Editors and reviewers supposedly purify science by stripping out rationality, which they call speculation, and redesigning someone else's research, which they know nothing about. To leave their indelible mark on someone else's work, they redesign sentences, reversing subject and predicate and soforth making the author look like an idiot. Another example is removing spam from search engines. The spam removers spend their lives developing rules, and they all have different rules. To follow the wrong rules is to spam.
Bureaucracies are of course major purifying devices.
There is no expense to great or quagmire too deep for perfecting the social order. But notice in all examples the extreme double standard. The peer reviewers wouldn't think of questioning what big name scientists or institutions submit to them. The spam removers sell their top positions for cash, swamp their pages with advertisements and promote professional gimmickry like frames and scripts. The bureaucrats look blindly upon sources of power and focus their attack on the public or vulnerable businesses.