The sheer hate Greta Thunberg has received online is astounding. Some have joked about her yacht to the US sinking, others have called her “disturbed” and “a socialist whack job”. She has even been compared to the children in Nazi propaganda.  

To some extent her critics don’t want to hear what she has to say and are trying to deflect the focus, but her mistreatment is also part of a wider trend of finding fault with public figures.

This fault-finding has only recently evolved into cancel culture, but it is certainly nothing new. As a teenager I remember watching an interview with Chris Martin (Coldplay). When asked why his band received so much hate he replied: “Maybe it’s because we’ve done okay.”

Martin’s answer represents something ugly in our culture. As soon as someone is doing well we want to knock them off their pedestal. Maybe we can’t be happy about the success of others unless we’re doing better than them — it’s easier to hate on someone than admit he or she has achieved more.

But it is not just jealousy at play here; there is also a tendency to force everything we see and hear into easy narratives we have come to know and love. Do we really care about what a celebrity such as Greta Thunberg has done or said? Or are we more interested in seeing our favourite stories play out over and over again?

One such easy narrative is the ‘fall from grace’ — in which we see someone ascend to God-like status and then get slammed down to earth again. Does this sound familiar? If not, just open any newspaper — you’ll find plenty of examples of that narrative in there. No doubt a number of journalists are waiting for Greta Thunberg’s fall with bated breath — judging by the hate she receives on social media, many people are pushing for that already.

These easy narratives have one thing in common — there is always a hero and a villain. Everything is painted as “right” or “wrong” and “good” or “bad.” In reality life isn’t like that. Unworthy people shoot to fame and incredible people go unrecognised. Good people do bad things and vice versa. But people don’t want narratives about these grey areas because they are messy and rarely provide catharsis at the end. So we choose to love a public figure like Greta Thunberg or (more commonly) despise them and await their fall.

A famous quantum physicist once said: “Humans create narratives in an effort to manufacture a sense of order, but from a scientific perspective there is only chaos.” Perhaps we would get a more accurate picture of reality if we let go of these narratives and realised things are rarely black and white.