Brief: Greta Thunberg’s “Super Power” vs. Fascists and Liberals (Pt 1)
Greta Thunberg is a burr in the ass of the powerful throughout the world—and not only for rightwing sociopaths. Increasingly, as she grows up, learns more, and networks with other activists around the world, she’s become a scourge for liberals as well.
Many of them would prefer she remain a child, providing a theatre of emotional catharsis for a climate crisis industry more interested in raising money from green economy donors than forcing change.
Now, as Thunberg broadens her target to capitalism and colonialism writ large, it’s more and more clear that she’s confronting what autistic philosopher Robert Chapman calls “the empire of normality”, from her lived experience of autism, about which so many of the conspiracy theories we cover here swirl.
Chapter One:
Seizure of the Madleen
Why do Fascists Hate Greta
Why are Liberals Backing Away from Greta?
Neurodiversity and activism
Chapter two (Monday on Patreon):
Masking, Burnout, Contemplation
Hamster Wheel of Capitalism
Parenting in Humility
Show Notes
Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Aid Ship With Greta Thunberg Aboard - The New York Times
Greta Thunberg “kidnapped by the Israeli occupation forces” - YouTube
Greta Thunberg Frog Hat - Shibtee Clothing
Posts distort 2018 Greta Thunberg tweet on climate danger | AP News
Lindsey Graham Fantasizes About Sinking Gaza Aid Ship Carrying Greta Thunberg | Truthout
Thunberg gets backlash for pro-Palestinian post – DW – 10/21/2023
Fact Check: Altered image of Greta Thunberg holding antisemitic book | Reuters
Right-Wing Attacks Greta Thunberg
The cult of Greta Thunberg - spiked
Targeting Greta Thunberg: A Case Study in Online Mis/Disinformation | German Marshall Fund of the United States
The dangers of depicting Greta Thunberg as a prophet
Margaret Atwood says Greta Thunberg is the ‘Joan of Arc’ of environmentalism | The Independent
Greta Thunberg speech at climate protest Glasgow, November 5
We are all living in Greta's world now
The Greta Effect: a timeline of Thunberg's activism leading to her being on the Madleen
Fridays for Future – How Greta started a global movement
Greta Thunberg: From a Darling of Liberal Media to Public Enemy No. 1 - Left Voice
Why the Media Stopped Covering Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg Speaks from Aid Ship Heading to Gaza Despite Israeli Threats: It’s My Moral Obligation | Democracy Now!
Jason Hickel: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism
The Climate Movement Breaks Through | The Nation
Greta Thunberg Was Targeted for an Octopus. Then Israel Chimed In
Greta Thunberg is far from the only neurodivergent climate activist – many who see the world differently also want to change it
School strike for climate - save the world by changing the rules | Greta Thunberg | TEDxStockholm
Understanding Masking: A Neurodiversity-Affirming Perspective - Autism Society of NC
Mask of Your Own Face – Experiences with Masking as an Autistic Adult - Autism Spectrum News
Autistic Masking
“Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults - PMC
What Is Autistic Burnout? | Psychology Today Canada
The Treadmill Tendency
Greta Thunberg on X: "yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com" / X
Our House Is on Fire by Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Malena Ernman, Beata Ernman: 9780143133575 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
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My name is Gifa Tunbe and I am from Sweden.
If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces or forces that support Israel.
I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.
That is Greta Tunberg on June 8th, wearing a kefea and holding onto the rigging of the yacht Madeleine as it bobbed on a gentle sea about 100 nautical miles off the coast of Israel.
The video selfie was pre-recorded and then released by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which sponsored the humanitarian effort to sail Thunberg and 11 other activists, including a French member of the European Parliament and a symbolic amount of aid, including baby formula, rice, and medical supplies, to the illegally occupied and blockaded genocide zone of Gaza, where 2 million people are facing starvation.
She made the recording a short time before naval commandos of the Israel Occupation Force used quadcopters to drop unidentified chemicals or white paint on the boat, which seemed to disrupt their satellite connections, and then they boarded it to arrest the party and then forced them to throw their phones overboard, fully severing communication.
Like the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and of course the genocide itself, the arrest was illegal, taking place in international waters.
No other country came to the boat's aid.
After the seizure, hardline genocidaire Israeli defense minister Israel Katz ordered the military to show the detainees footage of the October 7th attacks, saying, quote, anti-Semitic Gritta and her Hamas supporting friends should see exactly what the Hamas terrorist organization,
which they came to support and act on behalf of, truly is, as if they weren't aware of that day and the more than 600 days of collective punishment that have followed.
