The Dangers of Virtue Signaling

Is there a Way For Others To Respect Differences?

This article by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute really breaks down the psychological factors at play in virtue signaling, and I think is very worthy of a full read.

Stigmatize Surround and Stomp

I tell my own life story, yet I can respect that many people have deeply private things that they do not wish to be known. It’s a premise I’ve grappled with dozens of times. Some people might have been comfortable wearing a MAGA hat. Some might want their Trump vote to be off the public record. We’re well past The Scarlet Letter, right?

Virtue signaling and consequent backlash for not doing so turns the whole concept on its head. Your private opinions about issues are forced into the public sphere by merit of their wholesome universal goodness. Encouraging publicly visible signals of support for a particular ideology is a violation of privacy, especially when it is likely to cause sanctions against people who don’t support it.

Facemasks are my favorite example of this. They’re a visible compliance symbol, and once they became enforced/mandated and encouraged, group psychology took over. People who didn’t wear them were shamed and outcast. It moved the whole debate away from the fact that they didn’t work to begin with.

Thomas Harrington breaks it down very well.

“Official ideological positions; that is, positions that are presented as unquestioningly good for all and thus above debate now regularly emanate from our government and have their effectively transcendent status vigorously defended by the media. The process looks something like this. 

1. First comes a policy which, as I have said, is described by the government and its media handmaidens as being resolutely for the common good, and as such, beyond any reasoned debate regarding its advisability and efficacy. 

1. A talisman is developed and deployed (a useless mask, a vaccine card) to serve as a visible marker of the citizen’s conformity to the supposedly wholly beneficent and thus fundamentally undebatable ideological program. 

1. As expected, a minority of the society questions whether the project in question is as immaculately conceived and wholly altruistic as they are being told. And they often express their discontent by eschewing the implied demand to sport the government’s talisman of ideological conformity. 

1.  In so doing, they effectively “out” themselves as “problematic” before their more pliant fellow citizens. 

1. This delights the cynical elites who have set the whole festival of officialist virtue signaling in motion, as it provides them with a readily identifiable symbol of hate-worthiness, a vast field of humanoid bloody socks if you will, with which to further inflame the passions of the great mass of conformists. 

1. Seeing the very real possibility that they too might be subject to a moral lynching, other nonconformists will naturally think twice about violating the verbal and semiotic codes of compliance in the future. 

1. The officialist ideology thus takes on an appearance of popularity that it does not in fact have in reality which, in turn further convinces other possible nonconformists of the futility of seeking to resist it. 

1. Lather, rinse and repeat.”