When I first encountered the No True Scotsman fallacy in the mid to late 2000s (roughly the same period as its equally smug companion, the Courtier’s Reply), in a blog post by P Z Myers, I understood it as a problem of bad reasoning. A logical sleight of hand. A way of protecting beliefs from falsification by endlessly refining who counts as a “true” believer. At the time, I also believed I understood where this tendency came from.
Religion.
More specifically, organised religion, and even more specifically, the Abrahamic kind. The constant calibration of purity. The endless sorting of the faithful from the insufficiently faithful. The sense that everyone else has misunderstood the doctrine, the practice, the spirit. There is no such thing as a pure Muslim, no perfect Christian, no ideal believer, except, curiously, the person speaking at that moment. It always struck me as faintly tragic, occasionally dangerous, and often absurd. A theology of permanent disqualification.
For a long time, I assumed this was largely where such thinking lived.
Then I paid closer attention.
Because once you step outside the frame of monotheism, you do not step outside the logic. The grammar remains intact. The tone softens, the metaphors change, the gods retreat, multiply, or dissolve, but the ladder stays firmly in place. Traditions that describe themselves as older, subtler, more holistic, more humane are not immune. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Hinduism (pick your poison, or your philosophy) all produce their own hierarchies of correctness, insight, detachment, and authenticity. The same quiet certainty that others have missed something essential. The same conviction that purity is real, attainable, and, conveniently, already possessed.
At some point, it became clear that this was not a religious problem at all.
It was a human one.
And then came the more uncomfortable realisation.
This logic does not disappear when we move into politics, ethics, or progressive thought. It does not vanish when the subject is feminism, caste, patriarchy, atheism, secularism, democracy, freedom, justice, equality, or privilege. It simply changes costume. The old rituals are abandoned, but new ones emerge. The old scriptures are discarded, but new vocabularies take their place. The tests of purity remain as exacting as ever.
Look around.
No one is a real feminist. No one is truly anti-patriarchy. Everyone, sooner or later, is revealed to be a product of patriarchy. Especially those fighting it. In fact, the more passionately one fights it, the more carefully one must be examined for internalised residues. The accusation becomes unfalsifiable. Patriarchy explains everything, including resistance to it.
The same structure repeats itself elsewhere.
No one is genuinely anti-caste. No one understands caste deeply enough. No one’s opposition is sufficiently rigorous, sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently uncontaminated by privilege. No one is properly secular. No one is authentically liberal. No one believes in democracy in the right way. No one understands freedom without abusing it. No one argues for equality without overlooking something. No one has truly interrogated their privilege, because interrogation itself becomes evidence of flawed understanding.
Everyone fails. Constantly.
Not because the ideals are wrong. But because the standard is no longer the ideal. The standard is purity. Perfection.
And that is unattainable. By design. But only for others. Never for the speaker, for some reason.
At some point, one begins to notice something else. The people making these judgements are not strangers. They are not zealots on the margins. They are people I socialise with. People I empathise with. People I broadly agree with. People who locate themselves on the side of the oppressed, the marginalised, the excluded. Even people who are themselves oppressed. Even people who are themselves wounded by patriarchy, caste, religion, and power.
Perhaps especially them.
Because suffering does not abolish hierarchy. It merely rearranges it.
What emerges is a strange inversion. Those who speak most loudly against caste begin to reproduce its logic. Those who rail most fiercely against inherited hierarchies quietly construct new ones. Not of birth, but of insight. Not of ritual, but of language. Not of ancestry, but of moral calibration.
This new hierarchy revolves around a different kind of purity.
It is about standing one rung higher. About knowing something others do not. About having already arrived at the right conclusions, while the rest are still “learning”. About endless instruction, endless correction, endless disqualification, and instant cancellation, not for having done something wrong, unethical, immoral, or even faintly unacceptable, but for not being pure. About insisting that the system must be dismantled, while remaining curiously invested in one’s position within it.
I do not exempt myself from this observation. I cannot. The mirror would be dishonest if it did.
Because the temptation is universal. The comfort of believing that while everyone else is compromised, confused, insufficiently aware, there is at least one vantage point that is clean. One position that is untainted. One consciousness that has finally escaped history, power, bias, and contradiction.
And, almost without exception, it is the position we currently occupy.
That, perhaps, is the final joke. And the final warning.
The moment we become convinced that we are the only ones who truly understand freedom, justice, equality, secularism, feminism, or democracy is the moment we have recreated the very structure we claim to oppose. We have not abolished hierarchy. We have merely renamed it.
And when the renaming is complete, when the dust settles, when everyone else has been found wanting, there is only one word left for what we have become.
We are the Brahmins.
And our Brahminism is about a different kind of purity.
But at the end of the day, it is Brahminism all the same, with only one perfect, pure being, the Brahma: Me.
