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 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 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?”

• From Cultish (2021)

  In late 2020, things were already going south for the company due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country harbored long track records of toxicity . Cults of personality formed around certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and allegedly sleeping with some students. (“Your riders should want to be you or fuck you” was a mantra instructors reportedly learned and internalized. One all-star openly referred to her riders as “little sluts.”) Some top instructors were known for verbally bullying riders and “lesser” employees, as well as stoking all the studio drama that surrounded them, relishing in their deification, like high school Queen Bees. Purportedly, SoulCycle HQ knew of and condoned the bad behavior, covering up complaints about its most prized instructors making bigoted side comments to riders and staff. (Let’s just say they involved the words “Aunt Jemima” and “twinks” and calling curvy staffers “not on brand.”) Reports of sexual harassment had allegedly been ignored, as well. The company “treated [instructors] like Hollywood stars anyway,” read one headline, which Natalia Petrzela DMed me the hour it broke. Insiders reported that higher-ups threw complaints in the trash, while bankrolling one implicated instructor’s $2,400 Soho House membership and rental Mercedes-Benz, like nothing happened. This news didn’t exactly come as a shock. “When you elevate instructors as godlike, abuses of power will follow,” Natalia tweeted. “It makes sense that we saw this kind of reckoning first in yoga, where leaders have long been revered as ‘gurus’; it was only a matter of time for instructors [with] a ‘cult following.’” I read a 2020 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology revealing that folks who received “spiritual training” in certain supernatural crafts like energy healing and lightwork were more prone to narcissistic tendencies (bloated confidence in their abilities, increased hunger for success and social approval, denigration of anyone lacking their self-evaluated superpowers, etc.). This was compared to people who hadn’t gone through any spiritual training at all, as well as students studying less performative disciplines, like meditation and mindfulness. The study showed that even as these gurus encouraged compassion and self-acceptance in others, their own egos swelled. “Master” SoulCycle instructors seem to display a similar response: existing pride in their natural charisma combined with the company’s extreme training is the recipe for a god complex closer to that of a 3HO Swami than an ordinary mortal employed to teach stationary cycling. As of this writing, SoulCycle hasn’t commented on the specific accusations or fired any alleged abusers. And CrossFit loyalists have ensured that their beloved culture—Hero WoDs, beast mode, and all—lives on, no matter the brand name. Some say the mark of a truly “successful cult” is the power to outlast the death or cancellation of its founder.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Because there was no wishful thinking in them? Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment. But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector. Her bad language throws no light on it one way or the other. And I can believe He is a vet when I think of my own suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is. What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal? I begin to see. My love for H. was of much the same quality as my faith in God. I won’t exaggerate, though. Whether there was anything but imagination in the faith, or anything but egoism in the love, God knows. I don’t. There may have been a little more; especially in my love for H. But neither was the thing I thought it was. A good deal of the card-castle about both.

