly good for media attention and driving the local economy around conferences. It has indeed made her a darling of environmentalists, their new “rock star.” But such stars are only useful as a figurehead. The part where you do things like wear rubber gloves and clean a local ditch is dirty, gross, and often dangerous. So she focuses on the part where she does the yelling and the rest of us are supposed to be shamed into getting into the ditch where all the gunk is. There are many legitimate reasons for not doing what she wants right away, and to excoriate people for making smart moves too slowly for her taste is a great way to turn people off her cause. It is basic psychology: Thunberg feels like she is effective if she prods or angers people, even if the actual effect is the opposite. It is the political version of a sel – ie: unwittingly narcissistic in light of oil workers trying to feed their families. Complex national systems cannot be changed instantly or perfectly, and Thunberg herself doesn’t have to drastically alter her life like an auto industry employee might. If they did what she asked, how she asked it, theirs and other blue collar workers’ lives would be in utter chaos within days due to the industrial ripple effects. Her yelling is merely performative in that sense, whether she knows it or not, and she is surrounded by adults who use her naïveté to their advantage. There is after all a thriving economy around climate protest, and Thunberg certainly is great for their industry. She is also yelling at people who have spent their entire lives working on the very issues she is taking them to task on. Who would want to be an ally of a movement that hates you for trying to do the right thing, especially when a teenager is celebrated for yelling at you? Greta Thunberg is young, thus we should forgive her lack of sophistication and insight in the world of geo-politics. She is rightfully crying wolf, but until she understands wolves better, she needs to stop yelling at the zoologists. Dr. Daniel Schnee is an anthropologist who studies Japanese creative culture. 8-7
