Virtue Signalling is a positional good, in that there is greater reward in being farther out than anyone else in your circle, and less reward as one moves back toward the mainstream. It is true that there is also greater risk and greater punishment, but as a status strategy (and mating strategy), the higher reward has its benefits. So much has long been known, and while I have mentioned it a few times here, others have known it longer and said it better.
Today another aspect of emotional and status cost occurred to me, which I have not seen elsewhere.* High risk and high cost strategies can force everyone else to pay higher costs in order to signal that they are one of the good 'uns. There seems to be a lot of that going on at present, with radicals forcing colleges, nonprofits, politicians, journalists, and anyone else who has to maintain credibility to pony up ever-increasing amounts of ridiculousness to even stay in the game. If one looks at those "white values" charts that have been circulating, they can be better understood in those terms. The black middle and upper classes would in no way sign on to the idea that those are only white values. But the black middle and upper classes have been cut out of the conversation, with the exception of those who have made their money in sports and entertainment, and seldom know much of anything about anything else. They aren't the audience and they don't have to ante up. They quite rightfully believe they should be an important part of the discussion, but they can't even get to the microphone these days.
It is expensive for anyone to publicly say stupid things, but it is more expensive for some than for others. The strategy is to reduce the competition for air time by paying a signalling cost that you can afford, however marginally, but others cannot. If they don't pay they get destroyed, but if they do pay they stand a higher chance of being destroyed than you do, because they make their living closer to the mainstream.
This was Donald Trump's campaign strategy in the primaries. He would do things that caused observers to say "That's it. He's offended too many people with that. He can't recover." But it would cost each of his opponents more, divide and conquer. He made the primaries a series of individual bouts. There is also an analogy to Reagan pushing the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as "Star Wars." It didn't have to work. It only had to be plausible enough for the Russians to spend themselves broke trying to keep up with it.
Make the other guys keep paying until they either drop out or go broke. I mentioned it as a mating strategy, and the best example of it is peacock display. The male announces "I have resources to burn, baby. Sign on to this." There are human equivalents, male and female. Clothes, cars...um, education. If you can stay in the game longer in a useless field, you are signalling.
*Whenever I say things like this, someone points out a series of essays by someone writing 20-100 years ago who absolutely nailed it but I never knew about. The phrase emiritus professor frequently show up in that.
4 comments:
"The black middle and upper classes would in no way sign on to the idea that those are only white values. But the black middle and upper classes have been cut out of the conversation"
Doesn't this suggest that this discussion really isn't about race??
I wonder if this approach applies to the flagellants. There seem to be some similarities.
It's a bit hard to interview the Brothers of the Cross, but maybe someone accumulated enough information about the participants to let us make some educated guesses. (It's probably all in Latin, though...)
Maybe we know more about the Shiite version.
engineerlite - Bingo
I'm shamelessly stealing from Glenn Reynolds the observation that class conflict in America is always presented as racial conflict. My own feeling is that it's simply good marketing because class conflict doesn't sell but you can get the part of America convinced the other half are bitter clingers and deplorables to buy into almost anything in order to signal they are different.
My memory is most likely faulty, but years ago I read Zinn's People's History and the one thing I remember from it is that poor whites (specifically indentured servants) were set against slaves purposefully to have them fighting each other rather than fighting their 'masters'.
It's been so long ago, I could be confusing reading that book with reading another, but the idea of having poor whites and poor blacks fighting against one another for favor from a higher class seems viable.
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