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

  No matter what he says, I stay calm and respond with as few words as possible, remembering that my kids are in the backseat, listening to every word. “Okay,” I say. “I see. Sure. Okay. Yes, I see your point.” But this is incredible—literally. As in, I literally do not believe that Trotsky actually means a word of what he is saying. Hardly anyone saw the comment I posted, and I deleted it only minutes after posting it. What’s more, Trotsky is the one who called and told me how Spinner had behaved like an imbecile with Barbara in the first place. If Trotsky were saying, Look, we both know Spinner is an idiot, but you can’t make jokes about her, I might believe he’s sincere. But that’s not what he is saying. He is saying that Spinner is right, that she has a legitimate grievance. He’s saying that he agrees with Cranium, that I probably should be fired. This is stunning. I don’t know how this has happened, but Trotsky has changed—utterly. It’s like the final scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where you think Donald Sutherland is still human, but then he points and opens his mouth and you realize he’s become... one of them. This all feels like a pretext, as if Trotsky has been looking for any excuse, no matter how small, to make a stink and start driving me out of the company. I remember the email he sent me earlier in the month, asking me, as a friend, why I wanted to continue working at HubSpot. Trotsky had insisted otherwise, but that message had felt like a not very subtle clue that he wanted me to leave. Maybe he was hoping I would write back and say, Hey, you’re right, this isn’t working, and I’m not going to return from my leave of absence. Instead I called and told him that I wanted to keep working at HubSpot. It’s true that I have been losing heart, and I have decided to start looking for a different job, but in the meantime I’d like to keep getting a paycheck. Now we have gone to the next level: Trotsky is using his manager voice and running through a list of things I have done wrong. Really I’ve done just one thing, and it’s just a small comment, and for that matter whatever slight or insult Spinner is claiming to have suffered, it’s nothing compared to the open battle that Trotsky and Spinner engaged in on Facebook a few months before, when he was ranting about elephants and she was accusing him of being a woman hater. That argument didn’t lead to anyone getting threatened with firing.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Ellen West—And Loneliness This chapter has a long history. Rollo May’s book Existence, a presentation of an existential point of view, was published in 1958. It contained a chapter by Dr. Ludwig Binswanger on a famous case in which he and Dr. Eugen Bleuler were involved., which was first reported in German (Binswanger, 1944–1945). Obviously, the treatment methods were in the early days of psy chiatry and psychoanalysis. In the autumn of 1958, a conference was held by the newly formed American Academy of Psychotherapists, which included both psychiatrists and psychologists. Dr. May organized a symposium at the conference to discuss the case of Ellen West. Taking part in the symposium were three psychiatrists, two psychologists (I was one), an anthropologist, and a social historian. The meeting was an all-day session, and the case was discussed from many angles. It has never been reported in full. As I studied the case in preparation for the symposium, I became more and more angry at the many and serious “mistakes” that were made in the treatment of Ellen. I felt she was dealt with by her parents, her various physicians, her psychiatrists, and her two analysts in ways that could not possibly help her— ways that would, in fact, certainly worsen her psychological health. Intellectually, I could forgive these errors, knowing that Ellen had lived many, many years ago and that psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment were in a primitive stage. But my forgiving thoughts did nothing to change the anger I felt. Consequently, in my presentation at the symposium I not only presented the dynamics of the interactions as I saw them but I also speculated on what the dynamics would be if Ellen entered my office, or that of any client-centered therapist today, seeking help. The outcome, as I saw it, would have been very different. Some years later I expanded the paper, presenting the major events in Ellen’s life, summarizing Binswanger’s account, and relating Ellen’s life to the isolation and loneliness that exist in modern society. The expanded paper is able to stand alone; it is not just one commentary in a symposium. Even though the initial commentary was written long ago and the expanded paper is far from new, I still stand by it, and am pleased to present it as illustrating additional facets of a client-centered, person-centered approach to a human being in distress.

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

  Worse, Cranium worded the memo in a way that sounds as if I’ve been fired: After a lot of conversations about career paths and what we are looking for out of our content team, as well as a lot of thinking about what he wants to do with his career and where his passions lie, Dan has decided to take his career back into the media industry. His new job is running the website Valleywag, part of Gawker Media. We wish Dan lots of luck in his new role! (And hope he doesn’t have any photos of the IPO party… haha.) His last day in the office will be tomorrow, so reach out to Dan if you want to connect with him in person. I go to the meeting with Trotsky. He plunks down a stack of paperwork with a cover letter that says I’ve been terminated, effective immediately, signed by the director of “people operations.” I have ninety days to exercise my vested stock options, or they will expire. My pay ends today. My health coverage ends in a week. So much for all that stuff about being lovable and remarkable and HubSpotty , and treating people with HEART. Trotsky says the company can offer me something a little better. I can keep my insurance through the end of December, and I can even continue to get paid for those weeks, but only if I sign a “release and waiver of claims” agreement that’s attached to the termination letter. Signing the release form prohibits me from ever bringing any kind of legal claim against the company. It also includes a nondisparagement clause. I tell Trotsky I want to take the paperwork home and look it over, and maybe have someone review it for me. “Sure,” he says. “That’s fine.” He asks me a few questions about the podcast and where things stand. There’s something I need to look up, so I open my laptop and start to search for the file—but he stops me. “I’m not supposed to let you do that,” he says. Trotsky takes my laptop. He also takes my ID bracelet. I’m speechless. I really can’t believe this. I gave these guys six weeks of notice and wanted to make a smooth transition, and in exchange for that courtesy, they’re firing me. Before we leave Trotsky says he wants to tell me something: “I’m your friend,” he says. “I’ve always been your friend. I know that right now you don’t think that’s the case. You think I’ve been out to get you. But the truth is that I’ve always been on your side, and I still am.” He also gives me some advice. He says that in his last two jobs he clashed with his managers. He left feeling angry. But in both cases, after he calmed down a bit, he reached out and tried to make amends with them. One boss refused to talk to him.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend. Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view ‘good,’ telling lies may be ‘good’ too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.

