Why I Hate Virtue Signaling

Its All About Class

You are on

Indigenous land. Since

Time immemorial, Indigenous

People have cared for the

Land, waters, plants, and animals of

Alaska. Here in Dgheyey kaq, or what is

Now known as Anchorage, the Dena’ina people

Have and continue to steward this place

Through Indigenous ways of being.

Libraries, like most Western institutions, have

Historically and inequitably promoted one form

Of knowledge and perspective. Today, we

Recognize this past so we can imagine a future.

This Land Acknowledgement is our first and

Grounding step. We are grateful for the work and

Relationships forged by the Dena’na people

Dena’ina Quat’ana Chin’an gheli gu yeh elnenaq

Luh ch’nidatl’ ghu

Thank you Dena’ina people for letting us

walk on your land

This Land Acknowledgement is displayed at the entrance of Z.J. Loussac Library, the main municipal library in Anchorage, Alaska. And it is in my opinion a premier example of virtue signaling. The library hosts the municipal assembly chambers, so it serves as the city capital building in addition to the being a library. During regular operating hours, the library has several security guards posted at different locations within the building. And one roving security guard. The entire job of the roving security job is to make sure no one is sleeping in the library. If they are sleeping, the security guard will wake them up and kick them out of the library building. This is significant because most of those sleeping and being kicked out of the library are Native Alaskans.

For those of you who are not from Alaska, let me explain a little bit of background. According to the US ADMINISTRATION FOR NATIVE AMERICANS, An Office of the Administration for Children & Families, 19.6 % of Alaska’s population is made up of Native Alaskans or American Indians, which is higher than every other state by a wide margin. On a federal level, Native Alaskans, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians only make up about 2% of the US population. Due to a plethora of factors many members of these native communities have struggled to find economic success. One outcome of this is that there is a large population of homeless Native Alaskans in Anchorage, Alaska. In fact, they make up 40% of the homeless population in Anchorage according to the Institute for Community Alliances. This has led to the local stereotype of homeless people being Native. So, when most people think of a homeless person here, they probably think of a native guy.

Historically there have been two homeless shelters that accept men in Anchorage. One is run by the evangelical Christians, and the other is run by the Catholic Church. Both of them will allow you to stay for up to a month in their shelter, and then they kick you out for two months before you can come back. Which leads to a full month out of every three that the homeless have no where to go. So in the winter, they tend to congregate in anyplace that is warm that will take them. The library fits that bill. Because you can’t just kick people out of the public library just because they look homeless. So, during the day pretty much the whole building gets filled with homeless people.

In response to this, the library hired a large security company to staff the library on every level with multiple guards, and to have a guard that just walks around to catch homeless people who fall asleep, because that is something they can reasonably kick people out for. Apparently. But it’s not just that. I saw them kick two homeless people out for charging their phones and computers at the same time. Apparently, there is an “only one thing can be plugged in at a time” rule. This is clearly a bullshit rule that is not intended to accomplish anything accept to give security a cover to kick homeless people out of the library. And the same is true about the no sleeping thing.

And now, maybe you can understand why I find this such an interesting paradox. A public library decided put up a Indigenous Land Acknowledgment that clearly had a lot of thought put into it, also hired people for the purpose of kicking homeless native people out of the library into the literal cold. Because it is almost inevitably that they will fall asleep after being awake in the cold night all long trying not to freeze to death. So, my question is, why?

I think it is obvious that the land acknowledgement what most people would call a virtue signal. It supposedly signals the virtue of wanting to make things better for native people. Or to at least not actively make things worse for them. And some people might argue that the land acknowledgement itself accomplishes that in some small way. But you can see the real life evidence that the opposite is true. When it actually comes down to actual native people who are either down on their luck -- if you are conservative, or being systemically oppressed -- if you are a liberal, the people who run the library don’t only just not give a fuck. They actually dislike them so much that they use pubic tax dollars to pay a security company to kick them out into the cold. So then again, why did they put the land acknowledgement up?

Now, the first option is that maybe there are two different groups. You know, like the people who put that Land Acknowledgment up really do care, and would not like the security throwing the homeless out into the cold winter day, and its just a bunch of meanies who have the real power who are actually doing that. Ok, well, lets suppose that this is true, then why did the mean people let the good people put that Land Acknowledgement there then? Because they are the ones who are really running the show anyway as you can see. Well, then you see you just kicked the can down the road. It is inevitable that the powers that be did both, and so that is what I am asking. Or maybe those good guys have some power just not enough. Then my question is why did they use their power to put up that Land Acknowledgement rather than doing something practical? You see, no matter how you slice it, people had enough motivation to do something symbolic, but not enough motivation to do anything practical. The most probably explanation is that the people simultaneously had a desire to had a desire to put up the land acknowledgment, but had at the same time a very strong dislike to the actual native people, so they kick them out.

