The Purity Complex vs. Complex Purity
Or Can I Be Trusted NOT to Eat Feces?
(As usual, there’s an audio version of this “omni-flavor” for paying subscribers.)
Question: Is purity good?
We must begin with a distinction.
If you don’t have time to read this whole article, the punchline is that I am differentiating between complex purity (“good”) and a purity complex (“bad").
But if, as The Dude says in The Big Lebowski (1998) you are “not into the whole brevity thing,” then please read on McDuff…
What I am calling complex purity is an effect of streamlining, integrating & synthesizing many relevant variables into a compressed, novel, and functional affect. Minimalist synergy. A high-leverage simplification or unification that is accompanied by an essentialist aesthetic. As in, “The musician worked his whole life to discover and refine his own pure style.”
A purity complex, on the other hand, is what I call the regressive tendency of heart, mind, body & society to seek for dysfunctional aspirational simplifications that promise an empowering “return” but actually produce fragility and psychosocial breakdown.
We will explore this distinction between degenerative and regenerative forms of purity from several angles. In fact, here’s an image of Colonel Jack T. Ripper from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove superimposed on his famous doodling of “purity of essence” from several angles:
I. THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES
In his provocative collection of essays, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset discusses his profound disagreement with other members of the anti-fascist governing council of the Second Spanish Republic.
The other politicians, revolutionaries, and activists wanted to secure the flourishing of Spanish culture via a return to purity. Get rid of foreign elements and modern contamination! Go back. Go back to the original essence of Spanish language, ethos, & ethnicity. Remove diversity until the underlying homogeneity is revealed.
Ortega y Gasset held a different view.
He saw that “being Spanish” was originally the result of a long historical period in which many non-Spanish qualities & pre-Spanish peoples grew together under common circumstances of challenge and rejoice. Spanishness was a labor of creation — not an underlying and pregiven feature of reality.
The best way to advance the cause of Spain, therefore, would be to increase its ability to convert non-Spaniards, synthesize new Spanishness & cultivate a new homogeneity from an embrace of the existing diversity.
Complex purity.
II. INTERIOR VS. EXTERIOR
One of the problems in thinking clearly in this domain is that we conflate exterior and interior forms of purity. We try to apply the rules for the exterior realities of chemistry and physics to interior things like psychology, sociology, & morality.
Water purifiers, for example, are a kind of external benevolent technology. Each water purifier, roughly speaking, makes the world a better place (unlike cars, guns, AI, or plastics — which have highly ambivalent and uncertain effects).
These water tools work by eliminating foreign elements from a chemical mixture. You can zap water with UV radiation. That kills most of the organisms. Although a few can roll themselves into a hard shell and unfold later — unscathed. And of course, radiation does not stop toxic minerals. Alternatively, you can drain the water through various materials that filter out larger molecules such as toxic minerals. Unfortunately, smaller molecules, including viruses and bacteria, might still get through. It all depends on the size of the holes in your filter.
Ideally, the holes are small enough that only those tiniest water molecules can get through. Check with your local City Council about the size of the holes in their emergency distributable water filtration systems. They will probably refuse to tell you. They wouldn’t tell me. In fact, they may not even have an emergency water filtration plan. And if they do, it might involve just one or two large centralized units (which is a very bad strategy).
Contact me privately if you want to go into the water filtration business together.
The point here is that “killing” and “filtering out” the foreign elements is a very practical tactic for simple material affairs. Exterior purity. And this exterior purity is desirable in order to facilitate the internal thriving of human organisms and societies. But the same approach does not transfer directly to the interiors of living beings.
Unlike minerals, living beings are notably adaptable. Our structure is unfinished, plastic, cultivationist. Human bodies, minds, & cultures are internally diverse and their streamlined functional homogeneity (i.e. purity) depends not only on removing impurities but also on the dynamic ongoing activity of forging new purity through integration and adaptation.