• From Cultish (2021)

  As he declared, “The free-enterprise system . . . is a gift of God to us, and we should understand it, embrace it, and believe in it.” According to DeVos, if you feel as though you’ve been shut out of the system your whole life, then you’d be an imbecile not to give up on bureaucracy and turn to an MLM. This is the rhetoric that permeates Amway’s legendary rallies, where the run of show might go something like this: Delivered with the anthemic cadence of a Pentecostal preacher, an emcee kicks off with some anecdote about one or two of Amway’s most successful IBOs. Then they introduce the featured speaker. Soundtracked by the Rocky theme song, the orator emerges while attendees go berserk. The speaker—typically a white, male, gem-level IBO pocketing tens of thousands of dollars for the appearance—narrates his emotional success story while clicking through a PowerPoint of the homes, yachts, cars, and vacations he’s acquired thanks to Amway. Shouts of “Ain’t it great?” and “I believe!” echo throughout the venue. Diamonds and Pearls call out “How sweet it is!” An award presentation follows, and in closing, the audience joins in a tearful performance of “God Bless America.” At the end, uplines look their downlines in the eye and literally say, “I love you.” It doesn’t take a sociologist to see how deceptive it is to drop the “love” bomb on one’s business subordinates—especially knowing they will never make a dime from the relationship, much less buy a yacht. Most recruits don’t even want a yacht. They’d have no use for a yacht. Again, the reason they struck up with the company in the first place and then attended this overblown conference was because they’re a stay-at-home mom or an immigrant attempting to build a decent life. Say you’re an MLMer who’s been in business for a while, even attended a conference or two, and have finally started feeling like you want to get out. Mention these inklings to anyone inside, and you can expect your upline to spam your inbox with messages guilt-tripping and gaslighting you into staying. Becca was fortunate that her mother-in-law was a fairly chill upline, so when she decided to quit while she was ahead, a year into Optavia, she only had a handful of calls to ignore. But for other MLMers, the exit cost feels enormous. While there probably won’t be Scientology-esque threats of alien body-snatching, you very well might experience agonizing guilt and anxiety that you’re giving up on your dreams and losing a surrogate family. One former Amway IBO lamented how terrible it felt to have people who once told her they loved her suddenly ghost her with no remorse: “Right at the beginning you’re confronted with love . . . [and] attention by Amwayians. You get the impression that people are really interested in you as a person. That’s simply not true.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  None but congruous and relevant images arise. When roused by indignation or moral enthusiasm, how trenchant are our emotions, how smiting are our words! The whole network of petty scruples and by-considerations which, at ordinary languid times, surrounded the matter like a cob-web, holding back our thought, as Gulliver was pinned to the earth by the myriad Lilliputian threads, are dashed through at a blow, and the subject stands with its essential and vital lines revealed. The last point is relative to the theory that what was acquired habit in the ancestor may become congenital tendency in the offspring. So vast a superstructure is raised upon this principle that the paucity of empirical evidence for it has alike been matter of regret to its adherents, and of triumph to its opponents. In Chapter XXVIII we shall see what we may call the whole beggarly array of proof. In the human race, where our opportunities for observation are the most complete, we seem to have no evidence whatever which would support the hypothesis, unless it possibly be the law that; city-bred children are more apt to be near-sighted than country children. In the mental world we certainly do not observe that the children of great travelers get their geography lessons with unusual ease, or that a baby whose ancestors have spoken German for thirty generations will, on that account, learn Italian any the less easily from its Italian nurse. But if the considerations we have been led to are true, they explain perfectly well why this law should not be verified in the human race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the inheritance of these modes—then called instincts—would have in it nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. He owes his whole pre-eminence as a reasoner, his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, par excellence, the educable animal. If, then, the law that habits are inherited were found exemplified in him, he would, in so far forth, fall short of his human perfections; and, when we survey the human races, we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at the outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated in the end.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend. Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us.

