Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  all of them, but he had always tried very hard not to. He wished he could be sure they understood that he and the men were there because they were trying to help all of them save their country from the Communists. They were on a rice dike that bordered the graveyard. The voices from the huts nearby seemed quite loud. He looked up ahead to where the lieutenant who had come along with them that night was standing. The lieutenant had sent one of the men, Molina, on across the rice dikes almost to the edge of the village. The cold rain was still coming down very hard and the men behind him were standing like a line of statues waiting for the next command. But now something was wrong up ahead. He could see Molina waving his hands excitedly trying to tell the lieutenant something. Stumbling over the dikes, almost crawling, Molina came back toward the lieutenant. He saw him whisper something in his ear. And now the lieutenant turned and looked at him. “Sergeant,” he said, “Molina and I are going to get a look up ahead. Stay here with the team.” Balancing on the dike, he turned around slowly after the lieutenant had gone, motioning with his rifle for all of the men in back of him to get down. Each one, carefully, one after the other, squatted along the dike on one knee, waiting in the rain to move out again. They were all shivering from the cold. They waited for what seemed a long time and then the lieutenant and Molina appeared suddenly through the darkness. He could tell from their faces that they had seen something. They had seen something up ahead, he was sure, and they were going to tell him what they had just seen. He stood up, too excited to stay kneeling down on the dike. “What is it?” he cried. “Be quiet,” whispered the lieutenant sharply, grabbing his arm, almost throwing him into the paddy. He began talking very quickly and much louder than he should have. “I think we found them. I think we found them,” he repeated, almost shouting. He didn’t know what the lieutenant meant. “What?” he said. “The sappers, the sappers! Let’s go!” The lieutenant was taking over now. He seemed very sure of himself, he was acting very confident. “Let’s go, goddamn it!” He clicked his rifle off safety and got his men up quickly, urging them forward, following the lieutenant and Molina toward the edge of the village. They ran through the paddy, splashing like a family of ducks. This time he hoped and prayed it would be the real enemy. He would be ready for them this

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was my own boss and I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations—I was more like God, if anything. This went on from about the middle of the war until . . . well, until one day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company—the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America—toward the close of the day, prepared to go through with it. I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job. The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school. I had even honored myself on the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on. The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn’t bother me so much; people didn’t offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me , Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it. In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hotfooted it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company . . . up to the twenty-fifth floor or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn’t give a damn. I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn’t give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were “warm” countries, places where you didn’t have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work—which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots . Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge. In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  He truly hoped that he might transform Antioch or Constantinople into a Christian city through the diligent reform of one household at a time. But prostitution was a particularly formidable challenge to this agenda, even in the late empire. A fourth-century catalog of the urban amenities of Rome still included some forty-five public brothels (listed between the public grain mills and the public latrines); it is telling that prostitution remained part of the official, public face of civic life in the early phases of the Christian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a particular preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy. 46 Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Christian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitution was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. The bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unprecedented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco-Roman sexual economy. Asterius of Amasea could see that the double standard of sexual behavior was rooted in a society where property and legitimacy were transmitted through monogamy: “If men consort with many women, they do no harm to their own hearth, but if women commit sexual sin, they introduce alien heirs into their house and their line.” John Chrysostom was hardly the only bishop to appreciate the role of Roman law in solidifying an alternative set of sexual norms. Augustine explicitly rejected the “law of the forum” in favor of the “law of heaven.” Salvian of Marseilles summarized Greco-Roman sexual policy in the pithiest, and most accurate, formulation on record: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. Prostitution was not simply tolerated—it was viewed as a way of protecting the honor of decent women. Ambrose despaired that his Christians could visit the brothel “as though it were a law of nature.” Christian leaders became desperately aware of the double standard, and the braver among them were perfectly willing to identify its origins. “The laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women.” The acerbic Jerome offered a penetrating reflection on the fundamentally distinct logics of classical and Christian sexual boundaries. “Among them [the Romans], the bridles of sexual restraint are unloosed for men. The Romans condemn only stuprum and adulterium, letting lust run wild through whorehouses and slave girls, as though social status makes an offense, and not sexual desire.