Why activists are behaving like infants
By: Gurwinder
Published: Aug 8, 2024
Across the West, protests are getting larger, more frequent, and more disruptive. Over the weekend, the UK saw nationwide anti-immigration riots in which cars were flipped over and buildings set aflame. A few days before that, Just Stop Oil activists sprayed orange paint in the world’s second-busiest airport, Heathrow. The week before, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the US Congress, pro-Palestine activists rioted in Columbus Square, vandalizing memorials and releasing a swarm of maggots and worms in his Washington hotel.
These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance, and which has this year seen activists across the West spray-paint Stonehenge, squat on university campuses, block access to roads and bridges, occupy museums and government buildings, storm sports events and movie premieres, attack priceless artworks and historical artifacts, and even desecrate war memorials and holocaust monuments.
Ostensibly, these “nuisance-protests” are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as the environment, Palestine, trans-rights, or immigration. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.
This movement has its roots in the digital revolution of 2009, when use of smartphones and social media reached a critical mass, allowing strangers to easily unite and mobilize around shared views, which led to a rapid increase in the size and frequency of protests around the world. But protests didn’t just become bigger and more frequent, they also became more outrageous.
In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, grandiosity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders — narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are characterized by overemotionality and a need for validation. They’re also associated with heavy social media use, likely because dramatic cluster-B behaviors, such as playing the victim and catastrophizing, excel at getting attention on such platforms.
The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama. Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.
It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification, activism for the attention-deficit generation. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.
Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most outrageous video clips, which typically involves vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. This surrender to their own impulses makes them first-order thinkers, meaning they consider immediate consequences but not consequences of consequences.
This chronological myopia was starkly illustrated after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. Many pro-Palestine neotoddlers publicly celebrated the massacre because, trapped by their emotions in a perpetual present, they couldn’t think far enough ahead to realize that Israel was going to retaliate, and that its wrath would be catastrophic for the Palestinians. When the inevitable retaliation came, the neotoddlers’ joy turned to horror as it dawned on them that actions have consequences.
One young pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, learned this lesson the hard way. In April, she addressed councilors at a Bakersfield City Council meeting in California, and, outraged by their refusal to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaimed to the councilors that she’d murder them, adding: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” Later, she appeared in court on 16 felony counts, sobbing uncontrollably as she was confronted by the second-order effects that her first-order thinking had failed to foresee.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely she’ll learn much from her punishment. Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. “Where is the outrage?” they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue.
The Civil Rights movement succeeded because it was guided by leaders who had clear, specific, and realistic goals, and were able to negotiate to achieve them. Since neotoddlers “organize” mostly on social media, they’re decentralized, and don’t have leaders that can guide them or negotiate for them. They are therefore ruled by their loftiest ideals, in service to their basest impulses, and they don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.
And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet their attempts to do so are misguided because, for all the issues they protest about, the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, crime, and pollution are bad, because we learned such lessons in primary school. What we need are clear, specific, and realistic plans of action. And the neotoddlers, being impulsive short-term thinkers, have only broad demands but no rational way to achieve them.
Anti-immigrant activists chant “Get them out!” as if there weren’t a host of legal and logistical challenges to doing so. Pro-Palestine activists chant “ceasefire now!” as if such a ceasefire wouldn’t quickly be broken by Hamas (as happened on October 7th). Climate activists chant “Just stop oil!” as if that wouldn’t cause Western civilization to regress technologically backwards into an age of famine, war, and superstition.
Neotoddlers are so shambolic they even try to disrupt attempts to meet their own demands. Many pro-Palestine activists call for peace in Gaza and yet support Hamas, the main obstacle to peace in Gaza. And many eco-warriors oppose fossil fuels but also try to stop viable alternatives such as electric and nuclear by, for example, storming Tesla factories and atomic energy conferences. And recent Right-wing protesters in Sunderland, who claimed to represent the unheard, burned down a citizens’ advice center, one of the few places to offer an ear to the unheard.
