The lesson of Greta Thunberg

I have been thinking a lot about Greta Thunberg for the past few months. I must be the last one. Her reappearance at an Extinction Rebellion protest confirmed her irrelevance. Brief commentary on that was generated only by the anonymous wag that edited the photo of her arrest to make it appear that she had developed massive breasts.

I was thinking about Greta Thunberg because I managed to get through the first section of the second volume of Bernard Stiegler’s Qu’appelle-t-on panser?, which is subtitled La leçon de Greta Thunberg. For him, she was a modern-day Antigone, a reincarnation of the young woman, who by offering Polynices the appropriate rites, defended the law set down by Heaven, in defiance of her elders. Stiegler is less interested in ecological problems or how Greta Thunberg might solve them than this problem of generations.

Greta Thunberg in her speech to the United Nations Climate Action Summit was attacking a generation that failed her. It failed the “young people.” She accused them of being destructive and irresponsible. This parrhesiastic outburst represented an inversion of the correct order of things: the “young people” were lecturing an older generation that appeared immature, or devoid of reason, or being capable only of short-term thinking. In other words, she was demanding to have her own childhood restored, which means returning to a type of innocence, maybe immaturity. She was calling for her parents’ generation to shelter her. She was asking for the reinstatement of generations, with care and knowledge passed down.

This is why she was called mad, or suspected of being under the control of more powerful enemies of the prevailing social order. I am not saying that either thing is untrue.

This brings to mind the outrage provoked by a recent New York Times profile of Japanese sophist Narita Yusuke. His suggestion of a mass suicide for the elderly went too far. In fact, it was intended to be symbolic suicide, strictly political, with the elderly voluntarily accepting less electoral power, refusing appointments, and so on. This is an inversion, too, in the same way. He is calling for the reinstatement of generations, as well. He would force on them the correct state of things: young men become mature through tutelage under the last generation, absorbing knowledge passed on by them, and then move into positions of leadership and responsibility. He was called a psychopath.

These inversions could be taken as shots in a generational war, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Narita Yusuke and Greta Thunberg are crying out for the reinstatement of generations. That seems like something else—not resentment, at least, or simply anger at misallocated generational wealth.

There are no generations anymore, it seems safe to say.

Most people are caught in perpetual adolescence. I think sometimes that the greatest problem for young people unwilling to have children is that they are cut off from responsibility. Caring for children and passing on knowledge means maturity.

Neil Postman wrote a book a long time ago about the end of childhood. He puts the blame on technological change. The knowledge monopoly of book culture separated adults from children, while new technologies do not protect knowledge. Stiegler would agree. He says it in more complicated terms. He talks at length in several books about how the programming industries have the goal of stimulating immature drives, which has led to an organized mass regression, cultural minoritization, and a situation where transindividuation across the generations is impossible.

I can reinstate the generations in my own life, by raising children, and by connecting them to their community and the older generations of their own family, by putting them through endangered rites of passage, but what can I do beyond that? What would it mean for more ambitious project, whether in online or offline communities? Where is the authoritarian potential in a new generational politics? I don’t have the right question.

>>1301

I'm all for a regime in which the young are prepared to take power in a timely manner.

I have difficulty relating that to Greta Thunberg, except in the broad sense that bad political tendencies often feed off of some real problem.

This is how I felt about housing in the bay area. I rented a room in Berkeley in a nice house in North Berkeley for a year where the landlord was a lovely 80 year old.

The value of the house according to zillow was 2.5m USD whereas it was valued at 200k for the purposes of taxing. Even though it was walking distance to the UC Berkeley campus, the area was zoned for single family housing. I was paying 1300+utilities a month.

I thought it was a great representation of a certain generational inequity, where the old extracted rent from the young, and didn't even pay proportionate taxes due to their influence over the political process. I imagine she'll pass away before social security goes bankrupt too.

>>1318

The taxing of real estate in California (where the taxable property value is determined on purchase and not reassessed from scratch yearly) is unique due to Prop 13 in 1978.

When adopted, this was intended as an anti-tax measure, not a generational preference measure. People were getting taxed out of homes they owned, even though their mortgage was paid off, due to rising property values. Prop 13 was intended to stop that. The fact that it had weird side-effects wasn't considered at the time.

>>1301
About generations, I've noticed in my own life that I get more out of the older generations every time I become more mature. Now in my 30s with some kids and successes under my belt it's quite pleasant to learn from and help out the olds in my life. I think of it as a sort of series of bootstrapped rites of passage and initiations into adulthood. I don't know what to think of this observation but there it is. But it's all very inaccessible. The median person of my generation even in my own family is absolutely fucked by lack of support and guidance, by the destruction of all moral structure, by the closing off of opportunity (eg I still can't afford a house despite being mildly successful), and by having less ambitious energy. I survive only with supernatural assistance.

The vampiric class war the old wage on the young (without even realizing it for the most part) is very real. Greta sees her part of the elephant and misdiagnoses it as climate change or whatever. She's not wrong that something has been stolen, but I don't think as a 12 year old she could have actual knowledge of what exactly. She's largely just a puppet of the olds. Note how they clap and cheer and invite her to the highest halls of power to ritually berate them. This ritual self-condemnation trick they pull is pernicious. It establishes a blanket collective guilt that they can then manipulate to fall primarily upon their near rivals, most notably their own children. It's the highest evil. What has been stolen from Greta may just be her own freedom to examine the world on terms not set by the olds, and her own moral agency.

>the end of childhood
I haven't read the book but it seems to me more like the overextension of childhood into this deadly adolescence where the median millennial wakes up at 30 with the emotional maturity and material rights of a 5 year old, still trapped in eternal kindergarten. They realize their life never had a chance to begin. They have no power to right the situation. The worst thing about such crimes is that any natural justice that comes around for them falls only on the stunted children and not the departed vampires. The adult babies of our generation will be slaughtered, metaphorically and possibly literally, by the total collapse and loss of the social order our parents inherited, rejected, and chose not to pass on.

>>1318
It is a rather stark injustice. I have the same experience in Berkeley though I was paying more for probably less.