Virtue Signaling And The Consecration Of The Dictatorship Of Emotion
Virtue Signaling And The Consecration Of The Dictatorship Of Emotion
Generation Z comprises people born from the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s (researchers and popular media often use 1996 as the starting birth year and 2010 as the ending birth year). They are the first generation to have been raised from a young age with the internet, social media, and portable digital technology. Gen Zers grew up in the midst of a crisis of authority induced by the prevalence of new media in their lives.
In early human communities, the youth listened to elders who orally passed their wisdom to them. With the invention of writing systems came the first crisis of authority. Scribes copied manuscripts enclosing knowledge and as many among the masses were illiterate, scholars obtained posts of influence in societies.
During medieval times, monks duplicated holy scriptures in Latin, the liturgical language of the Church, the language of science, literature, law, and administration. Therefore, the Catholic Church was able to maintain its position of authority over commonalty speaking vernacular languages.
The invention of the printing press helped propagate knowledge among the population. Books on every imaginable topic were effortlessly and inexpensively mass-produced. Above all, holy scriptures were transcribed in common language thus ending the monopoly of the Church in teaching the sacred writings. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther issued a New Testament translation into German vernacular in September 1522 and the completed Bible in 1534 making it more accessible to the laity.
For that reason, the printing press initiated a new crisis of authority. It facilitated revolutionary ideas, such as Protestantism, to arise and spread among the masses, and the unprecedented ability to publish and share scientific papers further challenged the power of the church.
With the invention of television, for the first time, the crisis of authority originated from the media itself, which legitimized a discourse once predicated on knowledge i.e. the media became the authority (I believe in it because I have seen it on TV).
The digital age and growing prominence of social media triggered a new crisis in which the authority, that decisively shifted from the vertical to the horizontal, derived from popularity. The “influencers” perceived as role models and trendsetters, particularly among Gen Zers, preached to their millions of followers.
In truth, influencers mostly market the spectacle of happiness and realization through materialism. They advertise manufactured goods on behalf of multinational companies via the public show of their – sometimes actual, more often fantasized – high social status supported by examples of their conspicuous consumerism. They are the digital human billboards for neocapitalism and the Homo consumericus libertarian lifestyle.
Besides, while the traditional structures (Church, family, nation etc.) collapsed under the ideology of deconstruction, social media proffered the false promise of socialization between people sharing similar passions, and having a common interpretation of the world.
In reality, social media is the realm of cold and transactional relationships, a community of self-centered atomized individuals who pursue connection and fulfilment via the digital approbation from the group.
Although offering a virtual connection with the entire world, social media inhibit genuine and authentic connection. People only seek the dopamine shots and instant gratification available at their fingertips. Undeniably, the narcissistic, selfish, and desperate quest for group validation exclusively leads to isolation and loneliness.
Among Gen Zers, particularly addicted to that need for digital recognition, 42% have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Social media has exacerbated their insecurities and anxiety. Individuals have entered a competition in a virtual market for more “engagements” and “likes”, a competition based on popularity and spectacle. The domain of the struggle has been extended to the online world.
In addition, the disparities between the narrative constructed for others on social media and the authentic offline personality caused a rise of identity disorders among Gen Zers. Subsequently, rampant narcissism has been adopted as a coping mechanism which ironically thrives on the dopamine spurred by the praises of the group.
As a consequence, Gen Zers became prisoners of their never-ending reliance on virtual validations. With this aim in mind, they exposed their supposed financial capital via the spectacle of hyper-consumerism, their purported cultural capital which is nothing more than exalting opinions over facts, sexual capital through hyper-sexualization, the commodification of bodies, and their professed societal capital, namely the objectification of compassion and tolerance i.e. virtue signaling.
Admittedly, this commodification of morality allows narcissistic individuals in constant search of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation to increase their (digital) societal capital without the need to do anything meaningful in real life.
This virtue signaling is the spectacle of the adherence to the progressive left ideas. It is the promotion of ideologies in which men, being told that they are members of the oppressive patriarchy are required to deconstruct their toxic masculinity. And women are compelled to conform to the feminist notion of emancipation through salaried work while embracing hook-up culture (with all associated body image implications).
In essence, virtue signaling is a complacency in moral self-satisfaction that camouflages a factual moral baseness. It is an artifice aiding to compensate for the lack of virtue. The narcissistic gratification it provides to individuals is symptomatic of our hypocritical age that disguises lust for raw power as altruistic benevolence. It is a strategy employed to gain attention and sympathy by indulging in victimhood status for oneself or on behalf of others.
As such, with virtue signaling, small interactions are blown out of proportion. In some cases, individuals even manufacture instances of personal hurt in order to obtain social or financial benefits. In other words, virtue signaling appeals to sentiments for profits.
The relentless search for virtual validation among Gen Zers resulted in excessive and unrestrained exhibition of pathos online. Virtue signaling is the consecration of the “dictatorship of emotion” that has annihilated the use of reason and facts in political and social debates. It is a justification for the prevalence of the narrative, the ideology, over the truth.
Subsequently, virtue signaling led to the death of free speech, the call for the regulation of opinions deemed problematic. This reflection of groupthink amplified by the artificial indignation of the crowd with the compliancy of social media companies gave birth to a new form of censorship, cancel culture.
Conclusively, Gen Zers expected to have found in social media dissent, marginal and unrestricted rational systems to compensate for the deconstruction of so-called oppressive traditional structures that ultimately created a void, a feeling of emptiness inside them. Moreover, those digital multinational companies promised us freedom and happiness by means of the commodification of all aspects of our existence (swapping through products, swapping through bodies).
However, if capitalism is by nature economically liberal, it is also an ideology based on control and domination of private life that only tolerates points of view in concert with its interests. Therefore, social media ended up being tools to regulate dissenting views and monitor and manipulate public discourse with arbitrary user policies. Accordingly, nowadays, the political power no longer censors the media, but social media censors the politics (US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely suspended).
Thanks to social media and virtue signaling, the market has opportunely invaded everything in our lives to the point that it successfully commodifies speech, attitudes, and opinions.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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In 1987 the FCC , under the Reagan Administration, abolished the "Fairness Doctrine". This is when all the trouble started. It was part of the Trickle Down economics theory of the Reagan Era....as in a lot less government oversight of everything.