Signalling & the ladder of acceptability

Often when we exhibit a selfish behaviour we like to find justifications that make it more acceptable. This is a general-purpose defence mechanism we all instinctively have because it's very low-cost - we may have several motivations but since no-one can read our mind, if we're asked about our motivations we might as well focus on the nice ones.

To make this more convincing it often helps if we believe the best of ourselves, but we usually have no reason to believe other people's self-serving justifications when they try to peddle them to us. In fact we're often suspicious of their motives straight away, especially if the behaviour in question involves any kind of competition.

Sometimes there are situations where large groups of people will be using the same justifications for the same behaviours, and so their voices will combine loudly enough to ingrain some positive association for that behaviour.

Meanwhile there might be an adjacent behaviour this mass of people don't have, and so they're quite happy to be vocal about how they see through the bullshit, which leads to that behaviour having negative association.

One nice set of examples are the various ways we use our time and money to elevate our social status. These can invoke a bit of uneasiness because on one hand they tend to have a selfish under-current since status is largely a zero-sum game. On the other hand though it's a game we're all adept at playing so can feel like healthy competition, and it doesn't hurt that they're usually quite beautiful by design - think a Swiss watch.

The net result is that some of these behaviours end up managing to be perceived in a positive light, while others are stigmatised:

Of course the boundary of what's fair game for moralising isn't really so abrupt and there's a lot of fuzzy ground. Sometimes buying a nice car is seen as legitimate self-expression (it might help if it's foreign, environmentally friendly, a 4-wheel-drive, etc.), sometimes excessive clothes and jewellery are seen as tacky, and sometimes obscure art or music is seen as pretentious.

The difference is affordability of the middle class - all the green examples are available to most people, while the red examples are beyond their budget and thus easy prey for moralising. You can sometimes even find two examples of the same thing on opposite sides of the moral chasm - one single diamond on a wedding ring is an elegant expression of love, but one hundred diamonds on Angelina Jolie's necklace is celebrity over-indulgence.

Now, if you find these examples convincing then there are still two distinct ways to react:

1. You could view learning guitar as more of a competitive bid for social capital, like a peacock's tail for human teenagers.

2. You could view luxury cars as more of a justifiable expression of taste and not condemn them as grandiose.

Which way you go depends on how you view social elevation in general, but one thing is for sure: you should probably view plastic surgery and orthodontics as both just medical interventions that attempt to turn money into beauty, and try to apply your moralising consistently, my dearest and most magnanimous reader.