I think this kind of thing is why people often use virtue signal as a pejorative label. Because in this case, as in most apparent cases, there is no evident virtue behind the signal. So long as you see virtue as actually doing something to better the world in a practical no symbolic way. I think the prevailing wisdom is that these people who virtue signal are hypocrites, people who want credit for being a good person while actually being just a normal person or even a worse than normal person. And normal people really don’t like these people pretending they are better than them. So they complain about the virtue signalers. But I don’t really buy that perspective. I think there is more going on. I mean anyone who visits the library can clearly see the supposed hypocrisy. So then when why would people go about being so obviously twofaced? Clearly any normal and sane person can see that that will end up in them looking less virtuous, not more. Like if no one is going to know the difference, yeah, signal away. But people can clearly see you are lying. So why do it? If people will vainly signal their virtue, even when their lie is readily apparent, it doesn’t make sense to me that they are actually signaling their piety or integrity. Meaning that they cannot be signaling their commitment to their virtue, since it is clear to everyone who is seeing their signal that they have no commitment to it. So what about their virtuous character exactly that they trying to make sure everyone knows about them? I think they are simply signaling that they know what is right. Meaning that they are not trying to say they are good people because they do good deeds, they are saying that they are the right kind of people, because they ascribe to the right kind of moral positions. Even if they have absolutely no intention of acting on those moral values. They know the right answers, and that is the point. It’s more like a password to the club, than it is a call to action so to speak. So they are not trying to distinguish themselves from those who don’t do what is good, they are trying to distinguish themselves from those who they believe don’t hold the same pointless moral positions.

In this sense it would be better to call it shibboleth rather than virtue signaling. A sign people use to distinguish themselves from an out group. People only mistake this as virtue signaling because there is often an underlying sense of moral superiority to these shibboleths. These shibboleths are different from other virtue signals which do generally just signal virtue. Like people who wear t-shirts they got from a blood drive. Or if someone wears something that is clearly associated with a mission project they took part in to a church gathering. Where they are not signaling that they belong to a religion but rather they are signaling to people in their community that they have piety. This would be different from someone wearing a cross out in public which just signals to others that they belong to the Christian group. The cross is a shibboleth, the local church run soup kitchen volunteer bracelet is a virtue signal. There is no group, race, religion, or creed that blood donors belong to, so that would also be a clear virtue signal. These types of signaling can be annoying and a little self-righteous but I think they are fine. Virtue is virtuous and the more people do virtuous things, the better off we all are. So, it’s good that there are at least perceived rewards to be able to accurately signal virtue in this sort of way. Also, one more point is that shibboleths don’t just signal to outsiders. They also signal to insiders. And occasionally are used to reinforce group uniformity. I think having large groups salute or pledge allegiance to the American flag is a perfect example of this. We aren’t signaling to other countries that we are American. We are signaling to ourselves in a uniform way to increase group cohesion based on our Americanness.

Now back to the land acknowledgement. What group are they signaling with their shibboleth? Well fundamentally the signal is that they know and pledge allegiance to the “right” positions which is contrasting them to those who do not. At first glance it may appear the contrasting group is the conservatives who would not signal that. But I don’t think that is correct. I think the politics of this is simply a confounding variable. I think they are signaling class. That is upper-middle classness. Land acknowledgments are most common in universities and other institutions associated with higher learning. The upper-middle class is defined by their educational achievements. On the extreme end, a good number of the homeless natives probably couldn’t even read the land acknowledgment. A good deal of them who came in from the bush and developed substance abuse and untreated mental disorders which often contribute to their homelessness probably don’t even know who the Deniana are. Deniana are Athabaskan, and most Alaskan natives are not. You are more likely to meet a Yupik or an Inuit in Anchorage than an Athabaskan really.  So, it’s not like it has anything to do with them not knowing their own heritage. Most of them do not share that heritage. And on the more common end, normal working class and lower middle class Alaskans don’t know what any of this stuff means anyway. Like to the uninitiated it kinda looks like the city stole the land and build a library on it. Not even the uneducated Natives say that this is Indigenous Land, If they were to say anything about it at all they would say something like “Hey, you fucking stole our fucking land, fucking asshole.” And then then would repeat fucking asshole like five times because homeless native people really like saying that. Lower and lower-middle class people would share that sort of thinking way more. And they would not go around saying things like “Libraries, like most Western institutions, have historically and inequitably promoted one form of knowledge and perspective.” They would instead accurately say libraries are were they keep books and the big down town one is where all the homeless people hang out to get free Wi-Fi and heat. I have never met anyone in my life who knows that the Anchorages geography used to be called “Dgheyey kaq.” Only a scholar would know that. And only upper-middle class people who are sycophantic for the life blood of their class distinction (educational achievement) would hear that and think “yeah, these are my people.” An insecure middle-middle class person might try to do something like this but without the practiced affectation that you could only pick up at a university by spending a lot of time there could you come up with adding: “Dena’ina Quat’ana Chin’an gheli gu yeh elnenaq Luh ch’nidatl’ ghu | Thank you Dena’ina people for letting us walk on your land.” And so the middle-middle class pretending to be upper-middle class would be given away immediately.

