Purity Spiral

Purity spiral is a term for a form of infighting between activists or members of a victim group in which participants seek to outdo one another in zealotry, a self-reinforcing feedback loop sometimes called moral outbidding. According to the commentator Gavin Haynes, a purity spiral occurs when a community's primary focus becomes the implementation of a single value that has no upper limit and no agreed interpretation, and the term has been applied to historical episodes including the French Revolution, the Moscow Trials, McCarthyism in the United States and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.