On Virtue Signaling
We’re at the point where nearly every action or message could be politicized or related to a social cause. It puts people and brands in a precarious situation where you’re often damned if you do say something (by someone) or damned if you don’t say something (by that same someone or a different someone).
I like the idea of being like Cato the Younger, firm on principles and willing to defend whatever it is that you believe in. But I also like the idea that virtue isn’t something to be signaled about. It isn’t something to be bought and sold or traded or masqueraded like a badge of honor that’s worn on your sleeve. (Especially if it’s only virtue that’s politically convenient or useful for your bottom-line. That’s just advantageous and disingenuous. Which by definition is the opposite of virtue.)
I like how Nassim Taleb expresses these ideas about virtue. He says, “virtue is precisely what you don’t advertise. It is not an investment strategy. It is not a cost-cutting scheme. It is not a book selling (and worse, concert tickets selling) strategy.”
As Taleb mentions in his book Skin in the Game (which beautifully articulates why someone should have skin in the game when it comes to virtue, like Cato did in his opposition to Caesar), the Biblical book of Matthew covers virtue signaling very well. And as Taleb calls out in the book, Christ Himself had skin in the game. (The ultimate version actually.)
We see in Matthew 6:1, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
And Matthew 6:2, “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Those are valuable lessons. I don’t think many brands or people believe in a Father to be rewarded by, and they obviously have quotas to meet today and not in the afterlife, but it’s hard to look past the commodification of virtue. It’s taken advantage of by businesses, politicians, and citizens to gain status.
While I stand by the idea that we should all stand firm in our principles, I hope that those principle are, like Cato, things that we actually believe in, and not just things that we manipulate for the sake of expediency.