Unsurprisingly, nuisance-protests often end up alienating ordinary people. While the public supports climate action, it has a negative opinion of Just Stop Oil. And while the public supports a ceasefire in Gaza, it has a negative opinion of the campus protesters. The same is true of Right-wing nuisance protests: while the public generally believes immigration should be curbed, it overwhelmingly opposes the recent riots, which have achieved little except convince the public that Right-wing extremism is a serious threat. So, though nuisance-protests do get attention, little of that attention is converted to sympathy and a lot to spite.
But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people that their communities have been forgotten and their concerns about immigration are not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile actions like vandalizing mosques and setting fire to police cars, all of which hurts their cause more than help it. It does, however, make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.
As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish), because they’re generally much more affluent than Right-wing neotoddlers. For instance, an analysis by the Washington Monthly revealed that the Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is “privileged” and living in a white middle-class “student bubble”.
This is no accident: it’s often the prosperous, not the downtrodden, who have a greater motivation to protest. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer:
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.
People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, or invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes:
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.
The young and privileged are particularly prone to this. They don’t have to worry about money, nor do they have homes or families of their own, so they have nothing to lose, and nothing to conserve. This gives them both the need to find struggles and the luxury to be radical.
Overall, Left-wing neotoddlers and Right-wing neotoddlers tend to come from different demographics — with the former being younger, richer, more educated, and more female than the latter — and this gives them different motivations, and different modus operandi. For instance, research suggests that the cluster-B trait of narcissism takes a different form in the two groups. In Right-wingers, it mostly manifests as a sense of entitlement, while in Left-wingers it mostly manifests as a need for exhibitionism.
This is born out in the different approaches Left-wingers and Right-wingers take towards their public tantrums. The nuisance-protests of right-wingers are primarily attempts to relieve their frustrations at not getting what they want. As such, they typically take the form of straightforward thuggery and hooliganism: starting fires, overturning cars, and hurling bricks.
In contrast, Left-wing nuisance-protests tend to be less about relieving frustration and more about getting attention directly. As such, they’re usually more calculated and creative: throwing soup over paintings, releasing insect-swarms into hotels, or, most recently, painting the hands of a statue of Anne Frank red.
Generally, the Left-wing approach is more effective at getting attention; it took mass destruction by hundreds of Right-wingers in Southport to make news headlines, but it only took two Just Stop Oil activists with orange paint at Heathrow to achieve the same.
Left-wing nuisance-protests are also treated more kindly by the mainstream. Right-wing protests tend to be roundly condemned by polite society, firstly because they tend to be more violent, and secondly because upholders of mainstream culture — such as liberal journalists, academics, and entertainers — are culturally programmed to dismiss concerns about Islam or immigration as “far-Right”, placing such concerns outside the bounds of polite discourse (and into the hands of actual extremists).
In contrast, Left-wing neotoddlers are generally viewed by Western cultural elites as well-meaning. When Left-wingers recently flooded the streets of Walthamstow to counter-protest the Right-wingers, they were lauded by many Western outlets — from the BBC to NBC — as spreading peace and unity, even though the Labour councilor Ricky Jones used the protest to demand that his fellow Left-wingers slit the throats of Right-wingers.
The West’s mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, from academia to the liberal media, tend to be populated mostly by Left-leaning people who see Left-wing neotoddlers as a force for good because they’re broadly ideologically aligned with them and judge them by their perceived intentions rather than their results. For this reason, the mainstream treats Left-wing neotoddlers as its golden child, always seeing the best in them, while Right-wing neotoddlers are treated like the red-headed stepchild, worthy only of scorn.
This is particularly true at universities, where conservative speakers are routinely shouted down, and students are overtly encouraged to campaign for Left-wing causes, while also being taught that speech is violence and it is therefore acceptable to shut down speech they don’t like by making loud noises. The universities’ decades-long encouragement of cluster-B infantilism reached a tipping point this summer with the campus protests. We saw the students put everything they’d been taught — exhibitionism, catastrophization, and hysteria — into practice. The protests quickly came to resemble a LARP. Whenever the protesters occupied a new part of the campus, they hung banners and declared it liberated. All this liberating eventually made them feel hungry, but when they demanded refreshments from university officials, and were denied, they claimed they were being deprived of “basic humanitarian aid” and might die of starvation.
