Modern Activist Culture: A Cancer Diagnosis
When the adoption of the new idea is soured and is overrun by disingenuous virtue signalling.
A few years ago, I was out shopping with two friends when we passed a store with the “Sexuality Safe Space” label plastered out front. This prompted one friend, who’s straight, to ask the other friend and me, who are both gay, whether or not seeing this felt meaningful or important. I thought back to the first few times I saw those labels while still “in the closet” myself, and the intense impact it had at the time. The subtle affirmation that I was welcome in that particular place was incredibly powerful. But now, I don’t even notice them.
As my other friend at the time said, “I can’t tell if they’re just putting these up because everyone else has… or if they even care”.
After some reflection, we both concluded that there was once a time these labels were rare because it could put that business at risk of public backlash. Therefore, if you saw one, it was undoubtedly genuine. However, times being far more accepting as they are now, such that “acceptance” is barely even a question, the gesture feels empty. There is very minimal risk to the business, so the token feels more like a ploy for that business to earn favour by maintaining an enlightened image.
Recently I was reflecting on this, and the myriad of activism that has hit the western world in the last 12 months. I recognised the importance of a specific and yet unidentifiable point in the life cycle of any activist movement - when the adoption of the new idea is soured and is overrun by disingenuous virtue signalling.
First, an important caveat. I am someone who benefits from multiple civil rights movements that preceded my birth, and that affords me the freedom I have today. Therefore, I consider it some sort of personal sin to blanketly condemn the phenomenon of people’s collective action and the positive changes it has the potential to bring about. However, I also believe that nothing should be excused from criticism, analysis, or dialogue, as the net effect of these things tends to have an improving quality on the subject. Hence, what follows is not a condemnation of any current or past social movement, but perhaps a study on the nature of social movements in this day and technological age, and some of their shortcomings.
How New Ideas Are Adopted
Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve is a well-known economic model that describes how new technology may be adopted into the market through time, according to different types of adopters, and given that some individuals are more open to change than others.
While the model was never constructed to describe social change, I believe it applies quite well. Innovators are defined as “Brave people, pulling the change. Innovators are very important communicat[ors]”. Then there are the Early Adopters - passionate people who become committed advocates from an early stage. Next is the Early Majority, this is when the new idea gets popular. By this stage of adoption, every individual knows at least someone who is talking about it, if not many people. The idea is entering the mainstream, although the responsive action has yet to occur. The Late Majority are defined as “Sceptic people, will use new ideas or products but only when the majority is using it”. These are the people who will join the cause, but only when it is proven to be safe by those who joined it first, only after it has become trendy or when at least half of their friends have joined. So, then it becomes ambiguous if they are motivated by social pressure or genuine belief.
It is this tipping point between the Early to Late Majority that interests me. It is the exact point at which showing “allyship” becomes a more self-serving act than it does self-sacrificing. In the beginning stages of any recent movement, those who protested took significant risks to their status, employment, safety, and even their lives. As the movement swells, this risk gradually decreases until, at a certain point, it is overtaken by the risk to yourself and your reputation for not partaking.
January 26
Amongst my reflections on the smorgasbord of (mostly online) activism that was 2020 and is bleeding into 2021, I was particularly intrigued by events of what is officially Australia Day on January 26 – marking the landing of the First Fleet on that day in 1788 and consequently the beginning of the British colonisation of Australia. The debate around changing the date of our national day has existed for decades, but in 2021, it had suddenly jumped levels to become mainstream, popular, and trendy. I’m not sure of the exact combination of drivers, though prolonged pandemic stress and the influence of #BLM in the USA are strong contenders. In any case, it has definitely graduated from the Early Majority Phase and moved well into the Late Majority.
To clarify, I do not think January 26 is a date the people of this country should celebrate, in fact, I’ve never met an Australian who advocates that.
Changing the date is a debate that been around for many years. However, this year I was shocked by the sheer number of individuals among my extended social and professional circles that shared one of the popularised posts or phrases, e.g., “Always was, Always will be, Aboriginal land”. In no way do I disagree with this statement. My problem is that almost all of these people had never previously showed any interest in Indigenous rights, and even more shockingly, several of these individuals once made jokes at the expense of Indigenous Australians in private and will likely do so again.
