Comment by ryandv
3 days ago
> Some of the worst behavior ive seen in my life has been done by devout catholics.
Those same "devout Catholics" can also be found identifying as secular "progressives" or whatever other word is trendy and evokes implications of moral superiority and righteousness. The religions and pantheons may differ but the core psychological mechanisms are the same.
The devout Catholic knows all the canned responses and hymns by rote, but only when the priest is there to prompt him; he forgets his moral code the second he has stood up from the pews.
Analogously the secular progressive will eagerly output all the tokens expected of a "good person" when adequately prompted with contemporary inclusive language; yet they don't appear to be able to keep to their principles in other environments when they aren't being supplied with the exact same context and tokens.
What a wildly random series of sentences that never bother making an actual point.
Personally, while I'd rather people be good, I'll settle for them pretending really hard.
> What a wildly random series of sentences that never bother making an actual point.
What a dismissive and lazy thought terminating cliche with literally zero informational content whatsoever.
> Personally, while I'd rather people be good, I'll settle for them pretending really hard.
The point is people don't even pretend. They receive a prompt then parrot the response by rote which is never understood and then immediately forgotten; by the time all the lip service has been paid and all the tokens emitted they don't even know what it is they're supposed to pretend to do.
You'll noticed I already addressed that. There are a number of virtuous actions you can perform. One of those is "emitting the right tokens" in the right context. Can we argue that other things are more virtuous? Easily. Does the existence of more virtuous actions make these actions nonvirtuous? Of course not.
Saying the right thing is a good start.
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I find often with progressives not that those people are constantly trying to "signal" they support or stand with some people, but rather that they themselves are of some minority and therefore want to surround themselves in places where they're actively accepted.
Like, gay people aren't going to gay bars and drag shows to signal how woke and cool they are. They're going there because that's where they can be them, and that's where they're gonna have fun.
Or, when it comes to identity groups that they're not a part of, there's usually some overlap. Like a lot of the sort of underground gay scene and the black communities go hand and hand, and you'll see the adoption and flow of things like language and culture between them.