The Virtue Signal

Our actions and intentions do not need to be paraded for all to see.

Please don’t tell me about the compassion you feel for others. Such virtue signaling makes me want to throw up. If you want to help or comfort others, then just go ahead and do it. Don’t parade around looking for approval.

Most of the so called spiritual world is nothing more than an orgy of virtue signaling - gratitude, loving-kindness, compassion, charity, humility, awakening, and so on. Having set up numerous behaviors and attitudes that are deemed desirable, spiritual folk then thrust these values down the throats of others and parade around like peacocks in the righteous indignation which they aim at we unspiritual folk. And if we reject their admonitions, the spiritual folk, Buddhists being a prime example, will tell us we live in ignorance or the world of maya.

I like the world of Maya, and particularly ignorance. As the author of Ecclesiastes stated, the more we know, the more we suffer. Ignorance is good. Nietzsche would say that most of the so-called spiritual values and morality are simply expressions of weakness; the morality of slaves. Even Spinoza, that little goody-two-shoes who was drunk with his love of God, said that pity was a waste of energy.

There is absolutely no need for a spiritual industry that invents behaviors and morals that are deemed superior to those of the likes of you and me.

I’ll give the last words to Spinoza:

“They (spiritual folk and philosophers) believe that they are thus performing a sacred duty, and that they are attaining the summit of wisdom when they have learnt how to shower extravagant praise on a human nature that nowhere exists and to revile that which exists in actuality. The fact is that they conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be.”

Perhaps Spinoza wasn’t such a goody-two-shoes after all.