Moral Superiority Is a Hell of a Drug

Moral superiority is a hell of a drug. This is why, for instance, you can find endless videos online of guys chasing pedophiles around with cameras and confronting them in public. Not to defend the pedophiles who are unquestionably indefensible, reprehensible, and deserving of the highest forms of punishment (up to and including capital punishment), but I’d be willing to bet that a large percentage of the guys chasing them are a moral mess themselves, yet they’ve latched on to this one vestige of virtue which in their mind supersedes the rest.

The formula goes something like this: Find the most socially unacceptable thing there is, oppose it vehemently, and therefore you are now virtuous. But it doesn’t work like that. That is not virtue. That is called virtue signaling, and virtue signaling is the prime symptom of this drug. It works on the flip side too: Find something acceptable in your social circle—whether that circle be political, religious, etc.—and support it with the same vigor, and boom, you are virtuous. But again, it doesn’t work like that.

This moral superiority, this virtue signaling, shows up not only in guys chasing pedophiles, but in the rainbow-colored corporate logos which desecrate our eyes every June, in the weak-willed men who “support a woman’s right to choose,” in the vaccine evangelists who lambast any dissenters from their rule of faith—the list goes on and on, and it goes on in you and me too, to one extent or another. Where do you feign morality? Perhaps it’s something as simple as hopping on the gossip train, participating in the pile-on of a person who’s done something stupid or shameful when in fact you have done the same thing yourself.

This drug of moral superiority can even possess people to go to extremes, to go so far as to assassinate in cold blood the likes of Charlie Kirk for his faith or former UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, for his business practices. They must show the world that they are taking matters into their own hands, to do what needs to be done—it’s pathetic and almost comical, for they’ve murdered their way to “virtue.” Again, such acts are merely a signaling of virtue, but to signal virtue is to signal a lack of it, as we tend to signal that which we do not have.

The only antidote to this deadly drug—and make no mistake, it will kill you eventually—is Christ. You solve your sense of moral superiority by coming to terms with your actual and utter moral deficiency. This is the way. He is the way. The only way. The only way to go from morally deficient to perfectly sufficient. And here you will not find a high, a fleeting self-satisfaction swamped in delusion; here you will find a true and lasting peace.