Virtue signaling. It is a term that is not heard outside of certain circles of the Internet and it is amazing that most people haven’t caught on to the game these days.
In short, virtue signaling is an action done for the sake of the supposed virtue behind the action. It is a narcissistic action that is about raising yourself up and not so much doing the right thing.
But motivations are often secondary. If you are doing good to help others or help yourself, you are still doing good. Western culture gets hung up on motivation too much, especially in America, because for some reason, we like to judge the hearts of others.
So if I see someone feeding the homeless in front of the press, I don’t care that he’s an attention whore because at least the homeless are getting fed. And usually wicked people who behave like righteous people end up failing within their lifetimes.
The problem with virtue signaling these days is that it mostly happens with ideas that are neither virtues nor vices.
The most common form of virtue signaling these days is for white people to try and prove to the world that they are not racist. There are a variety of ways in which they do this, though, with the most common method being the adoption of a child of a different race.
I’m sure the child you adopted appreciates that you have him around to prove a point to a bunch of communists.
Racism is not a vice nor a virtue. In fact, I doubt that it even exists since primitive tribalism never involved groupings based solely on skin color. But that was another blog post.
On the other hand, Anti-racism is also neither a vice nor virtue, but it appears to be destroying more lives and creating more divisions than racism theoretically ever did.
While virtue signaling does take place on the Right, usually in the form of token children, it is much more prominent on the Left. Communists tend to use rhetoric, largely because they are too stupid or too illiterate to use dialectic, and virtue signaling is nothing more than emotional appeals of one’s own self-righteousness.
So we have communists engaging in man-shaming, white-shaming, Christian-hating, and all other sorts of “virtues” where they try to appear either penitent or righteous or both. From a mediocre author stating he’s a rapist to a feminist claiming there’s oppression in video games to a white woman passing herself off as a black woman and leading a local NAACP chapter, virtue signaling is the primary means of engaging in rhetoric for the cultural Marxist.
The sad thing, most Americans, especially white Americans, have grown up with this guilt stigma that has been hammered into their collective psyche in government skools. This causes them to overcompensate for the supposed collective crimes or overlook the virtue signaling of others. Because there is nothing worse than being called a “racist” in modern times.
The solution to combating virtue signaling is to stigmatize it. Respond to it with contempt anywhere you see it and people will back off from it. Once they realize that their attempts at doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons won’t be accepted as good or righteous, they will find other pursuits, hopefully more constructive ones.