The need for uncontaminated (“holy”) water is true, essential, and ongoing. Yet the need to prevent contamination of our bloodlines, community standards, and inner emotional innocence tends to become an automated way of thinking that is one step away from a very slippery slope. No racial pun intended. This phobia about contamination of our bloodlines is, as Wilhelm Reich analyzed it in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), dangerously adjacent to a culturally self-destructive, nihilistic-idealist form of racial purity psychosis that is probably based in a deeply trained reaction against biology, sexuality, mortality & relationship. Our lifeworld cannot and should not be simplistically filtered like drinking water.
That said, even the relatively simple matter of exterior purity can also be a double-edged sword. You can massively amplify, distribute (and charge for) the intensified effect of aspirin, cocaine, and sucrose by extracting and refining those substances down to a “pure” white powder. That’s good if you need a quick strong hit. However, over time, we might see troubling signs of accumulating dysregulation. Maybe in general we need these substances balanced out by the other long-evolved compounds in the willow bark, coca leaf or sugar cane. Maybe we need them in their impurity.
All of this is to say that we have to be very careful, from numerous angles, when applying the idea that purity can be achieved by the concentrated removal of alien elements.
III. THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM
Fred Nietzsche (notoriously anti-German) remarked in the 1880s that Germans, although sick and stupid, were not inherently racist. He suggested, by analogy, that their national body had absorbed more Jews, Slavs, and modern ideas than it could assimilate. And he warned that a period of fever and vomiting was probably imminent. The next few decades proved him right in many tragic ways.
Today, under the influence of wars, climate change, and other forms of planetary destabilization, all countries face similar problems regarding immigrants, migrants, and refugees. We oscillate between alternative idiotic ideas like “shut the borders” or “open the borders.” In mainstream or reactionary media, one seldom even hears a common-sense immigration idea such as: We should let in as many people as we can integrate into the thriving of our ethos. No more and no less. Such ideas are not a panacea but it is odd to almost never hear them mentioned in legacy media.
Instead of worrying about how to build the institutions, community networks and psycho-behavioral assessment tools necessary to cultivate people and transform them into a safe, free and creatively empowered citizenry, we argue about “how many” and “they’re taking our jobs.”
Are we even trying to get better at naturalizing people?
It doesn't seem so. And we are not a lot better at naturalizing the largest group of immigrants — our babies. If we are not educating these immigrants (who enter through the “border” of our wombs) to be competent, compassionate, resourceful, strong, and wise citizens then it is unlikely we can do a good job at our geographical borders either.
As long as we fail to think constructively about evaluation, integration and cultivation, we will fall back on predictably messy and destructive attempts to secure purity by allowing our emotional upset to block, remove and punish the non-integrated elements.
A purity complex.
IV. SIMPLEXITY
Creative purity is simplexity. Simplexity is a word I like because it intrinsically connects simplicity & complexity. Einstein, in a typically playful and inspirational mood, said, “Always make things as simple as possible but no simpler.” That sometimes lands like a pro-simplicity argument until you realize that what he meant by “as simple as possible” was the General Theory of Relativity.
There are trade-offs between useful simplicity and accurate complexity. If something is too simple, it leaves out many important elements, regresses into self-sabotaging outcomes, and proves itself maladaptive over time. But if something is too complex we cannot use it, recognize it, value it.
I think of simplexity in connection with the concept of leverage. A lever — as per Saint Archimedes — is a stick or rod that is balanced so that small movements of the little end create big movements at the long end. A little bit of energy output gets a big result. Leverage. Proportion.
A complex reiterative fractal equation, for example, has a lot of leverage. One little computational shape can keep going forever, generating endless variations of the strange attractors that seem to populate the natural universe. There is a profound and stable relational identity between the simple unity of the input algorithm and the vast range of complex phenomena which it generates or describes.
I say, “This is Tobias. He is a purist when it comes to psychedelics.” I am not thereby suggesting that Tobias is a puritan who refuses entheogenic experience, on principle, in order to maintain his sense of a world that is simple enough and obedient enough to trigger his aspirational hopes about purity. Rather, I am suggesting that Tobias has idiosyncratically integrated a huge set of experiences, concerns, substances, evaluations, curiosities and disciplines, such that he now has a very clear, streamlined & value-suffused approach to his choice-making in this domain.
