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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And her voice was as icy cold as her hands. ‘Oh, of course if you’re feeling like that about it—’ laughed Violet, ‘no, but honest, she is keen on Roger.’ When Violet had gone, Stephen sprang to her feet, but her sense of direction seemed to have left her, for she struck her head a pretty sharp blow against the side of a heavy bookcase. She stood swaying with her hands pressed against her temples. Angela and Roger Antrim—those two—but it couldn’t be, Violet had been purposely lying. She loved to torment, she was like her brother, a bully, a devil who loved to torment—it couldn’t be—Violet had been lying. She steadied herself and leaving the room and the house, went and fetched her car from the stables. She drove to the telegraph office at Upton: ‘Come back, I must see you at once,’ she wired, taking great care to prepay the reply, lest Angela should find an excuse for not answering. The clerk counted the words with her stump of a pencil, then she looked at Stephen rather strangely. 2 The next morning came Angela’s frigid answer: ‘Coming home Monday fortnight not one day sooner please no more wires Ralph very much upset.’ Stephen tore the thing into a hundred fragments and then hurled it away. She was suddenly shaking all over with uncontrollable anger. 3 Right up to the moment of Angela’s return that hot anger supported Stephen. It was like a flame that leapt through her veins, a flame that consumed and yet stimulated, so that she purposely fanned the fire from a sense of self preservation . Then came the actual day of arrival. Angela must be in London by now, she would certainly have travelled by the night express. She would catch the 12.47 to Malvern and then motor to Upton—it was nearly twelve. It was afternoon. At 3.17 Angela’s train would arrive at Great Malvern—it had arrived now—in about twenty minutes she would drive past the very gates of Morton. Half-past four. Angela must have got home; she was probably having tea in the parlour—in the little oak parlour with its piping bullfinch whose cage always stood near the casement window. A long time ago, a lifetime ago, Stephen had blundered into that parlour, and Tony had barked, and the bullfinch had piped a sentimental old German tune—but that was surely a lifetime ago. Five o’clock. Violet Antrim had obviously lied; she had lied on purpose to torment Stephen—Angela and Roger—it couldn’t be; Violet had lied because she liked to torment. A quarter past five. What Was Angela doing now? She was near, just a few miles away—perhaps she was ill, as she had not written; yes, that must be it, of course Angela was ill. The persistent, aching hunger of the eyes. Anger, what was it?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From an early time Spanish legislation was directed to the humiliation of the Jews and their segregation from the Christian population. The oecumenical Council of Vienne, 1312, denounced the liberality of the Spanish law which made a Jewish witness necessary to the conviction of a Jew. Spanish synods, as those of Valladolid and Tarragona, 1322, 1329, gave strong expression to the spirit of intolerance with which the Spanish church regarded the Jewish people. The sacking and wholesale massacre of their communities, which lived apart in quarters of their own called Juderias, were matters of frequent occurrence, and their synagogues were often destroyed or turned into churches. It is estimated that in 1391, 50,000 Jews were murdered in Castile, and the mania spread to Aragon.954 The explanation of this bitter feeling is to be sought in the haughty pride of the descendants of Abraham according to the flesh, their persistent observance of their traditions and the exorbitant rates of usury which they charged. Not content with the legal rate, which in Aragon was 20% and in Castile 331/3% they often compelled municipalities to pay even higher rates. The prejudice and fears of the Christian population charged them with sacrilege in the use of the wafer and the murder of baptized children, whose blood was used in preparations made for purposes of sorcery. Legislation was made more exacting. The old rules were enforced enjoining a distinctive dress and forbidding them to shave their beards or to have their hair cut round. All employment in Christian households, the practice of medicine and the occupation of agriculture were denied them. Scarcely any trade was left to their hand except the loaning of money, and that by canon law was illegal for Christians. The joint reign of Ferdinand, 1452–1516, and Isabella, 1451–1504, marked an epoch in the history of the Jews in Spain, both those who remained true to their ancestral faith and the large class which professed conversion to the Christian Church.955 In conferring the title "Catholic" upon Ferdinand and Isabella, 1495, Alexander VI. gave as one of the reasons the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, 1492. The institution of the Spanish Inquisition, which began its work twelve years before, was directed primarily against the conversos, people of Jewish blood and members of the Church who in heart and secret usage remained Jews.

• From Between Us

  92 ​a core theme of anger: The reason to start from those prompts rather than from the equivalents of anger was precisely that we were not sure if the meaning of anger and its translation in Japanese (ikari) would be equivalent. In comparing the emotional stories, we did not want to bias our results by differences implicated by the words; more on this in chapter 6. 96 ​What if anger . . . stance in the relationship?: See Solomon, “Getting Angry”; Solomon, Not Passion’s Slave, for a similar idea. 96 ​shame is “wrong”: E.g., Helen B. Lewis, “Shame and Guilt in Neurosis,” Psychoanalytic Review 58, no. 3 (1971): 419–38; June P. Tangney et al., “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 6 (1996): 1256–69. 96 ​being evaluated by others and found to be deficient: Boiger et al., “Condoned or Condemned.” In a U.S. sample of college students, vignettes in which others pointed out your personal flaws were in fact rated as most shameful. 97 ​this type of event had never happened to them: A study with American college students, predominantly white, suggested that the more shame situations are judged to elicit, the lower their frequency was. The situations at hand were vignettes based on previously self-reported shame situations, and respondents who read them both rated the intensity of shame they would feel in such a situation, and their perceived frequency (Boiger et al., “Condoned or Condemned”). 98 ​salespeople in the financial sector: Richard P. Bagozzi, Willem Verbeke, and Jacinto C. Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance: The Case of Salespersons in the Netherlands and the Philippines,” Journal of Applied Psychology 88, no. 2 (2003): 219–33. 98 ​shame stories that involved customers: Shame stories were collected in focus groups with financial salespeople from a firm that did not participate in the final study. Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance.” The article does not provide much detail on the process by which those stories were selected. 99 ​feel like “crawling in a hole,” “suddenly shrinking,” and “physically weak” and “tongue-tied”: Items used to measure the phenomenology of shame. Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance,” 232. 99 ​Dutch salespeople . . . would “strive to be unique . . .”: Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance,” 220. 99 ​no longer able to deliver appropriate service: I use slightly different labels than Bagozzi et al. do, but my labels are equally based on the actual scale items that were used. All findings are self-reported. 99 ​situations that had elicited shame: Boiger et al., “Condoned or Condemned”; the examples are real experiences reported in previous studies—names are fictitious—that were used as vignettes in the study. The precise wording of the vignettes can be found in the supplemental materials to the article.

