Greta is the perfect poster girl for the Green Left
Shes' a 17-year old with psychological problems so severe she had to be pulled out of school, ending her Swedish celebrity mother's career. She refused to eat. She refused to talk. It took her hours to consume the one dish that she would eat: gnocci.
E. Michael Jones postulates that the initial thrust of her selective eating disorder and mental break was to get her mother back in the home. Lacking a mother and being raised by the state can be daunting -- perhaps doubly so if your father is a bit of a beta and your mother is always trying to femme flex. Whether or not this is is the case for sure cannot be known, but nobody would be surprised to hear that it was.
Regardless, her speeches are like short performances. They remind me of the kids I used to see participate in speech contests back in North Dakota. Polished, professional, sleek, talented. The content isn't particularly deep and the message isn't very profound, but that isn't the point.
Persuasion through sensationalism is the point.
Because her delivery is flawless, she is a hero to her fans and to tens of millions of impressionable youth that do not feel the need to think much further than what is presented to them. Moreover, because the message is simple and the difficult parts of the argument are all unloaded to the amorphous group of "scientists" that are expected to dispel any criticisms with the mere mention of their name, she has no real burden. She's a one trick pony -- maybe she will not always be, but that is all she has to be for now.
This is actually one of the more brilliant aspects of the climate change debate for the left: no one really has the time to unload all of the data and begin discussing it. Indeed, much of the data that we are even familiar with has actually become irrelevant by the month, and a huge amount of it is simply about change in general and does not deal directly with whether or not the climate change is necessarily anthropogenic. Of course, nobody can be blamed for a topic being full of difficult points, but it has to be pointed out that one side here tends to benefit from the fact that it is near impossible to discuss this in person because there are too many data points and counterpoints that are constantly evolving and changing.
More Than Meets the Eye
Greta was not an accident. She is not a little girl who got famous by chance. She has an activist PR man by the name of Ingmar Rentzhog who has been active in climate change activism since at least 2017 with a lot of fancy speaking engagements (like SXSW). They claim to have no prior association, and maybe that is the case, but it seems fishy how he was among the first on the scene to break the story of her. He has also raised a lot of money while invoking her name for his NGO which is definitely not hurting for finances, though subsequently they have taken steps to distance themselves from one another, perhaps because critics have been getting too hot on their tails (news.com.au).
Greta was shoe-in for being a role as a spokesperson. Her youthfulness and childlike appearance makes her someone who is immune to a lot of the harsh criticism that activists normally face, and the fact that her mental disabilities are frontloaded makes it even harder to really dig in. But let us not be too cynical: she is good at what she does, and not some helpless loser being taken advantage of. She is from a family of influential performers, and it appears that the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Her mental issues and awkwardness are things that also play to her advantages with her own crowd. We have witnessed over the last half-century (especially the last two decades) the emergence of a sort of victim worship in the West. We expect our heroes to be people who overcome some sort of burden. We expect them to surprise us by rising to this great occasion. We also want them to be actors in our active narratives: our society discriminates against women, minorities, and the disabled. Why should we listen to the white men who are the top of everything? Why should they be given more of a voice? While it is not explicitly a prerequisite to be gay, brown, diseased, broken, or a biological or imaginary female, it certainly helps to gain traction.
In the new ersatz-religion of the Woke Left, the top clergy should be from the new class of heroes. They shouldn't be some sort of continuation of the past in an era that seeks more than anything the ability to break from history.
Intersectional Environmentalism
Everything must be intersectional.
I'd never actually begrudge the environmentalist movement.
I am a big admirer of being good stewards of the Earth. While we are given dominion over animals (Gen. 9:2), we are expected to care for the Earth as well, for the Earth and nature itself is a source of knowledge (Job 12:7-10). Wastefulness and disregard for the rights of other things is itself is sinful.
But what makes the environmentalist movement so unpalatable?
Perhaps it is the way that it attempts to tie itself in with everything. There is something fundamentally holistic about it because it is incapable of detaching itself from a secular humanist theory of the universe.
It's attached to humanism because it began as a critique of Capitalism. The Capitalist ideas of the 19th & 20th century very much held onto the idea of man's dominion over nature and this became the basis for celebrating advancements and the exploitation of nature.
Initially, environmentalism was more about criticism of capitalism. I say this because "climate change" was not an issue in the early stages of environmentalism, but rather there was the naked appeal to the pristine beauty of nature and crying Indians.
Obviously, man subsequently learns of climate change and understands that environmentalism is about much more than small patches of pollution & preserving habitats. It has become an existential question for humanity. But, until this realization, environmentalism was tied at the hip with the Left, for the Left criticizes capitalism in the West.
And what does the Western left believe in? While there can be a lot of divergence among individual leftists, what is certainly true is that it is overwhelmingly secular and humanist, steeped in Enlightenment ideology.
Because of this, Greta and her crew naturally fall into other political movements:
The secular humanists believe that God is not an explanation nor does God play a role in our political life -- especially our political life. Many secularists are theists, but they build a high wall which God cannot pass over when it comes to politics. God is strictly forbidden, and all things within the political sphere must be explained through ideas and with a lexicon that is separate from God. All things must be secular, and they must conform to the perceived consensus that the secularists have been building in the Western world since the Enlightenment.
