Virtue Signalling and Tribalism examines how people—across politics—adopt norms to fit in, from avoiding racist language to supporting "moral tribes" like right-to-life movements, with social media’s algorithmic rewards amplifying this trend. Politicians now rely on vague terms like "values" instead of concrete policies, while wedge issues (abortion, gun control) artificially polarize voters by prioritizing tribal loyalty over substantive debate. Both MSNBC and Fox News exploit this, framing facts to serve group narratives, even when audiences agree. Conspiracy theories like QAnon flourish in these echo chambers, where belief trumps evidence. The hosts warn that rigid tribalism stifles growth, deepening confirmation bias and fracturing discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
No big preamble, just a reminder that we do have a email address, truthunrestricted at gmail.com, for anyone to send any feedback, any gripes, any complaints, anything they'd prefer we talk about instead of this boring stuff that we chose.
We're big fans of criticism.
Yeah, yeah.
More nasty words.
And if I don't get any, then I'm going to go find a reason for people to give me some.
So there.
Today, we're going to talk about virtue signaling and tribalism.
Oh, boy.
I don't know if we're going to fit that in half an hour, but we'll find out.
So virtue signaling.
I define it as the overt or conscious effort to portray a property that we know will be seen positively by whoever we're talking to.
I hope that makes sense.
Ostentatiously portray.
The big focus on that would be the signaling part, right?
Like it doesn't count as virtue signaling if you're not talking about it a lot and drawing attention to it.
Well, here's where I differ from what most of the world is calling this thing.
For most of the mentions of this in our idea space these days, it's a thing that is happening almost entirely on the left.
And it's dogmatic thinking that's slurred in with political correctness, with a very certain set of words that you're not allowed to say, definitely not allowed to say.
And then also some other things that you definitely have to say that you support or you are in favor of all that stuff.
And you have to bend over backwards to do it.
I will definitely agree that when that's happening in those conversations, it's definitely happening in a much less subtle manner than it's really happening everywhere else.
But virtue signaling is a thing that everyone does every day of our lives.
And you're probably just doing it without even thinking about it that much.
So to even to call it a conscious effort is almost a stretch because we're doing this.
We're trying to signal to everyone why we're important to them all the time.
It's just a thing we do.
And if you're in a room where everyone does some other strange thing and they think it's normal, you might start displaying those normal properties and displaying those virtues for them just the same as they're displaying them for you.
That's monkey see monkey do 101.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I guess so.
I think your definition just sort of implies a level of gradients to the behavior when all we typically tend to discuss is the extreme.
Yeah, but usually it's a single virtue.
Very often we're expected to display at some point that we're not racist in any way.
That's a very common thing in our world today to have a display of the fact that you're not a racist.
How have you displayed to people that you're not a racist, Jeff?
You haven't thought of any overt things that you might be doing that?
No.
Aside from avoiding racist jokes or slurs or whatever.
Yeah.
In my everyday life, I don't run into that much either, but it's definitely a thing that I've caught in conversations among talking heads on TV, for example.
In comedians I've seen poke a little bit of fun at this notion where they come up with a bit on a sitcom or something and they'll say something and then they'll trip over that thing immediately and say, I'm not a racist, though.
I'm not a racist.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't think that I'm a racist.
I have a co-worker who hilariously attempts to tell everyone that I'm a racist.
Okay.
That's good fun.
Inside joke between him and I that I have to immediately start telling people, especially new people that don't know me.
No, I'm actually not a racist.
He gets good fun out of that.
We virtue signal about all kinds of things.
People on the right are doing it at least as much as people on the left are doing it.
If you support a certain politician, then when you're among the people, especially when you're among the people who support that politician, they'll come to expect that you show that same level of devotion for that certain politician.
That's been happening in crowds of people who like politicians since we've had politicians, I think.
Or, you know, if you identify as part of the right to life tribe, you would trumpet what you see as a virtue to identify yourself as part of that moral group.
