In this episode of House of Life, we explore the topic of purity testing to try to understand why the world seems to be increasingly polarised, and what motivates polarising behaviour. And it all begins with an unexpected story from Asim’s wife, Zanete.
Zanete, is a knitwear designer and she created a pattern called the Children of Gaza sweater. She then ran the Brighton Marathon to raise money for War Child, got injured before the finish line, but still raised £5,000 for charity and was, for a brief moment, riding a wave of genuine warmth from her online community of 200,000 Instagram followers.
Three days later, sitting on a plane with intermittent wifi, she started getting messages. People were calling her a Nazi. A fascist. A white supremacist. She was losing followers in a visible stream, with her reputation and livelihood seeming to evaporate in real time.
The source of the outrage: she had appeared on a small knitting podcast — a few hundred views, two people talking about a mystery knit-along pattern she’d designed — hosted by a man who, it had been decided by an influential Instagram account, was right-wing. By appearing alongside him, Jeanette had, in the logic of online purity culture, revealed her true colours.
What Is Purity Testing?
This experience lodged in Asim’s mind not just as a family crisis but as a clarifying lens on something much bigger. Purity testing, he argues, is the engine of polarisation — and once you’ve seen it, you see it everywhere.
His definition is deliberately simple: purity testing is just deciding who is in and who is out. It’s not about fixing problems. It’s not about changing behaviour. It’s about drawing and enforcing a line.
“It’s deciding, are you in this group or out of this group? And that’s all I think of when I think of purity testing. Even when I’ve been accused of greenwashing, it’s not because the purity tester particularly cares about solving any problems.”
The consequence is that the fuzzy middle disappears. Between any two political positions, any two communities, any two camps, there is always a broad, messy middle of people who partly agree with both sides, who haven’t made up their minds, who hold contradictory views, who are just getting on with their lives. Purity testing firms that middle into a wall. Then into a moat. Then into a chasm. Until the camps on either side seem like different species who could never possibly speak to each other.
Tom’s instinct is to reach for a darker analogy: “It sounds awfully similar to me like a key technique in cult mind control. Arbitrary tests of obedience to prove that you’re in the group. And if you’re just a little bit disobedient, then you’re a traitor and you’ve got to get in line or they’re going to kick you out.”
A subset of knitters following a knitting influencer, he suggests gently, might not realise they’ve joined a cult. But the structural dynamics are the same.
Who Benefits?
The episode’s sharpest question is also the one that reframes everything: if purity testing doesn’t actually solve the problems it claims to care about, who does it serve?
Asim’s experience with the Children of Gaza sweater is a case in point. Zanete designed the sweater explicitly to raise money for children affected by the conflict. She raised thousands of pounds. The online mob that called her a fascist, ostensibly because of concern about the very same children, did not raise money for those children. They did not change any policy. They did not build any bridges. They lost her several thousand Instagram followers — which means less income, which means less capacity to donate in future.
“The activity of purity testing from that example doesn’t even result in the positive outcome that you want to have. It actually results in the opposite.”
So who wins? Tom’s answer lands with some weight. The people who benefit from a polarised society are the people who need you divided and distracted — politicians who want a loyal base rather than an engaged citizenry, online influencers who need a tribe rather than a conversation, and anyone with power who would rather you argue with your neighbours than look at what they’re doing.
“Divide and conquer,” Asim says. “That is a literal military strategy. On many different fronts.”
Free-Floating Anxiety and the Promise of a Pill
How does a society become this susceptible? Tom reaches back to Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist whose concept of “free-floating anxiety” describes how populations become vulnerable to polarising forces.
The conditions are familiar: economic uncertainty, the threat of war, environmental disaster on the horizon, the existential dread of new technology. Not acute threats you can fight, but diffuse, ambient ones that hover over daily life without offering any clear target. When people carry that kind of anxiety without anywhere to put it, they become desperate for someone to point them at a persecutor and promise salvation.
“What they’re looking for is a pill,” Tom says — and then ties it back to the previous episode’s geoengineering discussion. The same dynamic that makes someone want to chemically patch a planetary crisis rather than change behaviour makes someone want a simple enemy rather than sit with complexity.
Reform UK’s landslide in the recent UK council elections is the obvious live example. Asim’s response to it is instructive: rather than dismiss the result, he asked an AI to steel-man the Reform position. What came back surprised him. Nationalising utilities. Policies that sounded, stripped of the tribal branding, like things people across the political spectrum might actually support.
“I like a lot of this,” Asim admits, somewhat to his own alarm.
