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June 16, 2020 - Davis Aurini
17:48
Virtue Signalling is the Enemy of Virtue

Originally published March, 2017.

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So, this requested video comes from Kim Christian.
It's on the topic of virtue signaling.
Now, we're going to dig into this because I think it's an important topic that we really should explore what the term means because virtue signaling destroys information, it destroys character, it destroys virtue itself.
But to start from a fun place, let's address where it's coming from.
So, Kim Christian stumbled across a video.
Screenwriter Max Landis posts YouTube video calling non-SJWs assholes and deletes it.
And Jake Starr has it up on his channel.
I'll link to that down below.
And now, here's the thing.
Max Landis, you guys probably know him.
He's a friend of the Red Letter Media Fellows.
And quite frankly, I'm a fan of his.
Not necessarily the movies he's written.
I don't think they were directed very well, but I just like the guy.
Okay?
He's just one of those honest geeks, you know, not like the fake geeks they have on that stupid big bang theory, but just an honest, geeky guy.
I would love to sit down with him for a beer.
And hey, Max, if you're ever in the same place as any sort of meetup, you are more than welcome.
We would love to have you.
But that said, Max, you're a bit of a pussy.
Let me try and explain something to you.
What you see as Donald Trump being a big bully, or alpha males, you know, being mean to their girlfriends, or what have you.
It's not actually them being mean, okay?
Max, women are over-emotional, and they kind of need a guy to calm them down to be that rock that they can cling to.
They need a guy to say, no, honey, it's okay.
No, honey, the dog is fine.
Stop having a panic attack.
It's just a freaking dog.
The dog will be fine.
You know, they need that.
They need that calming influence.
And that's not the man or the husband being abusive.
That's just him being a man.
They crave that.
They want it.
They need it.
As much as we need them to be women.
So what you're viewing as abusive is anything but.
And, you know, the same thing goes for the whole race issue that SJWs bring up.
Like, Max, I know you're in Hollywood and you're just inundated with this.
Oh, we need to do something to help the Africans, to help the poor people.
They don't need that sort of help.
Okay, blacks don't want to be pandered to.
Okay, they would like some economic opportunities.
They would like fair and straight dealing.
They certainly don't want to be called names or anything like that.
But being frank about the situation in the ghetto, being frank about crime rates and to racial crime rates, calling a spade a spade, and no, that's just a saying.
That's not a dog whistle.
That doesn't upset them.
They know what's going on, man.
You can deal frankly with them.
You don't need to walk on eggshells.
Alright, and it's when you get caught up in all of this, this SJW, nicey nice liberalism from Hollywood sort of thing, you know, you wind up being really condescending to women and men.
Okay?
If a woman's with a guy, it's because she wants to be with that guy.
Alright, there's nobody forcing her.
He's not threatening.
If he's threatening her, she can go to the police.
There's plenty of domestic violence shelters.
Okay?
Like, they don't need you to go and talk about their issues for them.
They can talk about them themselves.
And that's why we call it virtue signaling.
Because they don't need you talking.
They need economic opportunities.
They need good advice.
But if they're being over-emotional, they don't need you pandering into their fantasies.
So that's just my piece with Max Lantis.
I still really like the guy.
And like I said, Max, I'd love to have a beer with you sometime, but you gotta stop being such a pussy, okay?
Most people are not emotionally fragile little snowflakes that melt at the first blush of heated conversation.
Now all that said, virtue signaling it's more than just what the SJWs get up to.
In fact, I'd say it's a very endemic thing in our culture right now, in all walks of life, not just amongst the effect liberal elites.
I think it's worth considering the etymology of the term.
Where did this word come from?
Well, I was looking it up on Google Engram Viewer.
It's a search algorithm that you use to look through books that have been published, goes back 200 years or so.
And quite frankly, it didn't come up.
Now, I searched virtue as well, and that's getting mentioned less and less often in books, but no virtue signaling.
So I decided to look it up online.
Where and how is virtue signaling being mentioned online?
And it really started peaking around 2014 or so, with no mentions before that.
So I think it's safe to say that the term virtue signaling derives from the work of Robin Hansen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, who talks a lot about social signaling, okay, about how a great deal of communication can be understood as meaning to signal something about yourself.
And he gives the example of how there were some upper class people wearing shirts that said Fakuck on them, FCUK.
You know, to signal that, look, I'm so much above these people that have to wear suits that I can wear an almost swear word on my shirt, but also I'm above the people that would wear an actual swear word on their shirt.
I'm just doing it ironically.
Quite frankly, I think this whole thing is a very destructive process.
And think about what you're wearing for a moment.
Okay, why are you wearing what you're wearing?
Because it says a lot about yourself.
You chose to wear this.
Why are you choosing to wear that?
Now, it used to be that certain styles of dress they communicated accomplishments a military uniform, a firefighter's uniform.
This communicates some sort of accomplishment, some sort of objective real world status in your life.
You know, wearing clean clothing, wearing good fitting clothing, this communicates status, that you not just status, but that you have self-respect, that even if you're not rich, you keep an ordered house.
But with the amount of hypocrisy we have in civilization society these days, many of these signals are getting mixed, they're turning into counter signals, and eventually they're turning into nothing but signals for the sake of signaling.
So any inherent meaning that started this all is lost.
You know, a rich entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, instead of wearing a comfortable Oxford shirt and jeans and some nice shoes, is going to wear something trashy and ugly to signal that he can get away with it.
And you just wind up with this spiral of meaninglessness.
And from this, we get virtue signaling.
You know, as Matt Forney said, you know, in this post-virtue society, the only remaining sin is hypocrisy.
