Greta Thunberg is standing up for my generation’s future - and our freedom
To understand just how successful Greta Thunberg has been, one need only look at the criticism she has garnered from adults in response to her blunt words to governments and the older generation in general. My own father, and Editor of TheArticle, Daniel Johnson, provides an excellent example. He has written succinctly about how Greta is fundamentally wrong to be so blunt, even ruthless, in her address towards the United Nations General Assembly, because the “achievements of Western civilisation” are at severe risk from the requests of this 16-year-old.
My father and I hold very different views: not only on the environment, but also on politics and the supposed achievements of “Western civilisation” (a phrase I cringe at using). And such matters are completely intertwined, as we can see from the fact that most environmentalists are on the Left, and individuals who do not identify with the Left are far more sceptical of policies to protect the environment. They see environmental policies as an attack on their ideology and a forceful imposition of another. My father sees the young leftist environmental movement as an attack on the personal freedoms that events such as the Cold War seemed to threaten. Rather than explicate all the research that explains the anger and fear felt by today’s youth, I will address an inconsistency between my father’s fear of loss of freedom and his applause for the capitalist framework.
After undertaking theoretical research into the relationship between individual environmental action, political leanings and existentialism for my undergraduate dissertation at Manchester University, I have come to the conclusion that capitalism and its baby, consumerism, are not only fatal for the environment itself, but also for one’s own motivation to act upon our fears of climate change in our everyday lives. Capitalism threatens our ability to achieve an authentic sense of being within our lives and draws us into political alienation. The important philosophical history of existentialism has a running theme: freedom. And if it is freedom that critics of Greta Thunberg are afraid of losing, then perhaps it is useful to see how a capitalist consumerist framework bears upon the tenets of the most freedom-loving philosophical perspective of them all.
Consumerism in the early 20th century was viewed as an attribute of a capitalist “free” society where the consumer steers the demand and economy. Yet such an infinite desire for more luxury goods is a fundamental cause, not just of environmental problems, but also a free sense of self. Marketing became the key tool of consumerism; advertising for mass-produced goods began targeting people’s emotions and identities as opposed to their needs. Thus mass-produced goods became reflections of ourselves, which drove an overlooked dependence and a fake sense of individuality.
Edward Bernays, a pioneer of public relations, transformed smoking into an expression of liberation for women in the 1920s. Using psychoanalytic concepts (his uncle was Sigmund Freud), he created the Lucky Strikes cigarette brand’s “Torches of Freedom” campaign, that convinced women to smoke in public as an expression of empowerment.
If one’s sense of identity is commodified and homogenised in this way, yet presented as something one freely chooses, the opportunity for the authentic life is compromised. Authenticity in existentialism is a very general notion. The common ground between the various conceptions is that it involves distancing oneself from the established convictions of one’s society (ranging from the religious to the political), in order to decide independently about the best way to live.
Yet consumerism inhibits this feeling of independence. We do not control our identities; rather we are told that if we purchase this commodity then we will have this identity. Moreover we have a continuous desire for these commodities, making the separation from society’s established convictions far more difficult. Jean-Paul Sartre states that authenticity “consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation”, yet consumerism relies on the subtle manipulation of the public’s consciousness.
These short-lived identities are caused by the “ever-new desires without satisfaction and the temporality of all engagements, attention and focus” (Todd Lavin). Therefore, the series of existential moments, for which we take responsibility and which shape our identity, are replaced by a series of moments that are “fundamentally self-enclosed entities that have no relation to, or consequence for, the past or future” (Lavin). The possibility of recreating of one’s identity is crucial to Sartre’s conception of freedom. But if this recreation is simply an accumulation of luxury material goods, then these choices lose the meaningfulness that make them existential.
My father fears that the environmentally conscious youth on the Left, who embody the existential mindset of taking matters into one’s own hands, are threatening such freedoms. But this worry is misplaced. Greta Thunberg’s attack on the long-standing history of the Western capitalist framework, which has ignored our environmental values for the sake of profit, is crucial. Our relationship to nature and the environment is integral to our choice of identity. Greta is standing up, not only for our future physical health and happiness, but also for our freedom and our sense of self.