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

  Venture capitalists will insist that they don’t engage in “pattern matching” and are not just looking for people who look like Mark Zuckerberg. But they are, and this makes perfect sense, because that’s what mom-and-pop investors want to buy. Investors in the public markets want to get in on the ground floor of the next Facebook. So that’s what venture capitalists in Silicon Valley try to make for them, selecting “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no idea how to monetize,” as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz once put it. At one time, venture capitalists who invested in a tech start-up with a young founder would insist on bringing in “adult supervision,” meaning an experienced executive to help build the business. But today the conventional wisdom among venture capitalists is that it’s better to leave a young founder in charge and give him (and it’s almost always a him) free rein. Compounding the problem is the fact that Silicon Valley now attracts a different kind of person—young, male, amoral, perhaps not as evil as Patrick Bateman, the investment banker serial killer antihero of American Psycho, but cut from the same cloth. Guys who once would have gone to work on Wall Street hoping to get rich now move to San Francisco, where venture capitalists entrust them with millions of dollars and tell them to do their worst. “In all too many cases, what venture capitalists are investing in is assholes,” Sarah Lacy, editor of the tech blog Pando, wrote in a 2014 essay that was widely read and shared in Silicon Valley. Give millions of dollars to young entitled assholes, provide no adult supervision, and what happens next is predictable. You get Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of a start-up called RadiumOne, relieved of duty after being charged with domestic violence for allegedly beating up his girlfriend. (Chahal maintained his innocence and pled guilty to two misdemeanors.) Chahal previously appeared on the reality TV show Secret Millionaire and posed sitting on his bed, which had a headboard with gold trim and a gold crown over a golden initial G. You get Mahbod Moghadam, co-founder of Rap Genius, booted out of his own company after posting tasteless jokes about a murder spree on the UC Santa Barbara campus.

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

  His relation to the king was that of the pope to the emperor. Yea, we may say, as he had outkinged the king as chancellor, so he outpoped the pope as archbishop. He censured the pope for his temporizing policy. He wielded the spiritual sword against Henry with the same gallantry with which he had wielded the temporal sword for him. He took up the cause of Anselm against William Rufus, and of Gregory VII. against Henry IV., but with this great difference, that he was not zealous for a moral reformation of the Church and the clergy, like Hildebrand and Anselm, but only for the temporal power of the Church and the rights and immunities of the clergy. He made no attempt to remove the scandal of pluralities of which he had himself been guilty as archdeacon and chancellor, and did not rebuke Henry for his many sins against God, but only for his sins against the supremacy of the hierarchy. The new archbishop was summoned by Pope Alexander III. to a council at Tours in France, and was received with unusual distinction (May, 1163). The council consisted of seventeen cardinals, a hundred and twenty-four bishops, four hundred and fourteen abbots; the pope presided in person; Becket sat at his right, Roger of York at his left. Arnolf of Lisieux in Normandy preached the opening sermon on the unity and freedom of the Church, which were the burning questions of the day. The council unanimously acknowledged the claims of Alexander, asserted the rights and privileges of the clergy, and severely condemned all encroachments on the property of the Church. This was the point which kindled the controversy between the sceptre and the crozier in England. The dignity of the crown was the sole aim of the king; the dignity of the Church was the sole aim of the archbishop. The first rupture occurred over the question of secular taxation. Henry determined to transfer the customary payment of two shillings on every hide of land to his own exchequer. Becket opposed the enrolment of the decree on the ground that the tax was voluntary, not of right. Henry protested, in a fit of passion, "By the eyes of God, it shall be enrolled!" Becket replied, "By the eyes of God, by which you swear, it shall never be levied on my lands while I live!" Another cause of dispute was the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The king demanded that all clerics accused of gross misdemeanors be tried by the civil court. A certain clerk, Philip of Broi, had been acquitted of murder in the bishop’s court. The king was indignant, but Philip refused to plead in the civil court. The matter was taken up by the archbishop, but a light sentence imposed.

