Greta Thunberg is the personification of all the eco-movement could want and more. As a child, she can lay claim to represent the future. She does not play the role of leader but assumes the much more important mantle of symbol.
Time Magazine has announced that this year’s Person of the Year award will go to the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. The Swedish school-girl-turned-eco-activist has become the poster-girl of the climate change-turned-emergency worldwide. The choice was not surprising, given the media adulation for the girl who has traveled the globe with a minimal carbon footprint.
Time has long abandoned the pretense of giving the award to truly great people, full of personality and talents, and who influence events. Alas, the time of grandeur, discipline and vision is over. Time is no longer the serious magazine of importance that it once was. People no longer want to make an effort to know, admire, and appreciate grand figures. We easily tire of greatness.
Greta a Perfect Fit
In this sense, the award to Greta Thunberg fits perfectly. In our shallow and mediocre times, today’s figures must not be too deep or complex. They must not be connected to any historical or religious narrative outside of their own evolving story. Their speech must be Twitter-friendly. The new models need not be exceptional as long as they defy standard definitions. Time typically picks those who can link themselves to all the liberal causes in vogue.
By naming Greta Thunberg, Time is presenting a perfect postmodern archetype. Her award might be better called the Archetype of the Year award. Like all archetypes, she serves as the model for which all other activists of the same type are representations. She is meant to represent “the power of youth” in rebellion against an adult-dominated world. Her story expresses well postmodernity’s rejection of Western Christian civilization.
Time’s choice makes more sense when we consider that agendas progress more with archetypes than party platforms. If a movement can find an archetypal person who can embody its platform principles, it will advance much more quickly. If the media can propagate a perfect archetype, they can make a cause universal.
Thus, Greta Thunberg is the personification of all the eco-movement could want and more. As a child, she can lay claim to represent the future. She does not play the role of leader but assumes the much more important mantle of symbol. In so doing, she need not present concrete proposals but only make impossible demands.
What She Is Not
She presents a new human type to act on a world stage that will be stripped of leaders and thinkers. She stands out much more for what she is not than what she is.
Thus, Ms. Thunberg is not a deep thinker or an articulator. She is nothing more than a symbol. Hers is a fatalistic world of gloom and doom of either-or alternatives. She accepts no other explanations beyond the coming human extinction scenario, and, like a broken record, she repeats it over and over again.
She is not given to tact, subtlety, or diplomacy. Instead, she demands vague and urgent action without specifics. Her message is cold, brutal, and unpoetic. She will talk about the hopes of youth and the instability of ecosystems without transitions. Her discourse uses direct, simplistic terms that address her anger, rage, frustration, and desperation.
She has no fondness for anything since she is the ultimate expression of anti-consumerism. She dresses in plain expressionless clothes without adornments or jewelry. Everything surrounding her life is likewise plain and unassuming. It is a joyless world that does not admit an appreciation of man-made beauty or progress. A coldness permeates her world, filling it with sadness.
Mystery and Mysticism
There is also an element of mystery and mysticism in her presentation. Unfortunately, she suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which impairs her emotional expression, making it cold, mysterious, and disconnected. Thus, everything about her tragically defies the standard definition of what might be expected of this child seemingly without a childhood.
Like all who embrace the ecological cause, Ms. Thunberg claims to have a spiritual connection with the earth from which we might draw energies. She takes up the cause of the indigenous peoples who she holds up as models of eco-friendly populations.
As Time notes, she is a 16-year-old that appears to be twelve in her short five-foot-tall body. Time’s cover picture reinforces a mystical overtone by presenting an almost elfin figure staring out into the vast expanses of waves crashing into a rocky beach.
The media have been quick to capitalize on ascribing to her mystical persona special powers, not unlike that of a prophetess or oracle. However, the school truant from Sweden has only become a sensation due to the enabling power of adults who have opened every door from the Vatican to the United Nations. It is no coincidence that every liberal cause, from feminism to indigenous rights to gun control, can identify with Ms. Thunberg.
Advancing the Liberal Cause
If the object of Time’s Person of the Year award is to recognize the person that most advances the liberal agenda, then Greta Thunberg certainly can claim the title. By serving as an archetype for the ecology cause, she is a model to take the sagging eco-movement’s fortunes forward.
However, what we need are authentic role models that practice virtue and move society to true progress. This vision is not found in a neo-pagan pantheistic worldview that rejects all that is civilized and Western. Instead, truly representative figures in society aspire to an order based on sanctity and governed by a personal God and His Providential action on Earth.
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The featured image is a photograph of Greta Thunberg, was taken by Anders Hellberg (who is not affiliated with The Imaginative Conservative or any of its essays), and is not under any license.
Well and thoughtfully said. This poor child is being manipulated, but no one seems to know by whom or for what purposes.
Are there no child protective services in Sweden?
Further, the abuse flung at her is unconscionable. No victim, no child, should be subject to further victimization.
May God protect her; the adults sure aren’t.
Apparently Doctor Horvat has hot noticed Time magazine does not place persons on it’s covers for enduring reasons in the first place. IIRC, Benito, Adolf, and Uncle Joe have all made “Person of the Year”, not for philosophical abstraction, but merely for being newsworthy in the short-term.
But to the young lady. Other than having become a “liberal icon”, what exactly has she done to incur the wrath of the unthinking horde on the Right? She has a concern, and is taking personal action to express her concern. She is calling on others to share her concern. Whether any others, in or out of positions of authority join with her is their choice, she forces no one. And that taking action at the lowest level, that “subsidiarity”, which we all ought practice, makes her more conservative than many of her critics.
Had Conservatism not succumbed to the siren call of “ideology”, it would perhaps be easier to see that.
TIME magazine, no more or less than The Economist, is just another publication serving the interests of the globalists, who own and run them relentlessly to achieve their aims. They have been cultivating this “climate change” agenda as a tremendous moneymaking scheme for some time, since they probably knew the day would come when the EU and their other globalist projects would fail, as we see happening now that Nationalists all over are delivering a well-deserved blowback. It is terrible how children can continue to be exploited by ideological, financial and geopolitical motivations.
It’s sad that what is such an obvious case of shameful exploitation akin to child abuse is being not only celebrated but weaponized to limit any form of dissent. It would be laughable it the consequences were not so serious.
God created the heavens and earth and humans that dwell there. Humans are unable to control the climate and cannot change gender.
She is just as qualified and fitted as 1938 time’s person of the year
The Person Of The Year should be the scientist who proved Global Warming is caused by CO2 production
It is hoped that the misguided will take a moment to reflect on this essay. Maybe some will also take a moment to rethink what they have been led to believe as gospel. Now there is a word to meditate on.
To those who have led this young world to believe in the prevailing nihilism , and further to instill a desperate need for redemption(now there is another word to meditate on). As well many of us should be ashamed of not preventing this prevailing mindset of many youth.
Thank you for this essay..