Research on virtue-signaling
The researchers don’t call it that, but that’s what it appears to be. And they found something very interesting:
Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3).
Makes sense. Virtue signaling is revealing. Whenever approval from others is needed to affirm self worth, deeply buried insecurities are present.
Geoffrey Britain:
I don’t see it as necessarily a sign of pathology. If a person has grown up in fortunate circumstances, many soft-hearted people feel guilty about that even though they’re done nothing wrong. They also feel the situation of the perceived inequality and unfairness of life is unavoidable and are casting about for a way to make a difference and also to make themselves feel less guilty. Espousing seemingly worthy causes fits the bill. It can make a person feel as though he/she is actively doing something both to help the world AND to alleviate his/her guilt.
Whether it actually accomplishes the former thing—helping the world—is arguable. But it often can assuage at least some of the guilt.
I don’t necessarily see any of that as pathological. I just don’t think the solution of embracing leftist causes actually helps the world very often; au contraire.
My, my a very timely topic as the left is wallowing in virtue signaling at every opportunity and often over petty matters like shoes on a sofa.
Well, yes; but, the religious/moral human fitness function is derived through a reconciliation of moral, including individual dignity and intrinsic value; natural (e.g. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…”); and personal imperatives. So, even when we fail, general principles matter.
That said, it’s possible that were headed in the same direction but following different paths. However, the destruction of human spirit with perpetual smoothing functions (e.g. welfare); the denial of individual dignity under [class] diversity including female chauvinism; and denial of human rights and value under abortion rites, are evidence that the journey is at least as significant as the destination.
“I don’t see it as necessarily a sign of pathology. If a person has grown up in fortunate circumstances, many soft-hearted people feel guilty about that even though they’re done nothing wrong.” “Survivor guilt” is not a new thing…Neither is the old adage that “There’s nothing worse than a former smoker.”…and that’s basically what you are describing neo…if I read you correctly. And in that you are spot-on.
I read this as wholly different though. Maybe not a “pathology” as such but the researchers seem to often use the language of “over-compensating.” It’s that “over the top” kind of response that indicates the deeper malady in the morally outraged. And that they want to “punish” some “third-party” on behalf of their perceived “victims”…It’s SJreligion sacrificing some scapegoat for sins from which they themselves refuse to repent.
In the past neo that too was my assessment.
Just one Democrat last night applauded the idea that America should be great. I find that very telling and IMO it confirms my assessment of most of todays liberals, they have have drunk fully of the Left’s kool-aid.
Leonardo Di Caprio was unavailable for comment.
Well, it does explain a lot about Democrats lately.
I’ve found that any time they accuse their political opponents of some “crime” (PC or otherwise) it is because they have usually committed it first!
It’s the progressives’ (per)version of the Catholic’s Confiteor.
This is accompanied by repeated breast beating … as the progressive reaches over and strikes the “guilty” party’s breast … an endless number of times.
Yeah, out of high school, and despite a case of glandular libertarianism due to bad Southern genetics, I joined the Sierra Club and the Arbor Day Society, and subscribed to Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today and Scientific American among others. And I can’t tell you what a paragon of virtue I almost immediately became. Why, for a short period at least, I shone like a lamp unto the world; and all it cost me was a few bucks here and there.
Of course I had a job while in college; and worked pretty hard physically. And as I saw what was persistently taken out of my paycheck, and figured out why, it was not long before I wanted go smash the faces of those soft-handed, gliding sons of bitches with the perpetually smug smirks and endless sense of entitlement who passed those laws … or run over them with my motorcycle.
Of course you can confront them in class if you don’t care about the fall out. I’ll always treasure the look on a Maltese Jesuit anthropologist’s face when he complained of the cultural imperialism of western societies, and I suggested that one way to rectify it would be to withdraw from all contact, including the provision of medicines and technology of any kind.