They might, in some cases, even expect you to show some vocal level of support for it if they feel strongly enough about that issue.
Political correctness is, I think, a product of a fact that we're trying to virtue signal at such a high rate.
We're definitely trying to avoid showing the wrong virtues in that case.
It's almost like a reverse.
Not like we're trying to signal that we have the right virtues, just try to show that we don't have the wrong ones.
Yeah, almost like an Orwellian group think or group speak.
Yeah, I remember when I first heard the term political correctness was probably still in high school for me back in the 90s.
Yeah.
It seemed such a strange term.
And, you know, there were still people who would try to correct you, try to demonstrate for you the politically correct thing to say.
Nowadays, we don't even have that.
We just recognize a certain level of behavior as the politically correct behavior.
We almost don't.
Oh, no, that behavior still absolutely exists.
I was very soundly schooled by my 15-year-old daughter on what was a previously unknown lack of educated empathy that I had for gender identity issues.
And this isn't due to any inherent bigotry on my part.
Are you virtue signaling right now as you say that?
I guess so.
But it was predominantly based just on my ignorance on the subject.
They've drilled down a lot further than they did back when you and I were in high school and queer just meant gay.
There's a lot more there and a lot more pronouns and other things to keep track of that I was still fumbling with.
And my daughter, bless her heart, could not resist the opportunity to give me a good virtue signaling, condescending scolding on my lack of education on the subject.
So, you know, the behavior still absolutely exists.
I would argue even more so than it did when we first saw what we perceived as the first rearing of politically correct behavior in the 90s.
And it's circling back to previous episodes.
I think predominantly because social media gives us so many more avenues with which to signal our virtues.
So many more reminders of what the correct virtues are.
Well, easy enough to get feedback.
You know, if you've hit on a solid virtue, then you get more likes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You get this measure.
Oh, it's almost engineered now.
Yeah.
Forgot about the likes.
So, yeah, I've seen this phenomenon where if you join a new company or you're with a new set of people and they have a different set of values and they just casually hold them and use them in conversation with each other, you might find yourself adopting some of those values, at least for the time that you're around those people.
Have you ever noticed yourself doing that?
Yeah, I would, I would say so.
I don't know if it necessarily falls within the purview of virtues, but I cursed far less before I became a construction worker.
I think it fits.
It's not something we see as a virtue, really.
I would disagree.
In the anti-politically correct sphere, it's definitely seen as a sign that you're one of the people, you know what I mean?
Well, yeah.
And I think among a more working class mentality, having a plethora of expletives at your disposal, wearing your coarseness on your sleeve is seen as a sign of openness and honesty, which is something that's very valued in relationships on all levels.
Yeah, I think I remember reading somewhere, something about that, about how generally speaking, people who curse a lot are trusted more by their friends and peers.
So this slurs directly into tribalism, especially the thought that if you were to immerse yourself amongst a group of people who have a different or at least slightly different set of values that they hold, you might permanently or perhaps only temporarily take on those values.
That leads directly to tribalism.
I didn't feel like I could talk about tribalism without first mentioning or viewing it through this idea of virtue signaling, because I feel like the two are locked together in a way.
What do you think?
Oh, absolutely.
You virtue signal to show that you belong to the tribe.
And what is tribalism other than the macro expression of individual virtue signaling?
A collection of virtues.
Anthropologists are the ones who probably first coined the term tribalism back when they were looking at it.
They were just looking at it for actual tribes.
You wouldn't choose your tribe.
It would be chosen for you based on where you lived and who your family was and how they raised you.
The original birth lottery.
They needed a tribalism because you might have amongst a group similar culture and yet they don't get along with each other.
And they needed a way to describe why and how they came to be perhaps even at war with each other, even though they're remarkably similar and really have the same cultural beliefs and everything else.
And they found a way to describe that by talking about tribalism and they're just from a different tribe.
But in the modern context, we have tribalism from a tribe that we choose.
