Or maybe meat-puppets.

The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism. . .

The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism. . .

By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. . .

The flipside of the devaluation of adult authority is the sacralisation of the status of the child. Increasingly, children are assigned the role of educators, charged with enlightening their misguided, greedy, stupid elders. This has led to a process of socialisation-in-reverse. The project of using ‘pester power’ to socialise adults is most systematically pursued in the realm of environmentalism. Many environmental educators self-consciously advocate pester power as a useful way of changing the behaviour of adults. . .

In previous times, it was only totalitarian societies that mobilised children to police their parents’ behaviour. It was Orwellian, Big Brother-style states that tried to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil to reshape the outlook of adults. . .

It appears that preying on children’s fears and exploiting their anxiety is now considered to be a form of enlightened education. Yet the future of our children demands that we provide them with existential and moral security. Instead of feeding them on a steady diet of scaremongering, we need to inspire them about our potential to improve the future of our world.

Well, as horrific as this sounds it seems like S.O.P. to me. If there is a difference it isn't the practice of indoctrinating children using fear of damnation and destruction, it is that the doctrines are new and weak. That's why the comparisons to the extremism of mid-twentieth century Europe resonate. Eco fascisim, like left fascism and right fascism, is muddle minded nonsense that has no chance of lasting through adulthood. As young minds mature and more information is acquired the silliness of the doctrine becomes evident and individuals lose faith.

As noted in a previous post:

The result is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described over a century ago as cultural nihilism, something that happens when the old systems of meaning -- God, progress, nature, science -- lose their power. We no longer believe in them, but we continue to behave as though we do.

Nihilism is the phenomenon of going to church, saying confession, and sometimes even praying to God, even though you no longer believe that God will do anything for you. Climate nihilism is the phenomenon of going to Copenhagen, promising to reduce emissions and pretending to believe the promises, even though neither you nor anybody around you has any intention, plan or funding to do so. . .

What comes to mind for me is the old idea that our selection methods for public employment need improvement. For example, someone who wants a political job - say, POTUS - must be barred from such employment since wanting that job is a clear sign of moral turpitude and serious mental defects. No sane or well meaning person would take the job unless forced to do so. Therefore, the POTUS should be drafted rather than elected.

Similarly, people who want to work with children are suspect. In the past many educators took the jobs because they lacked better options, often on a temporary basis. Young women with fewer employment opportunities than they have today were common, and many did so only for a time until they left to raise families of their own. Now we have a system that actively selects for those who are the least desirable educators, those who want to manipulate children as a way of acting out their own social maladjustment.

It isn't quite that clear cut: there were maniacs in education in the past too, and there are sane people in education now, but the proportions have changed for the worse. That makes it that much easier for the maladjusted politicians to express their neuroses through a willing education system. The structure and incentives of such bureaucracies guarantee that they will degrade over time, a dynamic that can perhaps be understood in comparison to unions, which invariably are captured by organized crime over time. Not surprisingly, the education system in highly unionized.