Virtue signalling

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Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men.

St. Matthew, chapter 6, verse ii.

A form of preaching to the choir, only with added moralising, virtue-signalling is making a statement that looks brave but is not. A virtue signal is a flamboyant but yet safe and inexpensive gesture that has no prospect of really impacting is subject matter, but is calculated to burnish one's own, inevitably libtard, credentials.

Social media are intrinsically excellent for virtue signaling, because it costs nothing to make a statement, and you can choose & filter your audience (or it chooses and filters you) based on pre-determined proclivities.

any sign yet?

The cause célèbre of virtue signaling followed Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 girls from a Secondary School in Nigeria in 2o14. This was a categorically horrific act, to which most of the networked world responded, on Twitter, with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, often accompanied by a photo of individual (the most famous was Michelle Obama), moon faced, holding up the hashtag on a piece of paper. Everyone joined in. Easy, cheap, filling oneself with a sense of lofty righteousness and achieving precisely nothing.

#ThankYouTopGunActors #OurTopGunActors

In fairness, that only happened once as everyone recognised it at one for exactly what it was, and more recent social atrocities have been mercifully free of such humble self-aggrandizing behaviour by overpaid entertainers.

You see, James Bond, if you want to support the health service give them some of your money, or get in your van and start helping, but either way shut the hell up about it.

The point isn’t to criticize the sentiment — what kind of monster could do that? — but to ask what practical good it does? Would a worldwide crush of hashtags lead a religious fundamentalist to the error of his ways? Or was that not really the point, but to visibly, righteously, show concern in a costless but bragadocious way?

Since virtue signalling namechecks politically correct issues du jour it a natural bullshit detector bypass - and where it doesn’t bypass the bullshit detector, it certainly mutes it. Calling out bullshit is over thing, calling out a virtue signalling bullshitter risks challenging the signal -which may indeed be bullshit, but that's not the point, is it?

Prime example: yogababble Adam Newman from WeWork. “At WeWork we don’t discriminate. We are going to build something. We are going to change the world for the better.”

Imagine no virtue signalling

Just occasionally, the bullshit filter clicks in, as it did for Gal Gadot’s excruciating “imagine no coronavirus pandemic” effort of March 2020, which really has to be seen to be believed. Go on, have a look, you know you want to. The result;t is genuinely, toweringing, breath-takingly awful.

I challenge you to keep watching to the end.

See also

• The dog in the night time
• Bullshit detector
• Banter