Naomi Klein, 'green' advocate, is one of the top influential environmental critics and academic activists today, which you can search on her if you wish. She has immense influence in some spheres of society. I find it interesting how she is one not afraid to talk about her feelings, especially as a mom of a seven year old child. Yet in this recent article "How I Get It Done: Writer and Activist Naomi Klein" (Oct. 14, 2019) she talks about the importance of bringing more over grief and rage into her public talks and educational practice. She also puzzles about how to do that. She declares the oppression women in public positions have and to be successful they often learned to be "calm" in their challenges to the males in power and in our institutions, in order to gain their approval and gain power in positions of economic gain for themselves professionally. However, with the severity of the climate crisis, Klein is reconsidering and wants to be more fierce, even if it brings up people's fear of her and what she is talking about. Admirable as that desire is, I question her defense for herself in this Oct. 14th article where she says: "I truly don't give a shit [anymore] whether I'm taken seriously by people I don't respect." (p. 1) OKAY, but what Klein is not admitting is that she is stirring up fear, if not terror, by her teachings and actions. Can she justify ethically "I truly don't give a shit..." raising such fear and terror that she does and that climate change debates arise? Is she going to be that heartless? Cold? Sober? towards her 'enemies' (e.g., those that may not respect her, but also those who are terrified of her?)... big questions, with ethical import and more so they are big questions that relate to fear management/education in the 21st century (my 'baby')...
Klein has led often the populist "feelings" (perception) of an absolute "emergency time" (seemingly a neurotic relationship to linear time) frame to overall existence. This is very common amongst environmentalists and now especially the climate activists. Some of which is rational and some which I find is irrational and not helpful to create a truly educative environment of learning. With the neurotic (obsessive, fetish) re: time, people like Klein are prone to propaganda pedagogies because of the way they manage fear-- that is, manage terror/time/mortality/extinction. In the Oct. 14th article she also says "I don't want to be out there [in public as an environmental or climate activist] making people terrified of nature." And, I think this is quite a problematic positioning she has put herself into because nature is also the future, and both are under massive assaults today due to global warming phenomena amongst other ecological crises of grandeur proportion. Thus eco-anxeity, eco-fear, eco-terror, call it what you will cannot be avoided. The question remains as to how Klein and others are going to deal with their need to express grief and rage as activists because of the way things are and the way the power institutions and people players are not acting fast enough and strong enough to the crisis (i.e., the eco- "emergency").
Her few times she ventures into writing about fear management (e.g., in her book "This Changes Everything") I find are quite simplistic and she doesn't give her readers more than usually her own opinion how to handle eco-fear. I wonder if she is too terrified herself to expand her fear imaginary and her fear management/education? I wonder if most all environmental activists fall into this narrowed way of thinking about the core of the problem that is taking humanity towards and over the cliff--the Fear Problem. Klein and her compatriots typically have no interest in or awareness of a meta-theory of fear and fearlessness.
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