Ecology provides a wide ranging, cohesive and evidence based explanation of the history of our planet and all living species. As such, it qualifies as a metanarrative. The Green Party Philosophical Basis and values are grounded in this ecological metanarrative.
What characterises Post Modernist ” eco populism ” is ‘an incredulity’ towards metanarratives and reality. Post modernist thinking is that all religions or philosophies – Rationalism, Empiricism, Pragmatism, Marxism, Humanism, or Freudian psychology – are essentially tools in the excercise of power; that is power used by Western, white and heterosexuel men to oppress other ‘ minority’ groups.
Paving the way for Identity Politics, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) focused on language in the exercise of power which he argued was oppresssive, constructed by oppositions and always taking the form of a positive and a negative.
The duty of post modernist activists therefore is to deconstruct the opposition and overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.
If someone, for instance, says something that someone else may interpret as ‘offensive’, that “being offended” feeling must always be considered as “valid”, even if it clearly miscontrues what the speaker intended to communicate in the first place.
What is now considered to be ‘valid’ by our Post Modernist greens is not therefore so much the content and meaning of what a member might say, but what members at the receiving end make of it. In other words, the intention of the speaker becomes irrelevant against the impact of who actually says it from their position of any ‘privilege’, as perceived by a member of any ‘oppressed minority’.
Green oppressed minorities – formely known as Liberation groups and now going by the name of Common Interests Groups – have moved so far away from the basics of our ecological metanarrative and the Party’s green values of respect and tolerance where decisions were meant to be made by consensus that we have seen a complete shut down of freedom of speech and a relentless silencing of ‘hateful heretics’.
‘Events’ however do have a habit of rapidly disrupting the best laid plans and thus potentially challenge the dominant narrative and Leadership.
This may not be “the end of History”, but the inevitable misalignment between the broadly ecologist wing of the Green Party and zackactivists eco populism marks the beginning of the end of wokeism and of our captured green movement.
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