He didn’t seem to be able to process the notion that one could say: Ok then have it all your own way if you insist, and to hell with you. Despite the fact that it was his own religion’s ultimate metaphysical principle
Progressives however, when given a choice, pretty much keep to themselves. Less disconfirmation is experienced that way; and less physical danger too. ‘Course they will get a jab in now and then if they can mange to do it in a situation where the victim’s sense of propriety will protect them from retaliation, or they can get away behind some object or person …
But you know, that is just them being liberals and doing what they do: working off their guilt on the backs of others
charles Says:
March 1st, 2017 at 8:00 pm
Well, it does explain a lot about Democrats lately.
I’ve found that any time they accuse their political opponents of some “crime” (PC or otherwise) it is because they have usually committed it first!
* * *
Or perhaps there is even something darker going on for at least some of the signallers.
This is a disturbing post, which I came to in a round-about way, but contains significant revelations.
Make of it what you will.
http://thedeclination.com/radfems-cenobites-and-the-lament-configuration/#comment-18927
“Folks, this post is going to be a doozy. It’s been rattling around in my brain for a very long time, and I finally feel that the time is right to post it. For this, I will blame the esteemed Tom Kratman, who accidentally reminded me of it in a conversation earlier. It’s going to be long, and dark, and go into places the human psyche is not always comfortable in. I have faith my readers can weather it, but if you’ve any question… now is the time to check out. Take my warning seriously, here….
In my DJ career, I have spent a great deal of time in communities and scenes that normal folks would regard as underground. For many years, I DJed BDSM parties, Fetish events, and the like. I’ve DJed warehouses and clubs with no names, buried in the wreckage of abandoned industrial parks. The marketplace of sex is one which I know exceedingly well. I’ve been DJing these scenes for the better part of 20 years.
To quote Blade Runner, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
As that commenter lamented, so I’ve seen first-hand. These SJWs, the radical feminists who spend their lives fighting the Patriarchy? They come to my clubs to be beaten senseless on crosses, chained to them by men dressed in uniforms very reminiscent of the Nazis. Yes, it’s a thing, as anybody who has ever been to a Goth club can attest. They demand to be tied up, burned, bruised, and battered.
Go on social media, and you will see SJWs telling us that Nazis are everywhere, that they are evil, and foul, and legion. They are in the White House, they are on Youtube, they are on Twitter, they are in Video Games. Nazis, everywhere. And so they march out into the streets, the Black Bloc, Antifascists engaging in what Tom Kratman calls a bit of political theater (not unlike Fascists once did).
But at the end of a long week of fighting the cisnormative heteropatriarchy, they come to be beaten by men dressed as Nazis, to the gritty beats of loud Industrial music in the depths of an Industrial park.
…”
A lengthy analysis of why this might be so, and the extent to which debasement clubs have become more .. debased .. (and their activities normalized) over the last few decades is gripping.
Commenters support the main thesis; although the plural of anecdote is not data, the consensus is very troubling.
Reason article more detailed summary but not behind ($39.95) paywall.
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serving
To put this problem into proper context we must acknowledge first that we live in immoral society:
americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/the_biblical_story_of_esther_and_the_immoral_society.html
because the left makes a person that does that a TOOL of the revolution and expendible and self paid… and they think they are finding meaning as jesus told us about the hippocrites who want their rewards from their fellow man…
in fact THATS the reading that comes last night for Lent
do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing, etc…
they seek reward for the lazy position of sayiing they have feelings.. well, funny, the sociopaths show mor feelings than the peopel that have them, and the people who have extreme feelings are validated nuts.
it was NEVER about what its about
sociology, the marxist version, was created to learn about people so you can control them… so lots of stuff fromthere are used as tools and the public dont know and they dont want to know as i have tried to show them the game (and i am in it)
much of what is now in studies like this has been known for ages… but not studied as the knowing without the public purview, makes for a basis of control
but this is what happens when you let the servants take over the manor.