And so people desperately signal that they aren't hypocrites while being complete and utter hypocrites.
I think it's important to consider the post-Christian world that we're living in.
Now, if we were a post-Shintoist world, for example, we would have something else entirely.
Okay, in fact, if you watch anime, and if you watch anime looking to detect the sickness in Japanese society, you are going to find a subtly different form of sickness over there.
The effects are the same.
Neats, dropping birth rate, masculinized women, feminized men, the same effects, but a different root sickness, because theirs is a shame-based culture, while ours is a guilt-based culture.
And so without the actual Christianity, without the higher purpose of refining your soul, of becoming a person worthy of human company that's present in Christianity, when we remove that mystical element, it becomes a guilt-based culture which is all about going along to get along, being an obedient little office worker who doesn't upset other people, and so you're supposed to feel guilty all the time.
And the forms of virtue that we signal about tend to be about being guilty and about being charitable.
The irony, of course, being that you shouldn't be doing charity in public.
Okay, in the Christian culture, charity that's done in public is not highly regarded.
Okay, because it's not really about the charity, it's about signaling the charity.
You're doing the charity for the sake of God, because you know that God cares about those other people, and so you're trying to make their lives better for the sake of God, because I mean, he's got a bleeding heart and he's done so much for us.
In the post-Christian society, there is no God.
The only God is the corporation, is the culture.
And so when you go and be charitable, you do it in a public manner.
Public perception is all that exists at this point.
So you want to do something charitable, but really you're just making appropriate noises.
It's no different than a corporate meetup that they have for the whole company, and you're supposed to wear a blue shirt with a logo on it saying we're doing the new thing for the future, and you're supposed to do a cheer and they're going to have games and yippity doo da day.
Any purpose or meaning, anything inherent is lost.
Suddenly you're not at the corporation to earn money so you can live your life.
You're at the corporation to derive meaning because you have no meaning in your real life.
It's through this that corporate that virtue signaling, it actually destroys virtue in the process.
Okay, because the person that's doing it for the corporation, their locus of valuation, their locus of meaning is tethered to something that can change.
The objective world can change.
So if right now environmental causes are popular, they will tether their definition of virtue to environmentalism.
You know, if in five years it's breast cancer, and by the way, you should look at the documentary Pink Ribbons Incorporated to see what a scam the breast cancer industry is.
They'll tether their sense of meaning to breast cancer.
And it's all about wearing a pink shirt and doing the fun run and etc, etc, even though that money is completely mismanaged.
It's not actually about curing cancer, it's about appearing to care about curing cancer.
And virtue signaling, it happens on the right as well.
There are so many shibboleths, so many terms that people will throw out to signal allegiance to a group.
And this allegiance signaling can get out of control.
Soon you have entire groups that are signaling allegiance to something just for the sake of signaling it, and they're not actually doing anything to accomplish the goals which that allegiance suggests.
All of us are guilty of this to some degree.
So I'm not calling out any individuals or particular organizations, although you can probably think of a few.
All of us are guilty of this.
All of us are trying to belong, and through the process of trying to belong, we forget what we were doing in the first place.
Belonging becomes more important than action.
This virtue signaling becomes very, very destructive.
And so we're left with the question, what are we supposed to do about it?
You know, how can we avoid virtue signaling?
Because there's always that temptation.
And how can we keep our eyes on the ball?
How can we stay humble?
And how can we actually focus on doing the right thing, doing the charitable thing, making an action that improves the world as opposed to a statement that tells other people that we want to improve the world?
Well, when it comes to our personal affairs, first of all, whenever possible, you should be calling people out in private, not in public.
Again, this goes back to reclaiming our Christian culture.
You know, right from the beginning, you know, I believe it was Paul that talked about this.
If one of your brothers is sinning, then you and another member of the church, you go and talk to them, talk to them face to face.
Listen, brother, we think you're getting out of control for these reasons.
We don't want to embarrass you, but we care about you.
You call them out in private, because in public, people are going to have to defend themselves.
Right?
Yeah, you look very virtuous calling out this person with a purity test, but you're not actually doing anything to amend the behavior.
This leads to the next one.
Call out behaviors, not individuals.
If there's some mistake that is being made by a number of people, don't call them out to win points over them, but describe the behavior.
Talk about why the behavior itself is a problem.
And finally, lead by example.
If your mates want to do something stupid, or if your mates are going down a dark path, no need to attack them, no need to ridicule them, no need to make a big scene.
Just say, no, I'm not really into that.
Or, you know, if they're virtue signaling, saying, you know what, I think women can fend for themselves.
To go back to the start of this video, with Max Landis talking about this, this need apparently for us to be sensitive to brown people and black people and Muslims, even though they're murdering people and etc.
Here's the thing, Max, on the off chance that you're still listening.
Us big bullies on the alt-right or whatever we are, us Trump supporters, we actually agree with your goals.
Yes, we want blacks to be doing better financially.
Yes, we don't want women with abusive husbands.
You know, yes, we want good things to happen in the world.
But see, we want to get those good things to happen by destroying the toxic structures that have been holding people down.
You know, the people that just talk about doing this all the time, but don't show any action, any goal to actually change things.
We're actually on the same side, brother.
It's just that, like I said, man, you need to stop being such a pussy about it.
But you're a good guy.
I'm sure you'll come around.
And like I said, you're always welcome, always welcome to have a beer with me or any of my friends when we're hanging out.
So folks, focus on the actions, not the statements.
Let your actions speak for themselves.
Let your life, let the life you're leading be a life of virtue, as opposed to just an outfit purchased from hot topic.
Thank you for listening.
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