What is it one conveys by sharing this content at such a late stage in the adoption cycle? Are they truly invested? Or is it less about Indigenous Australians, and more about a white person’s desire to maintain their social standing by appearing both progressive and compassionate? Does it actually contribute to solving the issue? Or is it just a way of preserving a person’s image so they can go on living their life, unchanged.
Worried this might be you? Ask yourself this: If you never cared before, why now? I can only assume it’s because the relevant issue is now popular. Would you have spoken up before had you been made aware of it? Most of these topics have been in discussion for quite some time. Did you simply ignore them because it was easier? Did it threaten your way of life? Had you stuck your neck out as an Early Adopter, your actions would’ve reflected an individual thinking for themself. However, if you’ve only recently begun to adopt these views, perhaps you’re only following the same trends that before led you to ignore them. Do you actually care? Because, if this is you, you’re not an activist, you’re merely a virtue signaller. A consumer of trends. A sheep.
Commit to caring or abstain from pretending.
The Mimicry Complex of a Social Justice Warrior
There is a Peruvian frog species (Rangitomeya imitator), Rangitomeya imitator), whose tadpoles may grow into a mature frog that mimics the colours of one of several other frog species. The other species are poisonous, but the mimic is not. The advantage of this is that predators stay away from the mimic because they’ve learnt to fear the frog it has disguised itself as, but then the mimic doesn’t have to spend energy producing the toxin.
Late adopter Social Justice Warriors mimic the behaviour of early adopters in order to gain the social benefits of looking good and virtuous, without labouring through the earlier stages when cost outweighed reward. The initial proponents of a movement work hard and make personal sacrifices for what they believe in. Their virtue is costly. Latecomers simply mimic the publicly visible element of their behaviour, without doing any of the work, while benefiting from the virtuous social appearance it provides.
Social Media Bad! (yes, again)
It is well understood that social media keys into our brain’s reward circuitry. This works in multiple ways. Getting likes and comments on our post tells our brain we are receiving attention, praise and support. Conversely, sharing content with others plays on our primal need to communicate thoughts and information, something that has been established by researchers as a healthy survival mechanism in primates. On top of all this, our reward circuitry is also activated by simply seeing a post, because we are anticipating the reward.
Consider, or imagine, activism before the internet and social media. What would all the keyboard warriors and Instagram-story-activists have done then? What would have been their role in anything before the 90s? I’d hazard a strong guess: Nothing. Zilch. Zero. It’d be nearly impossible to virtue-signal in person. You’d very quickly be exposed as someone who knows nothing about an issue other than how to parrot its hashtags.
Now think of the current population of keyboard warriors that exist solely in virtual space. These people are not genuinely in pursuit of positive change. They are simply hitting that reward button over and over. And projecting the illusion that big changes are afoot when nothing could be further from the truth.
A good question to ask yourself is: “What would I have done about X issue before the internet?” If the answer is either “nothing”, or “I wouldn’t have known about it at all”, chances are, you’re virtue signalling.
What Harm Can Virtue Signalling Actually Do?
The rhetoric often used to justify virtue signalling is that “every little bit helps to create change”, and therefore every action of any size is helpful if it points in the right direction.
But I’m calling bullshit.
Serial virtue signallers are the mechanism that allows for the merging of several objectively unrelated movements into one – forming an ideology. This blurring of all social movements into one mass ideology weakens the value of each separate one, cheapens the efforts of the individual people involved, and excludes any potential supporters among policymakers that might disagree with one of the aligned movements, even if they support some of the others.
A result of this merging is the production of taglines similar to “we can’t solve the climate crisis until we solve systemic racism”, or this screenshot from Twitter claiming the cure for COVID-19 is to restore our relationship with the planet. This is damaging for multiple reasons. First, by conflating unrelated topics and promoting the illogical claim that one is conditional to the other, we stray further from a land where logic, reason, and science could help resolve said issues. Second, observers will apply the one-drop rule, meaning that if they disagree with a singular movement in an ideology, they will dismiss the rest, or worse, be excluded from joining any of the movements unless they support them all. This builds an all-or-nothing system. Nothing can be achieved unless everything is achieved at once. But everything can’t be achieved together, or coherently, so nothing is achieved at all.
