Racism as unwearable virtue signals

In light of the last 20 months, I am coming to view racism very differently. Not that I ever had a theory of it per se (although some facets of it came up in my earlier book, Vision Revolution), but I definitely had not thought about it in the social narrative sorts of terms that’s part of my new framework for grasping social movements, nor in terms of the rise of metaphors of infectiousness and uncleanliness (see my YouTube series).

For Covid, bourgeoisie, Jews, and Islam, folks can be in the outgroup but often hide it. They can be “asymptomatic.”

But for most ethnic minorities it’s impossible to hide it. Their very face is an anti-virtue signal, one that’s not removable.

And their opponents in the mainstream community create post hoc “justifications” for why their own majority facial features are good and virtuous and clean and heavenly and like Jesus and good design and so on, and why the ethnic minority’s features are the opposite.

And those justifications get legitimized into the reputation network’s “gossip blockchain,” and is almost impossible to undo the false narrative.

Imagine the situation we’re in now, of being perceived as unclean if you’re not masked or not vaccinated.

But now imagine it’s forever and always and unchangeable — there’s no way you can ever dress or do your makeup or behave that can serve as a virtue signal getting you into the “clean club.”

And, making it even worse, the mainstream majority have no inkling that they’re under the sway of these psycho-societal illusions. None at all.

Only the minority can see the mass irrationality. Alice in Wonderland from birth to death.