You have your family and you have how you were raised and that's all fine.
But now, especially with the internet, we have any number of other communities, perhaps even multiple other communities that we can be a part of in which we can be fully immersed in a whole separate tribe that has a whole separate set of beliefs from the set we would hold if we were just with our families or at work.
And that has strongly led to all kinds of other strange and wonderful things in our world.
Yeah.
I have a call back here to the second episode of this podcast.
We talked about trust, conformity, and social expectation, all three in a tripod holding up a part of our life.
Tribalism and the social forces that hold you into the tribe, that's all of them right there.
Trust, conformity, and social expectation.
You want to have the people in your tribe trust you.
You conform to the things that they are doing and saying in order to earn more of their trust.
And they might, in interaction with you, create a new set of social expectations of new things or perhaps more strongly believe in certain things that they would expect you to be a part of.
It's interesting, though, because by your definition of virtue signaling, it almost just feels like a perfectly natural, organic behavior, a peacock showing its feathers to signal to others of its kind that it's one of them.
But the common consensus, more common pop definition of virtue signaling, there's a definite, decided, derogatory overtone.
Yeah, it's used as a pejorative.
Yeah, exactly.
If you accuse someone of virtue signaling, you are insulting them.
Definitely.
There's little of value that's seen in virtue signaling.
It's seen as being fake.
Yeah, exactly.
Or not even necessarily being fake, but disingenuous.
You're not doing a good deed if you're doing it just to get recognition for it.
I remember it floated by my social media feed a couple of days ago, the shopping cart test.
If you've heard of that?
To see whether people are really putting their shopping carts back.
Outside of British Columbia, which I found is one of only a few provinces that does this, where they shackle the shopping carts with a coin-operated chain.
There's places where you take your carts back and it's just expected that when you're done putting the stuff in your car, you will walk the shopping cart back and put it away.
It's sort of the ultimate test of whether or not you're a functioning member of society, if you'll do the right thing when nobody's watching, because there's no penalty for just leaving it in the middle of the parking stall next to you and driving away.
Nobody's going to find you or come after you or tell you you can't shop here anymore.
There's also no reward for doing it.
No one's going to give you a high five or pay you.
That's the social expectation, the courteous thing to do for the next person.
Virtue signaling is the antithesis of that.
It's doing that while the entire time you're walking the cart back, speaking through a megaphone to everyone around you to draw attention to yourself and what you're doing.
Yeah.
You can't really exert any pressure on people to put the cart back.
Maybe if you saw them trying to leave it behind and you caught them in that moment, maybe if you were really nosy, you might go and knock on their window or something and ask them if they're really going to leave the cart there.
But I'm not the kind of person that would do that.
But you know, what you might do is when you're with other people, you might relentlessly complain about it to demonstrate that that's a terrible virtue to have.
Leaving the cart behind is an awful thing so that when they're in that situation, they think about that and it's in the back of their head.
Should I just leave it here?
Should I take it back?
People think poorly of the person that leaves it there.
So even though there isn't a person here that I want to impress, I'm still going to bring the cart back because that's only something that a savage does, just leave the cart here like this.
And that's a thing that we're doing.
We are talking about the thing that's terrible so that we can maybe encourage other people to not do the terrible thing.
Even if we're not going to check on them, there isn't a system to punish anyone who does it or fails to do it, if you're looking at it that way.
We're still going to talk about it as though we're going to demonstrate what the proper virtue is.
And if anyone feels that it's the proper virtue to leave it behind, feel free to send me an email because I want to talk to you.
Yeah, that's all part of it.
And the idea that it's fake, that it's a thing that we're doing that's fake.
And the other idea that I have that it's a natural thing, that's part of what I do with almost every one of our topics.
I don't know if anyone's noticed yet, but I want us to realize that most of the things that are happening that are leading to what might be considered bad conclusions are actually just little bits of code that are occurring inside our brains naturally all the time and then get just getting used in the wrong way.
