Are performative displays (warning: all my communications here partake of signalling of various kinds, including ‘virtue signalling’) somehow inherently ‘wrong’ or implicitly a form of lying?

When we look beneath the relatively superficial common dialogue here, we notice an inherent capacity in individuals and groups to produce a ‘representational shorthand’. The underlying purposes vary widely across the possible continuum, but symbols and signals assist us in the complex process of disambiguating identity, role, purpose and many other features of relational seduction, scripting and interaction.

Such signalling is incredibly complex. Fundamentally, it serves a variety of purposes that allow us to rapidly, and without complex analysis, understand and orient ourselves in the impossibly complex modern social and mimetic environments. Costumes identify doctors, police, politicians and grocery clerks. They imply and broadcast all kinds of important information, particularly including membership (and non-membership) in various cohorts.

But there are other features that have been overlooked. Some roles evolve from representation (role-playing) into embodiment, and some of these begin with signalling ‘like’ those who already embody the goal-state or purpose implied by such signalling.

The problem here is, primarily, mimicry: the predisposition to pretend one thing while embodying something else, or even something directly opposed to the pretense adopted.

The topic is complex, and our responses have to go far beyond knee-jerk policing agendas before they will become useful, intelligent, or trustworthy.

Surprisingly: a large portion of the common activity oriented toward policing is self-ironizing. That is to say that ‘calling out’ something like virtue signalling — is, itself, a form of virtue-signalling! In a situation like this? We need to learn to step back and carefully analyze the origins and modern expressions of signalling behavior in ways that train us to both recognize the landscape and participate in ways that help us to become more intelligent together rather than collapse into often facetious or uninhabitable roles.