On June 10th, Thunberg was deported back to Sweden, but seven of her colleagues refused deportation in order to press their case in court.
*Soul music*
This brief is called Greta Thunberg's Superpower vs.
Fascists and Liberals.
And in it, and I'm going to continue Monday with a follow-up on our Patreon, I'll be unpacking Thunberg's backstory as an iconic burr in the ass of the powerful throughout the world, and not only for right-wing sociopaths, because increasingly, as she grows up and voraciously learns more and networks with other activists around the world,
she's become a scourge for liberals as well, many of whom would prefer she remain a child and provide a theater of emotional catharsis for a climate crisis industry more interested in raising money from green economy donors than forcing change.
Now, as Thunberg broadens her target to capitalism and colonialism writ large, it's more and more clear that she's confronting what autistic philosopher Robert Chapman calls the empire of normality from her lived experience of autism, about which so many of the conspiracy theories we cover here swirl.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality.
And here we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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Now, before I begin, one caveat here related to my title for these episodes and also my understanding of autism studies as the dad of an autistic kid.
In Thunberg's earliest disclosures about her diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder conditions of Asperger's, OCD, and selective mutism, she does use the term superpower to describe her neuropsychology.
And I think that's a natural sort of developmental and empowering, depathologizing process that a lot of autistic kids can benefit from.
However, more recently, she's also acknowledged that the term superpower is not a universally appreciated descriptor.
In an interview with her that I'll clip for the Monday program, Thunberg says that, quote, of course, it isn't as easy as just saying it's a superpower for everyone who has it, because she explains that for many individuals, autism, quote, can be something that is really difficult if you do not get the support you need.
And that notion of support is crucial for what Chapman will bring to the table in this discussion, because it points to a focus on serving the social model of disability.
And that veers away from putting Thunberg on the pedestal that liberals will strand her on so that fascists can knock her down.
And by the way, this growth and learning in her messaging and language about her own experience really boosts my respect for her.
This is somebody who really wants to keep learning and really wants to do right by her communities.
Chapter 1.
Recent Attacks Having given up on saving the planet after her 2018 prediction that climate change would destroy humanity by 2023 proved to be disappointingly wide of the mark, Scandinavian doomgoblin Greta Thunberg has moved on to saving Gaza.
She's on a boat heading for the Middle East, the Israelis, and it's full of a performative cargo of aid, symbolic aid.
She's going to take it to the poor people of the non-state of Palestine.
And she's wrapping herself up in Palestinian flags as they sail on a rather nice boat across the Mediterranean in lovely weather.
So a nice little cruise for her.
So that is Talk TV's blustering fascist uncle, Kevin O'Sullivan.
So Talk TV is a UK-based YouTube channel with 1.26 million subscribers.
And he's speaking a few days before the at-sea arrest.
And he manages to sum up the basic right-wing position on Thunberg these days, which is that, you know, she hysterically predicted the end of the world in 2023.
She did not.
And the receipts are in the show notes.
That her climate activism was a failure.
I mean, it certainly hasn't been, or else this shitheel wouldn't be talking about her.
And her need for attention has driven her onward to another bleeding heart cause, or that her protests are performative and fun, that she doesn't have a job, she's always on vacation, and so on.
O'Sullivan goes on to openly hope that the Israel occupation force raids the boat so that, quote, the silly little girl will be finally shut up.
Now, days before, the pro-Israel senator Lindsey Graham tweeted, hope Greta and her friends can swim, which is this fantasy about Israel capsizing the boat.
And then what appears to be a visibly drunk Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports took it farther.
You should just go over to Gaza.
We can do unnamed.
You can be live.
I'll jump on Greta Van Thorsten or whatever that girl.
She's sailing there.
Like whoever that fucking, I hope they hit a fucking, like a missile on her boat.
Well, I hope they hit.
They hit a missile.
Not on the boat.
I ate when I hit a missile.
Knocked that boat down, Greta, whatever her name is.
Thunberg, I believe, right?
The bottom line is Thunberg drives all of the right people into incoherent babbling.
But this is really just the froth on the surface because American fascists ceded a number of these positions long ago.
In 2019, after Thunberg's breakout speech at the UN in New York, you might remember these lines.
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet, you all come to us young people for hope.
