A few years late to virtue signaling

It happened again the other day; I had the misfortune of seeing people respond to college students protesting for Palestine with some mix of “That’s just performative” and “These comfortable kids just want to be victims” and various other nonsense they’ve been recycling for over 600 days now. To think that college students are disrupting their own graduations out of some victimhood complex, or simply for ‘performativity’ is both asinine and a strange form of genocide denial. The souls of these students are clearly crying out, a feeling perhaps not everyone is familiar with.

This recurring discourse, the recurring sad insults leveled at anti-genocide protests, it all rings utterly hollow. Those trying to dismiss the students, and the countless other people who can’t bear to witness endless live-streamed atrocities, are harkening back to the shallow conversation around ‘virtue signaling’ of years past, but their comments simply boomerang as the entire globe sees the reality of Israel’s relentless slaughter and starvation of Gaza. The critics deliberately confuse performativity for real stakes, the only recourse they have in the face of their own moral brokenness and depravity.

The people making the assertion that protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza is ‘performative’ appear completely unaware of their own performance. Their pathological defense of a violent status quo relies on constant performance. The structures of power, the ideologies that underlie it, and the system we live under depend upon people continually performing numerous rituals.

At certain times the status quo demands that its adherents perform horrific feats of their own dehumanization, such as those required to support genocide, but the day-to-day performance is often more mundane. Perhaps the most pervasive and regular performance necessitated in this society is what I think of as “money signaling.”

Photo by Joan Oger on Unsplash

I should probably explain this somewhat unoriginal term. The way people talk about travel started this little thought process, although it extends far beyond that one activity. I don’t know if it started percolating when I heard people talk about “doing” countries, as in “Oh yeah, you can do Peru in four days,” or if it began when I saw people saying they wanted to hit 50 countries by age 30, but somewhere in there a new way of formulating a familiar concept started taking root in my frustrated brain.

To me travel is, ideally, a profound experience of getting to know a place, a people, of developing real relationships or maybe visiting friends you already have real ties to. It involves respect and deference and is full of awe and wonder. But more and more I’ve seen people treat it like a checklist, discussing running through countless countries in a way that feels stripped of joy. The end purpose, whether they acknowledge it or not, is often building up a travel resume that they can burnish and show off. Of course it might be fun, they may see incredible buildings and beautiful beaches, but they also want to signal that they are travelers, that they can hop on a plane at a moment’s notice, that they are of a certain group. They want, in large part, to money signal.

And this performance is just one of many. Some people pay $100 more for a t-shirt with the right brand name than they’d ever pay for a plain tee. Others develop hobbies (perhaps skiing) in order to be around a certain class and signal their belonging to that echelon of society. Certain wines and other drinks rely on this habit, certain restaurants depend on it, the list goes on. And beyond these activities lies the way they’re discussed. The signaling is sometimes inherent in the purchase, but the way it’s flaunted, displayed, and talked about adds another dimension to this pervasive culture.

I know that some of this is rather obvious. Consumerism runs rampant, and people have increasingly defined themselves by the brands they’re loyal to, the items they own, and so on and so forth. But, unlike virtue signaling, which was largely a derogatory term for something with good intentions behind it, money signaling masks an emptiness. It’s a behavior and a way of life that both arises in the absence of other values, and proceeds to crowd out other values. For many people, substantial values with roots in caring for others, morality, or ethical considerations have been so thoroughly replaced that when they pop up, as with the anti-genocide movement, folks are unable to recognize the motives of other humans with spines.

Photo by Marii Siia on Unsplash

Like most human behaviors, developing a conception of self that revolves around signaling your status evolves from natural tendencies. Social dynamics are inherent to our species, and the desire to be perceived as cool can be seen in schools across the country. The desire to be accepted, to be liked is as normal as it gets. But you take that impulse and inject decades and centuries of capitalist culture and you get a twisted mix where signaling wealth, often independent of having wealth, grows into a dominant drive in untold millions of people.

None of this is new. Neither the phenomenon nor my analysis is particularly novel. The interesting question, and one that could shed some new light, is what does all this do? We, all of us, have limited capacities and limited time, and if we spend our energy trying to project class and wealth it’s easy to grow devoid of depth, of values. People become flattened in their pursuit of signifying something that is ultimately empty, both because they typically aren’t the rich person they want to portray, and because even that which they become a weak shadow of is itself devoid of meaning.

So what happens when flattened and flimsy personas meet real events with heft and substance and stakes? What happens when a concept of self based on shallow signals of status comes face to face with the immeasurably harsh and devasting reality of genocide, or fascism, or our gradual apocalypse? In many cases people balk, they turn and run, frightened by world events and by the reflected truth of their own emptiness. Others may gesture toward the truth, may decry genocide and rightly say “Free Palestine” while failing to engage on a deeper level, either intellectually or out in the world. We can repeat this question with the climate crisis, fascism, and our other cataclysmic problems, look around, and see that most people are ill-equipped to confront devastating realities with the limited selves that we’ve developed.

There is also the question of the world that is created and reinforced by this relentless money signaling. On a very material level the status quo and the persistence of capitalism rely largely on millions and millions of people aspiring to a ruling class status that in truth only has room for a far smaller number of people. Millions conceive of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, as John Steinbeck said, and modern consumer life has deceptively enabled masses of people to more effectively pretend they aren’t embarrassed anymore.

It is this specific spending that people largely do to tell themselves they are somebody, that keeps much of the economy afloat. While the real ruling class jacks up the cost of housing and food, people with more disposable income keep the rest of the economy going with items they don’t need to fill a void they don’t know they have. And I know this won’t change overnight, but an examination of what’s going on within us when we try to convey wealth, when we money signal, could plant seeds that grow into something over the years and decades.

A real examination of this phenomenon could allow us to see what’s important, or at least which of the things we care about are glaringly unimportant. Instead of thinking of ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, maybe we’ll start to see that we’re temporarily exploited workers, temporarily disempowered people being led around with carrots made of cardboard. Maybe we’ll start to see the truth, and maybe that truth will start to set us free. - JP

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