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Similarly, it is important not to blame someone for being recruited into a cult. Instead, you need to regard what happened as an example of undue influence. The person you care about has contracted a mind control virus. Get angry with the cult. Get angry at all mind control cults. But don’t get angry with the person who has been victimized. It isn’t their fault. I have been told many times by people who have left cults that they felt psychologically raped. Don’t do emotional harm a second time by telling them it’s their own fault. If you want to get even with any mind control group, fine—but first work to help the person you care about. Then do as much as you can to expose the group to the general public. Take it to court, if you have the time, energy and resources. Make sure that you have competent legal advice from an attorney with experience of the cult you are dealing with. You should also write to your political representatives, giving a brief outline of the cult. See if you can use the law to ensure justice. Most of all, though, focus on helping the person you care about. To this end, information and strategy are your two most important tools. The overall objective should be this: Do everything within your power to create the necessary conditions to help the cult member change and grow. Keep this objective in mind at all times when deciding what to do or say. Notice that your objective should not be rescuing the person from the group. People leave destructive cults as a natural consequence of changing and growing. If people are focused on positive growth, there will be less resistance, and everyone’s efforts will be more effective. That said, it is also essential to adopt the consistent attitude that the person is going to leave the cult. The only questions are whether they will do so sooner or later, and whether the transition will be easy and smooth, or difficult and painful. People can do only that which is within their control to do. People can help to create the positive conditions necessary to help a person trapped in a cult to grow so that they can break the shackles of mind control. The best way for you to help the cult member leave their group is for you to be adequately prepared to undertake the job. Here are some ways to make sure that you’re able to handle the stress you’ll inevitably encounter. Good preparation is the key to success. Preparing For A Successful Effort Take Care of Your Own Emotional Needs Don’t expect instant results. Pace yourself and keep a balanced perspective. Your efforts to help the person you care about shouldn’t be at the expense of your (or anyone else’s) health. This is particularly true if the cult member has been involved for many years, and efforts to help them are complex and protracted.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren’t. They were simply tossing fitfully in their sleep. No one lost his appetite, no one got up and rang the fire alarm. The day I first realized that there had been a war was about six months or so after the armistice. It was in a street car on the 14th Street crosstown line. One of our heroes, a Texas lad with a string of medals across his chest, happened to see an officer passing on the sidewalk. The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a sergeant himself and he probably had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians, the passengers in the car, everybody and everything. He said if there was ever another war they couldn’t drag him to it with a twenty-mule team. He said he’d see every son of a bitch killed before he’d go again himself; he said he didn’t give a fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he’d shoot him in the back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general. He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he’d picked up over there, and nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. And the second time I experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway stations. They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn’t have the heart to fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction that I felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ he would go up to the twenty-fifth floor, or whereever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We don’t want to hear about the logic of events—or any kind of logic. “Je ne parle pas logique,” said Montherlant, “je parle générosité.” I don’t think you heard it very well, since it was in French. I’ll repeat it for you, in the Queen’s own language: “I’m not talking logic, I’m talking generosity.” That’s bad English, as the Queen herself might speak it, but it’s clear. Generosity —do you hear? You never practice it, any of you, either in peace or in war. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheel chair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it’s generosity. You don’t know what the fucking word means, you bastards! To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth. To say Yes you have to be first a surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have understood what it means to say No. You can even say Yes and No at the same time, provided you do more than is expected of you. Be a stevedore in the daytime and a Beau Brummel in the nighttime. Wear any uniform so long as it’s not yours. When you write your mother ask her to cough up a little dough so that you may have a clean rag to wipe your ass with. Don’t be disturbed if you see your neighbor going after his wife with a knife: he probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be sure he had the satisfaction of knowing why he did it. If you’re trying to improve your mind, stop it! There’s no improving the mind. Look to your heart and gizzard—the brain is in the heart. Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed—Cendrars, Vaché, Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire—if I had known that then, if I had known that in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I’d have blown up. Yes, I think I’d have gone off like a bomb. But I was ignorant. Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvelous phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat an onager”—that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” . . . “my hunger is the black air’s bits” . . .