Virtue signaling didn't get invented when people wanted to institute political correctness.
It's been there all the time.
It's calling from inside the house, if you will.
It's there.
It's always been there.
And now it's just getting used for this other purpose.
And that's what is, I think, sort of the inherent problem with tribalism.
The point you made that kind of triggered it for me was it's just this little bit of code in our brain that's getting miswired or misused.
Tribalism comes from the more instinctual part of our brain.
Is it the id?
I'm not up.
I was never formally educated in ways of the mind.
Is it the id, the ego and the superego?
Is that the order?
The id is like the sort of basest instincts, the closest we are to animals.
Yeah, that's the idea.
That's what tribalism comes from is your id.
And it comes from that time when tribalism was necessary because resources were scarce and we needed to signal who our partners were so we could tell who our enemies were, so we could defeat who we needed to defeat to get the resources we needed to get to survive because ancient life was savage.
But we've evolved largely beyond that in the developed world anyway.
But there's so many forces at play that are preying on that tribalist instinct.
Politically, it's so much easier to just find a handful of wedge issues like right to life versus pro-choice, gun control, the plethora of gender identity and sexual orientation issues that are at the forefront of our society now.
Are men allowed to go into the women's washroom if they identify as a woman?
Yeah.
So you fabricate these wedge issues that you know polarizes your voting base because it's so much easier to manipulate a voting base when you can drive a line down the middle and say, hey, we stand this over here and those bad, terrible people over there, they stand for that.
Then as a politician, you don't have to work for them.
You've just convinced them that you've saved them over this one terribly important, completely paper tiger issue.
And it's used because it's effective, because we still have that base instinctual need to belong to a tribe and to trumpet the virtues that justify our belonging to said tribe.
We do.
It's a little different now that we get to choose our tribe, though.
Yeah.
Thinking back to the times in my life that occurred before the internet took over as the main communication medium, we had mass communication, but it was one way.
Television and radio were one-way communication.
There might be programs on the television or radio that would communicate some things to us about what virtues are the proper ones, especially in the 80s and 90s.
There was a lot of stuff about drugs that was meant to be what's meant to be the right thing to do and what's not the right thing to do in relation to things like drugs.
And that was fine, but it didn't facilitate much of a conversation.
I remember episodes of sitcoms that would have every sitcom at one point would have the drug episode.
The more you know.
Yeah.
The child would do drugs and then something terrible would happen to them.
They'd fail a test or crash a car or something.
And then they'd have that moment where they have to face their life and whatever.
And it was a very tired cliche.
And none of those sparked any kind of conversation for me with anyone, not my parents, not my friends.
We just shrugged that off.
It was never a thing that really caught us, at least not for me, and caused us to have a conversation where we agreed on what was the right thing to do then.
And in that way, because we weren't having that conversation, we weren't forming a tribe with tribal lines drawn based on that virtue.
And that's the big difference between the internet and those other mass mediums is that we almost can't interact on the internet without having a conversation.
And that conversation is always leading to people being either in agreement on what sets of properties will cause them to decide this versus that or which is good or bad.
And all of that is we little tribal lines being drawn.
We are good because we will decide this way about these drugs and that way about those drugs, or we're good because we'll decide this way about guns.
And those other people are bad because they'll decide that way about guns.
However, it comes out, those are little tribal lines being drawn.
And the macro view of this comes out to be often that we'll have tribes that are forming around the loudest voices.
That's how it comes out.
We talk a lot about the polarization of the political spectrum.
And we have, I call it, two sides in a tug of war over society.
I hate that it's only two sides.
The political spectrum being only a line is a great dumbing down of the situation.
It has many more dimensions than that in reality, but we in Canada are always flooded by the view from the U.S. in ways that the people in the U.S. just can't appreciate, I find.
It's hard for me to have a conversation with people from the U.S. about the Canadian perspective on this because our political spectrum is much wider than two sides and theirs is just not.
