"We have some bad hombres here, and we're going to get them out."
The guy has an uncanny ability to land a phrase. In that 2016 debate, "bad hombres" gave Americans a clear picture: the bad people aren't us, they come from over there. And if we could stop them from coming, send them back, or if they would stay over there, then we'd be pure.
As a personal instinct, purity can be a path to a moral life. Keeping the bad out keeps our consciences uncorrupted. And that's good, as far as it goes, which to me is for individual consciences. As individuals, we are better off without the pernicious influences of mind-altering substances, prurient materials, and other vices. But I'm not sure the purity instinct is all that great for groups of people. Institutions, families, and whole societies can't be managed in the same way: our evils tend not to be on the other side of the border or deportable. The baddies are among us and are indistinguishable from us.
The purity instinct says the opposite. It says those who look different from us or disagree with us ought to be separated and fought with. A glance a European history show show strong this impulse can be: we fought centuries of wars over which religion we'd practice. This seems insane to the contemporary western mind, as Chadwick Stokes sings in The General:
I have seen the others, and I have discovered
That this fight is not worth fighting
But we still divide and fight, just with less militarism. Any activist group or church denomination saves its worst venom not for those who completely disagree, but for those who generally agree, departing only on one crucial point. We even have a phrase for this—the purity test.
Any recent social history has to remark on the totalizing ideologies fractionalizing society. Ours is an age of purity tests and perpetual divisions and ostracizations and boycotts, from the resistance left's list of things you can't buy to the right wing's anti-Bud Light or Target flare ups. We're great a finding political codings in which Home Improvement store you shop at and ensuring that we fit right in with whatever yard signs are in our neighborhoods. All this running around and posturing lets some real bad hombres in.
For decades, the religious have thought that the bad hombres were infecting their institutions. If they could just keep out the wrong kind of believers, say those who vote the wrong way or ordain women or who are concerned about sexual abuse coverups, then all will be pure and good. Among Southern Baptists, a religion Harold Bloom interestingly noted as uniquely American and not historically Christian, this happened in the '70s and seems to be happening again today. If we take the older timeline as instructional, it was the very person who engineering the SBC's theological and political turn to the reactionary right who was perhaps its worst abuser. Paul Pressler ruined the lives of those whom he abused at the same time, according to the reactionary right, he "saved" the SBC. The people following his playbook today continue to aid and abet and ignore abuse, even as they are intent on keeping their religion politically pure.
I think it's a similar impulse in the land of technology. Only in this case, its a rebellious, left-coded impulse: we need to keep the "man" and control out of the way of the savant engineers and their noble attempts to transform society. Technopoly makes all kinds of allowances for creative destruction, idiot geniuses, and hoodied coders, marveling at their ability to do great, virtual things. If we can just all be like a good engineer, or at least stay out of his way, then all will be pure and good. The story goes something like: genius person creates great tech and launches a company, as the company grows, someone decides it's time to bring in the "adults" or "business types," after that, inevitably, the genius idea begins to slowly die. Keeping out the "adults" or "business types" or "lawyers" or "accountants" is a mantra. Silicon Valley values nothing like how long a company pretend to be a noble startup, making their Steve Jobs-ian dent in the universe. The myth of tech bro purity hides endemic poor behavior, from misogyny to fraud. The myth lasts right up until the blood testing company is exposed as a fraud or the Adderal-addicted crypto genius ends up in prison for money laundering.
The bad hombres aren't out there. It's the people on the inside—starting with the one in the mirror—that we should be worried about.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Reading
He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations.
Paul Pressler helped ordain the marriage between white evangelicals and the Republican Party, all while accusations of sexual abuse piled up. Right-wing groups are still using his political playbook.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Prison Experiment
His life behind bars and his desperate campaign to get free.
‘All I Have Is the Power to Talk and Be Heard’
Tucker Carlson on pitying Donald Trump, never listening to podcasts, and planning a new political party—while selling you nicotine pouches.