Maxxing is not a natural feature of human life; though most of human history it could barely exist. Take the early Middle Ages. Chris Wickham estimates that in the period 400-800 AD, around ninety percent of the European population were rural peasants, and almost everything they consumed was produced inside the household. [...] In such a situation, maxxing is almost impossible. It doesn’t matter what you think about women; you can’t reduce yourself to a single principle when you need to be able to farm crops, build and thatch a house, sew clothes, and occasionally die in someone else’s aristocratic squabble. You would starve long before you managed to extend your maxximand anywhere near infinity.
The only exception was a dedicated caste of pietymaxxers. These were, like all maxxers, celibate. In the early part of this period they would usually hermitmog the sincels by starving themselves in the desert; eventually this was formalised into a network of monastic hype houses. Throughout the medieval period, pietymaxxers would swear off food, whip themselves, or become anchorites, walled like a fig wasp into a tiny cell attached to their local church. It makes sense that this would have its germ in religion; if a maxximand is a principle extended until it resembles a god, then God can equally be described as a maxximand that’s lost all qualities except infinity. But the clergy could never really sustain it; the infrastructure wasn’t in place yet. Instead, there was a well-established monastic treadmill, in which new orders would spring up, committed to poverty and the mortification of the flesh, but within a generation they’d all be rapacious landlords drinking from silver goblets. There’s nothing more repulsive than a larping maxxer. Clergymen who’d decided to start living more holistically were frequently massacred in chiliastic peasant revolts.
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