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 Great Transformation (2006)

  But in these pragmatic times, the rulers tended to find Confucians too idealistic, and they turned increasingly to the xie, the bands of peripatetic military experts who, like other members of the shi class, had lost their foothold in the cities and roamed the countryside in search of employment. By the Warring States period, however, many of the xie were recruited from the lower classes. They were mercenaries, prepared to fight in any army, as long as they were rewarded adequately. Unlike the more aristocratic Confucians, they were aggressive men of action. According to a historian of a later period, “Their words were always sincere and trustworthy, their actions quick and decisive. They were always true to what they promised and without regard to their own persons they would rush into danger, threatening others.”50 But toward the end of the fifth century, one of the xie turned his back on this militancy and preached a message of nonviolence. His was called Mozi, “Master Mo” (c. 480–390). We know very little about him, because the dialogues recorded in the book that bears his name are far more impersonal than the Analects, and Mozi the man disappears behind his ideas.51 He headed a strictly disciplined brotherhood of 180 men.52 Unlike Confucius’s loosely organized band of disciples, Mozi’s school resembled a sect. It had strict rules, followed a rigorously egalitarian ethic, and its members dressed like peasants or craftsmen. Instead of fighting as mercenaries, Mohists intervened to stop wars and defend cities in the smaller and more vulnerable states.53 Nine chapters of the Mozi deal with the techniques of defensive warfare and the construction of equipment to protect city walls. But Mozi was also a philosopher. He did not stop at disciplined action, but traveled from court to court, preaching his highly original ideas to the rulers. From the evidence of the Mozi, it seems that Master Mo could originally have been an artisan or craftsman. He used the imagery of a working man, comparing Heaven’s organization of the world to the compasses and L-square of the wheelwright and the carpenter, who employed these instruments “to measure the round and the square throughout the world.”54 Unlike the graceful style of the Analects, Mozi’s prose was somewhat humorless and ponderous, suggesting that he may have been a self-educated man who took up the pen with difficulty.55 Despite his impressive grasp of tradition, a residual awkwardness of style indicates that Mozi was not wholly at ease with the high culture of the nobility. Mo and his followers were arrivistes, impatient with the aristocracy’s preoccupation with prestige and status. He wanted a uniform control of expenditure, a curbing of extravagance, and a society that reflected the more frugal ethos of his own class.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  From the evidence of the Mozi, it seems that Master Mo could originally have been an artisan or craftsman. He used the imagery of a working man, comparing Heaven’s organization of the world to the compasses and L-square of the wheelwright and the carpenter, who employed these instruments “to measure the round and the square throughout the world.” 54 Unlike the graceful style of the Analects, Mozi’s prose was somewhat humorless and ponderous, suggesting that he may have been a self-educated man who took up the pen with difficulty. 55 Despite his impressive grasp of tradition, a residual awkwardness of style indicates that Mozi was not wholly at ease with the high culture of the nobility. Mo and his followers were arrivistes, impatient with the aristocracy’s preoccupation with prestige and status. He wanted a uniform control of expenditure, a curbing of extravagance, and a society that reflected the more frugal ethos of his own class. Mozi was, for example, highly critical of the Zhou dynasty and had little time for Confucius’s hero the duke of Zhou. He had very little interest in the Zhou ritual, music, and literature, which was so inspiring to Confucius. The poorer folk had never taken part in these elaborate court ceremonies, and the li seemed a complete waste of time and money to the Mohists. Mozi was deeply religious and believed that it was important to sacrifice to Heaven and the nature spirits, but he was disgusted by the extravagance of the elaborate ceremonial rites in the ancestral temples. He was especially incensed by the expensive funerals and the long, three-year mourning period. This was all very well for the idle rich, but what would happen if everybody observed these rites? It would ruin the workingman, bring down the economy, and weaken the state. 56 Mozi took a strictly pragmatic view of ritual. Rulers spent an inappropriate amount of money on these ceremonies, when the ordinary people did not have the wherewithal for food and clothes. The li did not elevate the soul; the ritualists had simply retreated from the problems of their time, taking refuge in the discussion of arcane ceremonies and abandoning all hope of redeeming the world. The situation had already changed dramatically in the short time that had elapsed since Confucius’s death. In the fourth and third centuries, as we shall see, Confucians would agonize about the plight of the poor and work indefatigably for the reform of society. But in Mozi’s day, some of the ritualists might have been so shocked by the rapid changes in the great plain that they withdrew from public life in the way that Mo described. Mozi, however, was extremely distressed by the predicament of the peasants, who were dragged off to fight in wars, conscripted into the corvée, and impoverished by heavy taxation.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor. This zakat (“purification”) would purge their hearts of habitual selfishness. At first, it seems, the religion of Muhammad was called tazakkah, an obscure word (related to zakat) that is difficult to translate: “refinement,” “generosity,” and “chivalry” have all been suggested as English equivalents, but none is entirely adequate. By tazakkah, Muslims were to cloak themselves in the virtues of compassion and generosity. They must use their intelligence to cultivate a caring and responsible spirit, which made them want to give graciously of what they had to all God’s creatures. They must carefully observe Allah’s bounteous behavior to human beings by observing the “signs” (ayat) of nature: The earth he has spread out for all living beings, with fruit hereon, and palm trees with sheathed clusters of dates, and grain growing tall on its stalks and sweet-smelling plants.69 By meditating on the mysteries of creation, Muslims must learn to behave with similar generosity. Because of Allah’s kindness, there was order and fruitfulness instead of chaos and sterility. If Muslims followed his example, they would find that their own lives had been transfigured. Instead of being characterized by selfish barbarism, they would acquire spiritual refinement. The new religion enraged the Meccan establishment, which did not approve of its egalitarian spirit; the most successful families persecuted the Muslims, tried to assassinate the prophet, and eventually Muhammad and seventy Muslim families were forced to flee to Medina, some 250 miles to the north. In the context of pagan Arabia, where the blood tie was the most sacred value, this amounted to blasphemy. It was unheard of to leave your kin and take up permanent residence with a tribe to whom you were not related. After their migration (hijrah), the Muslims faced the prospect of war with Mecca, the most powerful city of Arabia. For five years, they fought a desperate battle for survival. In pre-Islamic Arabia, warriors were merciless. If they had managed to conquer the Muslim community, the Meccans would certainly have exterminated every man, and enslaved every woman and child.