It's to the point now where they almost don't understand the idea that it could have more aspects than just the two.
There's been a couple other third party candidates, they call them.
They almost always seem to latch on to the things that the other parties are doing.
And they're almost just a way to siphon off a few percentage of the votes at this point because they know they can't make any real difference.
And that's the only difference that they're making.
Whether that's intentional or not is up to historians to decide.
But that's the only thing that they're accomplishing now, which is why they show up so rarely.
I think the only movement in the United States political spectrum that seems interesting as a tribe is libertarianism.
But I don't really want to get deep into libertarianism right now.
Maybe someday down the road, we'll do a whole separate podcast where we dive deep on that.
If it seems interesting enough, to me, it's just not that interesting.
It's a shirking of responsibility more than anything else.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
Sorry, that's our Canadian perspective on libertarianism to any libertarians out there.
Tribalism, though, as soon as you're forming those conversations and you're talking it out with someone about what are the right ways to act, that's the thing that's really allowing you to form the tribe.
And most people don't even realize that sometimes they're giving up on some things in order to get support for other things.
And that's that's where the two camps as they are are locking things in.
I mean, when you look at the right side of the political spectrum in the U.S. and the collection of beliefs they have, generally held, I'm not saying specifically, there's individual politicians that have greater sway in one direction or other or issues that they feel more strongly about, but generally they have to support all the main issues.
There's really, when you look at them, there isn't really a lot of reason why someone who is passionate about removing abortions should necessarily also feel that passionately about the Second Amendment.
And yet they do.
But you can very reliably make money all day long by betting on knowing about one, about their feelings on the other, because it's predictable.
It's very predictable.
And that's sort of the classic example of tribalism on the right is this collection of beliefs.
They don't interlock very closely.
They're just a separate set of beliefs that all happen to be in the same sack together at the same time.
And the people who are passionate about one, I'm not really sure how it is they come to all of the beliefs, but if they approach that camp because they're passionate about one of those, I think they often latch onto the views of all the others because they get to be part of the tribe that's going to accomplish the thing that they're really interested in.
And they're along the ride, along for the ride for all the other stuff too.
If they had to pick just one, they'd probably pick just one.
But because the tribe wants to do all of them, then they're in for all of them.
And that's why those wedge issues all get collected together as one.
Because yeah, because it's a topic that people generally feel passionate about that is a virtue signaling issue, where one will signal their position on the political spectrum by how they feel about said topic.
So politicians pick those and talk about the lots because it polarizes the voting base and lets them predict with reasonable accuracy how many votes they're going to get.
Yeah, I find how I see a lot of politicians now and the words that they use, they are using more wishy-washy words, even more so than they used to.
If I had $1 for every time I heard a politician use the word values without listing any of those individual values, I'd be a rich, rich man because values themselves, just saying the word over and over again, doesn't tell you anything about what their values actually are.
It's like me saying properties.
We want properties voters.
Switch them up.
If you say virtue voters, we want all the virtue voters.
I hold a lot of virtues and everyone who has strong virtues should also vote for me because I hold strong virtues and they have strong virtues and we have strong virtues together.
It sounds like a very strange thing to say.
We've got so used to hearing people use the word values in that spot that we just kind of ignore it now.
But it's a way of not talking about the specific things that they should be talking about.
And that frustrates me every time I hear a politician do it.
Most times when I hear politicians speak, all of them, I get frustrated because they avoid locking themselves down to so many things so often that I just tune them out.
A lot of those messages and the supposed specific things that they are meant to be supporting, a lot of that comes out with all the side conversations, the PACs and the super PACs and the additional people that are talking and the websites that are talking about them and the people that are on those websites to now is happening in a lot of places.
The people who are meant to go to those websites that are meant to steer the conversation towards certain things.
And in some cases, now the machines that are going to those places and starting their own accounts and changing the conversation towards those things.
That's part of that whole machine now is learning computers that are set to that task.
Argubuts.
Yeah.
