Virtue Signalling: The Hypocritical Wokeness that Masks a Will for Power, By James Reed

Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet — the great Australian immunologist who understood how systems really work — saw through the performance early. "These hypocritical displays of love always accompany 'a race for power.' To 'save' someone, to whine about their fate, to be moved by the misfortunes of others, is to increase one's own social value, and thus, to acquire respectability, notoriety, and power." Citation from Laurent Obertone, La France interdite : La Vérité sur l'immigration, Ring, 2018, p. 378.

He nailed the mechanics. Virtue signalling isn't harmless empathy. It's a status play dressed in compassion's clothing. Cheap signals that cost the signaller nothing, but deliver moral capital, audience applause, and institutional leverage. In a post-literate social media world of scrolling dopamine and collapsing attention, it thrives because depth is optional and optics are everything.

The Pattern in 2026

Look at the sequence we've been tracking at the Alog.org blog today:

Wine-Gate at the WHCD: Shots fired. Agent hit. Chaos. The chattering class — guardians of truth and compassion — methodically snatch bottles while others duck. Not for survival. Not to help. Just free Pinot as the Secret Service evacuates principals. Then the defences roll in: "It was paid for," "human nature," "the wine would go to waste." Genuine care would check on the wounded. This was harvest time for personal comfort under the guise of "it's been a tough night." Burnet would call it exactly what it is: a display that boosts their in-group prestige while revealing zero skin in the real game.

Pets Over Progeny: South Korean 4B women and Western cat ladies perform "ethical" singledom and animal rescue. They signal deep compassion for fur babies while societies age into pensioner death spirals. The "save the planet / reject toxic men" rhetoric increases their social value on apps and in media circles. Actual demographic continuity? Someone else's problem.

Guards Told Not to Guard: Retailers instruct security to film shoplifters, not stop them. Progressive DAs and commentators signal "compassion for the marginalised" and "anti-carceral justice." The result? Honest customers pay higher prices, staff get assaulted, communities lose shops. The signallers get likes and tenure. The costs land elsewhere.

Secret Service Porous Perimeters: Elite event with known threats, yet a manifesto-writing gunman walks in armed the day before. Post-incident, expect statements of "thoughts and prayers" for norms, "we must heal," and renewed calls for more funding. The performance of caring about security without the hard, paranoid competence required.

Each case follows Burnet's formula: loud concern for the "victim class" (the poor, migrants, minorities, the planet, democracy) that reliably expands the signaller's power, funding, or status while externalising the downsides.

Australia's Local Strain

Here in Melbourne and across the country, we see the same script. Climate rhetoric demanding net-zero sacrifices from coal miners and diesel farmers while elites fly to COP conferences. Immigration debates framed as "compassion for the vulnerable" that signal moral superiority but strain housing, hospitals, and social cohesion — with the bill sent to taxpayers and the next generation. Corporate rainbow-washing and acknowledgment-of-country rituals that change nothing material but let boards and bureaucrats pose as enlightened.

The post-literate multiplier makes it worse: short clips of performative tears or black squares travel faster than scrutiny of outcomes. Real virtue — quiet competence, family formation, enforced rules, energy security — gets no algorithm boost. It's expensive, slow, and often unglamorous.

The Power Play Exposed

Burnet understood biology and systems. Virtue signalling is an evolved hack: cheap, visible proxy for costly genuine virtue. In ancestral environments, helping kin or the tribe built trust. Scaled to mass society via media, it becomes a dominance tool. Signal loudest, claim the moral high ground, shame dissenters as heartless, and watch institutions bend. The chattering class gets the wine, the grants, the promotions. The rest get higher prices, lower trust, and a greying future.

This isn't conspiracy. It's incentive alignment gone cancerous. As Obertone documented in the French immigration context, the loudest "humanitarians" often preside over the policies that produce the most human misery — then use the resulting chaos to demand more power to "fix" it.

One Carrington event could black out the screens feeding these performances. Sustained virtue signalling without accountability blacks out civilisation's immune system: the ability to distinguish real virtue from its parasitic mimic.

The fix isn't cynicism. It's demanding costly signals. Did you adopt the kid, not just the rescue dog? Did you enforce the shop rules, not just tweet about root causes? Did you secure the perimeter, not just perform concern after the shots?

Burnet's warning, delivered through an Australian lens, remains sharp: watch what they do with the power their "love" purchases. The race is rarely for the victims. It's for the throne.