Shellenberger opined in in late October, 2022 that dumping milk onto floors, hurling food onto walls, refusing to eat, gluing body parts, throwing paint, refusing to leave, threatening to pee and poop in their pants, and screaming accusations are behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists. Consider the case of Gianluca Grimalda. On October 19, Grimalda, along with 15 other members of a climate activist group called Scientist Rebellion, glued himself to the floor of the visitors center next to a Volkswagon factory in Germany. The VW security guards brought pizza to Grimalda and the other activist scientists, but Grimalda felt disrespected and so he declared a hunger strike in retaliation.
Grimalda immediately expressed outrage at his treatment. “VW told us that they supported our right to protest,” he complained on Twitter, “but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating.” Many were quick to point out the childish nature of the protest. “I’m a serious scientist protesting against fossil fuels,” wrote one user. “Now turn the gas heating on and bring me my potty.”
The activists say that such childish tactics were necessary. Grimalda tweeted that he and his colleagues are protesting “until our demands to decarbonise the German transport sector are met.” On Sunday, after climate activists in Germany threw mashed potatoes on a Monet painting, they screamed at the nearby museum-goers. “We won’t be able to feed our families in 2050” because of climate change, they alleged. But Volkswagen already agreed last year to end the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035, and the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts rising yields under even very high temperatures so long as farmers keep using fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. That is, yields will continue under climate change so long as farmers don’t take the advice of climate activists.
The activists who keep degrading precious works of art, and themselves, claim to be concerned about food and energy supplies, but in opposing oil, gas and fertilizer production they are actively reducing both. Over the last several months, I have described the demands of climate activists as fanatical and pointed to a large body of evidence suggesting that nihilism, narcissism, and feelings of personal inadequacy are the primary motives. But nihilism, narcissism, and personal inadequacy alone do not explain why climate activists have chosen temper tantrum tactics. After all, the greatest protest movements of all time engaged in far more grown-up and dignified tactics. Think of the Salt March led by Gandhi, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, and the anti-whaling protests of Greenpeace.
Where protesters in the past asked to be treated like adults, climate protesters today demand to be treated like children. Civil rights activists in the 1950s sat at lunch counters and demanded to be treated like full adults. Notably, it was racist counterprotesters who poured milkshakes over them. Today, it’s the protesters who are spilling milk and throwing food.
Why is that, exactly? Why have Left-wing activists regressed in their tactics? The people in the protests are themselves apparently dignified people. Grimalda is an economist who works at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He has published for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Nature Communications, and other prestigious publications. Why, then, are he and his colleagues acting like babies?
Role Reversal
Racist counterprotesters dumped milkshakes over a white social science professor and his black students sitting at the “Whites Only” counter in Woolworth’s store lunch counter in May 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi (left). Climate activists dump soup over Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in October 2022 (right). One possible reason that climate activists have started engaging in childish behavior is that doing so is a low-cost way of attracting public attention. It is shocking to dump milk onto the floor of a supermarket, huck food at a revered painting, and spray paint over a luxury car dealership. It grabs our attention. And the activists correctly predicted that their actions would be celebrated by global elites, including the Secretary General of the United Nations, and everyone from The Guardian to The New York Times.
But activists haven’t always sought to be juvenile. As noted above, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Greenpeace at other moments in history balanced shock with other values, like dignity, maturity, and credibility. Climate activists today invite so much public scorn and hostility that they may have undermined the net impact of their protests. While true believers cheer, there is growing evidence that ordinary citizens find the protests off-putting. In Italy last week, angry drivers dragged protesters off the road; it’s amazing there haven’t been violent assaults.
What’s going on? One clue is the selection of a child, Greta Thunberg, as the climate movement’s leader. The infantilization of the climate change movement reflects a broader infantilization that, historians note, has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians refer to the lengthening of childhood as “infantilization.” And it’s not just that we take longer to become adults, it’s also that adults are retaining more characteristics of children.
Rising wealth means that individuals have many more opportunities to regress back into childhood, such as by staying in, or returning to school, or living with their parents for longer. The large range of life choices is disorienting to many people and makes it harder, not easier, for individuals to decide how to live their lives. “As a result,” write researchers, “young people tend to become escapist and delay important decisions.”
When Carl Jung famously spoke of the “eternal boy” archetype (puer aeternus), he meant people avoiding adult responsibility, like the Peter Pan character. But unlike Peter Pan, people who refuse to grow up are bogged down with feelings of inadequacy and neuroticism, constantly worrying about making the wrong choices, leading them into depression, anger, and addiction. Ironically, one-third of those between 1980 and 1986 complained they were rushed into independence too early, even though they had the slowest introduction into adulthood of any generation in recorded history.
Researchers say that “infantile personalities” are characterized by “childish” reactions, blaming others for one’s behaviors, “low demands on self (accompanied by high demands on society),” and egocentrism. “An infantile person,” they argue, “seeks to escape the need to adequately assess objective social reality.” In other words, infantile people routinely fail to read the room — or Twitter, as the case may be.
Social media appears to be intensifying infantilization. When in-person connections are replaced by digital communication, note scholars, people feel less empathy and see an increase in “autistic-like” anti-social behavior, like self-absorption, escaping reality, and emotional immaturity. Grimalda genuinely couldn’t understand why people on Twitter would react negatively to his complaints that VW executives refused to bring his colleagues a bowl to poop and pee into.
