Noblesse Oblige and Virtue Signaling

For twenty-nine years I took students to Europe on spring break to experience the rich history and culture. I certainly could not have afforded the trips had it not been for the generous program that allowed the leader to travel free as long as six students accompanied her.

The bus driver on a trip to Italy pointed out that there are buses of American students on spring break in many places in western Europe. “They are rich kids when compared to European kids. Do you see any buses full of European students on spring break across America,” he asked. He was right. There were none.

The only mass encounter with American landscape and culture took place this summer during FIFA World Cup. Every European soccer fan asked gushed about America, they were pleasantly surprised because their mainstream media always trashed America and the noisy Americans as if there was nothing good about our beautiful U.S.A.

There are some Americans who visit Europe upon graduating from high school. They are white rich liberals/progressives who go backpacking to Europe to find themselves, staying in hostels to pretend that they are poor, wearing torn jeans and shoes with holes in them to show their fake allegiance to the poor. I have never seen white, rich Europeans backpacking through America and staying in hostels here.

We are lectured by the white progressive rich in America who promote socialism with their wealth platforms of privilege, and virtue-signal their goodness in so many offensive ways.

They spew the communist ideology because the American education system told them that socialism, the steppingstone to communism, done the right way in America, would succeed this time even though it failed everywhere else it had been tried. Millions of its victims cannot speak for themselves anymore and those who survived are ignored.

One bragged about her rich family who helped her buy her first home in a very affluent and expensive real estate market just like her parents’ home which was bought by their parents. She held the keys beaming with unearned pride and began to lecture about the inequality and “institutionalized discrimination and the racial wealth gap” in our country between the haves like her and the have-nots like the rest.

She continued her rant of privilege while acknowledging her “wins in the system, a system that works for me, but we must make it more just.” She conveniently forgot to mention how she was going to make the “system” work for all and she made no pledge to donate her “unjust privilege” to the unprivileged or underprivileged.

A French expression, noblesse oblige, meant once that nobility obliges a person of high nobility to perform social responsibilities. However, rich Americans are not nobility, they promote socialism and communism while trashing the very capitalist society that bought them wealth, and their constant virtue signaling is not a form of noblesse oblige. It is just a form of social media narcissism, a “look at me, I am such a good person because I say so.” It is self-absorbed content with the goal of getting likes and admiration from total strangers. Narcissists suffer from a personality trait characterized by vanity, grandiosity, low empathy, and the sole desire for admiration. Virtue signaling is all about one’s grandiose ego.