Is it time to purge purity?

All of our lives we draw lines, some very clearly and some not. One of these lines that we draw so very often, that's anything but thin, defines the sacred on one side, and profane on the other. Every realm of ideas - religion, nationalism, identity, and so many more - that we engage in passionately has this line that demarcates these two. The only exceptions: a precious few that dare to walk where angels fear to tread (a fear that defines the rest)

Sacred: Untouchable, holy, a god-level we will never reach which we should aspire to and revere. 

Profane: Having the audacity to attempt to reach the sacred level and anything remotely beyond that line of thought and action

In usage

If you grew up obsessed with a particular band, you will always think their music is "sacred" i.e. untouchable, even if the latest one on the scene is far better by a far stretch of the imagination. Any attempt to decry your favourite band is plain sacrilege, at least to you. 

The above example is a harmless one. Extend it to religion, family, culture, identity, and politics. You have people raging at each other because one man's worship is another man's poison. We all just happen to share the same breathing space which makes directly opposing beliefs destructive by themselves. Ask people to look beyond them and it's sacrilege they're ready to avenge. 

What we can all agree on is that any form of sacredness is not worth its weight in blood, despite people's willingness to disagree with that statement. So, if you are so bold, take your most sacred value and take a walk with me into its backdoor. Wherever you got it from, I can predict a few things about it immediately. I don't even have to navigate into your head to figure it out. 

1. It is an arbitrary idea that has been planted in your head. Reason through it and you will only be able to do that successfully with circular logic i.e. X is sacred because our base assumption/argument is that it simply is.
2. Behind that assumption/argument/belief/teaching is a power structure steeped in a history between years and centuries i.e. no one knows why it is sacred but it just is

Let's digress a bit to talk about the story of power:

What's been told to us is taught by us to be followed and only be taught further. No questions asked about where it came from, whether it adds up, and what purpose it serves. All we know is that there is a design to follow and that it is infallible. There is no criticism allowed. The lucky ones end up on the better side of the design - at the expense of the rest

With our habits, it's passed down. 

With our mindlessness, it brings along its flaws. 

With our privilege, we multiply those flaws, setup a people divide, and make it a them-us thing - as if our left hand knows not what the right does. 

When this happens for a few generations, and everyone does what they're told, the design becomes fact and goes unquestioned. You've just met power: when one group of people have had the privilege of being told one thing at the expense of the rest, start to own it, and make it their way of life, while the rest linger behind eating the scraps that are left behind, doing the same thing without choice.

Power impregnates people's minds and, therefore, their ideas which they freely pass down from one role to the next keeping the line of succession. It soon gets written in stone, becomes "respectable", creates respected institutions, turns into identity, and births minds full of it in people who are wired to protect it (power) with their lives from their gut - making them victims. It takes forms of all evils including racism, xenophobia, gender bias, patriarchy, abuse, and others, even making up a few more so that it has an ego trip at will. 

Lack of power does the opposite of all this: becomes disrespected, turns into identity that is basically constant self-devaluation. These people eat crumbs of the above and get used to it. Now many generations and few centuries down, it's the unquestioned norm. Shame, internal undeservingness, and acceptance of such fate are how it shows in their lives.

The world is and the way it runs is an overall statement of power - every grimy detail. Those who embody this power for no fault of their own, of course, happen to sit on the throne. Unfortunately,  as it turns out, they had no hand in this conspiracy but they make up the structure. It happens to feed their identity for no fault of their own. It's like a bug you have to kill because it's not good for you, but you're too heartless to want to harm it. It's catch 22. If you avoid it, you're absconding responsibility and sending the world into a bigger rabbit hole - but you're just not being pinned to the wall to do. So, also, privilege! 

It's a very common situation that people conveniently ignore. The next step - which everyone avoids - is undoing this monopoly. 