This is the only explanation for the land acknowledgement. The upper-middle social class signaling that this is an upper-middle class establishment. A shrine to their god: education. If an educated Native came in who behaved as an upper-middle class person, they would be thrilled beyond measure to know that their shrine has attracted such an esteemed fellow pilgrim in search of knowledge. But the icky underclass of Natives and other races of homeless people who hang out at the library are disgusting to them. They are compelled to the rules of the moral society to not kick them out directly for their class. So they invented a bunch of bullshit rules to enable them to kick them out. Their land acknowledgement and their actions toward homeless people are in fact entirely consistent, and both are driven by the same impulse. Classism, elitism, snobbery, and a burning hatred for actual lower-class people.

While normally people see normal people helping homeless people in community run shelters and soup kitchens supported by religious churches and think, “that’s so nice.” And they see Native homeless people getting of a public building with the mentioned land acknowledgement and think “that’s not very nice of them.” The upper middle class is the opposite. Recently they have been fighting the religious homeless shelters in a myriad of ways. Like imposing regulations that they themselves admitted to not seeing an actual need for. (link) And other stuff I couldn’t find links to prove.

I use this example because it is hard to show clearly how slimy and reprehensible these people and their signals really are.  And I think this does a good job of showing it. But I think this general class shibboleth is actually really common behind a lot of so called “virtue signaling.”

Like the black squares in the wake of George Floyd. They didn’t even have a plan for how this was going to help anything. It was just a shibboleth of their social class. The whole defund the police movement is based on upper-middle class interest. Working class cops enforcing the law? Bad! People with master’s degrees being paid fat checks to care for the criminals in a new paradigm of society which only has jobs for upper middle-class people and leaves lower class communities ravaged by crime? Good! I mean who wouldn’t want this? Where is your empathy? If you think that an opioid epidemic that is killing droves of white trash, the constant smell of marijuana in the streets, Mexican cartels bathing entire towns in blood south of the boarder, rampant crime associated with drug seeking behavior that lower class communities almost exclusively feel the damage from, and think “that’s bad,” then you obviously haven’t ever faced the struggle of having a classmate suffer in their academic career because of a simple harmless drug possession conviction. If you had, you would change your entire perspective.

Why did everyone post about support for Ukraine? Did they think it would help the Ukrainians? Did they think their little Ukraine flags would stop the bullets coming from Russia? No, of course not. They just needed to show everyone that they were in the know, that they “cared,” in a completely vain and impotent way. They needed people to know that they were up on all the latest news, and had time to waste on things that didn’t affect them. Things that all the upper-middle class people were talking about as opposed to all the other tragedies going on in the world around them at the same time. They needed people to know that they were part of the right class. The upper-middle class.

In the wake of the October 7^th attacks in Israel support for Israel in the US increased. Lower class institutions like talk radio, evangelical churches, and fox news got the word out about what happened. The horrible crimes and voiced loud support of Israel and condemned antisemitism. But universities and other arbiters of upper-middle class taste came out to support the Palestinians, and in some cases even Hamas. American Jews were understandable upset about this. But was not understandable how they claimed they stood alone, about how they had been betrayed. About how the whole country hated them. The whole country did not. Only upper-middle class people and their institutions like universities. There is this (shown below) notorious post on Instagram from Amy Schumer but I can say from my experience that most of my young liberal Jewish friends felt the exact same way and many of them said things much stronger than this which I am not reposting for obvious reasons. But again and again they screamed shibboleths after shibboleths to prove and affirm their upper-middle classness. “I am upper middle class, why are you betraying me?” they said. But in shibboleths. Families Belong Together, Love is Love, Black Lives Matter, guys, I’m one of you, why are you betraying me?

So back to the title. Why do I hate this kind of “virtue signaling” so much? Why is it bad? Because it’s just class warfare pointedly directed at lower and lower-middle class people. Its smug, and unjustifiably self-righteous. And it isn’t even about virtue, it’s just a shibboleth, and if you don’t get it, well, you were never supposed to.