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Laws to protect victims of sex trafficking are beginning to change as well. Several states now have what are called Safe Harbor laws, which protect minors who are arrested for prostitution (it should be called “trafficking” but isn’t, yet). Instead of being put into jail, these young people are protected by social workers who advocate for their safety, health and well-being. There is a growing understanding that young sex workers are not exercising their free will; they are under the mind control of pimps or sex traffickers (this is also true of many adult trafficking victims). Loyola law professor Kathleen Kim has written numerous articles, including “The Coercion of Trafficked Workers,” which argues the need for law to be applied fairly and in support of victims’ rights.213 The same is true for all victims of mind control. Part of the problem facing lawmakers and the courts is that cults have sought to hide behind the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. In this country, people’s right to believe whatever they want is absolute, as it should be. What is not absolute is a group’s right to act in any way that it likes. For example, a sect may believe that it is a sacred act to handle poisonous snakes, but the law prohibits snake-handling rituals because too many people have died as a consequence. Lawyers for cults do their best to ignore this difference, and try to turn mind control issues into issues of belief, rather than issues of behavior. Attorney Marci Hamilton’s excellent book, God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty brings to light the way in which groups with influence over lawmakers enjoy special treatment under the law. Another way to frame this issue involves freedom of versus freedom from. The Constitution guarantees Americans the right to worship, think and speak as they please. But to what degree should we be protected from other people’s attempts to make us worship, think and speak as they want us to? Legislators and courts are still struggling with this. Cult recruitment and conversion are particularly difficult to analyze. Does a group really have the right to deceive potential converts who would stay away if they knew the truth? Likewise, does a group have the right to manipulate a person’s thoughts, feelings and environment in order to create a conversion experience? If so, where should the line be drawn between legal and illegal manipulation? I will say more about this shortly. So far, it has been difficult to determine scientifically whether a person is under mind control. Any evaluation has had to be subjective. Mind control experts have been seeking a legal vehicle that will allow them to satisfy the law’s requirement that they will be testifying from scientific data.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He would go from whorehouse to whorehouse, wheeling the chair in past the pretty painted Mexican women. He would find a table and wait for one to come up and talk to him. Usually they were kind and did not pity him. They would smile back, very interested, very curious, and he would smell their perfume and look at their breasts. He would sleep with a different one every night. He wanted to sleep with as many as he could, trying one after the other. One night another Vietnam veteran from the Village came in with him, a guy named Charlie. Charlie had some good weed and said he wanted to have a real party. They got very stoned and very drunk together, and in the last whorehouse they went to Charlie got into a wild fight with one of the whores. He punched her in the face because she laughed at him when he pulled down his pants and told her he couldn’t feel his penis or move it anymore. He was crazy drunk and he kept yelling and screaming, swinging his arms and his fists at the crowd who had gathered around him. “That goddamn fucking slut! I’m gonna kill that whore for ever laughing at me. That bitch thinks it’s funny I can’t move my dick. Fuck you! Fuck all of you goddamn motherfuckers! They made me kill babies! They made me kill babies!” Charlie screamed again and again. The owner was shaking his fist, telling them both to get out and never come back, and he knew someone was going to kill them if they didn’t leave right away. But he just sat there in the middle of the bar, unable to move. What Charlie was saying was what he had been feeling for a long time. Finally the owner got a couple of guys and threw them out into the street. They managed to get a cab, but halfway home Charlie got into another fight with the driver over the money he was charging, and they both had to get out in the middle of the highway. They sat by the edge of the road for a long time until a Mexican truckdriver picked them up. He just picked them up as if there was nothing at all unusual about finding the two of them out there. He lifted them out of their chairs and put them into the cab of his truck. Charlie was singing by the time they got to the Village and had pissed all over the seat; the driver opened his window but never complained. Somehow that was the end of it for him. The whole thing was over. He had a real cold feeling about it now. He didn’t go back to the city the next night. He spent one more day in the Village, then told Rahilio he’d had enough. He caught the next plane back to New York.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You never practice it, any of you, either in peace or in war. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheel chair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it’s generosity. You don’t know what the fucking word means, you bastar

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  During the 2004 Democratic Convention, returning soldiers formed a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, just as we marched in Miami in August of 1972 as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Still others have refused deployment to Iraq, gone to Canada, and begun resisting this immoral and illegal war. For months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, citizens here in the United States and around the world marched and demonstrated in growing opposition to our government’s reckless plan to launch an attack. I proudly participated in protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., doing countless interviews and speaking out wherever people would listen to me. Many prominent world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II, began to raise their voices against the terrible and ill-fated foreign policy. This extraordinary opposition culminated on February, 15, 2003, when more than thirty million citizens in over one hundred nations participated in the most massive demonstration on behalf