Complex purity.
V. THE JOYS OF ANTI-PURITY
I fell in love with Catholicism when I first heard, as a young boy, that they had officially moved "Jesus' birthday" to make it coincide with large, pre-existing pagan celebrations during the season of the Winter Solstice. The opinions of historians differ on this point but I was, as a child, happy to hear about this. It gave me a sense of trust and confidence. This was real religion. Alive. Strong. Able to flex, integrate, assimilate. It still had the power to absorb the strength of its adversaries. Like a martial artist.
Likewise, I loved how straightforwardly the Mormons adapted when the U.S. Federal government decided that overt racism and polygamy were now frowned upon. They absorbed this and kept moving. Splinter groups like the FLDS tried to preserve the purity of the old ways and — predictably — entered into rapid collapse, degeneration, lies & abuse despite (or because of?) their pure ideals.
It seems to me that where religion is growing in power, and providing an actual service to communities, that it is tremendously plastic, adaptive and absorbent. And where it is declining or degrading itself, it doubles down on dogmatism, purity and the notion of returning to the “real core” of belief.
You, dear readers, are no doubt so sophisticated that you will want to scold me for using Nazi Germany as a cliche example of fascist collapse, but — unfortunately for all of us — I enjoy some light scolding. Therefore: think of Hitler.
That doped-up, histrionic half-occultist sort of “religionized" early-modern Germany. He epitomized a dark mood that was circulating in their period of post-war trauma, international grievance, & sloppy retro-romantic Wagnerism. We often think of Herr Hitler as a combination of a clown and an evil genius but he can also be read as ground zero of the German cultural field’s failed suicide attempt.
Imagine doing the following:
(a) break the political system of your society
(b) drive off all the avant-garde artists and denounce cultural progress
(c) harass and drive off most of your best scientists — forcing them to join your enemies
(d) start burning huge chunks of the literature available in your language
(e) round up large population segments in your country and either incinerate them or work them to death
(f) start an over-extended war on two fronts that guarantees the sustained retaliation and revenge of the rest of the global community
(g) take your healthiest and strongest young people, train them in anxiety & rigidity, force them to breach their own integrity in dealing with their fellow citizens, and then send them to die against the advice of your best military generals
(h) reduce the fashion sense of your nation to narrow, outdated fetishwear festooned with an infant’s notion of scary symbols — lightning, skulls, eagles.
(i) make important decisions about general thriving whilst high on amphetamines and punish anyone who brings up any additional points of consideration
(j) finally murder your wife and then kill yourself.
Dark heroism? Evil brilliance? Or the tale of prolonged cultural suicide attempt rooted, at every step, in the rhetoric of purity? In the self-degrading fantasy of removing every kind of antagonism and complexity that prevents the idealized return to the affect of purity…
Puritans are, in a sense, attempting failure. If you really wanted to win a war, you probably would not send away Albert Einstein just because you associate him with a symbolic ethnicity that makes you feel gross. The rejection of the gross, strange, diverse, complex, alien and antagonistic elements within a psychological or sociological field is a rejection of the conditions that need to be creatively assimilated into an empowering complex purity.
The attempt to grow stronger without actually growing is doomed.
It is completely understandable that an unstable & mismanaged version of the current attractor, the current socio-cognitive operating system, will instinctively make people want to dismantle the new forms and regress to a previous systemic attractor that is imagined as more stable and empowering. But you cannot go back. The world has moved on. Your best hope is not the sacrifice of complexity for simplicity but rather the sacrifice of an old purity for a new purity that includes the new mutations.
VI. SALON DE REFUSÉS
I had a weird habit when I lived in Victoria, BC.
There was always a black magic marker in my pocket. I carried this magic wand because I used public washrooms which were a battleground between poor disenfranchised graffiti artists and a cadre of private corporations who had convinced the government that it was worth a lot of money to be constantly policing this and covering it over with bland paint.