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

  The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is something 'ampliative' in our greatest truisms, our state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them. This being the case, the question ''at what point does the new state of mind cease to be implicit in the old?" is too vague to be answered. The only sharp way of defining synthetic propositions would be to say that they express a relation between two data at least. But it is hard to find any proposition which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions do it. Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. D. G. Thompson to prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psychology, II. pp. 232 ff.) seem accordingly but nugœ difficiles, and little better than wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from the question, the moment one ceases to ascribe to any a priori truths (whether analytic or synthetic) that "legislative character for all possible experience" which Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied such legislative character, and contended that it was for experience itself to prove whether its data can or cannot be assimilated to those ideal terms between which a priori relations obtain. The analytic-synthetic debate is thus for us devoid of all significance. On the whole, the best recent treatment of the question known to me is in one of A. Spir's works, his Denken und Wirklichkeit, I think, but I cannot now find the page. [565] Book IV. chaps, IX. §1; VII. 14. [566] Chap. V. §§6, 8. [567] Kant, by the way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way of showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived from experience. He insisted on thought—forms with which experience largely agrees, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any possibility be the results of experience would be such as experience violated. The first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms of judgment to which no order in 'things' runs parallel. These would indeed be features native to the mind. I owe this remark to Herr A. Spir, in whose 'Denken und Wirklichkeit' it is somewhere contained. I have myself already to some extent proceeded, and in the pages which follow shall proceed still farther, to show the originality of the mind's structure in this way. [568] Yet even so late as Berkeley's time one could write: "As in reading other books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the sense and apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the language: so in perusing the volume of nature methinks it is beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing how it follows from them.

