Purity

Seems to me purity plays a large role in how we evaluate our own acts, in real time, and how we evaluate (also in real time) other people's actions toward us or intrinsically.

Did they have the appropriate purity to act as we think they acted?

Did we have the appropriate purity to partake in our own behaviors and feel good (guilt-free) about them?

Do we have a higher stake in the arena of purity on balance than others?  Do we think we're better because we're somehow more pure?  Or do we think that more pure is simply better, period.

We certainly capitulate reason to nostalgia and sentimentality frequently enough for me to feel that we have a reason for doing so, and I often reflect that our reason is our own supposed purity.

And I'm not even talking about purity as a modifier, although I suppose it would fall in line with the above, and our general ordering of things.

To wit: We don't necessarily like standards that are applied to us from someone else, but we all, and I earnestly believe this, hold ourselves to some standards, whatever they might be.  And, if that's true, if standards are out there, lurking, universal, implacable but different, some highly explicit and some so implicit that actions are taken on the backs of the rugged beasts even when the mere fact of the standard is not recognized (that it needs food, that it bucks, that it sleeps, that it breathes man, and that it has lice), it means only one thing: we're all blazing fucking idiots and it is fundamentally useless to think about how to stop conflict, in whatever incarnation we often do, and we should somehow become much more direct and much less worried about offending others (because if we're all direct, and not worried, then I have a feeling that average offense and average umbrage will actually decrease).