on purity culture
I wrote this over at micro.blog earlier today:
Progress isn’t about perfection. Purity culture and holier-than-thou posturing slows progress. I’ve left scenes because leaders spent too much time arguing about whose way was purer and not enough time actually doing anything. Progress happens inch by inch not mile by mile.
There was a reason I wrote that, and if someone feels called out by my words and wants to clap back, that's fine (but they shouldn't do either). My point is simply that if you want to make the world a better place, doing it is better than talking about how best to do it.
If you want to make the world a better place and you meet up with other people who also want to make the world a better place, disagreements are going to happen. Sometimes they're productive and lead to better ideas and more impact. A lot of the time, though, disagreements are about little more than a few egos battling for supremacy.1 I get why people do this, and I get how the people who do this are, in their own way, still trying to do good and fight the good fight. But purity culture sucks. It suggests there's only one way and that all ways that aren't that one way aren't just ideas of lower quality, they're straight-up wrong.
TL;DR there's always more than one way. There's always more than one way to enter a problem and more than one angle from which to attack a problem. There's always someone smarter than you or at least someone whose solution is better than yours given various variables. The quicker you figure this out and make peace with it, the more world-bettering you'll end up doing.2
Spending time talking shit about people trying to achieve progress the best way they know how or the best way they are able to in that moment doesn't make you better. It makes your progressive movement turn into bitchy back-and-forth conversations about nothing.
Footnotes:
1 I'm not saying I'm better. I'm not. I've been one of those egos before and the cause was worse for it.
2 No I don't have stats and graphs and peer-reviewed studies that prove this, I've just been alive for a long time.