Everyone is guilty of virtue signalling, yet we associate this behaviour exclusively with the progressive. Why?

The answers lies with the unfamiliarity of the cause. We do not notice virtue signalling when  something obvious is being celebrated. Consider the football fan waving the club colours or the patriot waving the national flag. These behaviours have been established over generations and are so familiar and spontaneous that they require no require special explanation. Yet the idea of virtue signalling implies some kind of conscious purpose. Even without the customary negative connotation, it appears an unnecessarily laborious description for behaviour as natural as breathing or sleeping. Hence we do not recognise this conduct as virtue signalling.

Progressive signalling is more conspicuous because it is unfamiliar. The causes themselves are known: for example, we recognise the transgender flag and its meaning. But we are not accustomed to that flag being used in mainstream signalling. While we would barely notice our local supermarket displaying the national flag, we would immediately notice if the same supermarket displayed transgender insignia. Here is a new kind of virtue and a new kind of signal.  And because we failed to notice the old kind of signal, we conclude that virtue signalling is a novel phenomenon. The progressive must have invented it. And since the progressive always has the misfortune of signalling things less familiar to the public, we draw the same conclusion in relation to every progressive cause.

For these reasons, virtue signalling is exclusively associated with the progressive.

_{Isamu Drayya, October 2022}

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