The 'Evil' Priming Of Greta Thunberg

 

In a rare moment of emotional masochism, I just watched the documentary I Am Greta. A popular view about Greta Thunberg - perhaps the most popular view of all - is that she's a young hero, bravely speaking up against climate injustices in the world, and that she's about to go on to be one of the most significant voices of her generation. It's a view that I think is both dangerous and reprehensible.

Don't get me wrong. Under different conditions, the story could be quite a powerful one. Schoolgirl galvanises millions of people to form an allegiance in fighting one of the world's biggest problems, and even the politicians stand up and laud her. If it was for a cause worth fighting for, with an agenda based on reason and good arguments, we could all stand up and applaud, possibly even gush with admiration at such a seminal moment for a teenage champion and underdog.

But we can't, and we shouldn't, because what is happening with the cult of Greta is bad and perverse (for further reading on this, see here and here). In fact, watching what's happening to her, and observing how a mass delusion is leading her so far off course, engenders such a level of disgust and revulsion in me, that I actually suspect the Greta phenomenon might be tapping into something quite evil.

If that sounds too extreme, here's what I mean. There are two kinds of evil that plague societies, which for simplicity I’ll call the manifestly evil and the subtly evil. Everyone knows the manifestly evil – it’s the evil that upon reflection nobody has any trouble identifying as evil. Examples of which would be political agendas behind Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge and modern day North Korea. But there is another kind of evil that goes unnoticed and unchallenged by most of the masses - the subtle evil of bad things purported to be good things. I believe that the radical left’s extreme economic policies, and the climate change alarmism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion fall under this category - they are abjectly dehumanising entities.  

Now there’s no question that in terms of intentions and moral response, the manifestly evil acts are a lot worse than the subtly evil ones. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Hitler is an all round more repugnant human being than John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Elizabeth Warren, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (although two caveats: 1: the ideologies they espouse can very quickly turn into manifestly evil regimes - it's only a matter of scale; and 2: under the wrong conditions most people are capable of far more evil than they would wish to acknowledge).

Regarding the profiling of Greta Thunberg - I want to be clear here: it’s not manifestly evil that a group of unbalanced extremists are politically grooming a scared, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive young girl with Asperger’s to be the poster-girl for their cult of delusion. But it may be subtly evil to exploit a vulnerable teenager in this way. It may not contain murder or torture or overt cruelty, but it contains many of the defects associated with moral wrongness, like manipulation, grooming, falsehood, delusion, scaremongering, civil disobedience, narrow tribal agendas and the hugely damaging ‘unseen’ effects of only looking at costs (and ignoring benefits) and trying to demand over-simplistic solutions to extremely complex problems. If not manifestly evil, the cult of Greta is plagued with manipulations, falsehoods and delusions that clear the ground for greater evil to manifest itself, while at the same time damaging a vulnerable child with paranoia and brainwashing.

Something that really strikes home about the past couple of generations is how they unashamedly lack gratitude for the monumental human achievements of which they are beneficiaries, and how so immeasurably better off we are compared with our ancestors. People in the Western world live in the most privileged time of any humans who have ever lived, yet they go around bemoaning the fact that their world is so utterly terrible. Anyone who goes about their business with almost existential ingratitude is barely awake, in my view, and is quite unbalanced and deluded. 

There is, to my mind, a subtle evil about that kind of mentality when it is used to scare the youth of today into an intense lack of gratitude, an entitled arrogance, and an abject failure to apply a proper balanced perspective to the world. Given the harm that such brainwashing has done to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people over the last 150 years, don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea that there might be something a little evil about the conditions that created the cult of Greta!