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

  The Society was not perfect: it tended to be anti-intellectual, its pronouncements often defensive and self-righteous, its view of the West distorted by the colonial experience, and its leaders intolerant of dissent. Most seriously, it had developed a terrorist wing. After the creation of the State of Israel, the plight of the Palestinian refugees became a disturbing symbol of Muslims’ impotence in the modern world. For some, violence seemed the only way forward. Anwar Sadat, future president of Egypt, founded a “murder society” to attack the British in the Canal Zone.54 Other paramilitary groups were attached to the palace and the Wafd, and so it was perhaps inevitable that some Brothers should form the “Secret Apparatus” (al-jihaz al-sirri). Numbering only about a thousand, the Apparatus was so clandestine that even most of the Brothers had never heard of it. Banna denounced the Apparatus but could not control it and eventually it would both taint and endanger the Society.55 When the Apparatus assassinated Prime Minister Muhammad al-Nuqrashi on December 28, 1948, the Society condemned the atrocity in the strongest terms. But the government seized this opportunity to suppress it. On February 12, 1949, almost certainly at the behest of the new prime minister, Banna was gunned down in the street. When Nasser seized power in 1952, the Society had regrouped but was deeply divided. In the early days while he was still unpopular, Nasser courted the Brotherhood, even though he was a committed secularist and an ally of the Soviet Union. When it became clear that he had no intention of creating an Islamic state, however, a member of the Apparatus shot him during a rally. Nasser survived, and his courage under attack did wonders for his popularity. He now felt able to move against the Society, and by the end of 1954 more than a thousand Brothers had been brought to trial, and uncounted others, many of whom had committed no greater offense than distributing leaflets, never had even a day in court but languished in prison uncharged for fifteen years. After Nasser became a hero in the larger Arab world by defying the West during the Suez Crisis of 1956, he intensified his efforts to secularize the country. But this state violence simply spawned a more extreme form of Islam that called for armed opposition to the regime.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  within the group. “Everything’s always happening behind my back. I’ll have to talk to your father about that.” He’s also not allowed to sit in Mr. Kugler’s office anymore on Saturday afternoons or Sundays, because the manager of Keg’s might hear him if he happens to be next door. Dussel promptly went and sat there anyway. Mr. van Daan was furious, and Father went downstairs to talk to Dussel, who came up with some flimsy excuse, but even Father didn’t fall for it this time. Now Father’s keep- ing his dealings with Dussel to a minimum because Dussel insulted him. Not one of us knows what he said, but it must have been pretty awful. And to think that that miserable man has his birthday next week. How can you celebrate your birthday when you’ve got the sulks, how can you accept gifts from people you won’t even talk to? Mr. Voskuijl is going downhill rapidly. For more than ten days he’s had a temperature of almost a hundred and four. The doctor said his condition is hopeless; they think the cancer has spread to his lungs. The poor man, we’d so like to help him, but only God can help him now! I’ve written an amusing story called “Blurry the Explorer,” which was a big hit with my three listeners. I still have a bad cold and have passed it on to Margot, as well as Mother and Father. If only Peter doesn’t get it. He insisted on a kiss, and called me his El Dorado. You can’t call a person that, silly boy! But he’s sweet anyway! Yours, Anne M. Frank THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Mrs. van D. was in a bad mood this morning. All she did was complain, first about her cold, not being able to get cough drops and the agony of having to

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

  A great man could have nothing to do with self-interested people of a “narrow, private spirit.” Standing before the merchants, businessmen, and land speculators of Northampton, Edwards uttered a blistering condemnation of men who “shamefully defile their hands to gain a few pounds, and … grind the faces of the poor and screw upon their neighbors, and will take advantage of their authority to line their own pockets.” 29 This revolutionary assault on the structural violence of colonial society spread to other towns, and two years later, Edwards was driven from his pulpit and forced to take refuge for a time on the frontier with other misfits, acting as chaplain to the Indians of Stockbridge. Edwards was well versed in modern thought and had read Locke and Newton, but it was his Christianity that enabled him to bring the modern egalitarian ideal to the common people. The Great Awakening was America’s first mass movement; it gave many ordinary folk their first experience of participating in a nationwide event that could change the course of history. 30 Their ecstatic illumination left many Americans, who could not easily relate to the secular leanings of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state that they called “liberty.” The revival had also encouraged them to see their emotional faith as superior to the cerebral piety of the respectable classes. Those who remembered the aristocratic clerics’ disdain of their enthusiasm retained a distrust of institutional authority that prepared them later to take the drastic step of rejecting the king of England. In 1775, when the British government tried to tax the colonists to pay for its colonial wars against France, anger flared into outright rebellion. The leaders experienced the American Revolution as a secular event, a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power. They were men of the Enlightenment, inspired by Locke and Newton, and were also deists, who differed from orthodox Christians by rejecting the doctrines of revelation and the divinity of Christ. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, and ratified by the Colonial Congress on July 4, 1776, was an Enlightenment document, based on Locke’s theory of self-evident human rights—life, liberty, and property 31 —and the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality. These men had no utopian ideas about redistributing wealth or abolishing the class system. For them, this was simply a practical, far-reaching, but sustainable war of independence. The Founding Fathers, however, belonged to the gentry, and their ideas were far from typical; most Americans were Calvinists who could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Reluctant initially to break with Britain, not all the colonists joined the struggle, but those that did were motivated as much by the millennial myths of Christianity as by the Founders’ ideals.