• From Between Us

  The South Baltimore mothers wanted to teach their girls to “be strong, to suppress hurt feelings, and to defend themselves when wronged.” When narrating their own lives, the Baltimore mothers described experiences in which they themselves had a great deal of anger and aggression. The girls were not protected from hearing about these incidents. The mothers seemed to want their children to know how to respond to the harsh realities of life in which they might find themselves one day (as their mothers had). Tells one of the mothers: He started that shit, he was embarrassed to walk down the street with me ’cause my stomach was startin’ to get big and all that. I said, “Well get the hell out then.” The morale of this story was: If you want to stand your ground, you have to show anger. This was exactly what the Baltimore mothers wanted to convey to their girls: “Don’t be a sissy!” When their child was hurt or wronged, these moms encouraged their child’s anger, and helped them “not being a sissy.” One mother helped her little girl by explaining to an older child: “She ain’t got no . . . blanket. That’s why she’s yelling.” On occasion, the moms also trained their children to not be a sissy by teasing them, and provoking their anger. One mother challenged her two-year old girl to fight her: “You want to fight about it? [provocative tone]; Come on then, chicken.” And then told the researcher: “I’m trying to get her mad at me.” And afterwards to the child: “Mad ’cause you lost?” In this context, the moms were found to encourage their little girls’ anger. Yet there were other contexts in which the Baltimore moms disapproved of their little girls’ anger: when their daughters were mad at them , for instance, anger was seen as “spoiled” behavior. Two-year old Wendy had a temper tantrum after her mom took her pacifier (“ninny”): “Wendy hurled herself against the chair, glared at her mother with wide, angry eyes, and screamed, ‘Want ninny! Want ninny!’” Wendy’s mom responded with a stern “Hey!” and a warning (“Go ahead, You’re gonna knock that chair over . . .”). In situations like this, moms used many techniques to stop the anger they perceived, from the kind of warning that Wendy’s mom gave to Wendy to threats of punishment (“Want me to beat you?”) and justifying explanations of their own behavior (“I needed to wash it off”).

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Employees at HubSpot are told that the needs of the company are more important than their own. “Team > individual” is how Dharmesh expresses this in his culture code, whose subtitle is “Creating a company we love.” Who falls in love with a company? Especially when that company tells you that we’re not a family? Yet those Millennials running around the HubSpot offices in their orange clothes and orange shoes don’t just like HubSpot; they love HubSpot. It’s their team. It doesn’t bother them that their team feels no such loyalty to them. One day in the content factory I have a kind of Norma Rae moment where I try to raise awareness among my fellow workers. Specifically, we’re talking about the candy wall. People are saying how amazing it is to have so much candy available. I’m hoping to persuade them that the candy wall is a bit of a con. “You know,” I say, “you guys are the first generation that’s willing to work for free candy. My generation would never have fallen for that. We wanted to get paid in actual money.” I’ll admit this might not be the best way to open up this dialogue. “We get paid,” one says, sounding defensive. “I know,” I say. “I’m just trying to make a point about why companies do these things.” “It’s because they want to create a cool culture. They want people to be happy.” I have no idea how much these people are paid, but most of them are right out of college, and I suspect Cranium has gulled them into taking small salaries in exchange for the great experience they will get at HubSpot, as well as all the fun stuff, like the parties and the outings and the free beer and the candy. “We’re not getting paid in candy,” another one says. “No, I know that.” The others join in. They love the candy. They eat candy every day. Now I’m backpedaling, trying to explain that what I really mean to say is that a big wall of candy dispensers is not an incentive for people like me. “If it were up to me, if I had the choice, I would not have a candy wall and I would just get paid a little bit more money instead. You see what I mean?” They don’t. “Because I have kids, right? I can’t bring home a huge bag of candy every day and feed the candy to my kids for dinner. I can’t sell the candy and use the money to buy food and clothes for my kids. That’s what I’m saying.” They look at me like Crazy Old Man Alert! Why is he angry about the candy? Don’t make any sudden moves that might scare him! Back away slowly, and call for help!

