I don’t usually post about a tweet, but this one was particularly striking.
A poster called Camus quotes from and links to a 3 minute video by Professor Bret Weinstein, who links climate activism to the sexual revolution, itself propelled by the availability of birth control & abortion. (Click on “Show more” for Camus’s excellent summary of Bret Weinstein’s thesis):
For those who (like me) are allergic to videos, I transcribe the relevant part of Weinstein’s thesis:
What I think has happened is […] the sexual revolution creates the opportunity to get one off the most profound rewards, in fact the most profound reward that the universe has ever produced as far as we know, without having to invest very much work at all. By making sex common, it totally altered the way people viewed the number of years they had to live. They could afford to put off child-rearing. It could be distant in the future, which left all of these young people with all of this energy, who might well not have been involved in movements if they were struggling to raise a family… What people do is that they take the energy, the seriousness of purpose that they would ordinarily be directed into managing a marriage and the role of being a parent and they put it into something.
And Heather has pointed out that this is especially powerful with young women, who seem to take on causes and they defend them like a mother defending her child. That’s a very powerful force. And the point is, if the idea is, well, climate change is a threat, and your role here on earth is to make sure that that threat is addressed, and you put the mama bear energy into climate change work, well, you know, that’s pretty frightening, especially if climate change isn’t the threat that it’s been made out to be. You have a large number of mama bears doing this ferocious work, and there’s a question about what it even is..
I had to look up Heather Heying, who made this observation. She is the wife of Bret, like him an evolutionary biologist, and author of “The evolutionary ecology and sexual selection of a Madagascan poison frog” and, with her husband, ” A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life .”
Wikipedia notes that she & her husband took their university to court and won damages for failing to “protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence,” and that they refused to be vaccinated against Covid and took Ivermectin – obvious crimes against humanity to all right (Wiki) minded people.
Wiki also points out bad reviews of her book (in the Guardian and elsewhere) which claim that the book “faltered when the authors claim expertise beyond their own fields such as in matters related to politics.”
There is no acknowledged academic field which studies the origins of the madness of climate hysteria. We’re all amateurs, so we can all join in the discussion. But, as you’ll know from Andy West’s book “The Grip of Culture – the Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism,”
(which I hope you’ve all read) evolutionary biology has a lot to tell us on the subject.
Climate Scepticism 
Careful, Geoff,
You’ll have us in trouble with Wikipedia, who don’t like Weinstein at all (its take on him is even worse than just the bits you mention):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein
They don’t have quite such a down on his wife:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Heying
But (shock, horror):
On January 29, 2021, Heying appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher along with Weinstein, presenting the “Lab Leak” hypothesis around the origins of SARS-CoV-2
I’m not convinced about the theory propounded in the video – far from it. Mind you, it’s no dafter than much of the climate crisis stuff that is pushed at us every day.
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Mark
I’m not convinced or the detailed argument either, which is obviously much simplified. It’s useful though to look at all beliefs, movements, ideologies from the perspective of evolutionary biology (as do Andy West & Jordan Peterson) since it places causality outside of human will and also outside of current morality, so giving us a new perspective on our own ideas.
It seems very natural that asking, “how did this or that characteristic evolve?” is going to produce answers that upset the Woke, and in particular feminists. Since survival depended for the vast majority of our species’ existence on women producing & nurturing offspring, & men providing for them, of course biology (and psychology & anthropology) are going to point up differences in the role of the sexes. And it’s only natural that those differences are going to come to the surface when women take on roles previously reserved for men. The shame is that any statement about how we are, evolutionarily speaking, whether by reference to lobsters, in the case of Jordan Peterson, or mama bears, in this case, is going to be interpreted as a conservative statement of how we have to be.
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… It’s useful though to look at all beliefs, movements, ideologies from the perspective of evolutionary biology…
Well, I certainly agree with that, having just this afternoon finished reading Richard Dawkins’ latest thought-provoking book (The Genetic Book of the Dead – I recommend it). I wonder what he would make of Weinstein’s theory?
I can see that there might be something in it, but only for a very small and comfortably-off part of the population. As the gilets jaunes said (or words to that effect): “While you worry about the end of the world, we worry about the end of the week”. I suspect the vast majority of people fall into the end of the week category.
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An interesting observation (and no I am not plugging myself!) but during a Podcast interview with James Corbett I ensured a link was available to my email address for people to contact me directly and discretely. I had hoped for some whistle blowers or insiders to contact me. Instead I got a lot of knuckle dragging male or indiscriminate gender abusers spitting bile at me – I guess I should have anticipated that but didn’t. I had to install a filter to direct unknown contacts into a holding file to be released or permanently blocked.