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

  He loves to send out long memos bursting with enthusiasm and peppered with phrases in ALL CAPS about some half-formed idea that he believes will enable us to “conquer the world” and “blow up the Internet.” People at HubSpot love that phrase about blowing up the Internet. They use it all the time. The problem is that Zack changes his mind a lot. We’re heading south! No, we’re going north! We’re taking a plane! No, a train! No, bicycles! One of my colleagues compares Zack to Dug, the peppy dog in the movie Up , who is constantly being distracted by squirrels. Zack realizes that the blog sucks, and he wants to make it better. One day, he asks me to write up a memo explaining what changes we should make. He says he will send the memo to Wingman. Finally, I think, here’s my chance to do something. I write a long, detailed memo explaining all the problems with the blog. The memo isn’t vicious, but it is pretty critical. This turns out to be a mistake, because in addition to showing the memo to Wingman, Zack shares it with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley, the three women who run the blog. Now they hate me. Who am I to come in and criticize their work and tell them how to do their jobs? Marcia has been here for five years, which means she’s one of the longest-serving employees in the entire company. Jan has been here for two years, which doesn’t sound like much but at HubSpot this makes her a grizzled veteran. They’re too smart to show their contempt openly, but it’s real, and I can feel it. They’re terse when they talk to me. My articles, which until now would just get published the way I wrote them, now get kicked back with suggested edits. Some articles get held for weeks, or rejected altogether because Jan doesn’t think they’re a good fit for the blog, or because someone at HubSpot already wrote something about the same subject a few years ago. Marcia and Jan sit across the aisle from Zack and me, about three feet away. They sit facing each other, their monitors back to back, and they communicate by trading instant messages. Marcia types something—tap, tap, tap—and a second later, Jan giggles. Jan types something back—tap, tap, tap—and Marcia bursts out laughing. They’re having a blast over there. “You know,” I tell Zack, “I think maybe it wasn’t a good idea for you to share that memo with the women on the blog team.” “What do you mean?” he says. I can’t tell if he’s playing dumb or if he is actually a simpleton. “Well I thought the memo was only going to Wingman. If I’d known you were going to show it to them, I might have worded things differently.” Zack assures me that everything will be all right. I wonder if perhaps he has intentionally set a trap for me.

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

  The team leaders give presentations. At home that night, I tell my kids about this and show them the photos of the paintings. They think this is hilarious. They are now eight years old, in the third grade. They claim their classmates could make better paintings than what the grown-ups at HubSpot have produced. Even preschoolers could do better, they say. The following Monday, when I leave for work, they taunt me: “Have a good day at kindergarten, Daddy! Have fun making your paintings!” At the office I find that everyone is talking about Fearless Friday and what an awesome success it was. Emails are whizzing around, with everyone praising Jordan for doing such an awesome job. A few weeks later Jordan announces that Fearless Friday was such a huge success that we’re going to be doing it again. “Welcome to the world of start-ups,” my friend Harvey says when I tell him about Fearless Friday. Harvey is about my age, maybe a little older. He lives in San Francisco. He spent years working at big tech companies, but a few years ago he left a very cushy gig and took a job as a vice president at a start-up, a tiny place that had less than one hundred employees. Eleven months after he joined, the company was acquired for more than $1 billion. Harvey won’t tell me how much he made, but I’m guessing it’s more than $10 million. Now he has joined another start-up, this time with a C-level title, and is hoping to do it all over again. Harvey is one of the people who encouraged me to bail out of journalism and take the job at HubSpot. He’s calling to check in and see how things are going. I tell him I’m frustrated. It’s not just batshit crazy stuff like Fearless Friday. It’s everything. Decisions get made but no one knows who made them. Who’s in charge? Nobody. Everybody. One day we are told the company will focus on big enterprise customers and that this decision has been etched in stone and will not change. Two weeks later, we’re going back to selling to small businesses. “I’m worried,” I tell him. “This place seems out of control.” Harvey says everything I’m describing about HubSpot is absolutely normal. “You know what the big secret of all these start-ups is?” he tells me. “The big secret is that nobody knows what they’re doing. When it comes to management, it’s amateur hour. They just make it up as they go along.” Examples abound of tech start-ups trying to bring in more experienced people who end up leaving, sometimes citing a lack of “culture fit.” Evan Spiegel, the twenty-five-year-old founder of Snapchat, a photo sharing application, raised $1 billion in venture funding and realized, or was told by his investors, that he needed to hire people who could run a business and make money.