How dare you?
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering.
People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
We have Michael Knowles with a comment on Fox that went so far, even for Fox, that they banned him as a commentator.
But that only jump-started his career at the Daily Wire.
If it were about science, it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.
So what you're seeing here is a political movement and a religious movement, and it's fulfilling religious and political goals of the left, but it isn't doing very much for science.
So Knowles packs a lot of the standard early conspiracism about Thunberg into those 19 seconds that she's a mentally ill puppet manipulated by her parents and created by a network of green Marxist elites, PR firms, or left-leaning organizations for profit or to advance a hidden anti-Western agenda.
Also, please note the criticism of climate activism as some kind of religion, which is a common line that we get from Jordan Peterson.
There's a narrative at the base of any belief system, and the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, what would you call hapless, defenseless, fragile virgin.
The industrial activity of mankind is characterized as something like a rapacious, power-mad, demolisher of natural virginity and beauty.
Now, these guys also claim that protests and arrests involving Greta are staged for publicity.
They say that she's not a real person, but a fictional character, or she's being played by an Australian child actress named Estella Renee.
And if you look up Estella Renee online, that's a pretty funny claim.
But things get darker with the QAnon crowd, who seized on Thunberg's first global public appearance in 2019 to fuel their emerging fever dream, claiming that her father, the actor and producer Svante Thunberg, lives in Germany with a boyfriend.
That her mother, who is an opera singer named Milena Ernmann, is a satanic lesbian who teaches abortion classes, of course, or that Svante and Milena are not her parents at all, or that Greta is related to financier George Soros or supports the Islamic State or is a millenarian-style cult leader.
On Fox, Laura Ingram compared Thunberg to one of the child religious extremists in Children of the Corn.
But then on the lightworker side of things, somebody found a black and white photograph from 1898 of some girl working in a gold mine in Canada.
And she does look uncannily similar to Thunberg with a particular facial expression and long braids.
And so, of course, it is said she is a time traveler sent to save us all.
And as Michael Knowles demonstrated, her openness about autism has also exposed her to all kinds of attacks on her sanity as she travels the world saying more sane things than they can even keep track of.
so Chapter 2, Why Do Fascists Hate Greta Thunberg?
I want to go back to an old source here.
This is a source that contains but predates the specific misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, the hatred for Thunberg's multicultural networking, and the soft eugenics of these ableist takes on autism, which have their hard roots in Nazi medicine, by the way.
In Alice Miller's incredible book, For Your Own Good, this is published in 1980, and it's her psychoanalytic classic on the poisonous pedagogy of Nazi parents and families, she quotes a famous 18th century text by Johann Georg Sulzer.
It's called An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children, and it's published in 1748.
This became a very influential text in German-speaking educational thought in its time and into the 20th century, which is what she's really pointing at, because Miller argues that Sulzer's ideas represent a pervasive, revered tradition of child rearing that created the cultural and psychological conditions necessary for individuals to comply with totalitarian regimes.
So here's Sulzer describing the ideal second and third years of public schooling according to his values.
So this might be first or second grade, actually, if we're counting kindergarten.
Quote, The second major matter to which one must dedicate oneself, beginning with the second and third year, is a strict obedience to parents and superiors and a trusting acceptance of all they do.
These qualities are not only absolutely necessary for the success of the child's education, but they have a very strong influence on education in general.
They are so essential because they impart to the mind orderliness per se and a spirit of submission to the laws.
A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will.
Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey.
It is a generally recognized principle that persons of high estate who are destined to rule whole nations must learn the art of governance by way of first learning obedience.
Qui nestcit obedire, nestchit imperare.
The reason for this is that obedience teaches a person to be zealous in observing the law, which is the first quality of a ruler.
Thus, after one has driven out willfulness as a result of one's first labors with children, the chief goal of one's further labors must be obedience.
It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children.
It is quite natural for the child's soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter.
One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used.
Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood.
If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will.
And for this very reason, the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.
Okay, so when you zoom out, I think this is at the heart of Thunberg's offensiveness to the world's right wing.
Who could this be, this girl who has no interest in dressing to convention, no interest in ingratiating herself to any male gays or any older person, who blew off school to pique the conscience of the powerful, who has no time for small talk, who seems to ignore insults, who can't seemingly be shamed, and who is so uncompromisingly honest.
On the very first info leaflet she was handing out to passersby as she sat in front of the Swedish parliament, she wrote, quote, I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future, unquote.
