something is wrong

What are we doing?

On climate, capitalism, and Greta Thunberg

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 7 min read
What are we doing?

At some point in the last few weeks, I realized I hadn’t heard from Greta Thunberg in a while, so I decided to check in.

Not personally, of course. I’m not that cool. But I went to look her up on socials, briefly assuming I’d unfollowed her on Instagram in one of my many follow purges. Maybe she was beavering away at a university, like so many twentysomethings do; less intransigent, more studious, and thereby less newsworthy.

Or, as it turns out, no: maybe the mainstream media stopped reporting on her, and Instagram started shadowbanning her, because she’d figured out the thing.

This piece by Joshua P. Hill is ~1500 words, and I’d recommend you go and read all of it and then return, because I’m going to be commenting on several of the points within.

Back? Good.

I’m generally hesitant to voice these kinds of theses these days, for a couple of reasons:

one: it is inevitable that once one alludes to an “it’s all connected” assessment of major social problems, one starts to sound like a cliché of a lunatic; and

two: there are people in my life who have already made clear that they are tired of hearing this from me; that they’re fine with having me in their life and all, but like, not like this.

But, per the article above, once one becomes deeply invested in the underlying causes of world-shaping events — be they the climate catastrophe, or the genocide in Gaza, or (while we’re out here donning our tin-foil hats!) even the flippin’ Kennedy assassination, it becomes harder and harder not to notice that the red string is always going to end up tied in a big knot called “capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism” at the centre.

So yes: Greta Thunberg’s sudden absence from media coverage and all of our social feeds is conspicuous. It gets at something that I really don’t want to get at, given who else voices these concerns, but has become inescapable, particularly over the past couple of months of coverage of the American electoral disaster: the mainstream media is blowing it, and it’s harder and harder not to see the imprimatur of the ruling class in the editorial choices that these publications make.

In the Thunberg article, Hill is right in pointing out that Thunberg’s growth as an advocate is commendable, and that following the science of one particular problem (climate) reveals the way that large crises are connected; the way (as an environmentalist would surely see it!) that everything that happens within the biosphere of this planet affects everything else within the biosphere of this planet. We are one world in a vast and uncrossable nothingness; “there is no planet B,” to borrow the protest quip. It takes a clear-eyed clarity to look at the sheer degree to which we’ve built the entire system wrong to understand the true nature of what we have to fix.

As Thunberg put it in 2022, “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…”

Part of me rues the march of time that has turned Greta Thunberg from an adorably spiky little kid standing outside her school with a placard, a feel-good story wrapped around a feel-awful story, into a young woman, the sort of person that Western media, and capitalist thought leadership in general, has spent generations successfully gaslighting, marginalizing, and rejecting outright. It’s just so easy to dismiss her now, when we should be doing the exact opposite; she is the very exemplar of the kind of work that activists and activism must undertake in order to deepen and broaden the impact of their efforts.

Here’s Hill again:

“Greta Thunberg has been in the process of growing up and coming to understand the world in recent years, and it’s led her to seek the truth about the systems she hopes to change. But, for those of us who are older, it’s also not too late to learn and reach new conclusions. Very, very few of us were taught much about the global systems of imperialism or colonialism or the truth of capitalism.”

I think about that last bit a lot: what I was taught, when I was taught it, and what moderating contexts were wrapped around what I was taught in order to keep me from questioning all of this stuff far sooner than I did. These teachings informed my absolutely ass-backwards education on race; they informed the fact that I only sorted out (or began to sort out) my gender identity in my 40s; and they sure as hell made it so, so easy to ignore that, as a successful beneficiary of white colonialism and capitalist free enterprise, I could afford to sit on my balcony getting angry on Xitter while insurgents agitated for real change in Minneapolis; or now in Gaza, minus the Xitter.

Teaching — the way we are indoctrinated into the status quo from birth — always informs the painfully rudimentary conversations I’m always compelled to have with cherished older relatives, adults who have surely gotten tired of hearing about all this, adults who both want to proclaim to anyone who’ll listen that the world is so terrible now (“but there’s nothing they can do about it”), and plead for someone to just tell them why this has all happened (“but no, it can’t be that”).

It’s these members of the older generation, in particular, who have taught me the most about my own teaching, because whatever meal of “this system works great!” propaganda I was force-fed in my 00s, my teens, my 20s, and even my 30s, their meal was even larger, and more satisfying, and much harder to scrutinize.

Something is Wrong

Last week, after the debate, someone texted me to ask me to explain to her, as a layperson, why any women vote for Trump.

I begged off for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to complexity and length (by text?!), and because I intuited that the question, itself, was less a query than a passive form of objection. Also, unlike most other “why is [X] like this?” questions that I get from my family, the simple answer here isn’t just “capitalism,” the answer everyone is tired of hearing from me.

But I think the real answer is aligned with something else that Hill refers to in his piece, which is that for a growing quantity of people in the United States (and elsewhere), the cognitive dissonance of living under all of this exploitation and oppression — even when it doesn’t come with obvious markers that they can understand, by relating to their race, their gender, or the sexual identity — is simply becoming too much. It’s giving more and more people “a sense that something isn’t right, that the true nature of how the world operates isn’t what we were taught.”

When I was in college, a friend of mine made a film whose tag line, as I recall, was “something is Wrong.” Capital W on the “Wrong.” I don’t really remember if the film itself was about this pervasive cognitive dissonance, the widening gap between how we think things are supposed to be and how they are, but that one line has become a linchpin idea for me in the years since, as I’ve tried to navigate my way around the reasons why, for example, a woman (or any upright human) would vote for Trump. The reasons for the dissonance are likely various and multifaceted, but I think there’s something very important and real in the idea that regardless of how it manifests, the sense that something is Wrong is growing, throughout the global North.

This might be because capitalism is entering its death spiral — less and less regulation, more and more mashing the oranges down to the pith to try to extract share price growth that comes at a higher and higher cost. I mean, fuck, Disney recently declared that signing up for their streaming platform exempts the corporation from wrongful death lawsuits, which is less an “oh man, that’s bizarre” headline than it is indicative of the kind of thinking that, were it to come from a relative, would demonstrate that it’s time for that relative to get moved into care.

Will capitalism’s death spiral outpace the biosphere’s death spiral? By the time you read this, I’ll have turned 48, so I’m a smidge too old to believe we’re that lucky, but it’s possible. We are watching the parallel collapses of two systems, one which has governed life on Earth for a thousand years, and one which makes life on Earth possible. In such stark terms, it ceases to be opinion and becomes fact that only one of these systems is actually necessary for our continued survival.

But back to Hill: he points out that millions of people out there are hungry for the truth and are simply finding it in the wrong places, whether it’s in Trump’s bullshit bravado (which of course, appealingly, promises a return to an imagined yesteryear that was theoretically “better,” even if all of that betterness was just the cloak of ill-taught lies that I referenced above), or in YouTube videos about how transgender people who transition later regret it (the number is effectively zero, but that won’t stop people from seeing one woman talking about it one time and assuming that it’s an actual, substantive debate point). Something is Wrong, and the opportunity, for those of us who have the energy, is to try, try, try till we die, to redirect that feeling towards the true nature of the problem, and the true actions that can be taken, before one of these death spirals reaches its end.

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