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  56 As a young man, Qutb had felt no conflict between his faith and secular politics, but he had been alienated by the ruthless policies of the British and shocked by the racial prejudice he experienced during a visit to the United States. Still, his views had remained moderate and tentative; what radicalized him was the violence of Nasser’s prison. Qutb was himself tortured and was horrified to see twenty prisoners slaughtered in a single incident. Dozens more were tortured and executed—and not by foreigners but by their own people. Secularism no longer seemed benign but cruel, aggressive, and immoral. In prison, Qutb took Maududi’s ideas a step further. When he heard Nasser vowing to privatize Islam on the Western model and observed the unfolding horror of his prison life, Qutb came to believe that even a so-called Muslim ruler could be as violently jahili as any Western power. Like so many others terrorized by violence and injustice, Qutb had developed a dualistic ideology that divided the world starkly into two camps: one accepted God’s sovereignty, and the other did not. In the career of Muhammad, God had revealed a practical program for the creation of a properly ordered society. First, acting under God’s orders, he had created a jamaat, a “party” committed to justice and equity that held aloof from the pagan establishment. Second, at the hijrah, he had effected a complete severance between the Godly and the Godless. Third, Muhammad had established an Islamic state in Medina; and fourth, he began his jihad against jahili Mecca, which eventually bowed to God’s sovereignty. Qutb formulated these ideas in his book Milestones, which was smuggled out of prison and read avidly. He was a learned man, but Milestones is not the work of an official Islamic authority; rather, it is the outcry of a man who has been pushed too far. Qutb’s program distorted Islamic history, since it made no mention of Muhammad’s nonviolent policy at Hudaybiyya, the turning point of the conflict with Mecca. Humiliation, foreign occupation, and secularizing aggression had created an Islamic history of grievance. Qutb now had a paranoid vision of the past, seeing only a relentless succession of jahili enemies—pagans, Jews, Christians, Crusaders, Mongols, Communists, capitalists, colonialists, and Zionists—intent on the destruction of Islam. 57 Executed in 1966, he did not live long enough to work out the practical implications of his program. Yet unlike some of his later followers, he seems to have realized that Muslims would have to undergo a long spiritual, social, and political preparation before they were ready for armed struggle. After his death, however, the political situation in the Middle East deteriorated, and the increasing violence and consequent alienation meant that Qutb’s work would resonate with the disaffected youth, especially those Brothers who had been likewise hardened in Egyptian jails and felt that there was no time for such a ripening process.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Toward the end of the sixth century, Lu was on the verge of total anarchy, as the three baronial families who had usurped the power of the legitimate duke battled against one another for supremacy. This was especially distressing to the ritualists. People from all over China came to Lu to attend the ceremonial liturgy and listen to the music that dated back to the early Zhou kings. One visitor from Jin exclaimed: “The ceremony [li] of Zhou is all in all here! Only now do I understand the potency of the Duke of Zhou and why Zhou reigned.”1 But by 518, the rightful ruler of Lu, the descendant of the duke of Zhou, was so poor that he could no longer pay musicians and dancers to perform these rites in the ancestral temple. Yet that year one of the usurpers had eight teams of dancers performing the rites of the royal house—quite illegally—in his own ancestral shrine. There was creeping dismay. The li no longer curbed the greed and ostentation of the noble families, and Heaven seemed indifferent. When Confucius heard about this illicit performance of the royal rites, he was incensed. “The Way makes no progress,” he lamented.2 If the rulers could not implement the sacred values that kept society on the right path, then he must do so himself. As a commoner, he could not establish the dao; only a king could do that. But he could educate a band of holy, informed men who would instruct the rulers of China in the Way and recall them to their duty. Confucius had hoped for a political career, but was constantly disappointed. He was too blunt and honest to succeed in politics, and never managed to achieve anything more than a menial appointment in the departments of finance and accountancy. Yet this was the best thing that could have happened. His political failure gave him time to think, and he became an inspired teacher, determined that if he could not succeed himself, he would train others for high office. Like other marginalized shi at this time, he became a wandering scholar, traveling tirelessly from one state to another with his small, faithful band of disciples, hoping that at least one of the princes would finally take him seriously.

