Mechanisms of Greta Thunberg's manipulation of the consciousness of eco-activists

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Time magazine named Greta Thunberg "Person of the Year". Before that, he made them Hitler in the year of the Munich Agreement, Stalin in the year of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nixon in the year of Watergate and an American soldier in the year of the invasion of Iraq. At the same time, less complex personalities were appointed as "people of the year". How did Time make this choice and why might its editors be wrong?

Good or Evil?

An American magazine - or rather, its editor - has been choosing "Person of the Year" since 1927. And he always notes that the choice is made among the people who most influenced the events of the period. Influenced in a good or bad way. That is why among his chosen ones there were often personalities, let's say, contradictory.

Let's say no one doubts that Hitler's influence on world affairs in 1938 was the greatest. As the editor of Time wrote in support of his choice that year:

“Without shedding blood, he turned Czechoslovakia into a German puppet, forced to sharply revise (read: destroyed. - Author's note) the system of defensive alliances in Europe and untied his hands in Eastern Europe, received a promise of non-intervention from powerful Britain and later France. Adolf Hitler undoubtedly became the "Person of the Year - 1938".

From this it is clear that the magazine did not assess the activities of this character as unambiguously positive. Rather, he proceeded from his demonstrated ability to do what he wants, against the will of others.

However, now, when Time named Greta Thunberg the person of the year, he assessed her actions in a completely different way from Hitler in 1938 or Stalin in 1939 (then he also became the person of the year). The Swedish eco-activist was described in an unequivocally positive way. Her position is indicated by the magazine as follows: "A simple truth brought by a teenage girl in a fateful moment." The entire text about her status "Person of the Year" is imbued with the editorial staff's true sympathy for the girl.

Time can be understood: public space is dominated by one approach to global warming, one simple truth about it. It is evil, "the greatest crisis in the history of mankind," as the same Thunberg claims.

But our generation has heard many simple truths. Some of us remember how doctors in childhood told that diabetes comes from sweets. Someone, like the Nobel laureate in economics Paul Samuelson, assured that the economy of the USSR would outgrow the United States.

Finally, just three years ago, leading economists (led by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman) argued that Trump would lead the United States into immediate economic disaster. All this, like many other "simple truths", turned out to be not at all so simple and not at all true. They were misconceptions, albeit common in recent times.

Therefore, with simple truths that are supposedly shared by all experts, it is best to adhere to the opinion of another Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Undoubtedly, scientific truth cannot exist without doubts that could be used to test it. It is worth pondering: Is Time magazine right in calling Thunberg's position a simple truth?

Simple untruth

Everything Greta Thunberg says boils down to the fact that humanity is faced with a crisis that threatens its existence - climate change. Among the problems of our species, nothing is more important than his, she said. She considers the current adults to be guilty of this. At the same time, adults themselves will suffer less from it than young people, due to the fact that they will die more quickly.

And like the icing on the cake: adults don't want to take vigorous action to do something about it. The reason - among other things - is that they are unwilling to listen to the opinions of scientists.

As a result, Trump, having forgotten that the Internet remembers his real views on climate change, now pretends not to believe in global warming at all. So, as we can see, cynical contempt for the truth in one's political or business interests in modern society is, to put it mildly, not new.

However, we doubt that Greta doesn't really believe what she is saying. It should be remembered: Asperger's syndrome, contrary to the words of the girl from Sweden, who calls him "super strength", is a rather serious problem. If your circle of interests is limited, narrow and includes the same topics, then it can be difficult for you to change the opinion that you once acquired on a particular issue.

Sufferers of this syndrome are often simply too inflexible. The Swede herself admitted that she sees the world "in black and white." For her, warming is evil, and that's the point.

Greta Thunberg and the rise of the greens to the top of the political Olympus

Yes, Time is wrong in calling Thunberg's position "a simple truth." But what the editorial office cannot refuse is the instinct of an information predator. The Swedish girl is in fact "Person of the Year" - in the sense that it is she who influences the reality of this particular year more than other people represented in the visible part of the information space.

It may seem that we are exaggerating. Well, yes, the actions of schoolchildren, "striking for the climate", covered more than 100 cities around the world, they were attended by millions. Yes, public opinion in Western countries is mostly on her side. But is it so important, because the world is not ruled by children or public opinion?

However, take a closer look at the surrounding reality. Somehow it so happened that in May this year, in the elections to the European Parliament, the "Greens" in Germany for the first time took the second place, gaining 20.5%. Already this summer, they became the most popular party in the FRG according to polls, ahead of even the ruling CDU / CSU. Many Germans seriously believe that the next chancellor of the main country of the European Union could be exactly green.