Now, among adults who believe they control time, both the meaning of the past and the destiny of the future, fascists are at the top, and there's no way they can tolerate a child spotlighting the shame that their own purity fetishes conceal.
*sad music*
Chapter 3, Why Are Liberals Backing Away from Greta Dunberg?
Up on our Patreon, I have a series of episodes called Conspirituality and the Imaginary Child.
And it looks at how children, as symbols, but not persons with their own internal lives, are at the center of conspirituality anxiety and discourse.
Now, there are two types of imaginary child that I work with in that series.
One is an object of dread.
This is the QAnon victim or the youthful satanic perpetrator of crimes.
But the other imaginary child is the idol of aspiration.
So this is the newborn baby that slides like a dolphin into a warm birthing tub after, you know, an hour of ecstatic, medically unassisted homebirth.
This is the starseed and indigo child who carry prophecies from the great beyond.
These are all of Kai Dickinson's subjects in the telepathy tapes.
What's interesting about Tunberg is that she seems to be a blank slate for both types of projections.
If you look closely, you'll see that on the flip side of those who demonize her, we have those who idealize her.
And here's Margaret Atwood with a very mild sort of gesture at that.
She's wonderful and she's impervious to people slanging her off.
She seems to be.
But rage was magnificent.
Well, she's sort of Joan of Arc of the environment.
I think she needs a big white horse.
Now, I've listened to Atwood for long enough as a Canadian to know when her tongue is firmly in her cheek and that she's aware that Joan of Arc's drive and intuition were inseparable from her fabled neurodiversity.
You know, she had auditory hallucinations, possible schizophrenia.
She had an obsessive focus on justice.
She was a very unusual person.
But nonetheless, the earnest praise for Greta Thunberg amongst liberals has also set her up to fail when the target of her attention shifted and began to zero in on the foundations of liberal Western society, and in particular, its commitment to capitalism.
So over time, Thunberg's message broadened from a relatively digestible climate change alarm to really digging into its causes.
Now, in a moment, I'll go back further into her backstory, but here's the brief public arc of how that happened.
In 2018, she's 15 years old, and in August, she begins skipping school to protest outside on the pavement in front of the Swedish parliament, demanding stronger climate action in advance of a coming election.
She held a hand-painted sign famously reading School Strike for Climate.
Now, after the election, she kept up the strike every Friday, and that inspired a movement that grew across the world.
It was called Fridays for Future.
Now, in November, she was invited to address the UN Climate Change Conference in Karowice in Poland.
And by this time, over 17,000 students in 24 countries were participating in the Friday climate strikes.
Now, next year, March, she's nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The climate strikes now have drawn over 2 million students in 135 countries.
By that fall, in September, she sailed on a carbon-free yacht to New York for the UN Climate Action Summit, and she delivered that famous how dare you speech to world leaders.
And that coincided with an outbreak of protests in many cities all over the world.
They were coordinated climate strikes with over a million participants estimated.
However, by November of 2021, she was in Glasgow at a protest outside of the UN's COP26 conference, which achieved little more than a series of promises to make more promises and meetings deciding when to have more meetings.
So, whereas in 2019 she addressed the UN directly, in Glasgow she stood in the damp and cold and delivered this banger as an outsider.
It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.
And more and more people are starting to realize this.
Many are starting to ask themselves, what will it take for the people in power to wake up?
But let's be clear, they are normally awake.
They know exactly what they are doing.
They know exactly what price and values they are sacrificing to maintain business as usual.
The leaders are not doing nothing.
They are effectively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system.
It is effectively the leaders to continue to limit the exploitation of people in nature and the disruption of the present and future living conditions to take place.
And then this.
And the climate and ecological crisis, of course, doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It is directly tied to public crises and injustices that they found to colonialism and beyond.
Priscillas based on the idea that some people are worth more than others and therefore have the right to steal others, to exploit others, and to steal their land and resources.
And it is very naive of us to think that we could solve this crisis without addressing the root cause of it.
Now, by the time she was doing book events in 2022 for her collection of climate essays from scientific experts and activists, it's called the Climate Book, she was expanding her activism to include speaking against injustice in Ukraine, Palestine, Armenia, and Western Sahara.
And she was saying things like this, quote, we are never going back to normal again because normal was already a crisis.
What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet.
It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and genocide by the so-called global north to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.
Okay, so what happened?