The point isn’t to endorse Reform. It’s to notice that “populist” has itself become a purity-testing term — a way of marking someone’s views as unengageable without having to engage with them. And that, as Tom drily notes, is “a bit weird” in the context of democracy, where being popular is ostensibly the point.
Darryl Davis Has 200 KKK Robes in His Wardrobe
If purity testing is the problem, what’s the solution? Asim went looking for evidence that the obvious answer — actually talking to people you disagree with — has ever worked at scale.
He found Darryl Davis. Davis is a Black American blues musician who played with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, and who spent 30 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. More than 200 people left the Klan because of his relationship with them and he always keeps their robes. He has a wardrobe full of them.
His opening line, every single time is apparently, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”
And crucially: he refused to do any of this except face to face.
Asim’s second example is Nelson Mandela, who after 27 years in prison emerged and negotiated directly with the people who had imprisoned him. “Today we would call that platforming the apartheid,” Asim observes. The logic of purity testing would have demanded he refuse to engage. Instead he ended apartheid.
What both cases share, beyond moral courage, is the willingness to be physically present with the other person. To look them in the eye. Tom has found this in his own life — meeting someone he fundamentally disagrees with, preparing the argument he’s going to make, arriving in the room and finding that something just... softens.
“Everything changes when you look somebody in the eye. You might still be really, really pissed off with them, but everything changes.”
Online, that moment never comes. You type it out and hit enter and walk away.
Thoughts and Actions Are Not the Same Thing
One important distinction the episode draws, quietly but firmly: there is a difference between someone who has done something harmful and someone who merely thinks something you disagree with.
Asim’s wife’s crime, by the logic of her critics, was proximity — appearing alongside someone whose views someone else had deemed unacceptable. She hadn’t done anything. She had knitted, and talked about knitting, with a man who held different political opinions. The moral framework that treats that as equivalent to active harm is, Asim argues, both intellectually incoherent and practically counterproductive.
This is not an argument for refusing to push back on genuine harm. It’s an argument for maintaining the distinction — because when everything becomes equivalent, when appearing on a podcast with someone is the same as endorsing their worst views, and endorsing their worst views is the same as committing atrocities, the scale collapses and loses all meaning. And a world where Nazi means anyone who once talked to someone with different opinions is a world in which the word no longer means anything at all.
The Drama Triangle, and the Problem with Heroes
Tom offers a framework near the episode’s end that is worth sitting with: the Drama Triangle. In almost every conflict — personal, professional, political, online — three roles emerge. The victim, whose suffering is being invoked. The persecutor, who is blamed for that suffering. And the saviour, who swoops in to rescue the victim and, in doing so, claims the most power of all.
The saviour cannot exist without the other two. Which means that anyone positioning themselves as a hero has a structural incentive to maintain both the victim’s suffering and the persecutor’s threat. The drama triangle doesn’t resolve conflict. It feeds on it.
Asim’s conclusion is the episode’s most subversive: “The problem is heroes.”
The people doing the quiet, unglamorous work of genuine change — raising money, teaching, building, negotiating — don’t present themselves as heroes. Asim mentions a friend who has spent years running maths and philosophy Olympiads for Palestinian children, has a Peace Garden named after him, and manages to mention none of this in any of his professional bios. The people who announce themselves as champions of a cause are, more often than not, feeding the dynamic they claim to oppose.
The Slow Work
The episode doesn’t end with a tidy solution, because there isn’t one. But it arrives somewhere more honest than despair.
Tom’s view, which Asim finds both daunting and clarifying, is that beneath all the specific crises — climate, AI, geopolitics, economics — the deeper variable is the collective state of human consciousness. Solve the policies without changing the people and the cycle will simply restart, because we will recreate our inner world in the outer one, at scale, as we always have.
The free will aspect is this: every person who does even a little work on themselves — the shadow work, the self-reflection, the willingness to sit with discomfort and not project it outward — changes, in some small way, every interaction they subsequently have. It ripples. Slowly. Almost invisibly. But it ripples.
The fate aspect is that we are, as a civilisation, somewhere in a cycle. Things fall apart so they can be rebuilt. The question is what kind of people are doing the rebuilding when it’s time.
In the meantime: talk to people you disagree with. In person, if you can. Listen more than you argue. Notice when you’re positioning yourself as a saviour. Ask yourself which role in the drama triangle you’re playing — and whether you’re willing to step out of it.
And maybe, if someone you know gets called a Nazi for appearing on a knitting podcast, tell them they’re not alone.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever changed your mind — or changed someone else’s — through actual conversation rather than online argument? Where do you see the drama triangle playing out in your own life? And do you think there’s a meaningful difference between engaging with someone’s ideas and platforming them?
Leave us a comment, and if this one resonated, please share it with someone who might need it.