So I would see various forms of graffiti, close up, when sitting in a stall or standing at a urinal. I would see it, from day to day, alternating with a shoddy overlay of new beige paint at the city’s expense. And I am in favor of tidying up but what struck me was the complete absence of evaluation and potential integration. Much of the graffiti was garbage, in my opinion, but not equally so.
Some was brilliant. Some was much smarter and more aesthetic than a cheap coat of beige paint on stale metal stall walls. So I carried my black marker and I ‘rated’ the graffiti that I encountered. Give it a number of ten. Add a few salient observations about its quality as public art. My fantasy was that the anti-graffiti people would regularly read these critical remarks and this would cause an aesthetic worm of existential doubt to begin growing in their souls.
Probably I got the idea from the famous Salon des Refusés.
In 1863 the French Emperor Napoleon III (called the Third to honor the imaginary Napoleon II who could have been Emperor under different conditions) overruled the Academy of Fine Arts and added a bonus event to the famous official Paris Art Salon.
The Salon was a very distinguished, very formal, annual evaluation of the best art and artists in Paris. They tended to reject any work that was not clean, realistic & aligned with the well-established categories of artistic purity.
Thus both many bad and many great artists were left out each year. This was unpopular with the people and a poor strategy for keeping France at the leading-edge of emerging planetary culture. So the Emperor decreed a special additional Salon des Refusés where all the refused art could be examined. Overnight the rejects were revealed to be much more popular than the main official salon. In a few short years, their work generated what we now call modern art. An historically appropriate shift of technique and motive that reflected more impressionistic, subjective, multiperspectival & transcultural challenges.
Ross King’s The Judgement of Paris (2007) details the fall of Meissonier, the Rise of Manet and the explosion of the unsettling New Art from the new Salon.
It is very often true that the good stuff is the rejected stuff.
The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
Psalm 118:22-23
Perhaps the heart of Western Culture’s successful periods always lay in its enfolding of otherwise rejected qualities into a complex new purity. The exact opposite of that sinister move whereby the citizens of a small town, facing an awful crime, accost and execute a stranger, a visitor, a minority sectarian, a differently skinned or accented person, in the name of a justice which is all too often indistinguishable from purity psychosis.
In my many conversations with the ruddy Game B theorist & podcast host Jim Rutt, we have often discussed the need to replace the policing of “bad words” and “misinformation” with a new protocol for online etiquette. Etiquette means that we police how you say it and not the perspective you are communicating — no matter how impure or necessarily rejected we assess it to be.
Free speech only has meaning when it protects something you hate.
Noam Chomsky
Yes, there will be problems. But the greater problem, for our collective survival and thrival, is that we might miss the few important and interesting shoots, concealed by the mess of offensive, inaccurate or pointless expressions, that are mutating in those specific strange ways that will turn out to be at the heart of tomorrow’s liberty, safety & empowerment.
Developmental theorist Tom Murray is fond of referencing the “simplicity on the other side of complexity.” We should be thinking (and feeling) very carefully about the difference between regressive and constructive purity.
VIII. A COMEDY OF HYBRID VARIABLES
Is there such a thing as progressive evolution in the cosmos?
It is far too easy to say either Yes or No. We should be vigilant about that. Professor Eric Chaisson notably proposed a model in which the leading-edge amount of “energy rate density” in cosmic structures was increasing over cosmological time. Stars have more flow-through of energy, for their mass and density, than the nebulous early universe. Biospheric planets have more than stars. Animals have more than plants. Human brains have more than other animal brains. And, worryingly or inspiringly, some new “integrated circuits” are outperforming human brains in this specific regard. For a moment, forget the question of whether Chaisson’s model is correct. Notice what kind of model it is. He is not saying that size or density or speed or happiness or compassion or belief is increasing. He is not telling the story of a single variable. Instead, he is saying that a complicated hybrid variable — which brings several moving factors together into a single expression — is being optimized over cosmological time.
The “pure” thing is a hybrid complex of many interacting functions.
