The Price of Truth in the Age of Virtue Signalling
In recent years, a new phrase has entered the cultural lexicon — “virtue signalling”.
It refers to a familiar phenomenon in the modern world: declaring one’s moral values, not to act on them, but to be seen holding them. It is a performance of righteousness, designed not to help, but to posture. It flourishes in politics, in online commentary, and increasingly in the rewriting of history.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the defamation of Gao Lingwei.
Those who call him a traitor, who lazily paste his name beside collaborators and war criminals, who compare him to infamous turncoats without evidence or context — they are not defending truth. They are signalling their own virtue. Their accusations are not acts of scholarship, but performances of outrage, aimed at appearing more patriotic, more morally pure, and more aligned with modern ideological values than the generations they condemn.
However, the truth is harder and far more uncomfortable.
Gao Lingwei was no hero of slogans, but he was also no traitor. He governed quietly during an era of noise. He protected the continuity of government during a constitutional crisis. He stepped aside when power turned to chaos. And when the country was swallowed by occupation, he did not rise with the enemy — he vanished.
Yet for those who lack the courage to understand history’s grey zones, such a man is intolerable. He cannot be marketed. He cannot be paraded. So they reach for a modern tool: moral condemnation disguised as patriotism.
They do not examine the facts — they signal their values.
They do not analyse the choices — they perform their purity.
This is virtue signalling at its most destructive: the flattening of historical complexity in order to elevate the self.
It is easy, in the comfort of hindsight, to judge the dead. It costs nothing to mock a man who is no longer here to speak. But such judgments, if not made with discipline and evidence, are not justice. They are a kind of cowardice.
History is not a mirror for our own virtue.
It is a window into the agonies, compromises, and endurance of those who lived when the world was burning.
To study Gao Lingwei honestly is to confront uncomfortable truths:
- That service can be sincere even when it is imperfect;
- That silence can be principled when noise would be reckless;
- That restraint, dignity, and legal process are virtues — even if they don’t come with medals.
In the end, it is not Gao Lingwei who stands exposed.
It is the critics who, in their rush to appear righteous, have abandoned the discipline that truth demands.
Let this chapter stand not just in defence of one man but as a warning.
Let us be slower to condemn, and quicker to understand.
Let us stop measuring the past by how well it flatters us in the present.
Because the ones who signal virtue the loudest …
… are often the last to live by it.