I'm going to link to an excellent YouTube commentary by Elliot Tsang on this question, but I'll just summarize his thoughts here.
From that big 2019 speech in New York City, legacy outlets would often portray Thunberg as a kind of savior figure for Gen Z. But this inadvertently set her and her generation up for really high expectations.
And that allowed the adults around them to abdicate responsibility.
And there was also a sector of that audience that treated her passion as a kind of cathartic entertainment.
Now, Thunberg also learned that her name and image were being co-opted by unscrupulous for-profit foundations, and that opened her eyes to the commodification of climate activism.
Meanwhile, she watched these big UN cop gatherings come up empty while perfecting the art of greenwashing.
So she began to turn away from the UN system, and her work evolved to directly challenge the issues of capitalism and colonialism because she was moving beyond the apolitical climate discourse favored by mainstream media.
And this involved her protesting Swedish mining on the land of the Sami.
This involved her denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as ecocide.
And she also started speaking out in solidarity with Palestine.
Now, her refrain became that the climate crisis is a political conflict disproportionately impacting poor people in the global south, and that it was driven by specific actors in a specific logic.
She highlighted that the profit motive is clearly the driver of these issues, and she pointed out the deception of the narratives around responsible capitalism, especially in her climate book of 2022.
I'm making my way through it now.
It's incredible.
It's very, very comprehensive.
In the book, she writes the chapter introductions for subchapters that are written by heavy-hitter researchers who, in addition to providing excellent science on our whole situation, go into great detail on the failure of markets to solve anything.
So strategies of greenwashing or the funky math of carbon offsets.
These are authors that argue that sustainable consumerism as framed by climate industry pundits is just not a thing that is manageable, and that moreover, capitalism has no real ability to address inequality and historical injustice.
Now, some quotes from Thunberg's chapter intros that speak to this amalgamation of ideas would be the following.
Quote, leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem in retrospect to have been a terrible idea.
Quote, we do not have all the solutions to solve this crisis within today's systems.
Quote, we can no longer reach our targets without a system change because meeting our targets would literally require tearing up contracts, valid deals and agreements on an unimaginable scale.
This would simply not be possible in the current system, unquote.
So, would it shock you to know that she got less and less media coverage as time wore on?
That there's an inverse relationship between her radicalization and her status as a legacy media darling appearing on the covers of Time and The Atlantic?
Now, the heat is turned up again as she turns her attention to Gaza and accelerates this conflict with the global north liberal democracies that once platformed her as an emotional proxy.
And why has she begun to challenge this very basic logic?
How does she tie her concerns together?
Well, she says it this way in conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
For me, there's no way of distinguishing the two.
We cannot have climate justice without social justice.
The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees.
I'm a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being, and those are extremely interlinked.
For example, when we see the genocide in Gaza, of course, there are some very obvious links that ecocide environmental destruction is a very common method used in war and to oppress people.
But also, it should be much simpler than that.
No matter what the cause of the suffering is, whether that is CO2, whether that is bombs, whether that is state repression or other forms of violence, we have to stand up against that source of suffering.
And if we pretend to care about the environment, if we pretend to care about the climate and our children's future without seeing and acknowledging and fighting against the suffering of all marginalized people today, then that is an extremely racist approach to justice that excludes the majority of the world's population.
Now, to flesh that idea out, I also want to flag an analysis given by the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, who advises the Great Thunberg Foundation and who Thunberg published in the climate book under, of course, a chapter called Degrowth.
A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East.
A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen.
It's funny, like I'm always asked to talk about ecology, when really what I want to talk about is capitalist imperialism.
And the two are just a piece of the same problem, right?
The ecological crisis is ultimately playing out along colonial lines, right?
We know that it is the countries of the imperial core that are overwhelmingly responsible, and specifically their ruling classes who control the means of production and energy systems and investment, et cetera, et cetera, are overwhelmingly responsible for the excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown.
We know that's a fact.
We also know it's a fact that the global south suffers the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown.
The people who have contributed literally nothing to the crisis whatsoever, not contributed a small amount, contributed nothing.
Thunberg's primary takeaway from her years in dialogue with the UN-based climate discourse is that it could not operate from a structural analysis of power because it sought siloed solutions generated by narrow points of really fine expertise, but without a holistic vision.
So we're talking about technocratic and accounting solutions, points on the carbon scale, investments in solar panels or desalination, research in geoengineering or studies in electric vehicle battery capacity that don't account for slave labor conditions in Africa, where the rare earth minerals are mined.