En masse virtue signalling produces what looks like big collective action, but, in reality, most movements are hollowed out from the inside by performative activists, and therefore have significantly less power than the optics suggest. This creates a system of activism in which the value is less than the sum of the parts.
Parasitic Ideas
An individual act of virtue signalling is not bad by default. Sometimes, when virtue signalling happens to align with a positive cause, it may get the publicity needed to encourage change. To provide an example, it’s well understood that the various leaps and bounds in civil rights for women, also informed, and were informed by human rights movements for people of colour and the LGBTQIA+ community. Regarding these movements, virtue signalling just happened to align with causes that truly made the world a better place, and if we were to just look at these examples, it wouldn’t be clear why virtue signalling is destructive. However, recent movements indicate serial virtue signallers to be attracted to causes because they appear progressive, irrespective of if they actually are. Some recent examples include the nonsensical claim that “Science is racist”, despite the fact that science itself cannot be racist, and transgressions are in fact the fault of individuals. While a claim like this might seem good-natured, it misdirects the blames away from those responsible, and serves to attack our values of enlightenment, along with our ability to convert the unknown into the known. Islamophobia-phobia is another byproduct of this trend, creating the fear of being Islamophobic in any way, so that over-acceptance and even glorification of Islam are allowed to thrive, despite its many regressive functions. For example, it’s laws on blasphemy, that prohibit criticism of any type of the doctrine, and permit the killing of apostates. Islam is the only religion that is not openly criticised by its own members. Ironically then, in current westernised culture, defending Islam’s “right” to not be criticised or satirised is not “multicultural” or “inclusive”, it is an exercise in wilful ignorance and functionally regressive. A final example is the parts of the fat acceptance movement that claim one can be “healthy at every size”, while completely ignoring the health risks of being overweight and irresponsibly misinforming the general populace. These examples, and many more, are cases of regressive thinking, strategically disguised as progressivism in what may be well-intentioned movements but are ultimately destructive to the actual issue at hand.
A further issue perpetrated by the conglomeration of ideas into ideology is that it allows positive and harmful ideas to be grouped together, poisoning any potential that might’ve occurred had the positive ideas been pursued on their own. Although it is not up to any one person to decide what classifies as positive and harmful, as sometimes this can be subjective, it becomes clear that they’ve been combined when an ideological group begins to contradict itself. A clear example is the movement tagged “Queers for Palestine”. It’s a clever use of the already well-established queer-activist culture, which has diverted its support towards Palestine in the long-standing conflict between Palestine and Israel. The irony here is that their support advocates against the safest place for queer people in the Middle East. Consider the sexuality laws shown on the provided map. It is illegal to be gay in Gaza, yet the virtue signalling minds have co-opted to support this idea of “Queers for Palestine” because it looks good and it looks like progressive activism. Evolutionary psychologist, Dr Gad Saad describes this phenomenon as a parasitic idea. This reflects an idea that has co-opted its host to act in a way that is detrimental to the host’s survival, but adaptive to the survival of the idea itself, by disguising a harmful idea as a positive idea. This is a terrifying example of the way virtue signalling can leave individual minds susceptible to truly parasitic ideas, consequently amassing a movement that is illogical, and counterproductive.
However well-intentioned the queer community may be in supporting Palestinians, their affiliation as a group whose interests clash with Palestine complicate the issue. Why do they rally as queers for Palestine? Why not just as people for Palestine? It’s almost like it makes it about the queers, and not Palestine, much like how white people supporting black rights has become about white people looking fair and compassionate. Advocacy for the issue becomes advocacy for the advocate.
“Authentically choosing something to make important in your life and standing by that and making sacrifices for it, it’s not going to win you any cool points, it won’t get shared on social media” - Mark Manson, author of 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck'
The solution can be found at the individual level. We can mentally armour ourselves against the trap of virtue signalling if we consciously think things through critically. This is the responsibility of each one of us. We must proceed with a healthy amount of scepticism. We should first consider opposing information and then formulate our response. Promote an idea only if it is justifiable. Rather than asking “what would progressives vouch for?” we must ask “what is truly progressive”.
By Roberta Davidson
Editorial Acknowledgments: Kienan McKay