Therefore, the modern day Green feels that they must understand themselves as a
product of nature, and they are inclined to believe that whatever they feel is
given to them by nature. This directly ties into the LGBTQ "Born This Way" concept which seeks to portray human sexuality as biologically determined and beyond our control. People often refer to this as
Rogerian humanism. Carl Rogers generally believed that all humans are born with the complete capacity for growth and change, and did not view humans as being born into sin. Don't take my word for it -- check out
Famous Davis, an ex-Christian who said that he found Rogers' ideas to be superior to the Bible because he could not view man as evil. Hence,
Greta waves the rainbow flag.
This can further be tied in with feminism with the suggestion that women are the mother of our species and of virtually all species. You must remember, the Greens do not take some hard evolutionist perspective that because woman was created physically weaker and with different psychological profiles it is justifiable to view men and women as having separate spheres, but rather they believe that there was a fundamentally flawed relationship between men and women before the Enlightenment.
One of the fundamental characteristics of Enlightenment thinking is this desire to magically think yourself out of necessary conclusions. While atheists often view the theists as engaging in magical thinking, just as often we find the atheist pretend that the physical and psychological differences between the genders are unnecessary because they can argue that men and women both have access to the "scientific method" or "reason." Because women have access to Enlightenment thinking, and the Enlightenment dismisses everything before it as irrelevant and cruder, of a fundamentally different era that we should write-off, whatever gender modes existed before the Enlightenment are irrelevant.
Or, as Pol Pot would say,
hail the year zero. We don't need to acknowledge truths that may fit neatly into the framework of the times before us and that pose problems for our path forward -- we just need to think of the future. Everything is new now, and the old is gone.
It is not difficult to then imagine Greta in her Anti-Fascist All Stars shirt based off of this. Enlightenment thinking and the Rogerian humanism. Fascism is really its own topic that we cannot get into here, and it is also something that we do not need to get into because Antifa types do not actually address Fascism in some robust way themselves. They treat it as a cartoon as Fascism is wont to be treated by everyone. Fascism isn't a serious ideology to anyone -- it's a pejorative that gets flung around.
Fascism basically represents anything that is regressive or hostile to humanist modes of thinking. This of course refers to someone who is misogynistic or transparently a right wing authoritarian, but it also will refer to people who believe and think about sin and immorality. It will include even people who are obsessed with moral discipline in a classical sense. Anything that is focused on overcoming human failure has actually transgressed against the basic tenets of Intersectional Environmentalism: it believes that humanity is fallen.
The environmentalism of the left is fundamentally intersectional and must be interectional. Intersectional people do not want non-intersectionalist company. Whatever they touch and interact with must be a part of their holistic vision.
Green Stewardship
Conservative Environmentalism
While the Green Patriarch of the Orthodox Church has done his best to promote environmentalism among religious conservatives, it has not been something that has actually generated that great of a movement among the Western right wing.
In the Anglosphere, it is more of a trivia question than anything. The bulk of people do not know who His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I is, and fewer still would even so readily associate him and Orthodoxy with the effort to protect the environment.
Every Green cause ties back not just to the left in general, but it ends up coming into close contact with feminism, LGBTQ, and that weird group of people who call themselves "Anti-Fascists."
To the Left,
everything must be intersectional because everything is intersecting. There is no environmentalism beyond their own, small scope. Everything is defined in relation to their
But the concept an environmentalism that is
beyond the clutches of the far left is emerging.
More and more, in Orthodox circles and in broader Christianity, you hear about regular conservatives who care about the preservation of the environment and value
good stewardship. We are also witnessing the rise of the
Dissident Right which is essentially a return of blood & soil nationalism, and we are seeing more and more people refer to themselves by that mysterious word "Traditionalist."
As significant parts of the Right Wing get a divorce from Capitalism (with a capitol C), we are seeing more people interested in protecting the environment -- and interested in doing it without going all in with secular humanism, LGBTQ, feminism, and Anti-Fascism.
I like to think of my own environmentalism as
Green Stewardship. We want to be good custodians of the Earth because it is our obligation to what God has given us. We work a liturgy over it with our prayers, and we gain wisdom from all the earth. We even praise God on behalf of all of the animals, and animals praise God themselves, mentioned in
Psalm 150:6, and more succinctly stated in
Psalm 148:
7
Praise the Lord from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
8
lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
stormy winds that do his bidding,
9
you mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars,
10
wild animals and all cattle,
small creatures and flying birds,
11
kings of the earth and all nations,
you princes and all rulers on earth,
12
young men and women,
old men and children.
Our relationship with the Earth has to be, by nature of our God's decree, positive and engaging, not one that is exploitative. For all that is created was created for singing praises to God.
It has been a mistake for the Right to watch the Left alone be Green. It is time for us to have our own Green Right, and to divorce environmentalism and care for the earth from the suffocating grasp of the left.
But this is not even the only lesson here: we have seen what the Left has done to the concept of environmentalism, and we have seen how it has become a dominant force, tying everything back to the specific narratives that it wants to promote right alongside it, until one would almost think that to love the Earth you couldn't be more than a few places divorced from Pachamama worshiping hippie.
The stranglehold the Left has on environmentalism is not just a disservice to environmentalism, but it is honestly a threat to the earth itself because it has become so distasteful as to turn away plenty of conservatives from environmental consciousness.
We have to actually work hard as traditionalists or other unconventional conservatives to integrate Green policies and consciousness among conservatives, and doing this is one of the perfect opportunities for bringing the faux droit into the real right.
The essence of conservatism is not Liberty & Capitalism, but it is the throne, the plow, and the soil.
