I was vegan for a while, and for a while I ran with an activist group. I made signs. I showed up. The group had a name that translated, roughly, as One Hand. The joke inside the group, half laughing, half not, was that the slogan was one hand against humanity. We stood in the streets and went after meat eaters, more or less. I stopped joining. It didn’t appeal to me.
I’m not telling you that to confess. I’m telling you because I’ve been inside one, and you probably have too, and the mechanism is the same everywhere it runs. You believe something fervently enough that everyone outside the belief is simply wrong. And then it gets pedantic.
When I was vegan I kept a list in a text message on my old Nokia: E-numbers, the additives that might contain insect parts. E120. E904. Somebody would offer me chewing gum, and I would take out my phone and check the gum against the list. A person being offered a piece of gum, consulting a database. And inside the group, I was one of the relaxed ones.
The more similar two groups are, the harder they attack their differences. Orthodox against non-orthodox. Rollerbladers against skateboarders. Punks against whatever the punks decided was almost-but-not-quite punk that year. The gap being small is not a mitigating factor. The gap being small is the whole point, because the gap is where rank lives.
The gap is where rank lives.
First, an absurd attention to detail. Then, superiority through the details. When your entire identity is the belief, the only way up is to hold the belief harder than the person next to you — so you stack law upon law upon law on yourself, and every new law is a rung. Deprivation becomes a badge. The suffering reads as transformation. The strictest person in the room is the holiest, and everyone knows it, and everyone is counting.
The internet calls this a purity spiral: a group outbidding itself in strictness until the mildest members are heretics and the founders are impure by their own standards. The literature on it is good. And the literature rightly assumes that the judge is also a defendant. That whoever enforces the code is climbing the same ladder, paying the same dues, bound by the same law.
In our house, the spiral ran backwards.
My mother built the strictest code I have ever lived under, and it was aimed entirely outward. Take plastic. Plastic comes from petroleum, she’d explain over coffee, and petroleum is the bodies of ancient creatures, compressed, liquified. Dinosaurs. And dinosaurs were pigs. She said it with complete calm, connecting dots anyone should see. You don’t believe me, she’d smile, patient, because she had proof. Scientists just discovered it, groundbreaking: the duck-billed dinosaurs had hooves on their feet. Hooves. And they didn’t chew their cud. Case closed. The scientists were only catching up to what we already knew.
So when my religious cousins turned up with food in plastic containers, out of a kosher kitchen any rabbi would sign off on, the containers were convicted at the molecular level.
Wine detached the soul from the drinker. A medicine derived from frogs was ruled impure while her own sister was dying. My uncle was barred from speaking to his own mother: she was impure, the code said, and speaking to her was damning his soul.
And whoever disagreed was ruled guilty. First the rabbis, over the petroleum. Then everyone with a university degree, idiots, over doctrinal gaps you’d need a microscope to see. She quoted scientists when they had hooves for her and called them idiots when they didn’t. The code climbed: kitchen, family, rabbinate, the entire educated world. Freud had a phrase for the fuel, the narcissism of small differences, but he was describing rivals. This was jurisprudence.
She quoted scientists when they had hooves for her and called them idiots when they didn’t.
And through all of it, one person never appeared on the docket.
Her own deprivation stayed optional. I watched my cousins' containers go down for petroleum, and I watched her fill the garden with plastic figurines the week a ritual wanted them. The purity that cost everyone else their kitchens, their medicine, their mothers, cost her nothing. The strictest code in the house had exactly one exemption, and the exemption was its author.
One judge, universal jurisdiction, sovereign immunity.
That’s the domestic variant. A spiral needs everyone falling. This needed only a bench.
It wasn’t a spiral at all. It was a courtroom, and she was never once the defendant.
Convenient like that.
The Keeper of the Mundane · A memoir.
My grandmother’s stories. My mother’s cosmology. My record of both.
Instagram · YouTube · KeeperOfTheMundane.com
Personal essay. Events as I lived them and as family members have sworn to them. No one here is named. People shown are generated images, not real footage. The judgments are mine.