Virtue signaling is defined as the act of publicly expressing opinions in order to demonstrate that you are a good person.
Examples from the Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area illustrate this exceptionally well. There are the venture capitalists and rich executives who drive a flashy Tesla because “it’s the right thing to do,” but at the same time employ a private jet for personal vacations. Building contractor friends of mine joke about the wealthy executives who say they’re all about saving the trees and reducing carbon emissions, but insist on real hardwood floors in their 6,000 square foot home.
In too many cases, the rooftop solar array, the electric car, the vegan diet, or the corporation boasting their products are “sustainable,” are efforts to conspicuously display awareness of, and attentiveness to, the climate agenda.
Dr. Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychology professor (proving there is a doctor for everything). He was trained at both Columbia and Stanford and currently teaches at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Miller has written a thought-provoking book, Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics & Free Speech, where he identifies two types of virtue signaling. The first is “cheap talk,” which he comically illustrates with a tote bag emblazoned with, MY REUSABLE BAG MAKES ME BETTER THAN YOU.
Then there is the genuine type, wherein the signaling is based on sincere belief. This is the type of virtue that, as Miller says, “reinforces social norms” and “teaches youths.”
In terms of climate change all varieties of virtue signaling, cheap and otherwise, are working collectively to mold the mass mind, and our schools provide the starting point for it all. The immense peer pressure during those formative years is the perfect incubator for development of this mass mind—and the Left is well aware.
Before Herbert George Wells—we know him as the author, H.G. Wells (1866-1946)—began his career writing The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and so many others classics, he was a grammar school science teacher. He was also a vocal socialist who personally visited Soviet Russia, interviewing both Lenin and Stalin. Regarding Lenin, Wells said, “In him I realized that Communism could after all, in spite of Marx, be enormously creative.” As for Stalin, “I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia.”
As I revealed in my book Climategate, Lenin was the first radical environmentalist to run a nation (into the ground), and understood the political capital found in “useful idiots” who would go along with his programs. My guess is Wells would be a fan of the climate agenda and the need to indoctrinate via the public education system. You see, in addition to his great fiction, Wells wrote quite a bit about using schools as the focal point for becoming virtuous socialist citizens. In his own words:
“The new world demands schools, therefore, to give everyone a sound and thorough mental training and equip with clear ideas about history, about political and economic relationships…socialism in itself is little more than a generalization about the undesirability of irresponsible ownership and that the major problem before the world is to devise some form of administrative organization that will work better than the scramble of irresponsible owners. That form of administrative organization has not yet been devised.”
Wells wrote that in 1928. I think it’s safe to say the birth pangs of “the new world” have passed and we have entered an age being built upon junk science and phony virtue.
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