• From Between Us

  The morale of this story was: If you want to stand your ground, you have to show anger. This was exactly what the Baltimore mothers wanted to convey to their girls: “Don’t be a sissy!” When their child was hurt or wronged, these moms encouraged their child’s anger, and helped them “not being a sissy.” One mother helped her little girl by explaining to an older child: “She ain’t got no . . . blanket. That’s why she’s yelling.” On occasion, the moms also trained their children to not be a sissy by teasing them, and provoking their anger. One mother challenged her two-year old girl to fight her: “You want to fight about it? [provocative tone]; Come on then, chicken.” And then told the researcher: “I’m trying to get her mad at me.” And afterwards to the child: “Mad ’cause you lost?” In this context, the moms were found to encourage their little girls’ anger. Yet there were other contexts in which the Baltimore moms disapproved of their little girls’ anger: when their daughters were mad at them, for instance, anger was seen as “spoiled” behavior. Two-year old Wendy had a temper tantrum after her mom took her pacifier (“ninny”): “Wendy hurled herself against the chair, glared at her mother with wide, angry eyes, and screamed, ‘Want ninny! Want ninny!’” Wendy’s mom responded with a stern “Hey!” and a warning (“Go ahead, You’re gonna knock that chair over . . .”). In situations like this, moms used many techniques to stop the anger they perceived, from the kind of warning that Wendy’s mom gave to Wendy to threats of punishment (“Want me to beat you?”) and justifying explanations of their own behavior (“I needed to wash it off”). Moms were also disapproving of their kids’ anger at a peer who did nothing wrong. The message here was a different one: “Don’t be spoiled.” The Baltimore moms considered the ideal child one who was not easily taken advantage of by others, yet knew their place.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  “We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers.” I feel so special. This isn’t such a big deal. It’s the kind of snarky little remark that I made on the Fake Steve blog all the time. But I have no illusions about how it will be received at HubSpot. Cults are not usually filled with people who can take a joke. Then again, why should I care? These people have made it pretty clear that they don’t want me around. Here is the CEO saying pretty much the same thing, in a newspaper. I figure I’m done at HubSpot, but I’m okay with that. Compared to most people, I have a fairly big audience on Facebook, with more than one hundred thousand people following my posts. Within minutes the comments start pouring in, with people complaining about age discrimination in tech. Some are my friends, but many are people I don’t know. My post is being shared, going viral and spreading around the world. A guy from France says in his country, “this would be called discrimination. And lead the CEO to serious trouble.” Someone writes an article criticizing Halligan and posts a link to the article in the comments under my post. My post is blowing up partly because people enjoy seeing the crazy Fake Steve Jobs blogger guy making fun of his boss in public. “Did you get fired today?” one asks. But I’ve also tapped into a huge well of anger that I didn’t know existed. Apparently, a lot of people have been pushed aside after reaching a certain age, especially in the tech industry. The things Halligan said out loud are exactly what those people suspect their bosses were thinking about them when they shoved them out the door. Officially nobody ever gets fired because of age. Officially, their position no longer exists, or the department is changing priorities. But everyone knows the truth. They’re old, and they get paid too much. As my editor at Newsweek told me, “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.” Now here is some asshole tech CEO who has just blurted that out, in an interview. On Facebook, Spinner chimes in. She writes an angry comment under my Facebook post telling me I am not a team player: “We’re all supposed to be solving for EV,” she writes. EV means enterprise value, and “solving for EV” means we’re all supposed to be doing whatever we can to pump up the value of the company. Then Cranium jumps into the fray. Instead of apologizing for Halligan he doubles down and defends the remarks. “I give Brian credit for being transparent and upfront,” Cranium writes. “A lot of CEOs are hard to read and borderline deceptive. With Brian you know what he is thinking and I think that is awesome.” Yup, it’s awesome all right. Now people really start piling in.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  At this point, however, in a series of long poems and discourses, the author tried to square the suffering of humanity with the notion of a just, benevolent, and omnipotent god. Four of Job’s friends attempted to console him, using all the traditional arguments: Yahweh only ever punished the wicked; we could not fathom his plans; he was utterly righteous, and Job must therefore be guilty of some misdemeanor. These glib, facile platitudes simply enraged Job, who accused his comforters of behaving like God and persecuting him cruelly. As for Yahweh, it was impossible to have a sensible dialogue with a deity who was invisible, omnipotent, arbitrary, and unjust—at one and the same time prosecutor, judge, and executioner. When Yahweh finally deigned to respond to Job, he showed no compassion for the man he had treated so cruelly, but simply uttered a long speech about his own splendid accomplishments. Where had Job been while he laid the earth’s foundations, and pent up the sea behind closed doors? Could Job catch Leviathan with a fishhook, make a horse leap like a grasshopper, or guide the constellations on their course? The poetry was magnificent, but irrelevant. This long, boastful tirade did not even touch upon the real issue: Why did innocent people suffer at the hands of a supposedly loving God? And unlike Job, the reader knows that Job’s pain had nothing to do with the transcendent wisdom of Yahweh, but was simply the result of a frivolous bet. At the end of the poem, when Job—utterly defeated by Yahweh’s bombastic display of power—retracted all his complaints and repented in dust and ashes, God restored Job’s health and fortune. But he did not bring to life the children and servants who had been killed in the first chapter. There was no justice or recompense for them. If Job was indeed written by one of the exiles, it shows that some of the community may have lost all faith in Yahweh. But others responded creatively to the catastrophe and began to develop an entirely new religious vision. The royal scribes continued to edit earlier texts. The Deuteronomists added passages to their history to explain the disaster, while priests began to adapt their ancient lore to life in Babylonia, where the Judeans had no cult and no temple. Deprived of everything that had given meaning to their lives—their temple, their king, and their land—they had to learn to live as a homeless minority, and once again, they were not afraid to rewrite their history, revise their customs, and find a radically innovative interpretation of their traditional sacred symbols.