Green Drama Triangle
Oh, the novel triangle!
These geometric marvels are not only the subject of entire mathematics courses but are also superheroes of structural engineering.
Apply a force, either in tension or compression (that is “push” or “pull”) and triangles handle them with glee. This is because the load gets distributed to the other sides or members of the triangle. Each member, in other words, have each other’s “backs.” When a structural engineer has determined that one triangle itself isn’t sufficient to counteract the forces anticipated during the structure’s life then an additional member can be added, creating a new triangle. This done over and over again, in a variety of directions, creating the complex skeletons that hold up lanes of traffic, high voltage power lines, and of course provide the perfect postcard of the Parisian skyline.
Triangles exist metaphorically too.
Humans are largely monogamous and have a built in tendency to be jealous of others in relationships anytime intimate bonding or the thought of mating is involved. Hence the the infamous “love triangle,” a narrative device used to describe the, er tension, between three parties involved in an intimate relationship. Love triangles are present in the top grossing movies, countless novels, soap operas, soap-free operas, and Jerry Springer knockoffs. Without one member of the love triangle, the entire thing dissipates.
There’s another metaphorical triangle: the [Karpman] Drama Triangle.
Barbara Wegner writes all about it, especially in the context of Woke Dogma.
The Drama Triangle consists of three roles (each a vertex of the triangle)
The Victim or Oppressed.
The Savior or Rescuer.
The Persecutor or Oppressor.
The Victim in the model isn’t necessarily an actual victim in the context of the drama but instead on who plays the role of one while often times shadowing or “de-centering” actual victims who are outside the triangle. These individuals often insist to themselves and to others they have little to no control of their situation. Instead it is the outside forces or other people who are the “cause” of their victim status.
Saviors try to “help” the Victim but instead serve far more as enablers and feel a sense of guilt for not “working” with the Victim. This keeps the Victim in their own dependency trap with the Savior which provides the Savior with a “purpose.” This “purpose” is more often than not narcissistic supply for the Savior. A Savior does not care whether their efforts genuinely help the victim or not so long that they’re the ones engaging in this role. Typically this is a cover-up for their own problems for which they wish to not take control over.
Lastly is the Persecutor. Persecutors insist that everything the Victim is going through is their own fault. Persecutors aren’t adept to taking responsibility either and often attempt to portray themselves as the Savior. When caught in their role by others - especially those outside the Drama Triangle - they often switch to the role of Victim.
Each role requires the other roles to reciprocate, much like the forces exerted in a real triangle counteracting and redistributing loads.
Remember the television show Intervention? Most of the stories told in the show were not one sided. They portrayed both the addict and his or her family and friends often enabling their addition. Drama Triangle roles work in the same way.
“We’ve got about seven, eight years to cut ourselves in half of what we use of fossil fuels, and unfortunately, the people that have the least responsibility for it are hit the hardest — Global South, people on islands, poor people of color. It is a tragedy that we have to absolutely stop. We have to arrest and jail those men — they’re all men behind this.
It’s good for us all to realize, there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism. There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way. White men are the things that matter and then everything else is at the bottom.”
-Jane Fonda
There’s a Green Drama Triangle of sorts with room for someone to play all three roles.
Without a doubt, the Persecutor role, those involved in the Green Triangle itself will likely wish to invoke, are likely any large corporation, especially one that sells fossil fuels. Other evil-doers such as “Capitalists,” “the Koch Brothers,” people who drive cars, cook on gas stoves, desire to live in single family homes, and of course the bugaboo labeled by actress and activist Jane Fonda above draw the Climate Persecutor Chance card too.
Really it can be anyone or anything depending on what others in the triangle feel.
Fonda here clearly views herself as the Savior, a disgraceful bigoted and narcissistic one at that. But that’s all a feature, not a bug, of the Drama Triangle as Barbara Wegner points out in another article of hers. “When people unfairly discriminate on the basis of sex, beliefs, skin color, etc. they are putting that group into the persecutor role. They believe it’s okay to discriminate against that person because they believe they’re ‘bad,’ ” she writes in The Drama of Hypocrites. And per N.S. Lyons it’s not even hypocrisy per se, it’s actually a power imbalance along with playing two different rulesets, writing “Yes there is a separate-and-not-equal standard for Team A, and this is no accident. Yes there are two different tiers of acceptable behavior; two tiers of justice; two tiers of citizen.” That goes to show how a Savior can flip on a dime to Persecutor role, and when caught, cast themselves as Victim.
Of course Noble Hero Fonda has the solution too!
Jail all those un-melanated zippy gamete producers responsible!
Also, end the use of fossil fuels!
And of course give her (PAC) some of your hard-earned money.
The Victim gets tricky with the Green Drama Triangle.
Fonda identifies several potential victims she’s purporting to save: “the Global South”, “people on islands,” “poor people of color.” These collectives, she asserts, are under threat due to the evil un-melanated zippy gamete producers and their evil Gaia-hating fossil fuels. She’s partially correct in identifying some potential victims however but seldom do we ever get to hear the actual voices of these people who are the assigned victims. This is especially the case when the inflated ego of Hollywood celebrities get in the way.
If you ever wonder why people in the Savior role (this applies to “wokies”/SJWs too) when they insist “the work” is exhausting to them, that’s because it is.
