Virtue Nukes
Forget the word “signalling,” and forget the word “bombs.” What we are dealing with now are nukes. Virtue nukes. They have an incredibly wide kill zone and an even wider damage zone. If I had to name one of the many “responses” of the lefty sheepy crowd that really sends me into a tizzy, I would say it was their holier-than-thou attitude. The other crap they lay on us, like accusing us of being heartless grandma-killers for questioning lockdowns, dismissing us as anti-science troglodytes when we cite actual data, or smugly parroting “trust the experts” while ignoring any expert who doesn’t toe the party line, just annoys me—and does annoy me a lot. But virtue blanket bombing/nuking makes my blood boil.
I have never been much of a fan of anyone who struts around acting like they know everything and presents like they are the greatest creature to grace the earth. To hell with that, I say. But usually these types do actually know a lot, not everything, mind you, but a fair amount. And their strutting like a rooster has maybe a little bit of validity to back it up. But these days the virtue bomber doesn’t typically know dick. But man, if you present something they don’t agree with, they not only tell you about it, they treat you like you are dumber than a box of rocks and that they are the smartest human to occupy the planet.
Not only that, but they are surely morally and spiritually superior. That is the nuclear part of their performance—the smartass part is only annoying, the morally superior part is blood-boiling.
Why do they do this? Why do sheepies do anything they are known to do? It is all rather unexplainable, but there is indeed some sort of complex psychological reason for it. I run into this sort of thing often in my psychotherapy practice. And I have to say I’ve gotten rather good at dealing with it. Deciphering the seemingly irrational behaviour of regular, normal folks is something that is a common pursuit in this profession. Say someone is acting in a fashion they, or the people around them, find irrational—like having serial affairs when married to someone who appears to be providing a healthy and loving relationship. Often this type of person comes into therapy, facing the collapse of their marriage, and they have no clue—no rational clue—as to why they are doing such a thing.
It doesn’t take much for me, from my archetypal perspective, to come up with a reason—it may not be rational, at least not to the ordered conscious mind, but it is a reason. Sometimes this helps in resolving the situation. Sometimes it doesn’t. But this virtue bombing thing, I can’t even come up with a reasonable explanation using similar psychological techniques. I have theories, as most of us do, but these theories seem to be inconsistent and thus inconclusive.
From a Jungian lens, virtue signalling—or nuking, as I’m calling it here—often emerges from the depths of the unconscious as a desperate attempt to ward off the chaos of the psyche. Carl Jung talked a lot about the shadow, that repressed part of ourselves where we shove all the qualities we don’t want to admit we possess: selfishness, doubt, aggression, and yes, even moral cowardice. When someone virtue nukes, they’re projecting their own shadow onto you. They see in you the “immoral” heretic, the one who’s “endangering lives” by questioning the narrative, because deep down, they’re terrified of confronting their own inner doubts. It’s like they’re saying, “If I can paint you as the devil, then I must be the angel.”
This inflation of the ego—Jung called it “psychic inflation”—happens when the individual identifies too strongly with an archetype, like the Wise Sage or the Moral Guardian, borrowed from the collective unconscious. In our modern world, this archetype gets hijacked by cultural memes: the “good citizen” who masks up, vaxxes up, and shuts up, all in the name of “saving the planet” or “protecting the vulnerable.” But it’s not genuine morality; it’s a compensatory mechanism. The unconscious knows the belief is irrational—say, that a cloth mask stops a virus like a chain link fence stops a mosquito—but admitting that would shatter the fragile persona they’ve built. So, they double down, feeling spiritually superior because it masks their terror of the void, the anima/animus imbalance where true integration of opposites (reason and emotion, compliance and rebellion) should occur.
Digging deeper, Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious plays a big role here. We’re all swimming in a sea of archetypes amplified by mass media and social engineering. The “Hero” archetype, for instance, gets twisted: these virtue nukers unconsciously cast themselves as the saviour of society, battling the “evil” shrews who dare to think independently. But this is enantiodromia in action—Jung’s idea that extremes flip into their opposites. Their insistence on being “right” stems from an overcompensation for inner emptiness. In a world stripped of genuine spiritual rituals (think: the decline of religion, community, and meaning), people latch onto pseudo-religions like climate alarmism or pandemic piety. Virtue signalling becomes a ritual of belonging, a way to ward off the persona’s collapse. They feel morally superior because the unconscious craves order amid chaos; by aligning with the “official” truth, they avoid the individuation process—the painful journey of facing one’s own irrationality and integrating it. Instead, they project it outward, nuking dissenters to preserve the illusion of wholeness. It’s almost tragic, really: their “superiority” is a cry from the soul, begging for the very authenticity they deny in others.
And let’s not forget participation mystique, Jung’s term for that primitive merging with the collective. Sheepies virtue nuke because they’ve lost the boundary between self and group; their “beliefs” aren’t theirs but echoes of the herd’s unconscious. Insisting on irrational stances—like that experimental jabs are “safe and effective” despite mounting evidence otherwise—becomes a badge of tribal loyalty. The spiritual superiority? That’s the God-image projected onto the state or experts, inflating their ego to divine proportions. But crack that facade, and you hit the complex: inferiority masked as superiority, the puer aeternus (eternal child) archetype refusing to grow up and face reality. In therapy, I’d guide someone to confront this through active imagination, dialoguing with their shadow. But in the wild? It’s a nuke fest, because in this setting the unconscious doesn’t negotiate—it erupts.
Of course, this isn’t just Jung; it’s amplified by our digital age, where likes and retweets feed the complex like steroids. The virtue nuker gets a dopamine hit from the collective pat on the back, reinforcing the delusion. Why do they cling to irrational beliefs as “right”? Because admitting wrongness would mean facing the abyss—the death of the old self, ego dissolution. Jung warned about this in mass societies: without individuation, people become possessed by archetypes, leading to fanaticism. We’ve seen it in history—Cultural Revolutions, witch hunts—and now in our “confused world.” The sheep aren’t evil; they’re unconscious, nuking to survive the psychic storm. But us shrews? We see through it, and that makes us the real threat to their fragile superiority.
So, next time a virtue nuke drops, remember: it’s not about you. It’s the nuker’s shadow exploding outward. Don’t engage the blast—step aside, stay sharp, and keep piercing the veil. That’s the shrew way.