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It is a social dynamic that plays out across that community - a process of moral outbidding, unchecked, which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly.Ī purity spiral propagates itself through the tipping points of preference falsification: through self-censorship, and through loyalty tests that weed out its detractors long before they can band together. Perhaps the most classic one of all hails from Salem, Massachusetts. Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals: the ongoing parsing of ethnic purity into ever-more Aryan sub-groups.

Even though intersectional social justice is a pretty great breeding ground for purity spirals, it is one among many. It’s not just another word for ‘woke culture’, or even ‘cancel culture’, or ‘virtue signalling’. In both cases, a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power.īy the same author How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral In 1794, Robespierre found himself on the same tumbrel he had prescribed for so many other problematic persons. By 1968, they had fallen apart as factions fought each other to represent the truest version of Maoism. In 1967, Mao’s Red Guards took to the streets determined to root out the ‘four olds’ of traditional Chinese culture, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. I’ve become fascinated by the link between what we see in examples like these, and a dynamic we’ve seen play out through history. In Canada, the music business has become so consumed by ethical etiquette that a juror who submitted the band Viet Cong for the nation’s top music prize was compelled to write a lengthy apology over how culturally insensitive his action was. Young adult fiction has exploded into an ethical gazumping war over who is allowed to write about what colour of character. In the past year, the middle-class, middle-aged, overwhelmingly female knitters of Instagram have descended into internecine conflict over racism allegations. Lately we’ve been witnessing more and more small worlds fall apart under the weight of their vast moral centre of gravity.