Greta Thunberg’s War on Imagination

By Gabriela Serpa

Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old girl who has a habit of publicly and successfully berating some of the most powerful adults on the planet. It’s something weird yet inspiring. Though she communicates like a strong, eloquent, and intelligent young woman, Thunberg never fails to call herself a “child” when addressing herself to a public. She likes to tell people that her future has been stolen from her because of governments’ negligence towards the climate disaster. She claims that she should be in school instead of fighting the planet’s fight. In her voice, there is always authority with an undertone of fear. She seems to be an adult, an adolescent, and a little girl all in one. Her hybridity, while mesmerizing, is unsettling to watch.

Many of us don’t know how to understand Greta Thunberg. If we see her as an adult, we find she does not live up to the media’s objectification of her as an exciting or innovative celebrity on the rise. When we choose to see her as a teenager in a position of power, we are forced to contend with how children fit into politics. To allow a child to scold world leaders about how we need to be saved from extinction challenges the structures of authority that we have built all of our systems on. The weight of Greta Thunberg threatens people in that it implies that teenagers, with their attitudes and mood-swings, are to be taken seriously. And yet the extreme pessimistic and aggressive urgency on which she built her platform resembles the anger of the Black Lives Movement and the suffragette movement more than it does the commonly withheld narrative of the angsty teenage experience.

Then there is the conversation surrounding Thunberg’s mental health. The activist has often referred to Asperger’s syndrome as her superpower. She also has high-functioning autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. At the age of 11, depression led her to the point of self-starvation. That we could be putting the future of the world into the hands of a neurodivergent minor is uncharted territory.

To trust Greta Thunberg as a leader, to truly understand her as the icon that we have made her out to be, we have to change how we understand mental health, children, and the planet. For that, we have to stretch our imaginations to new levels. Many children, it seems, have no trouble trusting Greta Thunberg. They believe in the message that Greta Thunberg is sending out, not because she is one of them, or because she seems like a cool person. They trust her because they have no trouble imagining the terrifying future that she describes. Children are inherently more open-minded than adults. They can stand behind Thunberg not because she is one of them, but because they see her message more than they worry about her identity.

By default, humans are apprehensive towards unfamiliar concepts. We are not wired to act on the complex statistical risk we associate with climate change. The far-off, intangible future can only torment us so much more than the immediate stresses of our daily lives. We fixate on the present. It’s what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting. In contrast to adults, children have a greater imagination with the capacity to worry about things they don’t understand. In their nightmares, they may very well see the world collapsing. They can easily visualize the picture that Thunberg paints and it scares them. It is only logical that they be the ones compelled to act on a climate apocalypse. Adults like to marvel at Thunberg’s public speaking skills. Some like to complain about her naivety. Others are jarred by her rage. Regardless, she has managed to keep the eyes of the world on her for months. She has us talking about her. Whether we chose to believe her message about the future, she is forcing us to stretch the boundaries of how we understand our world in the present. In this sense, Greta Thunberg isn’t just fighting a war on climate change, she is launching a full-blown assault on our collective imagination.