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

  The exciting cause of this religious revolt is to be looked for in the worldliness and arrogance of the clergy, the formalism of the Church’s ritual, and the worldly ambitions of the papal policy. In their depositions before the Church inquisitors, the accused called attention to the pride, cupidity, and immorality of the priests. Tanchelm, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders directed their invectives against the priests and bishops who sought power and ease rather than the good of the people. Underneath all this discontent was the spiritual hunger of the masses. The Bible was not an altogether forgotten book. The people remembered it. Popular preachers like Bernard of Thiron, Robert of Abrissel and Vitalis of Savigny quoted its precepts and relied upon its authority. There was a hankering after the Gospel which the Church did not set forth. The people wanted to get behind the clergy and the ritual of the sacraments to Christ himself, and, in doing so, a large body of the sectaries went to the extreme of abandoning the outward celebration of the sacraments, and withdrew themselves altogether from priestly offices. The aim of all the sects was moral and religious reformation. The Cathari, it is true, differed in a philosophical question and were Manichaeans, but it was not a question of philosophy they were concerned about. Their chief purpose was to get away from the worldly aims of the established church, and this explains their rapid diffusion in Lombardy and Southern France.944 A prominent charge made against the dissenters was that they put their own interpretations upon the Gospels and Epistles and employed these interpretations to establish their own systems and rebuke the Catholic hierarchy. Special honor was given by the Cathari to the Gospel of John, and the Waldensian movement started with an attempt to make known the Scriptures through the vulgar tongue. The humbler classes knew enough about clerical abuses from their own observation; but the complaints of the best men of the times were in the air, and these must also have reached their ears and increased the general restlessness. St. Bernard rebuked the clergy for ambition, pride, and lust. Grosseteste called clerics antichrists and devils. Walter von der Vogelweide, among the poets, spoke of priests as those — "Who make a traffic of each sacrament The mass’ holy sacrifice included." These men did not mean to condemn the priestly office, but it should occasion no surprise that the people made no distinction between the office and the priest who abused the office.

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

  In his readiness to support the ambitions of his nephew, Jerome Riario, the pope seemed willing to go to any length of violence. A conspiracy was directed against Lorenzo’s life, in which Jerome was the chief actor,—one of the most cold-blooded conspiracies of history. The pope was conversant with the plot and talked it over with its chief agent, Montesecco and, though he may not have consented to murder, which Jerome and the Pazzi had included in their plan, he fully approved of the plot to seize Lorenzo’s person and overthrow the republic.765 The terrible tragedy was enacted in the cathedral of Florence. When Montesecco, a captain of the papal mercenaries, hired to carry out the plot, shrank from committing sacrilege by shedding blood in the church of God, its execution was intrusted to two priests, Antonio Maffei da Volterra and Stefano of Bagnorea, the former a papal secretary. While the host was being elevated, Julian de’Medici, who was inside the choir, was struck with one dagger after another and fell dead. Lorenzo barely escaped. As he was entering the sanctuary, he was struck by Maffei and slightly wounded, and made a shield of his arm by winding his mantle around it, and escaped with friends to the sacristy, which was barred against the assassins. The bloody deed took place April 26, 1478. The city proved true to the family which had shed so much lustre upon it, and quick revenge was taken upon the agents of the conspiracy. Archbishop Salviati, his brother, Francesco de’ Pazzi and others were hung from the signoria windows.766 The two priests were executed after having their ears and noses cut off. Montesecco was beheaded. Among those who witnessed the scene in the cathedral was the young cardinal, Raphael, the pope’s grandnephew, and without having any previous knowledge of the plot. His face, it was said, turned to an ashen pallor, which in after years he never completely threw off. With intrepid resolution, Sixtus resented the death of his archbishop and the indignity done a cardinal in the imprisonment of Raphael as an accomplice. He hurled the interdict at the city, branding Lorenzo as the son of iniquity and the ward of perdition,—iniquitatis filius et perditionis alumnus,—and entered into an alliance with Naples against it. Louis XI. of France and Venice and other Italian states espoused the cause of Florence. Pushed to desperation, Lorenzo went to Naples and made such an impression on Ferrante that he changed his attitude and joined an alliance with Florence. The pope was checkmated. The seizure of Otranto on Italian soil by the Turks, in 1480, called attention away from the feud to the imminent danger threatening all Italy. In December of that year, Sixtus absolved Florence, and the legates of the city were received in front of St. Peter’s and touched with the rod in token of forgiveness.

