bct
1mo ago
Purity spirals are driven by individuals taking an opportunity to improve their own position.
Say there's somebody in your volunteer radical labour union who is an excellent organizer: he's likeable, outgoing, genuinely committed to the cause, and works a blue collar job where he actually puts into practice the organization's techniques and principles. (This is in direct contrast with most of the membership, who are grad students LARPing as workers.)
This guy is accused of mild sexual misconduct. Is the organization best served by a. immediately expelling him, b. investigating the incident then deciding what to do, or c. trying to find a compromise that ensures he can continue to do his good work?
Answer: what's best for the organization is totally irrelevant. Somebody is going to take position A. They're going to win, because the organization has no defenses against it - this is a question of good and evil, not of tradeoffs. Anybody on side A wins and gains a crumb of status and maybe power; anybody on side B or C loses.
Part of the reason that the radical left is so susceptible to this is that everybody has the authority to start this process, but there is often nobody with the authority to say "we're not doing that".
Often the offense is something less consequential, like "is not fully up-to-date with pronoun etiquette" or "works with fossil fuels".
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