No overall view of how the machine is working to ignore human and animal needs to preserve wealth hoarding and labor inequality.
And why would it, she comes to ask, if the cultures dominating the conversation only stand to lose if their advantages and privileges are challenged?
So Thunberg drives the fascist insane with her non-compliance, her rejection of gendered and behavioral norms, but she also drives the liberal into a crisis of conscience with a deeper disobedience aimed at a more deeply entrenched idea, which is that the way things are going now might just work out one day after all.
She challenges the self-image of the conscientious global north citizen who recycles their plastic bottles but doesn't challenge their government over global wealth inequality, or they switch to a Tesla while the conditions for genocide gather and explode in Gaza.
So, Chapter 4, Neurodiversity So how do thinkers like Greta do it?
How do they stop compartmentalizing their world?
How do they learn to apply the same standards of morality to every subject area and part of the machine?
How do they generate and maintain a parallel vision of the world?
Education, culture, networking, maybe religion play roles for some people, but with Tunberg and many other climate activists, it seems there's a neurological way of being in the world, a genetic variation provoked or enhanced by social factors.
So when I was 11, I became ill.
I fell into depression.
I stopped talking and I stopped eating.
In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight.
Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD, and selective mutism.
That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary.
Now is one of those moments.
Thank you.
For those of us who are on the spectrum, almost everything is black or white.
We aren't very good at lying, and we usually don't enjoy participating in the social game that the rest of you seem so fond of.
I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange.
Especially when it comes to the sustainability crisis, where everyone keeps saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all.
And yet they just carry on like before.
I don't understand that.
So on Monday, I'll get to how for Thunberg, recovering from autistic burnout happened in tandem with finding a pathway to speaking to her vision of the world.
This is from a Guardian article in 2021.
She tells interviewer Simon Hattonstone the following, quote, In the Fridays for Future movement, so many people are like me.
Many have autism, and they are very inclusive and welcoming.
She believes the reason that so many autistic people have become climate activists is because they cannot avert their gaze.
They have a compulsion to tell the truth as they see it.
Quote, I know lots of people who have been depressed, and then they have joined the climate movement for Fridays for Future and have found a purpose in life and found friendship and community that they are welcome in.
Now, is this a self-selecting group who could have rallied around any cause or topic that brought them together in a shared special interest?
Yeah, it's plausible.
But according to Belfast-based ecotherapist Louise Taylor writing in the conversation, there may be more stable links between neurodiversity and eco-activism.
Quote, In my doctoral research, writes Taylor, I interviewed 23 youth activists, conservation workers, and environmentalists to examine the link between nature experiences and mental health in an era of climate breakdown.
Many of my participants had been diagnosed with mental health, psychiatric, and neurological conditions, including autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder.
They reported finding community and a sense of purpose in the environmental activism movement and through a connection with nature.
Now, Taylor also goes on to speak about the possible advantages of the skill of hyperfixation and also the moral firmness of the obsession with justice.
And then she writes, Autistic people often struggle to adhere to or understand social and cultural norms.
This can put them at greater risk of social ridicule or being described as rude or antisocial.
Along with this is often an inability to comprehend or respect hierarchy and authority.
These traits may also be a strength in activism where directly criticizing and challenging powerful people and political systems can be a daunting project.
Edit?
These traits may also be a strength in activism where directly criticizing and challenging powerful people and political systems can be a daunting prospect.
Now, is it any wonder that autism, as far as these qualities were understood a century ago, was defined, diagnosed, and targeted for eradication by the Nazis?
I'm going to pause there for today and on Monday, pick up that particular thread and pull on it and see how far it goes.
And to do that, I'll use the work of Robert Chapman in his book, Empire of Normality, Neurodiversity and Capitalism, because he says two things.
I mean, he says many things in the book, but two key notes are that one, autism does not become a diagnosable pathology until urbanized industrial capitalism accelerates ableist work requirements.
And secondly, he says that autistic responses to capitalist pressure and logic happen to be reasonable and maybe even prophetic.
The autistic person, in other words, is a kind of canary in the coal mine.
Chapman is like the Jason Hickel of autism, because if you really read him carefully, his core challenge is that just like you can't separate eco-justice from decolonization, you can't separate listening to autistic people's support needs from disrupting the machine we are all spinning in.
So I look forward to unpacking that all with you on Monday.
