In this email, you’ll discover an interesting way to spot when someone is virtue signalling.
I say that because, in a way, it’s a form of manipulation. A way of trying to look like a better person than you really are. Holier than thou, you might say.
In case this psychological concept sounds a bit strange to you, let me explain it straight away:
Virtue signalling is a form of moral self-presentation. In other words, publicly displaying values or outrage to gain approval, status or a sense of belonging to a group, rather than to understand or solve the problem.
Not long ago, a very famous streamer called El Xokas was doing one of his live streams and ended up talking about a very famous actress called Ester Expósito.
He said it wouldn’t be worth being with a woman like her because of her political views, that he’d rather be with ‘a 6’, and that he placed his own partner far above her because of the way she thinks, her warmth, her personality and because he also finds her very attractive.
You might think rating people on their attractiveness is in poor taste, or you might think he should’ve kept his mouth shut.
But what he was essentially saying was that someone very attractive can stop being appealing if you can’t stand their views or personality.
Nothing more, nothing less.
But the issue here is that these comments went viral, and I’ll now explain why. More specifically, I’ll explain just how eager people are to take things out of context.
El Xokas didn’t say he wanted a woman with no mind of her own. In fact, he mentioned his partner’s way of thinking as one of the reasons he preferred her. But if you keep that context, the outrage that went viral on social media loses a lot of its force. So it gets left out of the collective narrative.
The truth is that you and I, along with half the human race, have had that exact same conversation with our friends thousands of times, saying the same things or far worse.
Isn’t that true?
Imagine this: a group of female friends gets together and starts talking about how good-looking one fella is, how ugly another is, how they’d put a bag over this one’s head because he’s so ugly but what a body he’s got, deciding who they’d go for and who they wouldn’t, laughing, hahaha, oh my God, that’s so harsh, etc., etc.
And the same thing happens in a group of men.
Or a mixed group.
I don’t care.
Or do you not have any friends?
Right.
Now that we’ve cleared that up.
The problem here is that those comments were made out in the open. With a great big microphone so thousands of people could hear them.
If they’d been made in private, neither you nor I would be talking about this today.
The difference isn’t that, in private, we’re pure, delicate creatures incapable of judging anyone’s looks. The difference is the setting.
In private, you say plenty of things you wouldn’t say in front of a camera because you know they’re informal, exaggerated or simply not particularly classy.
That’s one thing.
Something quite different is taking a sentence, stripping it of its context and turning it into supposed proof that the person who said it believes something they never actually said.
That’s where virtue signalling comes in.
First, the most scandalous part is selected.
Then any nuance that might tone down the scandal is ignored.
Next, a more sinister motive is…
This is where the public version ends. The full newsletter is for subscribers only.
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