PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to the structure of purity-seeking veganism, arguing that it constitutes a recognizable wrong attractor W_ PV in ethical-alimentary configuration space. The paper makes a careful distinction between two forms of veganism: harm-reduction veganism, a genuine, calibrated, and defensible ethical practice grounded in the real and documented harms of industrial animal agriculture, which is not the wrong attractor analyzed here; and purity veganism, the belief that a clean position is available—that one can eat without killing, live without taking life, maintain hands unstained by the food web's structural violence.
This belief is the wrong attractor: not because its ethical motivation is invalid (it is not) but because it is false, and the falseness generates systematic displacement from the ground state S^0 of calibrated, honest, and grieving participation in the food web. We prove nine propositions characterizing the geometry of W_ PV: the nature of purity-seeking as a form of death-avoidance, the infinite regress of boundary extension that deepens the basin without approaching its impossible goal, and the foreclosure of grief and gratitude that constitutes the basin's most damaging feature.
We examine the ecological reality—agricultural veganism is not clean; field clearing and monocrop agriculture kill millions of small animals annually; the food web is inescapably violent—and draw on the Jain tradition's honest acknowledgment that perfect non-harm is impossible, and on indigenous hunting traditions that achieve greater ethical sophistication through grief and gratitude than through abstention.
The return condition is not abstention from animal products per se but the abandonment of the false comfort of clean hands: eat with full awareness of what was taken, who died, and why; grieve the taking; be grateful for it; be changed by it. This is S^0_ eat: calibrated grateful eating.