This is similar to comedy. If you listen to stand-up comedians (perhaps most vocally epitomized in the philosophy of Jerry Seinfeld) talk about their “bits,” you will hear them discussing an elaborate process that they describe, counterintuitively, as a simplification.
It begins with the detection of a social or psychological incongruity. This is given linguistic form, usually through an unexpected analogy. Then this expression is tested in constant variations in front of live and critical audiences who usually do not like it. Over time, this testing process, combined with writing and rewriting, yields a “best fit” linguistic form for the joke, anecdote or bizarre declaration by which they revalue our values, open liberating space beyond social concern, and create deep human recognition in the sacred space of high-trust untrustworthiness.
This will then need to be — again according to the elder statesman of stand-up Mr. Seinfeld — performed by establishing affective congruence between the idea, the words, your voice, your facial expression, and your body posture. At this point, you have a “good bit.” Not everyone will laugh. Not everyone can connect with the same content and style to the same degree. But you have a full and complete comedic bit.
Seinfeld describes this as a purity operation. Minimalism. Whittling down the joke to the pure essential idea of what makes it funny. Stripping everything else away like the proverbial Renaissance sculptor simply removing all the stone that is not the Venus de Milo.
And we get why this language is useful. The idea of removal is empowering. It sets us off in a direction upon which we can immediately take action. However, it is not quite an accurate description. The “pure thing” to which the comedian is stripping down and chiseling away, is not an ideal that you formerly had but which got contaminated by additional complexity. It is a new construct that works with complexity. And to create this purity one has to simultaneously satisfy and balance many moving variables — not reduce them to one variable.
The latent, emergent or virtual “something” that will produce the admirably empowering affect must not only entertain me but it must also feel true to my observations about life, connect with audiences, activate a particular emotional and physiological state of laughter or play, be adequately different from the jokes of other comedians and be communicable through my voice, face, body and idiosyncratic cultural style.
That “purity” is complex. It has to hit many targets at the same time. If it pulls off this trick we will perceptually valorize it by registering it as an exquisite and eternal simplicity. And as one works toward synthesis across multiple variables the integration itself starts to emerge and help guide us — highlighting what fits better or worse. The omega point helps us to prune, tweak, remix, and test it as it appears for the first time. But is not a simple, singular, pre-given purity to which we must return by removing all the dross and contaminants.
That way lies madness.
And speaking of madness…
IX. CAN I BE TRUSTED NOT TO EAT FECES?
Occasionally, when I happen to catch a glimpse of some excrement, especially if it’s warm, I feel my throat slam shut. It constricts involuntarily. The automatic blocking of the digestive pathway between my mouth and stomach is quite strange. My throat apparently suspects that, if left to my own devices, I might just gobble a bit of shit.
And I get the concern. Feces and meat have a lot in common. Many animals (I’m looking at you — dogs) will take a bite and risk the bad bacterial effects. However, I think that at this point in my life, having proven for decades that I am not a corprophagist (shit eater) my vigilant throat can cut me a little slack.
Human beings have a famous gag reflex which porn stars, and people trying to make themselves vomit, often have to teach themselves to override. Our evolutionary history has perfected a disgusted recoil-and-clamp in the face of “gross” things. And it is not all cultural (although for some reason noble France seems to have a lot of disgusting delicacies). Disgust is when our bodies say NOPE. When something should not be allowed in. And many people struggle to relearn and regain a strong, self-protective membrane that may have been compromised in early childhood.
But, like a would-be-cosmopolitan learning to enjoy the snails, frog’s legs & intriguingly ass-scented cheeses of classical French cuisine, there are forms of growth and health that depend on disregarding some aspects of our cultural and biological disgust reactions.
Controlled disgust is a common feature in many forms of ancient initiation rituals and sacred rites. Bathe in bull’s blood. Eat dubious fungi found in dung. Remove your social costume and utter the forbidden words.
These acts have the double sacralizing function of (a) setting the embodied psyche of the participants outside of conventional social space, and (b) they require additional efforts that mobilize our intentionality to temporarily liberate extra energy that has been stored in the form of reactive patterns.
