Climate Anxiety

Greta Thunberg Is Behaving Rationally relayed the theory - which came via E Michael Jones - that young Greta's anger against her society is very real and deserved, but she has shifted it into a domain which earns her accolades from the public rather than scorn. We must wonder...how much of apocalyptic climate doomsday hysteria is secondary in nature? I suspect that the movement is almost entirely driven by misplaced angst.

William Briggs shared a relevant article in his recent post Reader Challenge: Is This Article A Troll, Or Are We Doomed? He bemoans the vapid nature of what passes for intellectual conversation these days, but I'd like to explore the article a bit. It is called Struggling with climate anxiety? You’re not alone. Off the bat, we have to wonder if climate anxiety is really a thing, or is just a vehicle to package other anxieties that are either difficult to articulate or are avoided due to social stigmas.

These are trying times. Mass extinction, mass destruction, massive injustice — it can be flat-out depressing. One common prescription for climate woe is: Do something. Go to a march! Call your representative! Join the fight! But throwing your heart and soul into climate and justice work comes with its own set of tolls.

The working premise for this post is that global warming fanaticism is a direct consequence of the collapse of spirituality in the West, and in the first paragraph the article reveals itself. "Throwing your heart and soul into climate" suggests that if we only believe and strive enough, we can will a change into Earth's climate.

The article then relates responses from three different interviewees from within the climate activism community.

Kristen Poppleton 

So I started out as a naturalist. But at some point I just started feeling like, this isn’t enough. In the early 2000s, when the Union of Concerned Scientists put out their report on climate change in the Great Lakes — that was the first time I had seen something that put climate change in this format that was digestible for normal human beings, and also localized it. Like, this is my place. It wasn’t this super high-up-there global thing, it was a local issue. That hooked me.

That report, from 2003, predicted that the low lake levels would continue to lower because of hotter weather:

Lake levels were highly variable in the 1900s and quite low in recent years. Future declines in both inland lakes and the Great Lakes are expected.  

In May of this year, the Great Lakes recorded their highest levels ever recorded. Now in October Kristen shares that the report is what hooked her. In the climate change community, either facts don't matter, or they only carry a 4-month shelf life.

Minnesota has the fastest-warming winters in the country.

I'm sure she knows Minnesota weather patterns better than I do. But then, they did set all kinds of all-time cold records this past winter and tied the state record for lowest recorded windchill. It does make the subsequent claim of "fastest-warming winters" tough to reconcile.

I mean, I live in probably the most liberal neighborhood of one of the most liberal cities in the state of Minnesota, which is one of the most liberal states in the country. My friends are all on board with climate change being real. But it’s still like a weight you carry around that you feel like no one else really gets. It’s this burden.

Climate change is a political, not scientific, stance, and they are comfortable describing it as such. And for the left, politics is really their religion. The burden of the cross has been replaced with the burden of climate zealotry. It's a pretty clear example of a claim we often make here: progressivism is just Protestantism where Man has replaced God. When asked what she was grateful for, she responded:

My kids. And that’ll make me cry right now, just saying that out loud. They’re little hope machines.

Kids?? Hope?? Surprisingly, she has managed to make her embrace of the secular religion work to a satisfiable degree, although she is still highlighted in an article about anxiety.

Olatunji Oboi Reed

He's the founder of Equiticity, which appears to be a webpage with the words "racial equity" and a portal for donating so that white people can alleviate some guilt.

I’ve struggled with depression since high school, so over 30 years. And for most of my life I was able to mask it. In my early career, I didn’t acknowledge that I had depression. Then I went to corporate America, where I couldn’t hide it — I couldn’t fight through it in a way that kept me safe at work.

In America, you study hard in high school to get into a good college. Then study and network well in college to get into a good corporate post. Then you work countless hours to improve shareholder profits and suffer phony virtue signaling initiatives attempting to boost morale as you look forward to your next major life milestones of retirement and death. His name indicates he's a foreigner. So he left his family in Africa, traveled clear across the world, and found his immersion into big-city corporate American materialism to be depressing, which is perfectly reasonable and has nothing to do with climate.

He then relates his first experience with bicycling.

Just a Saturday, summer morning, beautiful day out. The sun is in and out of the clouds, and it feels like it’s playing hide-and-go-seek with me. The waves crashing on the sand, on the beach — they felt like they were dancing with me. The wind blowing the leaves felt like a song in my ear. Nature spoke to me in a way that I had never experienced that morning, and it was beautiful and transformative. And that day, I became a cyclist.

He found serenity in nature. Many of us do. This is all normal.

What’s hurtful and harmful for me is the racism inherent in the work. Shortly after I started the bike club, the mayor [of Chicago] at the time, he was rolling out this huge strategy for bikes, right? Bike lanes, and Divvy — our bike-share system. And I was quoted in the New York Times, in essence saying, it’s great what the mayor is doing, however, should the historical pattern repeat itself, bicycle resources will be concentrated in predominantly white and middle- to upper-income neighborhoods, and we’ll see a trickle of those resources.

And up until that point, I was sort of like the darling of the bike advocacy community because I was black, I was organizing black folks on the South Side to ride bikes. Everybody was like, “Yeah Oboi, go, go, go!” And then when I made that statement, a lot of them turned on me, told me that I was putting the mayor’s entire strategy at risk, that I have no evidence that what I’m concerned about is the way it’s going to be. It was intense backlash. There was enough pain associated with that that I didn’t know that I wanted to deal with this anymore.