A few months later I did another podcast interview with the delightful and very attractive (am I allowed to say that?) Maryann Gebauer. https://www.maryanngebauer.com/ Again my contact email was given out (with its filtering shield firmly in place) but her primarily female audience (according to Maryann) were a remarkably friendly bunch emailing all manner of practical assistance and useful data not a single negative response.
Now I am no spring chicken nor much of an oil painting – I don’t even have the excuse of “rugged” good looks. I seriously doubt that the fairer sex were attracted to me but I was very surprised at the number who took time out if only to, somewhat oddly, thank me.
There were very clearly different responses from the different sexes. I don’t pretend to know why but I have to say it was a much more pleasant experience all round with a predominantly female concerned “audience”.
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Although I have little idea of the full percentage of women who act like “mama bear” in protecting us all from the apocalypse of anthropogenic climate change, I have often observed this behaviour in its’ ferocity. Their reaction to any sceptical questioning of the true impact of CO2 is so loud and aggressive that attempting such debate is socially stupid. And yes, I have long realised that this behaviour is nurturing in full voice.
But the notion that AI will produce wealth for all with little effort is Through The Looking Glass With Elon. Just as overbearing nurturing is a mostly female characteristic, uninhibited greed is a mostly male characteristic (a twisting of the evolutionary drive to provide and protect). “Wealth for all” would ignite that behaviour and its’ accompanying violence before the AI’s even began.
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I don’t buy this hypothesis. A mother-child bond is far more powerful than whatever attachment these women have for the environment. In fact, they hardly have any attachment to the environment – they don’t seem to know what it is. This is more likely to be performative demonstration of conformity with the idea of virtue of the day. It’s what their role models, influencers and peers are doing and tell them they should be doing. Their actual attachment to the environment is skin deep – I can’t think otherwise with their inane focus on carbon dioxide as the devil in chief. It’s a bond that cannot compare to that between a mother and child.
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Jit
Of course you’re quite right that their attachment to the environment is superficial – in the most literal sense. Well-off liberal childless women are as detached from their social and physical environment as it’s possible to be. The airport lounge is the only place they may find themselves in a crowd of people not like themselves. Their husbands at least find themselves in the occasional sports stadium or brothel. The reason for the appeal of Saving the Planet as displacement activity is perhaps that it’s more abstract and less upsetting than working in a soup kitchen.
Here’s the same Camus reporting on an interesting moment of realisation from a member of the rich liberal US philanthropic community.
https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1994506579660689812
The key quote comes at the end:
“Social justice and climate change. It always boils down to those two things. And it gets progressive women 100% of the time.”
These posts shouldn’t be seen as anti-feminist. “ianl” above mentions a fact I forgot to mention – that Bret Weinstein’s comments were made in the context of Elon Musk’s statement that AI would mean we’d all be so rich we won’t have to work. Weinstein’s point was that this would deprive men of the reason for their existence, as control of childbirth has deprived many women of theirs.
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Here’s an interesting 4-minute X clip supporting the Bret Weinstein postulation by the uber Mama Bear ex-wife of Sergey Brin on how she unthinkingly contributed huge amounts of dosh to back the WEF’s Great Reset, which she now recognises to be a very bad agenda.
Key extracts: “At the end of the day they always go: ‘But climate change.’ Social justice + climate change — it gets progressive women 100% of the time. … We were the useful idiots.”
https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1994506579660689812?s=20
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Doug Brodie 1
Thanks. That’s the same clips I just posted, but I didn’t know who the woman was. (I still don’t because Sergey Brin has had a few wives. In fact, I didn’t know who Brin was either.)
A few years back Mike Dombrowski posted an article about Jeff Bezos throwing a few billion at the green movement.
https://cliscep.com/2020/11/30/jeff-bezos-gives-big-green-to-big-green/
Some of us had a look at the recipients in the comments. It’s a complex little ecosystem, with multimillions being passed to NGOs whose sole job is to pass it on to other NGOs, and so on. And ex-Mrs Brin in the clip and her sisters are at the origin of it all. It really needs exploring further.
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Well, I don’t know; it seems to me that if climate change concern is the misplaced nurturing of mother bears, it must be mainly polar bears, i.e. white bears, because not many brown or black mother bears seem to be that concerned with the climate to be honest! I guess that must come down to disappearing Arctic ice, which mainly Patriarchal polar bears like Al Gore and Peter Wadhams have been warning about for years now.
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