In what I would cheerfully call “normal village life,” there are typically sacralization experts (shamans, witches, priests, spiritual weirdos) who collaboratively oversee the alternation between sacred and mundane realms of experience. The correct frequency and style of oscillation between these domains is part of the healthy circulation of the human social entity.
In the absence of this ethos, this protocol, and these deputized weirdos, the special conductive mixture of nature & culture starts to break apart into its constituent elements. Circulation fails. Some people become indifferent to sacred acts and symbols. Others become emotionally locked down into the idea that the old symbols must be officialized, enforced, and always, everywhere, positively affirmed.
Without organized taboo violations and ritual impurity, the society collapses into believers & unbelievers. And while we might assume that the “reactionary conservative” believers are upholders of the old purity standards, we are frequently proved wrong by observations of their private behavior. They are, in general, NOT OPPOSED, to the things they vociferously denounce as the depraved activities of godless liberal modernists.
I mention liberals & conservatives, which is a complex topic when taken in an Integrative or Metamodern sense, because there is a famous comment, made by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind (2012), about their constitutional divergence in regard to purity.
Haidt’s fascinating exploration of our “moral instincts” claims to have found that conservatives, typically with less formal education and living in less populated or university-dominated regions, demonstrate a wide swathe of diverse moral instincts including concerns about safety, purity, obedience, loyalty, etc. For more elite liberals, this is whittled down to just “care” and “fairness.”
Individual liberals might dislike some things, finding them gross, impure, but they do not regard disgust and impurity as immoral. They do not presume that purity must be aggressively enforced by criminalizing and punishing disgusting acts in this life (or the next).
Haidt’s research is provocative but there is a limit to this kind of analysis that emerges when we widen our “developmental lens” to include different styles of response appropriate to different layers of sociocognitive complexity. Is it really true that liberals do not treat grossness and impurity as punishable crimes? Or do modernists just do it in a manner slightly different than traditionalists?
Think about Hilary Clinton’s famous comment in regard to deplorables. Doesn’t it feel a bit like she thinks they “deserve” some “bad things”? Think about how — despite the fact that many American presidents have been war criminals, sociopaths, crooks, regressive buffoons, hypocrites and liars — that Donald J. Trump instinctively strikes so many liberals as obviously guilty because he is… gross.
Impure.
Didn’t we hear people, during Covid, suggesting that Anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics would get sick and die — as they deserved? That their disgusting ignorance and perverse perspectives required a punishment of some kind?
If we were going to undertake a more thorough study of human moral instincts, we might have to make room for subtler and more abstract forms of the desire to enforce purity and punish impurity. The difference between purity psychosis & complex purity probably exists across a plethora of levels and styles.
X. THE AFTERTHOUGHT
So there you have it. Purity is complex. And we would have to distinguish between a “purity complex” and “complex purity” in order to have a richer discussion about this topic in a developmental worldview.
We should be cautious about transporting purity ideas from material domains into psychosocial domains. We should be alert that even people who do not overtly demonize impurity may have their own covert responses in a similar vein.
And above all, wherever possible, we must keep ourselves and our culture healthy by making creative efforts to integrate diversity into new complex unities rather than throwing up our hands, hardening our hearts, and trying to resurrect a lost unity through the removal of contemporary diversity.
Originally this essay also had a lot to say about “Snapewives” and “Slenderman Proxies” (look it up) but I eventually whittled those things away. After all, all purity is maintained by the adjacency of some strangely excluded otherness…
O Sancta Simplicitas! What a strange simplification and falsification humanity lives upon! We shall never cease to marvel once we have acquired eyes for this wonder! Look how we have made everything around us so bright and free and pure and simple! How we have known how to bestow upon our senses a passport to everything superficial & upon our thoughts a divine desire for wanton risks and false conclusions! — How we have, from the very beginning, understood how to retain our delusions so as to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, frivolity, impetuosity, bravery, cheerfulness of life, so as to enjoy life!
F. Nietzsche