“Many aspects of our @ScientistRebel1 action at @Autostadt @VW have been misinterpreted,” he complained yesterday. “They said they were on our side, that we were fighting the same battle, etc.” But then, he said, “Security would come 2-3 times during the night, laughing at us and directing bright-lighted torches in our face to prevent us from sleeping.”
Sam Vaknin, an Israeli psychologist and expert on narcissism, says a growing body of research finds that Woke advocacy is fundamentally about using victimhood as a tactic. “What we are beginning to find is certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity. Their victimhood is their identity. Victimhood endows their life with meaning; it makes sense of the world. It’s an organizing principle. They would seek to be victims even in situations where they would not have been victimized otherwise. When they are not victimized, they push you to become victimized.”
Like other Woke movements, climate activists claim some special authority. Youth activists claim that the world is being harmed for them and their future, specifically. Recall Thunberg screaming at United Nations delegates in her 2019 tantrum, “How dare you!” Activist parents and grandparents claim the world is being harmed for their children. And scientists like Grimalda claim they have special insights, like priests, into how humanity is destroying the world, and thus deserve special treatment. All are forms of entitlement narcissism.
Vaknin says such people are in reality highly aggressive. “You can see these types of people in the empath movement and other nonsensical (playbooks) where these people are actually very narcissistic and grandiose, extremely aggressive, lacking in empathy, and yet,” notes Vaknin, “they claim that they have been victimized all their lives because they are super empathic, sensitive and so and so forth.” Such were the very claims that have been made by Thunberg about her childhood.
Researcher Ginger Coy added, “Part and parcel of our narcissistic culture is black-and-white dichotomous thinking” known as “splitting,” which she defines as a primitive defense mechanism and regressive thinking consistent with narcissism.” Wrote Thunberg, “Everyone says that there is no black-and-white issue, but I think this is. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”
Adds Coy, “If a person laments that they are a victim, in this narcissistic age, it should be a red flag that they are likely a perpetrator.” Such is the case with climate activists. They are some of the richest and most privileged people in the world, thanks to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Some of them, like the heirs and heiresses to the Getty Oil and Rockefeller Oil fortunes, are more directly beneficiaries than others. And yet they are actively seeking to deprive others, both their fellow citizens and Africans, of those very fuels, as well as non-fossil sources of productive energy, like hydroelectric dams and nuclear power.
Vaknin warns of the people who are attracted to victimhood (Woke) movements. “The infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths is universal in all these victimhood movements and they become the public face of the movement,” says Vaknin. “It’s very dangerous because if you are a perennial victim and this is your identity, you would tend to develop attendant behaviors, for example, you would feel entitled to special treatment and if you don’t get this special treatment you will become aggressive.”
Why, then, apparently dignified and professional people like Grimalda adopt the behaviors of little children? Because: they are part of a broader trend toward infantilization; they feel powerless in their own lives, relative to their grandiose vision, and they lack the purpose that earlier generations of scientists felt; and they feel, simultaneously, a deep sense of entitlement, including the right to break laws and not face any consequences.
Facing The Consequences
The bad news is that the forces driving nihilism, narcissism, and infantilization are only intensifying, regardless of real-world events. It is notable that climate activism has increased since the beginning of the global energy crisis one year ago, and after the passage of a massive, $370 billion investment in renewables by the US Congress, which climate activists had demanded. As such, we should not expect activists to stop engaging in destructive tactics.
It is up to civil society, then, to demand that governments create adult consequences for infantile behaviors. Advocates of positive parenting note that children must face the natural and logical consequences of their behaviors otherwise, they will grow up to be fragile, spoiled, and at greater risk of narcissism. That means VW executives should not have brought pizza to protesters, much less bowls within which to poop. Rather, they should have had the activists arrested and removed immediately. The instincts of the Italian drivers were correct when they dragged protesters off of a highway in June. So too were the responses from Twitter users to Grimalda’s tweet demanding a bowl within which to defecate; notably, Grimalda deleted it.
Now, it’s time for governments to act. There are signs that this is beginning to happen. A London court charged three climate activists with criminal damage for throwing soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and spraying paint at the Metropolitan Police’s headquarters in central London. All three activists pled not guilty. The court should give them long sentences, which may help deter other protesters. Instead of releasing the women on bail, as the judge did, judges should consider keeping climate protesters incarcerated, particularly when their guilt is obvious, because they themselves filmed it.
There is more governments should do. Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who resigned her position for unrelated reasons last week, unveiled plans to give police new powers to respond to the tactics of climate extremists. The UK government is reportedly seeking measures to require minimum service levels during strikes; the same should be required during protests, given the frequency with which climate activists routinely, and dangerously, block roads. If governments won’t act, the public will, as the Italian drivers did. And they are likely to be far less careful than the police. The police and courts must do their job so vigilantes don’t.
Governments will increasingly have the support of the public to crack down. The coming energy, food, and economic crises will alter public consciousness. Shortages of energy and food are already devastating Europe, and will soon devastate the rest of the world. Fertilizer production has declined by 70%. Aluminum is down by 50%. Silicon is down by down 27%. Steel is down by 17%. Paper and packaging are down 15%. The total production of the European chemical industries is to decline by 40%. Soon, unemployment will rise.
In an environment of high unemployment, high prices, and cold weather, behaviors like dumping milk on supermarket floors, hurling food onto works of art, gluing body parts, throwing paint, refusing to leave, blocking roads, and screaming will no longer be tolerated. When auto executives refuse to cater to the demands of adults acting like children, they will be applauded. And when activists threaten to pee and poop in their pants, the response from society will increasingly be to let them.
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