of peace in the history of the world. Never before had so many human beings come together before a war had even begun to say no to the insanity and madness. Many of us promised ourselves long ago that we would never allow what happened to us in Vietnam to happen again. We had an obligation, a responsibility as citizens, as Americans, as human beings, to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives, those long and painful years after we came home, those lonely nights. There were lives to save on both sides, young men and women who would be disfigured and maimed, mothers and fathers who would lose their sons and daughters, wives and loved ones who would suffer for decades to come if we did not do everything we could to stop the forward momentum of this madness. We sensed it very early and very quickly. We saw the same destructive patterns reasserting themselves all over again as our leaders spoke of “bad guys” and “evildoers,” “imminent threats” and “mushroom clouds,” attempting to frighten and intimidate the American people into supporting their agenda. The Bush administration seems to have learned some very different lessons than we did from Vietnam. Where we learned of the deep immorality and obscenity of that war, they learned to be even more brutal, more violent and ruthless, i.e., “shock and awe.” Sadly, the war on terror has become a war of terror. Where we learned to be more open and honest, to be more truthful, to expose, to express, to shatter the myths of the past, they seem to have learned the exact opposite—to hide, to censor, to fabricate, to mislead and deceive—to perpetuate those myths.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Because in the bottom of my heart there was murder: I wanted to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom. I wanted to see this happen purely out of vengeance, as atonement for the crimes that were committed against me and against others like me who have never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred, their rebellion, their legitimate blood lust. I was the evil product of an evil soil. If the self were not imperishable, the “I” I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have happened did actually happen, at least to me . History may deny it, since I have played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed. As to what happened . . . Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solution to all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself . I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel—that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this specter, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie—everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life. I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and earnest, or to be negligent and carefree.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  You are trying to uncover the names of front groups as well as the principle group. A cult recruiter will usually be taken off guard by this question and ask what you mean. Ask again; it’s a perfectly clear and straightforward question. If the recruiter tells you they don’t know, ask them to find out for you. Ask for their phone number—do not give them yours, of course—and say that you will call them tomorrow for the answer. If the person tells you there are no other organizations, at some later point you may discover that this was a lie. If and when you realize this, be assertively annoyed and leave. Remember, cults like to create front groups for popular causes. For example, both the Moonies and Scientologists have front groups to presumably combat trafficking. Who is the top leader? Tell me about their background and qualifications. Do they have a criminal record? You may or may not get a straight answer to these questions. The recruiter might use the name of the local sub-leader instead of the person at the top. They also might not know anything about the leader’s background or criminal record, because they may not know themselves. You might then ask the person, “How could you have become involved with a group without checking these things out first?” Remember, a destructive cult will try to get your commitment first, before disclosing important information. A legitimate group will always give information first, and ask for commitment later, only when you feel ready. What does your group believe? Does it believe that the ends justify the means? Is deception allowed in any circumstances? Most cult recruiters will not want to explain what they believe right there on the spot. They are trained to use your curiosity to bring you to hear a lecture, watch a video or attend a program. This will give them a better chance of influencing you, because you will be in their environment. If the person is not willing to summarize the key points of the group’s beliefs, right there and then, you can be sure they are hiding something. If they say that they’re afraid you will misunderstand, if they give you only a short description, ask for it anyway. Any legitimate group will be able to summarize its central beliefs. Destructive cults will not want to do so. If you find out later that this description was a gross distortion filled with inaccuracies, you have every right to be annoyed and leave. The cult members will most assuredly try to convince you that they had to lie to you because you have been brainwashed by the media against them, and you would have never listened if they told the truth. Don’t buy this “ends justify the means” rationalization. No legitimate organization needs to lie to people in order to help them.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  At the hard-sell urging of Scientology registrars, Jon borrowed money and studied Scientology, full-time, for a year. In his nine-year involvement, he completed six counseling courses, becoming a Class II and Dianetic “auditor.” By the time he escaped, Jon was on “OT V,” the 25th of the 27 available levels of the cult’s systematic indoctrination. According to promotional literature, Jon should have achieved supernatural powers by this time, but, as all Scientologists find, the technology just induces euphoric states and heightened suggestibility. Despite many boasts, to date not one Scientologist has taken up James Randi’s million-dollar challenge to perform a psychic feat.98 When one of Jon’s close friends was expelled from the cult, without justification, Jon followed the cult’s complaint procedure exactly. After six months, Jon received a letter, purportedly from Hubbard, saying only, “Your letter is on my desk.” He refused to sever communication with his friend—called “disconnection” by the group—and spoke to other so-called “Suppressives.” Jon found that 11 cult officials, including