{"id":101276,"date":"2026-03-10T03:00:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T07:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101276"},"modified":"2026-03-11T11:17:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T15:17:19","slug":"theres-ordinary-virtue-signalling-then-theres-virtue-costuming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/03\/10\/theres-ordinary-virtue-signalling-then-theres-virtue-costuming\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s ordinary virtue signalling, then there’s virtue costuming"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter<\/em>, L. Wayne Mathison<\/a> describes what happens when virtue signalling becomes someone’s entire persona:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When Virtue Becomes a Costume<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s an old village joke: if a man walks around telling everyone how humble he is, check his pockets. He’s usually carrying a mirror.<\/p>\n

That’s roughly how the modern “woke” phenomenon works. It presents itself as moral enlightenment, but most of the time it behaves like a status game, who can signal the most compassion, the loudest outrage, and the strongest allegiance to the fashionable cause of the week.<\/p>\n

My definition is blunt: woke politics is moral signalling replacing moral responsibility.<\/p>\n

It’s not about solving problems. It’s about performing concern.<\/p>\n

And once you start looking at it that way, the pattern shows up everywhere.<\/p>\n

The Performance Economy of Virtue<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”.<\/p>\n

Luxury beliefs are ideas held mostly by wealthy or highly educated people that signal status but impose real costs on everyone else. The people promoting them rarely suffer the consequences.<\/p>\n

Think about it.<\/p>\n

Defund the police.
\nAbolish prisons.
\nDecriminalize hard drugs.
\nRomanticize homelessness as a “lifestyle choice”.<\/em><\/p>\n

Who pushes these ideas hardest?<\/p>\n

Not the working-class neighbourhood dealing with break-ins. Not the single mother living beside a drug market. It’s usually professors, activists, and celebrities living in safe neighbourhoods with security cameras and gated buildings.<\/p>\n

The belief becomes a badge of moral sophistication.<\/p>\n

The consequences fall somewhere else.<\/p>\n

This is the luxury belief machine.<\/p>\n

The Five Laws of Stupidity at Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carlo Cipolla’s Five Laws of Human Stupidity explains the rest.<\/p>\n

His argument was beautifully cynical: stupidity is not about intelligence. It’s about behaviour.<\/p>\n

A stupid person, he wrote, is someone who causes harm to others while gaining nothing themselves.<\/p>\n

Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Look around at some modern activism and you’ll see Cipolla’s laws running like background software.<\/p>\n

Law #1: Always underestimate the number of stupid people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every generation believes it has escaped mass foolishness. Every generation is wrong.<\/p>\n

Law #2: Stupidity is independent of education.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A PhD does not vaccinate someone against bad thinking. Sometimes it just gives them fancier vocabulary.<\/p>\n

Law #3: A stupid person harms others without benefit.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Policies driven by emotional slogans often damage the very communities they claim to protect.<\/p>\n

Law #4: Non-stupid people underestimate stupidity’s power.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is why sensible people are constantly surprised when destructive ideas gain traction.<\/p>\n

Law #5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike criminals, they don’t know what they’re doing. And unlike the selfish, they aren’t pursuing rational gain.<\/p>\n

They simply push the lever harder.<\/p>\n

The Hollywood Example<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even entertainment hasn’t escaped the pattern.<\/p>\n

Hollywood increasingly behaves less like a storytelling industry and more like a political signalling club. The pressure to conform is real: careers depend on being publicly aligned with the dominant ideology, and dissent can carry professional consequences.<\/p>\n

The incentives are obvious.<\/p>\n

Actors gain admiration by championing fashionable causes. They receive praise, awards, and moral approval, often without sacrificing anything material in their own lives.<\/p>\n

It’s “virtue” at almost zero cost.<\/p>\n

The Moral Time Machine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Then there’s what Bill Maher once joked about: the moral time machine.<\/p>\n

Modern activists judge people from centuries ago as if those individuals possessed today’s cultural knowledge and moral vocabulary. It’s a kind of historical self-congratulation, imagining how virtuous we would have been in 1066 if only we had been there.<\/p>\n

But that trick isn’t really about history.<\/p>\n

It’s about status.<\/p>\n

If you can condemn the past loudly enough, you look enlightened in the present.<\/p>\n

The Incentive Problem<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.<\/p>\n

Most systems don’t run on morality. They run on incentives.<\/p>\n

Corporations chase profit.
\nMedia chase attention.
\nAlgorithms chase engagement.
\nPolitical activists chase moral prestige.<\/em><\/p>\n

If the reward structure encourages outrage and virtue signalling, that’s exactly what people will produce.<\/p>\n

Not because they’re evil.<\/p>\n

Because incentives work.<\/p>\n

The Reframe<\/strong><\/p>\n

The real divide in modern politics isn’t left versus right.<\/p>\n

It’s performance versus results.<\/p>\n

One side asks:<\/p>\n

“Does this policy sound compassionate?”<\/em><\/p>\n

The other asks:<\/p>\n

“Did it actually improve people’s lives?”<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s the question that cuts through the noise.<\/p>\n

Because compassion measured by intentions is theatre.<\/p>\n

Compassion measured by outcomes is responsibility.<\/p>\n

Here’s the test I use now.<\/p>\n

When someone proposes a moral crusade, ask three questions:<\/p>\n

Who pays the cost?<\/em><\/p>\n

Who receives the applause?<\/em><\/p>\n

What happens if the policy fails?<\/em><\/p>\n

Luxury beliefs collapse under those questions almost instantly.<\/p>\n

And the moment the performance stops, something interesting happens.<\/p>\n

We can finally start solving the problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[NR – emphasis added]<\/p>\n

Update, 11 March<\/strong>: Welcome, Instapundit<\/em> readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack<\/em> \u2013 https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson<\/a> that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison describes what happens when virtue signalling becomes someone’s entire persona: When Virtue Becomes a Costume Here’s an old village joke: if a man walks around telling everyone how humble he is, check his pockets. He’s usually carrying a mirror. That’s roughly how the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,53],"tags":[755,1481,1020,139,1238],"class_list":["post-101276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","tag-incentives","tag-luxurybeliefs","tag-progressives","tag-psychology","tag-virtuesignalling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qlu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101309,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101276\/revisions\/101309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}