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Then he’d say things like, ‘Nobody touch it, it’s damned,’ he’d cackle away, and we’d all laugh.” This phenomenon of listeners mistaking say-it-like-it-is honesty (which of course isn’t actual honesty, just a lack of filter) for the refreshing voice of antiestablishment dissent might feel familiar to anyone who’s lived through the reign of a problematic populis t: Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Slovakia’s Vladimír Mečiar, Donald Trump. It would be irresponsible, I think, not to mention the oratorical similarities between Trump and Jim Jone s, who shared the same love of coining zingy, incendiary nickname s for their opponents. (“Fake News” and “Crooked Hillary” were Trump’s analogs to Jones’s “Hidden Rulers” and “Sky God.”) Even when their statements didn’t contain any rational substance, the catchy phrases and zealous delivery were enough to win over an audience. It’s riveting to watch someone on a podium speak from a place so animalistic that most of us don’t let ourselves behave that way even with our closest friends. As Atlantic staff writer George Packer wrote in 2019, the strength of Trump’s populist languag e lies in its openness: “It requires no expert knowledge. . . . It’s the way people talk when the inhibitors are off.” Over time, the memorable nicknames and insider-y terminology acquire a strong emotional charge. When a word or phrase takes on such baggage that its mere mention can spark fear, grief, dread, jubilation, reverence (anything), a leader can exploit it to steer followers’ behavior. This lingo is what some psychologists call loaded language. Sometimes loaded language works by twisting the meaning of existing words until the new significance eclipses the old one. Like how 3HO redefined “old soul” from a compliment to something dreadful. Or how the megachurchgoers from my childhood talked about being “convicted.” Or how Jim Jones warped the meanings of “revolutionary suicide” and “the Cause,” or how he defined “accidents” as “things that never happen unless we deserve them.” If Jones were to say something like, “We need to do everything we can to prevent accidents,” an everyday listener would understand that sentence to have a fairly innocuous meaning, according to the shared rules of semantics and reality that most speakers agree upon. The loaded charge it carried for Jones’s followers would be lost, because for the majority of us, “accidents” is a simple word with no identity or sky-high stakes attached. Other times, loaded language comes in the form of misleading euphemisms. Certainly it’s no secret that when authority figures use too many vague turns of phrase, it can be a sign of missing logic, or that something inauspicious is hiding in a pocket of subtext. It’s also entirely true that euphemisms can soften unpleasant truths without being intentionally pernicious. Everyday speakers have plenty of them for taboo concepts, like death (“passed away,” “lost their life,” “didn’t make it”), which we might use to be polite, avoid discomfort, and maintain a certain degree of denial. But Jones’s and Applewhite’s euphemisms recast death as something actively aspirational.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Things escalated as Jim Jones grew hungrier for power, but most “cults” never spiral as catastrophically as his did.) A feedback loop of scandal is created: Only the most destructive cults gain attention, so we come to think of all cults as destructive, and we simultaneously only recognize the destructive ones as cults, so those gain more attention, reinforcing their negative reputation, and so on ad infinitum. Equally troubling is the fact that the word “cult” has so frequently been used as permission to trash religions that society just doesn’t approve of. So many of today’s longest-standing religious denominations (Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, Jews, and most Native American religions, to name a few) were once considered unholy blasphemies in the United States—and this was a nation founded on religious freedom. Today, American alternative religions (oppressive and not), from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Wiccans, are widely regarded as “cults.” The Chinese government insistently decries the cultish evils of new religion Falun Gong, despite its peaceful tenets, which include patience and compassion through meditation. Barker has noted that official reports out of majority-Catholic Belgium condemn the Quaker s (just about the chillest religion ever) as a “cult” (or secte actually, as the word culte in French has held on to its neutral connotations). Throughout the world, cultural normativity still has so much to do with a religious group’s perceived legitimacy . . . no matter if its teachings are any weirder or more harmful than a better-established group. After all, what major spiritual leader doesn’t have some trace of blood on their hands? As the religion scholar Reza Aslan famously stated, “The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion .” In the US, Mormonism and Catholicism have been around long enough that they’ve been given our stamp of approval. Having earned the status of religion, they enjoy a certain amount of common respect and, importantly, protection under the Constitution’s First Amendment. Because of this protection variable, labeling something a “cult” becomes not just a value judgment, but an arbiter of real, life-or-death consequences. To quote Megan Goodwi n, a researcher of American alternative religions at Northeastern University, “The political ramifications of identifying something as a cult are real and often violent.” What do these ramifications look like? Dig no deeper than Jonestown. Once the press identified Jonestown’s victims as “cultists,” they were instantly relegated to a subclass of human. “This made it easier for the public to distance themselves from the tragedy and its victims, dismissing them as weak, gullible, unsuited to life, and unworthy of postmortem respect ,” wrote Laura Elizabeth Woollett, author of the Jonestown-inspired novel Beautiful Revolutionary . “Bodies weren’t autopsied. Families were denied the timely return of their relatives’ remains.” Perhaps the most significant fiasco that resulted from demonizing “cult followers” was the case of the Branch Davidians—the victims of the notorious Waco siege of 1993. Founded in 1959, the Branch Davidians were a religious movement descended from the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But thinking that by censuring another’s misconduct she would cover up her own more successfully, she said: ‘What a nice way to behave! What a fine, God-fearing specimen of womanhood! What a loyal and respectable spouse! Why, she had such an air of saintliness that she looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth! But the worst part about it is that anyone as old as she is should be setting the young so fine an example. A curse upon the hour she was born! May the Devil take the wicked and deceitful hussy, for allowing herself to become the general butt and laughing-stock of all the women of this city! Not only has she thrown away her own good name, broken her marriage vows, and forfeited the respect of society, but she’s had the audacity, after all he has done for her, to involve an excellent husband and venerable citizen in her disgrace, and all for the sake of some other man. So help me God, women of her kind should be shown no mercy; they ought to be done away with; they ought to be burnt alive and reduced to ashes.’ But at this point, recollecting that her lover was concealed beneath the chicken-coop in the very next room, she started coaxing Pietro to go to bed, saying it was getting late, whereupon Pietro, who had a greater urge to eat than to sleep, asked her whether there was any supper left over. ‘Supper?’ she replied. ‘What would I be doing cooking supper, when you’re not at home to eat it? Do you take me for the wife of Ercolano? Be off with you to bed, and give your stomach a rest, just for this once.’ Now, earlier that same evening, some of the labourers from Pietro’s farm in the country had turned up at the house with a load of provisions, and had tethered their asses in a small stable adjoining the lean-to without bothering to water them. Being frantic with thirst, one of the asses, having broken its tether, had strayed from the stable and was roaming freely about the premises, sniffing in every nook and cranny to see if it could find any water. And in the course of its wanderings, it came and stood immediately beside the coop under which the young man lay hidden. Since the young man was having to crouch on all fours, one of his hands was sticking out slightly from underneath the coop, and as luck would have it (or rather, to his great misfortune) the ass brought one of its hooves to rest on his fingers, causing him so much pain that he started to shriek at the top of his voice. Pietro, hearing this, was filled with astonishment, and, realizing that the noise was coming from somewhere inside the house, he rushed from the room to investigate.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Anice, “The next thing I know Sister Arthur Francis is writhing on the floor screaming, her hands plastered to her eyes. Anita’s screaming too, hysterical. The other sisters came running and I got put in a cell by myself. They locked me in. A couple of days later the big black monsignor arrived. He said Sister Arthur Francis had been blinded and I was in a whole lot of trouble. Then he gave me the choice. I agreed, and the next morning we landed in Rome. Took me right through customs. I didn’t even have a passport.” “So, you blinded the bitch.” “T don’t know how I was supposed to have done that. I was mad, mad out of my mind, angry for what she’d done to Anita. I just remember coming off the bed and going for her.” “You don’t remember a flash of blue light?” “No. But .. . hey, now that you mention it, I remember snatches of conversation between the monsignor and Jacoby.” “Captain Jacoby.” “Yeah, something about a flash of blue. What ... what does it ‘ mean?” “Don’t know. Maybe we'll find out in Oriskany.” What did Oriskany have to do with her? She drew her knees under her chin and clasped her arms around her legs. “I never saw Anita again. I don’t know what happened to her.” He said nothing. She had fallen asleep almost ninety miles back, but now she stirred. “Hey, can we pull over? My bladder’s getting ready to burst.” She said it just as he pulled into a roadside hotel. “Thank God! A real shower and a clean bed. That cabin made my skin crawl. Two nights in that dump ... made me afraid I'd pick up some mold infection, or something.” “Wasn’t it a hole?” he agreed. It was almost 2 a.m. The night clerk had been dozing and didn’t pay much attention to them as he checked them in. He handed them a key and mumbled something about a complimentary breakfast. _ The room was standard, two beds, air conditioned. She began to peel off her clothes, then stopped, cast him a look, and said, “Ooops.” “Take your shower. I can wait,” he said. 220 Robert Buckley She nodded, gathered her things and stepped into the bathroom. A few moments later he heard the spray of water and a heartfelt moan of pleasure. He smiled, and then retrieved a document from a valise. The document was stamped: POR OCULES TUAS SOLUM. “For your eyes only. Well, no shit.” He frowned as he read the document, then muttered, “Fuck them.” A squeal followed by giggles drew his eyes away from the paper. He slipped it back into the valise and shoved the valise into his bag. She emerged from the bathroom with an oversized towel wrapped around her. She shivered in the air-conditioned room and pulled it even more tightly.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Better yet, the company can fire people without having to pay them for any accrued vacation time. Paige, who got canned after eleven months, had taken only five days of vacation. At a traditional company she would have been owed a week or two of vacation pay, but from HubSpot, she got nothing. Think about how many hundreds of people churn in and out of a place like HubSpot, and you can see how the savings add up. Another way to drive down labor costs is to deny people employee status in the first place. Uber, the ride-sharing company, saves money by categorizing drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. Uber insists drivers prefer this because they enjoy more freedom. Uber and others in the “share economy” are creating a new form of serfdom, an underclass of quasi-employees who receive low pay and no benefits. As former secretary of labor Robert Reich put it in a June 2015 Facebook post: “The ‘share economy’ is bunk; it’s becoming a ‘share the scraps’ economy.” Tech companies also are pushing the U.S. government to increase the number of skilled foreign workers who can enter the country on H-1B visas. Reich says that too is a way to drive down labor costs. In a 2015 Facebook post, Reich recalls that during his time in office in the 1990s Valley employers claimed they could not find skilled workers in the United States, “when in reality they just didn’t want to pay higher wages to Americans.” Foreign workers are “easy to intimidate because if they lose their jobs they have to leave the U.S.,” Reich says. Why are tech companies so obsessed with cutting costs? Look at their financial results. Many don’t make a profit. The biggest difference between today’s tech start-ups and those of the pre-Internet era is that the old guard companies, like Microsoft and Lotus Development, generated massive profits almost from the beginning, while today many tech companies lose enormous amounts of money for years on end, even after they go public. They need to constantly drive costs down, using things like Halligan’s VORP metric. A more interesting question is why there are so many companies that remain in business while losing money. This seems like a peculiar business model. The point of creating a company is to generate a profit—or that used to be the case, anyway. That changed in the 1990s, during the first dotcom bubble, when Silicon Valley created a new kind of company, one that can lose money for years, and in fact might never turn a profit, yet still can make its founders and investors incredibly rich. A watershed moment occurred on August 9, 1995, when Netscape Communications, maker of the first web browser, pulled off a huge IPO and saw its shares nearly triple in their first day of trading. Until then, companies were typically expected to be profitable before they could sell shares to the public. Netscape was gushing red ink.