Get the ability to run 10,000 Twitter accounts, meant to inject themselves in conversations to keep them on track to talk about the thing they want to talk about or argue about the thing they want to argue about.
And that's where tribalism sits.
It sits as these the two big tribes and then all the wee little tribes in between that are coming to all these strange beliefs all over the place.
When I think about the LGBTQ community has really they have their own tribe, but they also have a symbolism of the rainbow of this inclusiveness.
And it's great, you know, inclusiveness, fine.
But the real rainbow is all the many, many beliefs that are being had on the internet.
And when I think about it, that's the real rainbow.
And it's shocking sometimes to enter that space and go to some of those places on the internet and see the things that they're really talking about.
Well, that's one of those colors under the rainbow.
That's like what?
All the conspiracy hypothesis and all the things that they're telling each other to remind each other is true is really what they're what they're doing when they're going on about this.
I've seen some of the QAnon stuff over not recently, but a few years ago, and it was really remarkable to watch.
People who created entire channels, YouTube channels, them and their friends and family and neighbors would collectively run a 24-hour radio station, only it's with a camera and live like CNN, like their own CNN.
And they would continually talk about all the different aspects of all the stuff.
And they'd rapidly run out of the parts of the mysterious Q figure that are meaningful material.
And they'd come up with all kinds of other things to throw in there about how you know that these people are pedophiles or how you know that these people are in a cult.
And you look at it, you think to yourself, how is it possible that they really think that?
But if they're drowning themselves in it daily and you can just put that on forever, you can go to YouTube and YouTube will continually find new videos for you to watch.
But if you wanted, you could just let that run all the time.
And it would be technically new all the time.
It would be just like.
And there's all kinds of whatever flavor you want for that.
My wife's parents love them, but MSNBC is on constantly in their house.
Yeah.
Like constantly.
Don't get me wrong.
I agree philosophically with the bulk of their content because I consider myself to be a member of that left-leaning tribe that this is the media propaganda voice for.
But like, I just found it really jarring the last couple of times we were up for a visit when I watched it because I don't have cable TV anymore, just the internet.
So I hadn't watched a syndicated news network show in a while.
It was jarring to me, blatantly, obviously, tribalist propaganda, grotesque editorializing, very little in the way of actual facts being portrayed on any of the airtime.
Functionally, no different than Fox News, just left-wing Fox News.
It's blue Fox News.
I've seen that before with media that puts out things that I agree with in principle, but they're doing it in a way that's smarmy and dishonest and misleading.
And I shake my head and I think to myself, do you really feel the need to do it that way?
Yeah.
Why do you feel the need to do that?
Because it gets results.
There must be some results that they're seeing.
But at that point, they must just be entertainment.
It's not really news.
It's fodder for the tribe that you're attempting to feed.
Not the same thing as enlightenment.
And I shake my head at it.
I think everyone really, everyone is part of some tribe.
Everyone feels like they're part of some tribe somewhere.
Otherwise, they would feel like they're not belonging somewhere.
Yeah.
So everyone is experiencing some level of tribalism in some corner of their world, at least.
A lot of people are thinking, oh, that tribalism, it's a terrible thing.
It's happening over there, though.
It's happening to you too.
Yeah.
Everyone experiences it.
I go over this with things like politics as well, where I said that politics is not a negative thing.
It's just a thing that's happening a lot and some people are using it negatively.
Same thing for virtue signaling and tribalism both.
They're happening all around us all the time, but it's what you do with it.
It's how you enclose yourself off with it.
It's if you're actively closing yourself off to ideas that are outside your tribe, especially if it's a tribe that you chose that has a set of beliefs that was chosen.
It's not just you're stuck with this tribe because you happen to live in the same cave with them.
You're doing yourself a disservice by closing yourself off to everything else.
And we should work to break ourselves out of those places.
We have a confirmation bias generator at our disposal all the time, and it's not doing us any favors.
So maybe now's a good point to end the show on that note.