Barbara Wegner in Saviors Take the Weight of the World on Their Shoulders:
“I don’t know their motivation there, but the point is that the person with a savior mentality takes on responsibility from thousands to millions or billions of people onto themselves. It depends on what particular political cause strikes them as most important. But, the climate activists think they’re trying to save every single person on earth and all of their future lineage. That is a lot of misplaced responsibility.”
She later makes one of dozens of other points. This one refers to the people the Savior wishes to save.
“They may not even need help. Many with a savior mentality imagine that others need help when they don’t.”
And with regards to someone playing the victim role, in a separate piece.
When you get stuck in a victim mentality, there’s a near-constant fear of the “persecutor” and that terror blinds us from seeing all of the possibilities that exist. In the fight-or-flight response, our minds get locked into a very narrow focus. When you relax, which meditation can help you to do, your mind opens up to a broader range where more ideas can come to you. We have a large portion of people who are stuck in the fight-or-flight response and who never take time to truly relax. They often turn on the news after a stressful day of work and the news is focused intently on more “victims” and “persecutors.”
People in the so-called Global South are likely living in conditions that may leave them more vulnerable to natural disasters whether “climate crisis” caused or not so whenever disaster strikes, it’s difficult for anybody with a sliver of a heart to not jump into action.
Lesser-developed countries tend to lack the infrastructure available for what Alex Epstein calls climate mastery and often live in energy poverty. (Thank you Bryan Caplan for that excellent write up on climate mastery!) Epstein argues that via the use of fossil fuels, a uniquely cost effective, easy to transport, stable, and energy dense source humans have been able to reduce climate-related deaths over the past century by 98%. As societies spend less time securing their daily energy needs, often case moving from wood burning to dung or peat burning, then coal, and eventually denser hydrocarbons and even nuclear frees up their time to actually value the natural environment and keep it largely out of negatively impacting human activity.
(H/T/ to Jusper Machogu for this video!)
These areas prior to fossil fuel (and hopefully eventually nuclear) usage also tend to lack safe labor and environmental laws meaning that extraction and use of fossil fuels is likely more damaging to human health and the environment than in developed nations. That said, it still risks falling into the thinking trap Epstein warns his readers about which is overemphasizing the negative side effects of fossil fuels while completely ignoring their benefits. Fonda is committing this same fallacy and as Epstein argues beautifully in Fossil Future.
That’s not to say, these Victims can be real, but the culprits aren’t who Fonda feels they are and the true victims are often never helped by the Saviors.
Also all these People of Color, Island People, “the Global South,” etc are their own individuals. They’re human beings. They won the race so to speak. They have personal agency. Do they really need the help of meaning seeking Westerners? It comes off as immensely condescending , likely unintentional on the part of these activists to assume they need help to begin with.
In many cases, the Saviors make things worse which may as well make them Persecutors.
See: Sri Lanka
See: Ecuador
See: Congo
See: California
https://robertbryce.com/californias-energy-war-on-the-poor/
If one were to confront Fonda with anything resembling reality, chances are she’d switch roles and play Victim herself.
And each time she’s placed under arrest, all bets are on she will cast herself as the Noble Victim.
(At least she was arrested in style as Fashion Industry Broadcast’s Sami Tauber notes.)
If there’s an even better example of individuals caught in the Green Drama Triangle the Declare Emergency brats who clearly changed everyone’s minds (/s) earlier this spring.
All within the same videos, these individuals played:
Savior: By insisting they were rescuing “Gaia,” “the working class,” and “people of color.”
Persecutor: Both in the real sense and the metaphorical sense. They were bonafide preventing everyone else, often people who belonged to the groups they claimed to be saving, from going to work, school, play, etc.
Victim: Both by President Biden’s “betrayal” in approving the Willow Project, and in their drama-filled arrests by law enforcement. They too cast themselves as victims of “climate crisis” and “capitalism” despite being entitled spoiled brats with access to a higher standard of living than most even in their own country. Who else after all, can afford, both wallet-wise, and reputation-wise, to have an arrest record?
The above applies too for the Extinction Rebellion and Scientistm Rebellion participants.
Just Stop Oil gets no pass either of course.
Example one of likely hundreds:
The roles should be easy to identify. JSO protestors play all three here.
With a heavy dose of Cluster B like projection:
Shellenberger notes his best seller Apocalypse Never writing, “Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.”
Then later in the same chapter he writes, “The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.
It’s this replacement for a stable religion part that makes breaking out of the Green Drama Triangle especially difficult. On a conventional Drama Triangle that involves parties in presence of each other, say family, partners, co-workers, or friends, it requires the parties to take more personal responsibility and cease enabling each other’s behaviors. A risk of trying to break someone else out of their own Drama Triangle is that you’ll end up a a Savior in a new one, snowballing the issue even further.
If it’s not your circus, then it ain’t your monkeys, in other words.
Unless they’re blocking your way to work.
"The victim is the perpetrator and the perpetrator is the victim"
Gavin Newsom
The problem becomes acute when the Saviors and the Perpetrators are working for the same Master. https://open.substack.com/pub/thespouter/p/the-dialectics-of-liberal-environmentalism