Feedback Loop

Everybody signals. Many signals are small, unconscious, or at least unintentional. For example, I speak unaccented English, which should signal to you that I am from somewhere in the Midwest. I don't mean to speak the way I do, it is simply a byproduct of my upbringing. I used to wear band shirts and ripped jeans and uneven haircuts because I was a drummer in a crappy punk band in high school, and I specifically and intentionally wanted everyone to know what clique I belonged to. One signal was unintentional, one signal clearly was not. One I have to this day, one I have long since abandoned.

Everybody signals.

There isn't anything wrong with signals. Signalling is part of communication, it's how we build and maintain our reputation. Reputations help us socialize. Without signals, and therefore without reputation, there would be no interaction beyond a perpetual series of introductions that would fade into meaninglessness once proximity was lost to time and space.

Sometimes people rail against signalling and it sounds to me a lot like the postmodern tears shed over hierarchy. By that I mean that it is pointless and ineffectual and, frankly, stupid to rail against a permanent and ubiquitous phenomenon that is directly caused by the human aspect of being human. You'll never end signalling any more than fat feminists will ever really end hierarchy.

The postmodernists want to obliterate hierarchical arrangement for one of two reasons: either they are personally dissatisfied with their own rank and wish to cheat around the lie of equality by bringing everyone down to a level below where they currently stand, thus allowing them to leapfrog over their natural superiors - or - they are in such an excruciating state of perpetual mental distress (as VoxDay has claimed on several occasions) that they wish for the sweet embrace of nothingness. Reducing the distinctions between unique points interspersed throughout the universe is the same as reducing everything to nothing. The total erasure of time and meaning in a singularity. They long for the release they instinctually believe oblivion offers but are too cowardly to kill themselves. So far anyways - some have claimed that a great millennial die-off is coming. We shall see. Perhaps thots with no marriage prospects will start throwing themselves of tall buildings en masse, but that time has not yet come - if it ever will.

Sometimes postmodernists rail against hierarchy for both reasons at the same time. Never mind that this doesn't make sense, it doesn't have to if you understand that you should not be approaching this sort of thing in a linear, premise premise conclusion format. They certainly aren't.

Slightly downstream from the postmodern camp is the conventional urbanite cohort. Not quite wayward enough to mutilate themselves or dye their hair garishly, but in enough of a state of dis-ease that they will enthusiastically signal their academic credentials. Most frequently this is done by disparaging Donald Trump, as if their collective groan were somehow enough to undo the dawn of the Trumpenreich.

As if.

That part is important in understanding. Kant placed a premium on intentions. The intention of your friend signalling on Facebook is not to bring down Trump through his words and frantic gesticulations against the God Emperor. He may wish it so, but his intention is internal, and yet paradoxically solipsistic. It is paradoxically solipsistic because while his intention is to gratify himself through likes and pats-on-the-back from other thralls of the zeitgeist, he is ironically dependent on positive reactions from things outside of himself. Others. While he may have succumbed to solipsism, the superlative form of selfishness, gratification and relief must come from outside of himself.

You may say something to the effect of this dumb idiot cannot be fucked to pick himself up by his own bootstraps and you wouldn't exactly be wrong. You just wouldn't be telling either of us something we don't already know.

Keeping with that noble tradition, I too am about to tell you something we both already know, but that to my knowledge has not been fleshed out in exact terms.

The tendency of the millennial urbanite cohort to virtue signal is directly caused by the atomizing effect of city life. Cities are no longer centers of economic activity. Cities are high school 3.0 to the high school 2.0 of college. Lonely and emotionally stunted, this last, worst generation is lured to the city for economic reasons and the promise of frequent socialization. While for some the economic prospects do bear the fruits promised, for almost no one does frequent socialization result in genuine, permanent connections. Cheap, alcohol fueled sex and access to euphoria inducing hard drugs reduces inhibitions and long term planning in exchange for immediate gratification. Unfortunately when the high diminishes the user is left with two choices: hangover or redose? When the money runs out and the hangover sets in the loneliness that never really left comes back into view. Hence the pervasiveness of antidepressants and other prescription mood stabilizing drugs. What is remarkable is how nonchalant many people are in this regard. Everyone is medicated and yet no one takes a whole lot of time to stop and marvel at the implications. When you point out the profound and ubiquitous level of unhappiness the immediate answer has to do with some material or monetary want or dissatisfaction. Jobs, free schooling, higher pay. They screech about installing total communism and people who already failed to allow them to sink or swim chide them sheepishly about communism being impossible or killing one hundred million people in less than a century or a million other tired conservative cliches that mean nothing and solve nothing a do nothing because conservatives are tired and useless and cowardly and cretinous. The signalarity operates well inside conservatives' ooda loop, and the bait of virtuous materialism propels their wayward offspring to screech ever more. Each outburst is a feeble attempt at connection, the longing for the lost pats on the head mummy and daddy never ceased, even for a moment, to lavish upon their children lest they hinder their development.

Pure irony.

The rub of the whole stupid affair is that it isn't about installing full communism over the current late-stage capitalism OS. It's about the socialization points - signals - the speaker acquires for saying this, or that, or fuck Drumpf, or whatever. What is said is meaningless. What it results in means everything to a generation that is addicted to the social affirmation feedback loop.

There is a glaring weakness in this system of demented feedback loops hinted at in a (misattributed) G.K. Chesterton quote I've seen bandied about quite a bit recently:

When people stop believing in God they do not simply believe in nothing; they become capable of believing anything.

Something capable of out-turning trickle-down postmodernism in a dogfight is capable of taking the cultural reins and either bringing this insane spiral down to the ground in one piece, or, as they say, crashing this plane with no survivors.