I’ve seen something on YouTube recently; a short fragment from the newest Harry Potter movies with young Grindelwald and Dumbledore. I actually watched only the first movie from the series but in this fragment the Kirin, or Qilin, bowed to Dumbledore, which is supposed to mean he’s of pure heart. People were complaining that it’s not right because Dumbledore was all kinds of flawed, and the authors missed the opportunity for the Qilin to bow to that fat baker muggle guy because he’s supposedly of pure heart.

That’s how people usually think, and they are very much mistaken. You see, people think that poor and powerless people are pure, and rich and powerful are sinful, but if you want to know how pure someone is, give him money and power. Also, I would add, if you want to know how pure you are, practice energetic yoga.

Dumbledore was the most powerful wizard of his era, from a wealthy family, and he made mistakes and corrected them and faced the consequences. He is not pure in some naive way, in which someone is pure because they simply lacked the opportunity or incentive to fuck up. He’s pure because he had to face and overcome his flawed and sinful nature. Purity that wasn’t fought for and gained at a great price might be lost as easily as it was attained.

Revolutions show what horrors poor self-righteous people are able to commit when given an opportunity. We’ve seen how corrupt people can become when they happen to attain money and power. It’s not realistic to assume that a pure powerless person will remain pure if suddenly given all the opportunities for sin, debauchery and evil. Moral purity isn’t something you get to be born with. It’s something you need to develop in face of temptation, error and personal weakness. If we assume that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, imagine how much of a struggle Dumbledore had to face and overcome in order to be this morally clean, while being so incredibly powerful? People think babies are pure, but Hitler was a baby, too. That’s not how that works. To be pure isn’t to never fuck up. It’s to fuck up, see that it’s wrong, say “never again”, and then consistently work on not fucking up again. I don’t believe in the concept of being sinless from birth; I believe in the concept of experiencing failure, experiencing the consequences, understanding the principles, and then working hard to overcome weakness. Only then you can have purity.

You can talk about purity in the context of butterflies, for instance, but if they lack any capacity to be otherwise, is it really of any value? Dumbledore is something like a vegetarian tiger, or a super venomous snake that refuses to bite even when provoked. It is in his nature to be Hitler, and yet he fights it and does good instead. That, I think, is more purity of heart than being pure simply because you lack the means and incentive to do evil.

If your instinct is to drink nectar from flowers and fly around, it is perfectly unsurprising if you hadn’t caused any great tragedy with your actions. However, what virtue is there in it?