Well, makes me feel a little less out on a limb with my various and often repeated assertions that at the core of what we call “liberalism” nowadays, is a masochistic moral stance; a neurotic flight from the responsibility of a being a moral self (hardly my special insight as collectivists readily broadcast the “relief” they find in the termite-heap as a feature and benefit of their system); and, an in-your-face orgiastic nihilism which would look for all the world to have a metaphysical component … if we didn’t know better than that.
But of course all you really have to do to come up with these genius insights, is to read a little intellectual history carefully, to peruse some of the writings of Marx, Engels, Freud, The Order of the Golden dawn and so forth.
They all scream, ultimately, … “annihilate me” … at least insofar as what was once conceptually known as “man”, the rational and ensouled animal.
What they wish to be transformed into, is apparently less certain. Though again, the way they yammer on against Logo[s]centrism (esp. given its possible connotations in a Greco-Christian philosophical context), rationality, and the supposedly inhibiting “fear of nihilism”, one could again very readily come to some quite alarming conclusions … if only we didn’t know better.
Great post and some thought provoking commentary. The behavior being studied appears to be inherent to being human. There is some reasoning, which I embrace, that sees the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil as the nature/nurture switch that put each of our minds into a compulsion to look outward (rather than inward) and to continuously evaluate every single thing as good & bad, better or worse, positive or negative.
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I couple this with the wisdom of Matthew Chapter 7, which offers “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” (Note: in my heart I sincerely intend that “brother” be heard as the inclusive “sibling” as I am sure the Good Lord intended as well). The corollary is: The log in my eye makes me an expert at intervening to spot the splinter in yours.
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I’m not proselytizing, just noting that these ideas on projection are not new, and that projection is so woven into our humanity that it’s a condition requiring determined effort to recognize and restrain. It’s not surprising that political advocacy preys quite successfully on this human weakness.
Whenever I see research that confirms what I want to be true I try to back off immediately for an hour or two, then come back to it with an eye to criticizing it. Let’s not be hasty, Treebeard said. The first thing I notice is that the studies measure short-term guilt and moral outrage states. Even if entirely true, the suggestion is that provoked temporary feelings of guilt result in seeking avenues of blame. When those avenues are present, people use moral outrage to relieve their own bad feelings. When not, their bad feelings continue for at least a short time. If true, it would make intuitive sense that this is related to more chronic feelings of guilt and expressions of moral outrage. But there isn’t actually any evidence of that here.
Secondly, the results seem to be related to a type of priming, of suggestions in advance of where emotion might go. Priming studies have not replicated well. This isn’t quite the same thing, but seems related.
I don’t write these things to disbelieve the studies, but just to put in notes of caution not to over-interpret results. And as I said, when we want something to be true is when we should be most suspicious.
That said, let me indulge in some amusing speculation. If this turns out to be true, will people even notice how this applies to SJW’s, or will they instantly burrow into some narrative about how this is really all about Trump supporters and false outrage based on feelings of personal guilt (presumably, unacknowledged guilt about being homophobic racist fascist sexist bigots)? I think the study’s authors get it, because their design touches intentionally on some hot buttons. Yet how many reading the research will hear something different which is not in the study?
This seems apropos
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157904840851/dopamine-puppets
“Here’s a funny article by David Wong of Cracked that talks about the dopamine high we sometimes get from outrage. The gist of it is that the brain gets some sort of chemical payoff from outrage, and we seek it when we’re otherwise bored with life. Politics serves up lots of outrage opportunities. That’s why we are drawn to it — for the high.
We rationalize that we are fighting the good fight and making the world better. But mostly it just feels good to get worked up about issues and share the experience with like-minded dopamine addicts….”
To
John Guilfoyle
March 1st, 2017 at 4:36 pm
Yup, agreed; when I read Reason’s florid language about the “ingroup” and their “outgroup-directed moral outrage”. I smacked myself upside the head and said “Hey, what they’re talking about is scapegoating”.