Free Palestine Activists Occupy a Dutch Data Center Protest Against AI

I’d love to hear your theory about what caused this glorious bedlam.

Henry James gave the explanation in his account of New England, written over 100 years ago. He is considering the Great Awakening of 19c New England and concludes that its oddities were due to an over active conscience in search of objects.

The prediction this account makes is that moral fervor will be the constant, but that its objects will change for no logical reason and without there being any connexion between them. And this prediction seems to be confirmed by experience.

Put it a more modern way: there is a floating pool of demonstrators and activists, they are looking for a cause, and will take up unrelated causes one after the other because the interesting thing to them is not the causes, its the activism and the demonstrating.

So we find in the present instance the climate movement gradually changing its obsession with climate and energy to Palestine. Greta and the boats. The UK Green Party has changed from concerns with the local and global environments to Palestine, but also has inched recently into far left positions on both gender and economics. One would predict that it will shortly find some way of jettisoning Palestine in turn. Its interesting that Holland has seen what may be the first signs of a metamorphosis by the Free Palestine movement into an anti AI and anti data center program, exactly the kind of thing you would predict from the James account.

The ultimate cause of course is education. Education systems in the West are directed to the over production of elites. They graduate people often with huge debts but without any saleable skills, unequipped even for entry level business jobs, who then fail to find employment adequate to what they have been trained to expect. Moral fervor fills the gap of self-esteem, and is an attractive alternative to admitting one has taken several steps on a hiding to nowhere in the form of a liberal arts degree, in recent times devoid of any rigorous content and mainly filled with ideology.