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

  He advised the emperor to order every university in Germany to establish chairs of Hebrew for ten years.1072 Pfefferkorn, whom Reuchlin had called a "buffalo or an ass," replied in a violent attack, the Handmirror—Handspiegel wider und gegen die Juden — 1511. Both parties appeared before the emperor, and Reuchlin replied in the Spectacles—Augenspiegel,—which in its turn was answered by his antagonist in the Burning Glass—Brandspiegel. The sale of the Spectacles was forbidden in Frankfurt. Reuchlin followed in a Defense against all Calumniators, 1513, and after the manner of the age cudgelled them with such epithets as goats, biting dogs, raving wolves, foxes, hogs, sows, horses, asses and children of the devil.1073 An appeal he made to Frederick the Wise called forth words of support from Carlstadt and Luther. The future Reformer spoke of Reuchlin as a most innocent and learned man, and condemned the inquisitorial zeal of the Cologne theologians who "might have found worse occasions of offence on all the streets of Jerusalem than in the extraneous Jewish question." The theological faculty of Cologne, which consisted mostly of Dominicans, denounced 43 sentences taken from Reuchlin as heretical, 1514. The Paris university followed suit. Cited before the tribunal of the Inquisition by Hoogstraten, Reuchlin appealed to the pope. Hoogstraten had the satisfaction of seeing the Augenspiegel publicly burnt at Cologne, Feb. 10, 1514. The young bishop of Spires, whom Leo X. appointed to adjudicate the case, cleared Reuchlin and condemned Hoogstraten to silence and the payment of the costs, amounting to 111 gulden, April 24, 1514.1074 But the indomitable inquisitor took another appeal, and Leo appointed Cardinal Grimani and then a commission of 24 to settle the dispute. All the members of the commission but Sylvester Prierias favored Reuchlin, who was now supported by the court of Maximilian, by the German "poets" as a body and by Ulrich von Hutten, but opposed by the Dominican order. When a favorable decision was about to be rendered, Leo interposed, June 23, 1520, and condemned Reuchlin’s book, the Spectacles, as a work friendly to the Jews, and obligated the author to pay the costs of trial and thereafter to keep silence. The monks had won and Pfefferkorn, with papal authority on his side, could celebrate his triumph over scholarship and toleration in a special tract, 1521. With the Reformation, which in the meantime had broken out at Wittenberg, the great Hebrew scholar showed no sympathy. He even turned away from Melanchthon and cancelled the bequest of his library, which he had made in his favor, and gave it to his native town, Pforzheim. He prevented, however, Dr. Eck, during his brief sojourn at Ingolstadt, from burning Luther’s writings. His controversy with Pfefferkorn had shown how strong in Germany the spirit of obscurantism was, but it had also called forth a large number of pamphlets and letters in favor of Reuchlin.