Power is currency-less. You can't take from the rich and give to the poor because there is no physical cash stash or massive trust fund that we can use. Privilege is measured by what people have that they didn't earn that other people don't have that they may never be able to earn - wider knowledge through exposure, a guaranteed roof on their head, a pillow to fall back on if they had to, easy security, access to resources, among some. 

Undoing the monopoly has a fallback. Power won't go out quietly. It will go out kicking and screaming. It's a headless, heartless, mindless monster that needs to be betrayed by the blinded loyal army that feeds off it in plain sight. 

Either power is you, or it is not you. Either case, you know it, and you're the only key to this victory. Also, you are responsible for the power you embody, even not of your own choice. We don't exist in bubbles, nor do our privileges and those who lack them. 

For the privileged among you who are brave enough to want to change the world like this, you need all the courage you can get. It will overturn your whole world as it is. A lot of things you sincerely treasure, are routine and comfortably accustomed to, and base your family and cultural pride on, and much more is at stake. You won't have as much of that comfort anymore - the kind of stuff that you thrived on blindly. You'd be slowly but surely pulling the plug on your entire life privilege. You will most likely break apart, disintegrate, and cease to exist. Unless you adapt to lesser, more realistic privileges, all the king's horses and all the king's men wouldn't be able to put you back together again because that privilege will be given to those whom it was taken from in the first place and lost to you.

For the consciously powerful and proud, it's a daily ego massage they can't exist without. For the ignorantly powerful and naive, it's just about falling in line. Understand that power encodes you to invoke everything it can to protect itself. Once you stop being the host, the virus will cease to exist. With the sacred and the profane, like other things, power dictates the rules so that the rules benefit it and to hell with the rest. It controls things with completely arbitrary ideas of sacredness and profanity with sex, food, self, and anything that doesn't prop them up as the average joe but makes them separate and better. 

Just to not sound stupid, there is one well-explained reason for all this - purity: this idea of an unadulterated version of things. It tells you that there is an original, clean version with everything else being an abomination, a proper version with the rest all fakes, a right version with the rest all wrong, a good version with the rest all bad... you get the drift. Power needs an excuse so it makes one up. 

When purity is applied to physical things like oil, food, wood, and the like, it is an objective statement. It informs people of an actual physical quality of the product and passes no judgment on the thing itself i.e. it does not become less or more worthy by that statement. It just has a higher worth i.e. price, because it is objectively better. It also holds good to the claimed originality of it. 

When power applies purity to people and related things, both the objective and original tests fail. It creates a selfish and self-beneficial story about the original form and uses its influence to make it stick. With time, that comes to be known as the real story. It also makes some people lesser than others (again for its own selfish benefit) like they are physical products that are to be bought and sold as commodities. 

Unfortunately, the tests only pass when we can, both, objectively prove the original form and justify treating someone lesser than anyone else as if they're on sale, without only using supporting theories. We are all equal and must be treated so. We could be different, have different strengths, and play different roles but humanity is not on sale just yet, or ever - not even worth low enough to be tagged with a different price for some or most. 

When power sells its story of being better and supreme, it can be convincing (unless it doesn't have to be and has all effective control of the narrative). It will offer the argument of worth with a twist. Some of its parameters may add up to, indeed, be 'better' than others by coincidence which is not common e.g. casting sex as 'pure' and only within marriage when it is well understood even otherwise, or eventually learned, that meaningless sex is not the best idea as it is and that the one we have of it must be one that plays out consistently, giving us happier consistency. There's also the sense that sex (the whole idea, not just the act) is not a switch that you just turn on when you happen to get married. The sexual purity could possibly better be an advisory, which people find the truth about objectively, instead of it being a belief that has major roots in power and control. The same common sense could extend to methods of parental control or whether nonvegetarians should give up meat because it has been that way forever. 

Power holds the presumptions, makes the assumptions, and decides the narrative with circular logic. That's how the clever, greedy, headless chicken that power is has used purity, the sacred, and the profane to have the world spinning around its finger. What do you say we pull the plug, for the good of us all? Let's purge purity, kill power, and seek truth without their unnecessary burdens.