The Narcissistic Altruism of ‘Eco-Anxiety and Climate Grief’

“Many of us are feeling a sense of powerlessness and despair over climate change and its harmful effects,” psychiatrist Emily Willow observed in her latest advice column for the Washington Post. One might deduce from both Dr. Willow’s vocation and the implications around the words “powerlessness” and “despair” that this psychological condition is something its sufferers should try to overcome. Not at all, the Post’s editors confess in their summary of Willow’s prescription. “Eco-anxiety and climate grief are unlike other issues in psychiatry,” they write, “because the feelings extend to something greater than ourselves and our personal narrative.”

Willow’s clinical approach isn’t to help her patients conquer their fears but to advocate “more acceptance and awareness of their emotions” in non-sufferers. To remedy the syndrome’s most acute symptoms, she recommends hectoring corporations and governments rather than internalizing any sense of personal control over the weather. Beyond that, a regimen of powerful hallucinogens and street drugs such as “MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy)” might help. But the most important step for those dealing with “climate grief” is to convert those emotions into activism.

Willow closes her item by justifying the psychological affliction with which her patients are suffering by relating the extent to which it is legitimized by non-Western ontological spiritualism. “We are living members of a living planet,” said the Buddhist scholar Jonna Macy in a quote Willow found valuable. “We are like cells in a living body. That body is being traumatized. So, of course, we feel it.” This is a glib approach for a clinical psychiatrist to take — even one who specializes in “ketamine therapy,” a drug that is most commonly used as a veterinary anesthetic.

Willow doesn’t dwell on the harmful manifestations of acute “eco-anxiety,” many of which indicate that climate-related depression is, in fact, a “personal narrative.” A cottage industry has sprung up around a public-relations campaign that compels would-be parents to forego procreation because those children are destined to come of age in a dystopian hellscape where the living will envy the dead. “Basically, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said having imbibed the so-called research around this phenomenon. As a result of this advocacy, their well-meaning but hopelessly credulous audiences resolve to sacrifice their individual happiness to live a life that more closely comports with their personal moral framework. “Climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children,” one of the industry’s victims confessed. “I don’t want to birth children into a dying world [though] I dearly want to be a mother.” The first-person pronouns here are suggestive of the “personal narrative” at work.

The enduring quest to force citizens of the industrialized world to replace the consumption of animal protein with vegetables and bugs to “save the world” is an exercise in evangelism designed primarily to save their own souls. At least, that’s the conclusion any sentient observer would draw from advocates of the new dietary paradigm. The feeling of “doing good” outweighs what participants in this experiment confess is the measurable sacrifice of taste and satisfaction. Those who stray from the path ache over their misdeed. “How could I argue for radical change, how could I raise my children as vegetarians, while eating meat for comfort?” one climate change activist agonized after succumbing to the temptation presented by red meat. Indeed, climate anxiety-afflicted pet owners are even admonished to feed their carnivorous charges a diet exclusively made up of vegetable matter. It seems at least some of these “eco-conscious pet owners” can be convinced to subordinate their animals’ welfare to their all-consuming narcissism.

The delusions of grandiosity that afflict the most visible and disruptive displays of climate activism do not leave neutral observers to conclude that this is a profoundly selfless movement. The activists who attempt to deface priceless works of art and steal those treasures from future generations are not engaged in self-sacrifice alone. The people who form human chains in front of commuter traffic to maximize the inconvenience experienced by their neighbors aren’t altruists. The malcontents who hope to ruin your night of enjoyable music or performance art are not consumed with something bigger than themselves. Rather, they appear convinced that they play a messianic role in the grand historical melodrama unfolding in their own heads.

I’m no psychiatrist, but that doesn’t seem healthy. My lay assumption is that the afflicted are unlikely to benefit from treatment that reinforces the legitimacy of these delusions, much less the intake of psychedelic drugs. But good psychiatric therapy doesn’t come cheap — certainly not at the cost of a subscription to the Post.