What Does the Rise of the Child Activist Say About Us?

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 dystopian short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the eponymous city pays a high price for the happiness of its inhabitants: the constant torture of one child kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery.

Greta Thunberg addresses the National Assembly
 In Paris on July 23, 2019 in Paris, France.

Everyone in Omelas knows about the child: “This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve,” Le Guin writes, “whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child.” Occasionally, a citizen can’t take the fact that their life rests upon a child’s suffering, and they leave for parts unknown (hence the title of the story).

Le Guin’s story comes to mind now as I watch grown adults using social media to pile on climate change activist Greta Thunberg. The Swedish teen is currently sailing across the North Atlantic on a zero-emissions trip to attend the United Nations climate talks. And despite Thunberg’s noble cause, high-profile pundits are finding excuses to ridicule her. “Freak yachting accidents do happen in August,” Arron Banks, a co-founder of the Leave. EU campaign who is currently under investigation for smuggling diamonds out of South Africa, tweeted last week. After causing outrage online, he followed up, saying, “It was a joke.”

Read the story from Medium by Suchandrika Chrakrabati - “What Does the Rise of the Child Activist Say About Us?”

Consumption does not, cannot, bring meaning or even ordinary happiness

Writing about Pope Francis 2015 Encyclical entitled, "On Care For Our Common Home”, Robert Manne said, in his latest book, “On Borrowed Time”  - 

“Consumption does not, cannot, bring meaning or even ordinary happiness. In the consumer society, the ills of isolation, depression and anxiety are growing, the ties of family and community are weakening, because of what the encyclical calls ‘the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion’.”

Unbridled consumption leads not to the promised land, rather difficult times

U

Clive Hamilton.

nbridled consumption encouraged by the “business as usual” brigade has taken the world deep into energy debt and seen the world community rush past several planetary boundaries.

And of course, while we consumed and gouged the earth of its resources, it was assumed that happiness was, because of our affluence, forthcoming and a certainty.

However, that was not been the case and the cost of our casualness is descending upon us in many ways, among them resource depletion and a seriously questionably future because of a disrupted climate system.

Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and public intellectual who since 2008 has been Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, has written about happiness on The Conversation.

Read Hamilton’s views - “The lies of happiness: living with affluenza but without fulfilment”.

Professor explains our seemingly intractable desire to cosume

Professor Tim Kasser.

The seemingly intractable desire of most to consume is the root cause of climate change, worsened by the added complexity of resource depletion.

The latter is in fact a manifestation of that unbridled consumption, which is perverse desire to find happiness in surrounding ourselves with “stuff” simply intensifying our carbon-rich economies which worsen climate change.

Just recently it was the Professor of Psychology from Knox College at Galesburg, Illinois in the U.S., Tim Kasser, who set out to explain the root causes of consumerism during a free lecture at the University of Melbourne.

His address, “Consumerism, society and our ecological future: A psychological and empirical approach” was sponsored by the university’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

Prof Kasser set out to demystify consumerism, illustrating how we are all drawn into this almost magnetic need to shop, a point he illustrated with a quote from the New York Times just months after the destruction of the city’s World Trade Centre’s twin towers.

The newspaper, he was able to show, declared the terrorists should not be allowed to imagine achieved success in that they had frighten the nation to the extent that it was not going about it normal business and not shopping, or consuming.

He was able to show that people imagined that happiness was to be found in consuming, but in reality it has quite the reverse affect.

Prof Kasser explained that consumerism came with measurable ecological, social and personal costs; costs it seems that most people were happy to pay.

He discussed many things, among them the prime reasons why we become materialistic and that arose from having parents, friends or peers who were materialistic, watching more television or encountering more advertising, and living in a neo-liberalist capitalist nation.

A circular graphic of stochastic modelling prepared by Prof Kasser helped people understand how extrinsic values of consumerism helped promote undesirable traits popularity, image and financial success compared to the intrinsic values of community, affiliation and acceptance.

Those intrinsic values of community (‘I will help the world become a better place”), affiliation (“I will express my love for special people”) and self-acceptance (“I will follow my interests and curiosities wherever they take me”) contrast directly with the extrinsic values.

Prof Kasser said the ecological benefits of intrinsic values were more environmentally friendly behaviours; lower ecological footprint; and less consumption in the forest dilemma game.

He indicated it was important to eschew extrinsic values that promote consumerism and contribute little of value, while intrinsic values brought psychological benefits, among them more happiness, more life satisfaction, higher vitality, less depression, less anxiety and fewer physical problems.

The professor suggested some avenues for change, among them voluntary simplicity, improved environmental communications, a cut in our exposure to advertising, and a change from gross national product (GNP) to a National Indicator of Progress (NIP).

Prof Kasser concluded by noting that materialistic values undermine social ecological sustainability as well as personal and social wellbeing.