• From Cultish (2021)

  But devotees of Choudhury swore he was like “a big kid.” His lullabies and moodiness, even his tantrums, gave him an “innocent adorable” factor, they attested. Confirmation bias allowed fans to interpret Choudhury’s blatant lies (he gloated about winning yoga competitions that never even took place) and statements of grandeur (“I don’t even sleep thirty hours a month,” “I’m the smartest man in the world you ever met,” “I’m the only friend you’ve had in your life”) as “childlike” rather than disturbed. The sunk cost fallacy told them he’d make their careers if they just attended one more training. During his hot yoga workshops, Choudhury’s pupils were known to pass out, suffer dehydration, and develop upper respiratory infections. Because they were conditioned to trust their beloved guru as all-knowing, they learned to disregard their own pain and gut instincts. Choudhury was also accused of grooming and sexually assaulting at least half a dozen female trainees. In 2016, the man responded to rape allegations with more us-versus-them name-calling, hyperbole, and gaslighting: A parody of himself, Choudhury denounced his accusers as “psychopaths” and “trash,” adding, “Why would I have to harass women? People spend one million dollars for a drop of my sperm.” In 2016, Choudhury fled the US without paying the nearly $7 million he owed survivors in punitive damages, and a year later, a Los Angeles judge issued a warrant for his arrest. (As of this writing, he has not been brought to justice and continues to lead teacher trainings outside the US.) As soon as Choudhury’s American empire crumbled, another controversial yoga “cult” took its place: CorePower. After the fall of Bikram, Denver-based CorePower Yoga swept in and rapidly became the largest yoga chain in America. While Bikram proudly claimed to be the “McDonald’s of yoga,” CorePower’s cofounder, the (now deceased) tech mogul Trevor Tice, self- branded as the “Starbucks of yoga.” Over the following decade, CorePower faced five federal lawsuits for the financial exploitation of its instructors and clients, having to forfeit over $3 million in settlements. Not dissimilar to a pyramid scheme, the studio pays instructors an unlivable hourly wage, promising raises and promotions only to those who recruit students to its $1,500 teacher training program. CorePower instructors are told to deliver their teacher training pitches at the end of class, after Savasana, the final resting pose.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  “You see what I mean? Who’s they ? All I know is that someone just fucked me, and I don’t know who. There’s a dick in my ass, but it’s a mystery dick. Did you make the decision, and you just don’t want to tell me? Did Wingman make the decision? Did Cranium? Did Halligan change his mind? You keep saying they did this, and they want that, but who are we talking about? And why did they make this decision? What were their reasons? Why didn’t I get a chance to argue my case? It’s like a voice just comes out of a burning bush and tells us what to do. There’s a man behind the curtain, like in The Wizard of Oz . Is that where we are, Zack? Are we in the merry old land of Oz?” Zack remains calm. He has no doubt anticipated that I would be pissed. He says that who knows, maybe someday they will let me launch the online magazine, but for now this is what the team needs. At a place like HubSpot it’s important to be a team player. Zack tries to spin it. He says that in a way I’m getting what I asked for. I’m going to have my own project. Along those lines, I now will have my own monthly traffic goal, a number that I have to hit. Wingman will set the number. There’s not much I can do here. I could confront Wingman and Cranium, and demand to know why they’re ignoring a direct order from their bosses. I could go back to Halligan and Dharmesh and ask them to intercede on my behalf. But I’m starting to think that Halligan and Dharmesh don’t really have much juice around here. And they have bigger things to worry about. As Spinner told me, Halligan probably forgot everything we talked about the minute he walked out of our meeting. Spinner was right. I played it wrong. I thought I could jump over Cranium and Wingman, but they have leapt up and blocked my shot. I tell myself that at least I tried, and now I know that I’ll just have to wait out a year and then leave. It’s over. I’m done. I force a smile. I tell Zack thanks for the update. I tell him I’m sorry about my outburst, and I can’t wait to get started on this new project. “Oh,” Zack says, “there’s one more thing.” The content factory has been getting overcrowded, he tells me. So in addition to getting my own little blog, I am going to be moving to a new location, away from the blog team, in the telemarketing call center. It’s the loudest room in the building. People call it the spider monkey room. Zack assures me that this move will only be temporary. HubSpot is renovating space on the fourth floor, and eventually our team will move up there.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Mary Meeker, an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, which underwrote the IPO, later recalled to Fortune : Was it early for the company to go public? Sure. There has been a rule of thumb that a company should have three quarters of obviously robust revenue growth. And you also traditionally wanted to see three quarters of profitability—improving profitability, for newer companies. Netscape was not profitable at the time, so that was certainly a new idea. But the market was ready for a new set of technology innovations, and Netscape was the right company in the right place at the right time with the right team. Over the course of its brief existence Netscape lost a lot of money, but nevertheless a few people got rich. In 1999, at the peak of the dotcom bubble, AOL acquired Netscape in a deal worth $10 billion when it closed. After that Netscape more or less disappeared. Yet one Netscape co-founder, Marc Andreessen, reportedly walked away with shares worth nearly $100 million. Another co-founder, Jim Clark, reportedly made $2 billion. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is the famous line from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon. The tale of Netscape added a new twist: On the Internet, at least when it comes to investments, nobody cares if you’re a dog. The Netscape IPO set off the dotcom frenzy. In Silicon Valley it was as if someone had flipped a switch. Suddenly there was a new business model: Grow fast, lose money, go public. That model persists today. It’s a simple racket. Venture capitalists pump millions of dollars into a company. The company spends some of that money coding up a “minimum viable product,” or MVP, a term coined by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup , which has become a bible for new tech companies, and then pumps enormous sums into acquiring customers—by hiring sales reps, marketers, and public relations people who can get publicity, put on flashy conferences, and generate hype—brand and buzz , as HubSpot calls it. The losses pile up, but the revenue number rises. Basically the company is buying one-dollar bills and selling them for seventy-five cents, but it doesn’t matter, because mom-and-pop investors are only looking at the revenue growth rate. They have been told that if a company can just grow big enough, fast enough, eventually profits will arrive. Only sometimes they don’t. Zynga, Groupon, and Twitter are a few big examples. In the past five years, from 2010 through 2014, Zynga racked up annual losses totaling more than $800 million; Groupon lost nearly $1 billion; and Twitter reported annual net losses that added up to more than $1.5 billion, according to the 10-K forms they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Old-guard tech CEOs seem baffled by the phenomenon of companies that operate for years in the red. “They make no money!