This kind of grandiose fantasizing is emblematic of people with narcissistic traits because it makes their struggles seem bigger than they actually are. As such, we commonly see similar kinds of catastrophization among other flavors of neotoddler; every flood or forest fire is an omen of “climate catastrophe”, biological facts about sex are “erasing trans people” and immigration is “white genocide”. Such histrionics, whether propagated in error or with intention, serve to manipulate other hysterical people into becoming neotoddlers.
And the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse. Their disruptions and vandalism exert a huge economic and social cost on society, and they prevent ordinary people from getting to work, attending funerals of loved ones, and meeting vital medical appointments.
Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing neotoddlers across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Meanwhile, the fake news that sparked the Southport riots was amplified by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and even Russian state TV.
So how do we end this age of neotoddlerism? The simplest way would be to cut off its main source of support. And that isn’t the Ayatollah or Putin, or even the universities. The neotoddlers’ main source of support is, in fact, you and I.
Neotoddlerism endures because it’s much more effective at making news headlines and going viral than traditional forms of protest. As a case in point, on 22 June, celebrity environmentalists like Emma Thompson and Chris Packham led a huge march of over 60,000 people through London, to raise awareness of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It received little press coverage. Around the same time, a handful of Just Stop Oil protesters squirted orange paint on Stonehenge; it made the front page of every major UK newspaper and received coverage in the global press too.
Likewise, last week in London, there was a generally peaceful march against mass immigration, involving tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities, and led by figures like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. It was ignored by most of the press. One week later, when Robinson embraced his inner-toddler and stoked violent riots, they made global headlines.
At a time when competition for attention is fierce, it makes business sense for the press and social media platforms to boost stories that outrage people into clicking and sharing. Such platforms naturally form a symbiosis with people who seek to outrage their way to fame: demagogues like Robinson; vandals like Just Stop Oil “poster girl” Phoebe Plummer; and more bizarre figures still, like the “performance artist turned political activist” Crackhead Barney, who wears little but a diaper and seeks to save Gaza by being as obscene as possible.
By giving these figures platforms, we’ve not only allowed them to proselytize to huge audiences, but we’ve also turned them into idols — living testaments that you can get what you want by acting like a baby. Imagine how horrifically a toddler would behave if his every tantrum made world news?
And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we want to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.
The more we share and comment on clips of people throwing soup over paintings, or graffitiing on memorials, or vandalizing mosques, or blocking roads, or spraying orange paint at airports, or pitching tents on university campuses, the more we’ll see such events recur in real life.
The solution to neotoddlers, then, is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. The media will stop reporting on their meltdowns when we stop engaging with them. They’ll stop amplifying — and thereby incentivizing — the neotoddlers when we do.
If we gave less attention to those who outrage us, and more to those who inspire us, it would incentivize young people to invest their idealism in, and derive their purpose from, finding practical solutions instead of merely restating the problem in ever sillier ways. So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and give more of our attention to behaviors we wish to encourage. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too.
And if we take the time to consciously focus our attention, we find there are many people in this world who actually deserve it. While Greta Thunberg became world famous by yelling and blocking entrances to public buildings, the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat has been quietly removing plastic from the oceans through his startup, The Ocean Cleanup. His project recently hit a milestone of 15,000,000kg of trash removed from oceans and rivers worldwide, but it’s hardly been reported by the press.
We don’t yet have any start-ups to clear the oceans of rubber dinghies, but such a thing is possible, if addressing illegal immigration can be made more palatable to polite society. And that will only happen when the people who wish to “stop the boats” refrain from acting like the violent thugs they’re often stereotyped as, and start supporting practical, adult solutions.
Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviors validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous.
