Namaste, Now Obey

the velvet glove of virtue signaling

Photo by Tom Austin on Unsplash

This post has been in my drafts since early March.

I kept hesitating to publish it. Not because I feared sounding messed up, but because I feared sounding truly insane. The kind of insane where people stop nodding politely and start edging away.

But here it is.

About once a week, I call my friend

Josh Slocum

from the car. That’s a lot, in our era of phone-call-as-intrusion, when calling without texting first is almost rude.

He knows he doesn’t have to answer. If it’s an emergency — if I actually need him — I’ll just keep calling. He knows that if he sees a single missed call from me, all is well. If something’s wrong, his phone will be blowing up. So it’s not a burden. At least I don’t think it is. (Although, as patient as he is with my digressions into number theory, who knows?)

Why the calls? What happens often enough that I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t say it out loud?

Other. Drivers.

This isn’t going where you probably think.

I’m not talking about aggressive, reckless, or careless people making my anxiety worse. If it were something that ordinary, I wouldn’t need someone to reassure me that I’m not crazy.

What happens almost every time I drive is both harder to explain and harder to process.

It’s the velvet glove of virtue signaling. Being controlled by other people’s need to perform their goodness.

Being put in a position where someone else decides — without your input — that the rules don’t matter, because their performative kindness overrides them.

You’re forced, in a split second, to either break the law and hope it’s fine, or obey the law and risk being seen as rude, ungrateful, or aggressive.

Despite driving very few places — the art supply store, therapy, the handful of restaurants that serve both something keto for me and something Josh likes too, the library, the bookstore, the pharmacy — this happens almost every time I go anywhere.

Josh always affirms I’m not crazy. It happens to him too. That’s what gives me the courage to tell you.

Living in Vermont feels like being trapped in a simulation where every NPC is programmed to be aggressively deferential. At first glance, it's "nice." People are "considerate." Drivers wave you through intersections where you don’t have the right-of-way. They crawl at 33 mph in a 45 mph zone, for no reason other than an ambient sense of virtuous restraint.

A city bus — yes, a bus — will wave you to turn left in front of it, as if laws of traffic and physics alike are up for debate, if it means preserving someone’s moral self-image.

None of this is malicious. No one’s trying to mess with you. That’s what makes it so destabilizing. There’s no enemy to name.

Just a thousand soft gestures eroding the shared civic framework we all supposedly live by.

Norms are fluid now. Guidelines optional.

Laws negotiable — if you can make them look unkind.

It’s like being gaslit by a yoga class.

The Day I Froze

In four-way stop situations, I usually just double-check both ways and proceed. But last Friday, when the bus incident occurred, I just couldn’t.

The bus was flashing its lights and waving me through — insisting I make a left turn across its lane when I didn’t have the right of way. It wasn’t snowing. It wasn’t an emergency. It was just... vibes.

I had the conscious thought: “Thank fucking God for Josh — no one else would believe this.” But I couldn’t do it. I sat there, paralyzed and staring, until the driver finally gave up and moved his bus.

I made my left turn when I had the green arrow.

And not before.

The Psychology of Politeness-as-Control

It’s tempting — so tempting — to describe this as a political thing. Wokists. Leftists. The ever-encroaching progressive swarm.

And that’s probably true, for many of my fellow Vermont drivers. But not all of them, which is so frustrating. Because most people aren’t Very Online. Something like 5% of social media users produce over 90% of posts, not counting the bots.

They’re not consciously trying to enforce a worldview with every exaggerated wave at an intersection.

Still, their behavior does in fact radiate from a shared cultural script.

It’s not conscious politics. It’s absorbed politics.

Around election time, Google Trends always shows a spike in basic questions like "Who is running for president?" or even, last time, "Did Joe Biden drop out?"

Most people are not activists or news junkies. They’re just swimming in the current, unaware, like the proverbial fish who responds “What’s water?” when you ask him how the water is today.

So no, not every overly “polite” driver is pushing an explicit agenda.

But in practice, it functions the same way.

When people treat every interaction like a performance of empathy, it rewires social norms.

The goal isn’t order or safety — it’s being seen as the kind of person who cares.

And that’s the difference.

For people like me and Josh — center-right, not-Woke, online too much but aware of it and committed to paying attention to the real world — driving is about predictability and order. Rules matter because they allow strangers to cooperate efficiently.

We follow them not to show we’re good, but to show we’re reliable.

When someone waves you through a four-way stop they don’t control, they aren’t being kind. They’re asserting moral authority.

They’re declaring, “I am good enough to override the rules — and you must play along.”

This isn’t kindness. It’s coercion in the language of grace.

Josh and I may, for different reasons, be known for anger and sarcasm online — I was practically queen of snark before retiring from Twitter — but in person, we’re unfailingly polite. Courteous. Predictable. The waitstaff smile when they see us, not because we perform, but because we don’t.

Politeness, for us, is not a virtue signal. It’s a way of saying: I see you. I respect you. I won’t surprise you. We both know the script, and I’ll stick to it.

The Bus and the Future

I’ll be thinking about that bus driver for a long time.

What was he thinking?

Did he genuinely believe that overriding the traffic code was a kindness? Did he think I’d feel seen, validated, or special? Did he think he was helping?

Or was it just reflex — a behavioral echo of the culture we live in? A Vermont reflex, a Woke reflex, a "nice" reflex?

I’ll never know. But I know how it made me feel: disoriented, small, and dangerously alone in my perception.

And that’s what makes this kind of thing so insidious.

It’s not the violation of rules. It’s the pressure to pretend it didn’t happen. To smile and wave and go along.

But I didn’t. I waited. And when the light turned green, I went.

Because what keeps society running isn’t moral signaling. It’s adults, exercising restraint.

And your calm, compassionate glow of Woke moral righteousness?

Still no substitute for brake lights.

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Welcome, Instapundit readers! Always nice to see y’all here. You may be interested in this review of a book by the Woke math education lady who ruined math education for the whole country, this takedown of Glenn Greenwald’s bullshit, this reflection on patriotism, or this discussion of Trump Derangement Syndrome as a cultural phenomenon.

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