Breaking the Loop: How Virtue Signaling Became a System of Indoctrination

Have you ever wondered how so many people can believe things that are demonstrably false?

Indoctrination works, not through coercion or threat, but through what appears, on the surface, to be a moral framework. The most powerful tool for indoctrination isn’t fear or force, but the illusion of virtue, offered ‘for free,’ but with strings attached.

This is the argument I made years ago in my article “Virtue Signaling and the Indoctrination of the Left.” In that earlier piece, I argued that indoctrination does not begin with narrative, but by redefining what is perceived as morally virtuous. Once virtue is redefined, truth becomes subordinate to that virtue. From there, it’s only a short step to complete ideological capture.

In the years since I wrote that earlier piece (a piece that has become one of my most popular), I’ve come to realize that what I was describing is more than just a method. It is a system: a self-reinforcing, closed-loop indoctrination framework. I now call it Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling.

Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling is a process by which moral legitimacy is distributed not by truth, character, or behavior, but by narrative loyalty. It is called “closed-loop” because it feeds itself. Once inside the loop, disagreement is not seen as incorrect, but as immoral.

Because this system ties morality to belief, rather than to action or truth, there is no path to challenge it from within. Any dissent is automatically disqualified. This system actively discourages self-reflection and self-growth, and it seeks to place those who are outside of the narrative loop outside the entire conversation.

Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling is by design a circular framework, with the circular argument logical fallacy baked into its bones.

This is how it works:

1. A belief (for example, that America is structurally oppressive) is declared virtuous.

2. Those who accept the belief signal their virtue by affirming it.

3. Anyone who questions the belief is deemed immoral, regardless of their reasoning, evidence, or life experience.

4. Those outside the belief system are portrayed not merely as wrong, but as dangerous.

5. Dissent from within is punished even more severely, because it threatens the illusion that the system is inclusive and compassionate.

Over time, this creates a self-sealing ideology: one that cannot be corrected, because the mechanism that would allow for correction (truth) has been subordinated to the maintenance of narrative-driven virtue.

The most insidious aspect of Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling is who it excludes first.

It does not start by silencing conservative white men. That comes later. It begins by disqualifying the very people it claims to defend:

The black economist who questions systemic racism narratives
The gay writer who critiques gender ideology
The female professor who challenges feminist orthodoxy

These people are not debated. They are disowned as ‘traitors’ to their identity, and their voice is stripped of legitimacy. Why? Because they have violated the loop. They have refused to signal the approved form of virtue.

Think Thomas Sowell (or any other conservative who is also a member of a minority). The easiest way to delegitimize yourself to the left is to simply utter that name. Why? There are three reasons:

If Sowell were white, he’d have won a Nobel Prize in Economics,
Sowell’s work often runs counter to the narrative,
Thomas Sowell is black.

If Thomas Sowell were white, he would simply be ignored, but because he is black he becomes a cultural icon of hatred that every racial epithet can be hurled at.

The left cannot easily disprove what Thomas Sowell says (most of it I would venture cannot be disproven as it is truth), so they disavow who Thomas Sowell is, and by extension they disavow anyone who utters his name.

Let me be clear: Thomas Sowell is the greatest living economist in the world. His exclusion is proof positive that Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling is real, and yet there will be people who start reading this piece and who close the window, disinterested as soon as Sowell’s name comes up. The loop disallows Sowell, so referencing Sowell discredits me in their eyes.

Falling into the loop is not empowerment, but erasure. Minority speakers are forwarded, but only if they say what they are told. This is a morality system that rewards obedience, but punishes authenticity, and most insidiously, that removes voice.

If you are a member of a supposedly oppressed group and you think I’m making all this up, I have a simple test for you: post something you believe to be true that goes against the Oppression Olympics narrative into a public space and see what happens. It does not have to be something important. Anything that goes against the narrative will work. If you do this, one of two things will happen:

Nobody will notice, or
You will be destroyed, utterly and totally.

The control loop is enforced by those who are often not marginalized at all. In fact, many of the most powerful enforcers of closed-loop morality are:

Politicians
Tenured academics
Media executives
Corporate HR directors
Nonprofit bureaucrats
Our Intelligence Services (this is speculative – see my piece HERE for why I include it)

These institutions do not enforce the loop through violence or legal authority, but through cultural gatekeeping and resource control. Here’s how:

Politicians shape what is publicly acceptable to say through official messaging, policy proposals, and moral posturing. When elected officials equate disagreement with “hate” or “harm,” they are not offering arguments, but are drawing moral boundaries that exclude dissent.
Tenured academics institutionalize the loop by defining which research is publishable, which ideas are acceptable in peer review, and which students or colleagues can speak freely without repercussion. DEI statements and political loyalty oaths are becoming standard gatekeeping tools in hiring and tenure. This is particularly effective in the soft sciences, where ‘peer review’ simply means agreement, and where being more outrageous than others is often considered ‘courageous’ even when absurd.
Media executives control which stories are told, what angles are emphasized, and who gets to be heard. Cancel culture, as practiced by the press, isn’t a spontaneous social phenomenon—it’s a curated media response that reinforces narrative loyalty.
Corporate HR departments translate narrative virtue into behavioral compliance. Through mandatory training, internal reporting systems, and performance reviews tied to ideological conformity, they create an environment where employees self-censor to survive.
Nonprofit bureaucrats often function as the ideological enforcers of the administrative state, funneling funding only to groups that toe the ideological line, thereby crowding out dissenting views in the civil space.
Intelligence services, if involved as speculated, represent the most troubling enforcers of the loop by shaping the overton window of allowable discourse through information control, selective leaks, and strategic disinformation (see my related article for details). Intelligence services can focus the other groups to keep them on point.

In each case, the method of enforcement is not direct censorship, but moral framing and institutional leverage. They don’t need to silence you; they only need to delegitimize you. Once that happens, the public will do the silencing for them.

These groups may posture as champions of the oppressed, but they enjoy elite status within institutions. Their job is to enforce the narrative, not to seek truth. They are not representatives of the marginalized, they are the gatekeepers of the narrative that defines who counts as marginalized.

Single women are an oversized portion of our electorate based on the simple fact that Democrats tend to win elections when they show up in large numbers, and tend to lose when they don’t. The narrative is about power, so much of the narrative is designed to get single women to the polls.

I’m very familiar with Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling as I watched my whole family succumb. My parents fell for it, my sisters fell for it (my brother in law moved one of my sisters to Australia to ‘escape fascism’), and my children are in the process of falling for it. One of my children may already be gone. I don’t only know how this process works – I know how it can destroy relationships, and I know on a personal level what it can lead to.

Why It Works

Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling is powerful because it offers something incredibly seductive: the feeling of moral superiority without the burden of moral responsibility.

You do not need to be honest. You do not need to reflect. You do not even need to be kind. You only need to believe the right things, and (for bonus points) to shout down those who don’t.

The dictate to shut-down dissent is what makes Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling both so effective, and so dangerous. It is a counterfeit morality system, and if Satan were real, this is the kind of framework he would use: creating a false moral structure that deceives the masses. It is not necessary to tempt the masses into depravity. All that it takes is to offer the masses the illusion of righteousness without the need for repentance, grace, or truth, and millions follow.

Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling works because it is so much easier than actual virtue.

This is not to say the political right is immune. Conservatives today are increasingly falling into what I’ve called the Reverse Narrative Fallacy, which is the assumption that if something aligns with the dominant narrative, it must be false. This too is a kind of closed-loop thinking.

In reality, the narrative is designed independently of the truth such that some things that are true can also be a part of the narrative. Conservatives who assume that everything in the narrative is inherently false, miss that, and those in charge of Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling use this fact to great effect. Actually being correct every once in a while and then pointing out those conservatives who deny that truth, helps to keep the indoctrinated in line on other issues, where the narrative may be purely false.

The difference here between left and right is that while conservatives may fall into cynicism, they still value truth and can be corrected by it. Those in the loop, by contrast, no longer believe in truth at all so much as they derive ‘truth’ from narrative, identity, and power.

Virtue signaling is no longer a social behavior; it is the delivery mechanism for an entire indoctrination system. And unless we expose the circular logic at its core, we will continue to raise generations of people who believe that morality is something they perform, not something they pursue.

Understand that those who are indoctrinated within Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling are, by definition:

Morally dead. Their ‘morality’ is based on their willingness to obey whomever is writing the narrative, making them willing actors for whatever they are told to do. These are people who believe morality is based on doing as told. This is not the same as ‘immoral,’ and nor does ‘amoral’ work, as the people framing the narrative are not amoral. The leadership of such a system is evil, and the followers are morally dead.
Intellectually dead. These people don’t abhor the word ‘truth,’ but they reframe it such that the narrative becomes the source of truth. One might even refer to the narrative as the ‘Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling Bible,’ other than the fact that THIS ‘bible’ is in constant flux.
Emotionally Fearful. As the narrative changes, followers must be able to keep up. ‘Leadership’ is inverted such that to ‘lead’ means to be a first-follower. Take a vacation and fall out of line and you will be ruthlessly and utterly destroyed.

How do you reach someone whose entire sense of self-value is based on not being reached? How do you give truth to someone who would be destroyed by it?

Answer? Generally speaking, you don’t reach them. People like this are intellectually dead. The few that are reached speak of red-pill moments and become conservatives, but the vast majority of indoctrinated people spend their entire lives in intellectual purgatory, and the more of an ‘education’ they have in that indoctrination, the harder they become to reach.

We don’t need a new narrative. We need the truth. And that begins by breaking the loop.

The alternative to breaking the loop is to lose our self autonomy, our freedoms, and our way of life, living like Lemmings even if it means being led off a cliff.