He confesses he got special, unearned status because of his race, but then plays the racial oppression card anyway. The reason he got special attention in the biking community is that black Americans don't do biking or nature. On hiking and backpacking trails the people you encounter are almost entirely white, plus some Asians. That's it. Occasionally I'll see a black dad along with an otherwise all-white Boy Scout troop. The mayor is ignoring bicycle lanes in black neighborhoods because it would be the most useless infrastructure investment in all human history.

I know it’s tough to talk to some people about it. As open as I am publicly with this stuff, it’s tough for me to talk to my mom and my father about it, my brother. I’ll stand in front of a thousand people and tell them my whole story about depression instead of a room full of my friends.

He's completely alienated from friends and family. Why wouldn't he be depressed?

Margaret Klein Salamon 

So, psychotherapy is kind of my family business. My parents met in clinical psychology graduate school. Virtually all of our family friends had at least one member who is a psychoanalyst. I mean it’s kind of like a religion. So, because of that, I became a patient of psychotherapy starting as a teenager. And it was extremely, extremely helpful to me.

The things to always keep in mind about psychotherapy is that it's useless - probably causing more harm than good - and the field tends to attract crazy people as practitioners.

I came to New York, to Adelphi University, where they have a very strong psychoanalytic program. And I thought, wow, I’m going to have a great career, great life. For a long time I was in a state of willful ignorance [about climate change] — which means I knew enough to know I didn’t want to know more. But living in New York City, especially through Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy, I started to be really, really preoccupied with the climate emergency. And I started to do a little bit of writing and publishing online about some of the emotional elements of this.

So she went to college and got indoctrinated, and admits that climate change advocacy became a therapeutic emotional outlet for her.

It’s a movement that says, “This is not a problem. This is an emergency. We do not need incrementalism or tweaks to the system. We need total system transformation right now.” It’s really an amazing thing to be part of that. I sound like such a hippie …

No, you sound like a revolutionary.

Like, ‘No one understands the climate emergency. My friends don’t understand, my family doesn’t understand, my colleagues don’t understand’ — that kind of feeling. It’s a really defining experience for people who understand ecological reality. It’s a little bit like being in a nightmare: ‘Why is everyone acting normal? Why, when I walk down the street in Brooklyn, are there still all these people, like, idling their cars? Am I crazy or are they crazy?’

You're crazy.

I also have a little bit of an unusual situation, which is really great for me. I live in a brownstone in Brooklyn with my family. My husband and I live on the third floor. My brother, sister-in-law, and nephew live on the first floor. And then my parents, when they’re in town, which is about a third or a fourth of the time, are on the second floor. That’s really nice for me, that set-up, because I can kind of dip in and out, go see my family just for an hour or something, you know, have dinner, and then go back to work.

Good for her. I'm a bit surprised that both women interviewed here are married and family-oriented.

Fear is a major thing in the climate movement. And we have this idea that we can’t scare people, that fear doesn’t work as a motivator. Fear is one of the most basic motivators, not just for humans, but for all animals. Fear is literally how we translate our perception of risk into taking defensive action.

Fear is a major thing in the climate movement because it has become a socially accepted outlet for liberal atheists to focus their overwhelming existential dread. She finishes, in the question about gratitude.

Before I got into this work, I was just very self-involved. I was big into my resume and personal achievement, academic achievement. I was preoccupied with how I looked, and whether people liked me — all these kinds of questions that are honestly so boring. It’s so much better to feel like I’m a vessel, I’m part of this mission.

She has rejected materialism for religion. Which is great, except that she has found a false religion. She uses language lifted from Christianity (call herself a vessel for a high purpose) yet worships a false idol, in violation of the First Commandment.

Conclusion 

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these people. A mother who adores her children. A man dissatisfied with corporate life who is re-energized by nature. A woman who stays near her family and rejects materialism in pursuit of a mission. What they all suffer is a spiritual crisis, a God-shaped hole that lives in the heart of every liberal atheist. They believe what they are taught to believe by Science: that the universe is a purely mechanistic machine, that humans arose thanks to randomness and nothing else, and that the entire universe will one day destroy itself and won't leave a trace of anything or anyone that ever existed. They don't believe in life, so they obsess about death, which surfaces as histrionic claims of impending Earthly catastrophe. Their religious fervor drives them to punish sinners & heretics, and to gratuitously signal their own piety and make public displays of self-flagellation.

It can easily be seen how this has descended from apocalyptic Christianity, but there are a couple key differences. Paul thought God was going to destroy the world within his lifetime, and the proper course was to prepare and purify oneself for the coming doom. Climate changers believe that Man is going to destroy the world within their lifetimes, and that only Man can save the world from its doom, if only the people will believe strongly enough. Paul recommended to Christian communities that they cast out evildoers and focus on their own sanctity. Climate changers will not tolerate even outsiders to practice wrongthink because their morality is communal, rather than the individual preparedness of Christianity. Because Man is now deity, all of Mankind must be converted to the ethos of saving the world from bigotry, or it will be destroyed by lack of collective virtue.

This is not just esoteric philosophy. The spiritual crisis will destroy modern civilization. It's why millions of Californians are currently sitting in the dark, and why there is a growing trend of blackouts in major cities all over the Anglosphere. It's why Europe is losing a thousand farms per day and Dutch farmers are protesting "green fascism." Nature abhors a vacuum, and the God-shaped hole will be filled by evil forces in otherwise decent people. Those evil forces will cause war and famine by destroying the energy and agricultural systems which allow for modern civilization. The spiritual crisis of the West - and secondary effects such as climate anxiety - puts at risk the lives of billions of people.