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They have new ideas. Venture capitalists openly admit they prefer to invest in twenty-something founders. “The cut-off in investors’ heads is thirty-two,” Paul Graham, who runs an incubator called Y Combinator, once said, adding that, “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.” John Doerr, a legendary venture capitalist and partner at Kleiner Perkins, once said he liked to invest in “white male nerds who have dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they have absolutely no social life. When I see that pattern coming in, it [is] very easy to decide to invest.” Companies prefer the same thing. Forget about getting booted out when you turn fifty. In Silicon Valley that happens when you turn forty. Jennifer Young, a single mother, sued her former employer, a tech company called Zillow, for age discrimination, at the ripe old age of forty-one. In her complaint, Young says Zillow maintained a “frat house” culture with binge drinking and lewd behavior, and that she endured harassment by her younger male colleagues, who made snide comments, such as “Younger people are faster,” “Are you too old to close?” “Do you even know how to work a computer?” and “You can’t keep up with the rest of us.” According to her complaint, Young had a successful career in sales and was “lured to Zillow with the promise that Zillow had an exceptional workplace.” Once she was there, “It was commonplace at the Zillow office for managers to inform employees, including Ms. Young, that if you do not ‘drink the Zillow kool-aid’ there would be no opportunity for career advancement,” Young’s complaint reads. Young claims Zillow runs a high-pressure sales operation that sounds a bit like the boiler room at HubSpot. At one point the stress of her job caused an old back injury to flare up. She claimed that while she was in the hospital, Zillow fired her for “job abandonment.” Another Zillow employee, Rachel Kremer, sued Zillow complaining of “sexual torture” in an “adult frat house” and said the company had “a pervasive culture of degrading women.” Kremer says she received harassing text messages, like this: “Call me. Matt is showering. Thinking 333 dinner drinks and your smooth vagina.” In another exchange, Kremer asks a coworker, “Wanna go join a gym and work out tonight?” His response: “Wanna blow me and have sex tonight?” No thanks, she tells him. The lawyer who filed Kremer’s discrimination lawsuit says the harassment was the result of the male employees “being brainwashed by this corporate culture.” That culture, the attorney says, was basically the culture of a frat house.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Ever hear of Agent Orange?” “Um, no.” “How old are you?” “Twenty-five.” “Hmm. Well, it’s a pretty powerful defoliant. It'll kill any plant life on contact; it’ll kill you too, after a while, if you get it on you.” “What the hell did you say that thing was again?” “It doesn’t have a name, actually. It’s called by a dozen or so different things, cane devil, sugar shrieker.” “What about the other kids in that trailer?” “I’m sure they’re human. You see, that lovely couple made a living selling kids, and that’s likely what they were intending to do to those others, before they met up with the thing.” “Selling children? To whom, for what?” “I shouldn’t have to draw you a picture. You think this thing we just killed was a monster? That white trash cracker and his sow ... they’re the real fucking monsters. Weak-minded bozos. This thing was running them, probably running them back home to Paladins 213 Louisiana and murdering all the way with those two boobs giving itcover.” “What then — when they got to Louisiana?” “The legends around this thing say it spawns from the remains of unwanted infants buried in the cane fields. As usual with legends, there’s a kernel of truth to them. We’ve found that they gestate in the ground and live off a living host. Sort of like spiders; they don’t kill their prey, they paralyse them and come back to eat them at their leisure while they’re alive.” Syvecch! “Those kids were on their way to getting planted in some cane field to feed the next generation of these things. Let’s hope we put an end to the cycle.” “Sometimes, I’m not sure I can do this job.” “What did you say your name was?” “For the umpteenth-thousandth time: Rachel!” “Oh, yeah. Okay, Racey, you clean up here and I’ll see to Mr and Mrs Hog Jowls.” “Racey!” “Tm better at remembéring nicknames.” Before she could say anything more the screen door slapped ff closed and he was gone. The man at the trailer bolted out of his chair as Locan approached. “What’s the matter, friend? You look surprised to see me.” The man wiped his chin with his palm. “Uh, well, whatsa matter? cule ae. Didimechete “Oh, yeah, she did pretty much what we expected her to do.” The woman tumbled out of the trailer. She held a hatchet in her hand. “We don’t want no trouble, mister.” Her voice was like pebbles rattling inside a can. “Well, Mr and Mrs Lard Ass. You got trouble.” He tugged the revolver from behind his back, leveled it at the man’s forehead and fired. He fell back in a wet thud. The woman was about to scream; a second bullet cut it short. “You say you’re peace officers?” The dubious deputy held the IDs under his flashlight. Another cruiser pulled up behind them. The sheriff emerged, ~ surveyed the scene and growled, “What the hell we got here?”