But in order to influence European politics, the “greens” do not even have to win. First, it is more comfortable to criticize from the branch of the irreconcilable opposition than to torment and strain, putting together a ruling coalition. Secondly, the frightened middle-aged party bosses from the CDU / CSU understand that the voter has begun to love the green theme - and have just introduced subsidies for electric vehicles up to six thousand euros apiece. Green measures are being introduced out of fear of their victory.

Perhaps Greta Thunberg's unprecedented PR success and the rise of the Greens in Europe are a coincidence? How can one 16-year-old girl influence the West as a whole?

The school of life is the school of captains … There I learned to break off adults

Oddly enough, it's not that hard. Greta is not just a girl with pigtails: there is something under them, on her shoulders - a well-thinking head. To influence those around you, you need to understand what actually effectively changes their minds. Lenin, for example, kept on his desk "The Psychology of the Crowd" by Gustave Le Bon. But in order to learn how to manage people, it is far from always necessary to read in inhuman volumes, like the same Ulyanov. An observant person can learn a lot from the life around him.

What has surrounded Greta since childhood? Father, Svante Thunberg, is a famous Swedish actor (his father is also an actor), and today he is traveling with his daughter. Mother Malena Ernman, an opera singer, is also not super far from the acting genre. But the girl has not just an acting dynasty in her anamnesis - she also regularly attended a theater group, not the last in Sweden, and also studied dancing. Not bad for a victim of Asperger's - they are known to be normal clumsy.

The decisive crisis, after which Greta began to promote the fight against warming in her own family, happened in 2014 when she was 11. According to her mother, she started having problems with friends, for several months Greta did not speak to anyone at school. What happens to a girl at the beginning of puberty when she starts having problems with friends? That's right: she is deficient in the attention of others. And the deficit must be able to fill.

One of the situations that often happens in this case: a teenage girl turns to "her" adults - her parents, trying to get support from them. This is precisely what is noticeable in the story of Thunberg's mother. She reports: “Greta did not want to talk and did not eat. She was very sad and depressed and did not want to go to school, did not want to be there. We were at home with her 24 hours a day. Mostly she wanted to sit on the couch with us. " At the same time, the parents had to postpone several concert tours of the mother - recall, the demanded opera singer.

At this point, fifth-grader Greta took the first step towards understanding how adults can be influenced. It is necessary to make them panic, change their point of view abruptly - this will allow them to be taken out of their usual, normal state and made susceptible to influence. You need to make them feel your fear or your desire, then they themselves will do what you want.

Fear is not the only method of control. It also works well to provoke other emotions, such as feelings of guilt. The little girl Greta - even before her public career - was worried about the problem of global warming, which she sees in black and white. Therefore, one day she wanted her parents to stop eating meat, dairy products, and also flying on airplanes. After all, cattle emit methane, airplanes emit CO2.

If an ordinary person is instructed to force his parents to give up meat, and his mother (for whom concerts abroad are a large part of the income) from the plane, he will not cope.

But Greta was able to:

Greta is three times younger than her mother, but it is she who celebrates her successes and speaks benevolently about her parent: "She is trying." In our opinion, this is an excellent result, a high-quality "study" of a seemingly adult person in the direction where, to be honest, he did not particularly want to move.

The methods tested on “their own” adults - the parents - perfectly helped the girl to manage and “stranger” adults. Whether realized or not, Greta perfectly exploits her image of a "little" girl, putting on the most loose clothing that masks her secondary sexual characteristics. Wears pigtails, a totally atypical hairstyle for a girl of this age (try getting your daughter to wear that), and those braids make her look more like a girl than a woman. An uncorrected slight squint also works well for the image of a "natural" young lady.

At the forum in Davos in 2019, Greta was honest and frank when she said - right in the face of the heads of countries and large corporations: “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear that I feel every day. And I want you to act after that."

Doesn't it look like anything? The girl wants to inspire those around her with certain emotions, the same that she feels. So that they then do what she wants them to do. There is little new in this position: many manipulators of both sexes do just that every day.

But, definitely, Greta stands out from this row. She is not manipulating some kind of parents (as we have already shown, this is a passed stage for her) or a sexual partner, like her less ambitious and skillful peers. In Davos, she said without much concealment: “I want you to do what I want” - to the leaders of states and large companies.

And, as the press rightly notes, she managed to cause discomfort in them, forcing them to move in the direction in which the girl wants.