I had this pop up in a news feed and just laughed at how tone-deaf the whole thing was:
In 2021, the Body Shop gathered a group of Gen Zers who are passionate about the climate to critique the company and provide insight into how to be a force for good at the United Nations’ COP26—what could go wrong?
“The activists that were working with us were pretty critical of commerce,” Davis says, adding that there’s a cohort of extremists who think that all businesses are bad from an environmental standpoint. “We live in a world of trying to balance profit and principles. It’s not so straightforward.”
Although the conversation was colorful, he quickly learned that in order for criticisms from a board comprising bright young minds to actually be constructive, they’d need to be less radical.
“It wasn’t just a question of getting young people who are interested, who are smart, who care about the world, who want to make a difference—that’s actually not enough. On top of those things, you’ve got to bring people in who are on the side of wanting business to succeed,” he says, with the caveat, “but succeed on sustainable terms.”
With a vested interest in the company’s success, Davis imagined their feedback would err on the side of constructive criticism, rather than the company just being “slammed.”
“Sure, we could have a moment of introspection when even the labor aristocracy we surround ourselves with as underlings want our heads for lighting the planet on fire for profit, or we could just ignore that and find sycophants to keep telling us we’re doing great.”
Still a good sign that the kids are at least a little alright.
We’ve been seeing this game play out for generations.
A group of young people are made aware of a problem, either explicitly because of their material conditions or by secondhand sources who are trying to spread the alarm. The group accepts the call to action and attempts to mobilize, but they very quickly discover that there is little for them to actually do in opposition. Personal changes are ineffectual and structural changes are beyond their ability.
Recognizing the problems as fundamentally political, they seek a political solution. At this point, they run into a number of confounding obstacles - misinformation, bureaucracy, legalism, economic constraints - that deter them from any effectual activism. Political leadership confront the younger generation and tell them that there’s a system for making changes, and it is long and hard and extremely slow.
At this point, the movement fractures into “radicals” that begin discussing more extreme methods for achieving change and “moderates” that are too risk averse to pursue extreme measures. The moderates are subsumed into the political class while the radicals are purged. Moderates begin working their way into political leadership, where they get bogged down in even more bureaucracy and bullshit. Radicals are frozen out, ostracized, demonized, and - if they continue to persist - arrested or killed.
Then the situation gets worse, a new set of alarm bells ring, and the process repeats itself.
The tipping point is inevitably at the start - with how many people feel immediately and directly impacted - and at the end - with how many risk-averse people can be subsumed into political establishment.
In this case, the only people being interviewed are the ones that were gobbled up.
It’s kind of funny that we’ve reached the point where you can look outside and see the climate apocalypse happening every day and as far as I know not a single energy company exec has been killed for it.
