Dirty Mind, Clean Conscience

The power of illicit thoughts – how to survive your own mind without getting cancelled, excommunicated or institutionalised

This essay lives behind a paywall not because it is more valuable, but because it is more exposed. It enters territory that is easily misread, deliberately misused, or flattened into controversy. What I share here is risk, not branding. These are the kinds of thoughts that require a quiet room, not a public square. This is not secrecy, but intimacy, writing without flinching, and trusting that if you’ve chosen to step inside, you’re doing so with curiosity, nuance, and a mind of your own.

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Even under torture, I wouldn’t voice certain thoughts, not out of guilt, not because they are criminal, cruel, or actionable, though I won’t pretend my imagination always chooses the morally upright path, but because they violate an inner decorum I was raised to perform almost unconsciously, a code of mental hygiene inherited from religion, schooling, and the quiet disapprovals of dinner-table silence. Thoughts like imagining someone I like being hit by a car just so I could cry without restraint, or envying a friend’s grief because it gave her the social permission to disappear. These are not polite thoughts, but they are not pointless either. They are the compost heap of the psyche… ugly, fermenting, often foul-smelling, but essential for anything fertile to grow. And I no longer believe in discarding what could still be transformed.

If you have never fantasised about someone dropping dead mid-sentence simply to be spared the soul erosion of their voice, you either lie or you are so dissociated that even your therapist has fallen asleep. Most of us run a clandestine mental frequency, an illicit, unregulated broadcast where intrusive fantasies, absurd violence, sacrilegious punchlines, and inadmissible desires play in constant rotation. Is this evidence of moral failure or emotional instability? No! It is the mind flexing its imaginative muscle, stress-testing the bounds of what it means to be a self with instincts, limits, and too much social grace to interrupt a conversation we have outgrown. These thoughts are not flaws in the architecture of being. They are the structural reinforcements hidden inside it.

But try admitting this in the current climate of moral performativity, where even your subconscious is expected to be PR-friendly, and you’ll find yourself spiritually audited before you have finished your sentence. We have reached a point where thought is mistaken for intention, and intention mistaken for action. Private interiority is now regarded with suspicion, as if the very fact that you could imagine something taboo is proof that you are already halfway to doing it. We’ve begun to treat the imagination as a crime scene. The cultural mood demands pre-emptive purity: cancel the thought before the mob cancels you, disavow the impulse before it names you. But this model is neither sustainable nor psychologically honest. If our inner lives were policed with the same rigidity as our public personas, we would all be spiritually bankrupt and creatively neutered by the age of thirty.

The philosopher Georges Bataille, who famously masturbated on the graves of saints, presumably so the rest of us wouldn’t have to, understood this well. For him, transgression wasn’t a betrayal of the sacred; it was how we reached it. Not through action, necessarily, but through the symbolic encounter with what we have been taught to banish. The taboo, the unthinkable, the profane… these are not foreign to our moral selves, but fundamental to their formation. The capacity to imagine what we will never do is what separates ethical reflection from mechanical obedience. And obedience, let’s be clear, is not virtue! It’s just the fear of punishment dressed up as righteousness.