Hubbard’s wife, had been jailed in the U.S. for burglary, breaking and entering, theft, kidnapping and false imprisonment. Horrified by this and other evidence, he resigned from the cult. Jon was briefly at the center of a burgeoning independent Scientology movement in the UK, but soon realized that Hubbard’s claims to have been a war hero, a nuclear physicist, and a student of Oriental gurus were bogus. He also realized that the cult’s “technology” was designed to reduce followers to unthinking compliance. After leaving, Jon was harassed under the cult’s “fair game” doctrine, whereby critics can be “tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed.”99 A stream of false reports was made against him to authorities, including a charge of child abuse (a standard accusation against critics). He was “noisily investigated” by private detectives, who visited his family and friends all over the world, saying they had uncovered his dreadful “crimes.” His private confessions were published. Leaflets were distributed to thousands of households. Jon was accused of being a drug dealer, a rapist, a heroin addict and an attempted murderer. Scientologists picketed his house and academic conferences where he spoke. Their placards accused him of being an “anti-religious hate campaigner,” even though his work was supported by every mainline Christian church. Jon worked on hundreds of media pieces and earned former members over $14 million in settlements, although he received almost no compensation for his assistance. However, he was bankrupted by litigation fees from a raft of cases brought by numerous Scientology organizations and individuals. After 12 years of daily harassment, Jon retired from the scene. The cult continued to litigate against him for four more years. He returned to the work in 2013, because he realized that most former Scientologists simply do not recover from the intense hypnotic procedures and humiliating treatment they received in the cult.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  This was the moment I had come three thousand miles for, this was it, all the pain and the rage, all the trials and the death of the war and what had been done to me and a generation of Americans by all the men who had lied to us and tricked us, by the man who stood before us in the convention hall that night, while men who had fought for their country were being gassed and beaten in the street outside the hall. I thought of Bobby who sat next to me and the months we had spent in the hospital in the Bronx. It was all hitting me at once, all those years, all that destruction, all that sorrow. President Nixon began to speak and all three of us took a deep breath and shouted at the top of our lungs, “Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war,” as loud and as hard as we could, looking directly at Nixon. The security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hide us from the cameras and the president. “Stop the bombing, stop the bombing,” I screamed. For an instant Cronkite looked down, then turned his head away. They’re not going to show it, I thought. They’re going to try and hide us like they did in the hospitals. Hundreds of people around us began to clap and shout “Four more years,” trying to drown out our protest. They all seemed very angry and shouted at us to stop. We continued shouting, interrupting Nixon again and again until Secret Service agents grabbed our chairs from behind and began pulling us backward as fast as they could out of the convention hall. “Take it easy,” Bobby said to me. “Don’t fight back.” I wanted to take a swing and fight right there in the middle of the convention hall in front of the president and the whole country. “So this is how they treat their wounded veterans!” I screamed. A short guy with a big Four More Years button ran up to me and spat in my face. “Traitor!” he screamed, as he was yanked back by police. Pandemonium was breaking out all around us and the Secret Service men kept pulling us out backward. “I served two tours of duty in Vietnam!” I screamed to one newsman. “I gave three-quarters of my body for America. And what do I get? Spit in the face!” I kept screaming until we hit the side entrance where the agents pushed us outside and shut the doors, locking them with chains and padlocks so reporters wouldn’t be able to follow us out for interviews. All three of us sat holding on to each other shaking. We had done it. It had been the biggest moment of our lives, we had shouted down the president of the United States and disrupted his acceptance speech. What more was there left to do but go home?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  An Italian, of course. O’Mara, my assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to persuade me to take her on. She’s a whore clean through and I know if I put her on there’ll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building uptown—because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student, arrives; he says one of the boys I’ve just hired has Parkinson’s disease. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer from hemorrhoids, so O’Rourke tells me. He’s been having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me, as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can’t keep the force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed for part-time messengers. All the charity bureaus and relief societies have been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don’t even last an hour. It’s a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it’s totally unnecessary. But that’s not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says: I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I have his height, weight, color, religion, education, experience, etc. All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible—it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brownstone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out in the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple—you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s just what the bastards don’t want you to do—to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Making ready, with feet on the desk, to write “strong works, works forever incomprehensible,” as my dead comrades were promising. These “strong works”—would you recognize them if you saw them? Do you know that of the millions who were killed not one death was necessary to produce “the strong work?” New beings , yes! We have need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers—but we can’t do without new beings. If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx and the Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it is because there were no more new beings being born. Stop the machine a moment! Flash back! Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser sitting on his horse. Keep him sitting there a moment with his withered arm clutching the bridle rein. Look at his mustache! Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance! Look at his cannon fodder lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get shot, to get disemboweled, to be burned in quicklime. Hold it a moment, now, and look at the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious civilization, the men who will war to end war. Change their clothes, change their uniforms, change horses, change flags, change terrain. My, is that the Kaiser I see on a white horse? Are those the terrible Huns? And where is Big Bertha? Oh, I see—I thought it was pointing toward Notre-Dame? Humanity, me lads, humanity always marching in the van. . . . And the strong works we were speaking of? Where are the strong works? Call up the Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot—not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand-new museum ready waiting to house it—and cellophane and the Dewey decimal system to file it. All we need is the name of the author. Even if he has no name, even if it is an anonymous work, we won’t kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won’t mind. Bring it back dead or alive—there’s a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the man who fetches it. And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and that little Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did their best, and that since the war everybody has been doing his best to patch things up or to forget, tell them that their best is not good enough, that we don’t want to hear any more this logic of “doing the best one can,” tell them we don’t want the best of a bad bargain, we don’t believe in bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren’t satisfied with three-quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that’s what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn’t know what to think anymore. All he had tried to do was tell the truth about the war. But now he just wanted it to be quiet, to be where they weren’t cursing at him and beating him and jailing him, lying and calling him a traitor. He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill, a young thing to run through the meatgrinder, a cheap small nothing thing to make mincemeat out of. And somewhere along the way he had forgotten to be polite anymore, and how to be a nice person. Somewhere through it all they had taken even that and he wanted it back so much, so very desperately, he would give almost anything to be able to be kind to people again, but the big machine, the one that had given him the number and the rifle, had sucked it out of him forever. They had made him confused and uncertain and blind with hate. They wanted to make him hide like he was hiding now. How many more, he thought, how many more like him were out there hiding on a thousand other Hurricane Streets? He was a living reminder of something terrible and awful. No matter what they said to him, no matter how much they tried to twist and bend things, he held on to what he knew and all the terrible things he had seen and done for them. They had buried the corporal and the children he had killed in the ground, but he was still sitting and breathing in his wheelchair, and now the last thing he could do for them if he wasn’t going to die was to disappear. He knew too much about them. He knew, goddamn it, like no one else would ever know. They were small men with small ideas, gamblers and hustlers who had gambled with his life and hustled him off to the war. They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind big desks sticking pins in maps in rooms he had never seen, men who had long-winded telephone conversations and went home to their wives and children.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Kaupp paused the video. He asked for comments and reactions. One therapist said she thought the brunette was insincere. Another hypothesized that the brunette saw that the blonde was getting the man’s attention by being vulnerable, and she wanted to have his attention by being vulnerable too but couldn’t actually be vulnerable. I wanted to say I hated the man for sitting in the middle and having it all, for being showered with attention by two women, but it seemed unproductive so I didn’t. It didn’t matter. Kaupp seemed to sense what we were all feeling. He told us that the married couple—the man and the brunette—ultimately ended their relationship with the blonde, the third in their triad. In my mind I did a little fist pump. Then I wished the blonde and the brunette had gotten rid of him and become a couple themselves, which struck me as somehow a just outcome. But a young and beautiful African American therapist sitting in front of me had the opposite response. “Oh no, that’s so upsetting!” she said of the couple’s return to monogamy. She was rooting for a concept, the triad, that I could barely wrap my mind around. “Hang in there and try not to get triggered,” Kaupp advised as more of the workshop attendees spoke up. Then, perceptively, to everyone and no one in particular, he advised that in a situation like this, as a therapist, “you’d better get your shit together and figure out how to like them and understand what they’re going through.” In his experience, Kaupp told us, what we have to give ebbs and flows with our attachment security. The less attachment security we have to begin with, the less connected we feel to our love object, and the more threatened and threatening others seem. The more attachment security we have, the more we have to give not just to one but to potentially myriad others. And the more we can tolerate our loved ones doing the same. In this rather startling reframing of non-monogamy, limiting ourselves to dyadic sexuality and romance is restrictive, stemming more from anxiety than from a moral or even pragmatic stance. When I thought Kaupp’s point through, it made sense that there was a parallel universe where I might feel secure enough in my relationship with my husband that I could endure him being with someone else. And so confident in our mutual attachment that I could do what I wanted with others without it intruding on or diminishing my marriage. Kaupp’s view that consensual non-monogamy is a solution of sorts, allowing people “to stop lying and start living their lives and relationships a little or a lot more authentically,” as he put it, seemed utterly reasonable. “People have a hard time keeping it in their pants. Why don’t we give them a way to live without sneaking around and being hypocritical and feeling like failures?”