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

  It turns out that HubSpot has a split personality. On one side there is the touchy-feely stuff about the culture code and having HEART, which comes from Dharmesh. On the other side is Halligan’s domain, which is this room, where the only thing that matters is making your numbers, and nobody gives a shit about having HEART. The spider monkey room has one simple rule: Make your numbers, and you live. Fall short, and you get canned. Guys like Loud Pete operate under tremendous pressure and against long odds. They’ll hit the phone all day. On average, one call out of eighty lands someone who agrees to look at a demonstration of the software. That’s all the spider monkeys have to do, just get someone to say yes to a demo. At that point the lead gets passed to someone else. Those people are paid better than the telemarketing people, but they too operate under insane pressure. Selling software is a grueling job, and it’s especially rough at HubSpot, which imposes monthly quotas on its sales rep rather than quarterly or annual quotas that other companies use. “Your life hits reset every month. It’s a hamster wheel,” one high-level sales rep says. “That’s why the sales reps are so young. There’s hardly anybody who has been here more than five years. People don’t last. People who are forty years old, who are married and have kids, they don’t want to live like this.” Halligan is a former sales guy. He knows the kind of pressure he is putting on his reps. He is aware that no one can do this job for long without burning out, and he is okay with that. The spider monkeys are not being hired with the expectation that they will spend their careers at HubSpot. They are being rounded up to work for a few years, then go somewhere else. I don’t doubt that Dharmesh really does care about creating a company that people can love, but I am equally sure that Halligan cares only about the numbers. While Dharmesh obsesses about the five principles that make up HEART, Halligan’s big metric is something called VORP, or value over replacement player. The idea comes from Major League Baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It’s a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible. All that stuff from Dharmesh about being lovable, engaging in delightion , having HEART, and creating a culture code—that’s great for the keynote speech at the Inbound conference. That’s the face we show to the outside world. But there’s not much delightion in this room. Yet this canyon of desperation, packed with beer-drinking shitheads trying to hit their quotas—this, I realize, is the real heart and soul of HubSpot.

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

  To make the lunch I have to miss the marketing department meeting, but this is no big deal. Cranium holds this meeting every Monday. It’s not mandatory. Sixty or so people attend, but it’s just a way to get an update on what’s happening in the department. People miss it all the time. Nevertheless after the meeting I get an angry email from Trotsky demanding to know why I wasn’t at the department meeting. I remind him that I had a lunch with a CEO and that I had cleared it with him in advance. Back comes an angry, argumentative email saying that I’m being standoffish and not making enough effort to demonstrate my loyalty to the team. I send a list of things I’ve done in my first week back to reconnect with my colleagues. He fires back with an email saying he does not accept my explanation and offering point-by-point rebuttals to all of the items on my list. Now that we’re on the subject of my loyalty, he has some other questions for me. How many sessions did I attend at Inbound? He doesn’t recall seeing me there. I send him a list of the panels I attended and the people I spoke to, which includes several of HubSpot’s board members and investors, one of whom, Lorrie Norrington, thanked me for doing a good job moderating the panel on which she appeared. I tell him the name of everyone at HubSpot with whom I’ve had coffee or lunch as part of my effort to reintegrate myself at the company. Okay, Trotsky says. But that’s not all. Why did I remove any mention of HubSpot from my profiles on Twitter and Facebook when I was away in Los Angeles? Why have I still not put the word HubSpot back into my profiles there? Why did I skip the Thursday night after-party at the Inbound conference? Do I not like to socialize with my colleagues? I explain that I don’t drink, and I don’t like going to parties where people drink too much. Also, I have two young kids, I’ve just spent part of the summer away from them, and when given the choice of spending a night home with my family or going to a keg party with a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds, I’m probably going to choose my family. Is this really a problem? It is. All of these little things, Trotsky says, are adding up to create a picture of an employee who just doesn’t care enough about the company. Each one makes it a little less likely that I will earn my way back into the company’s good graces. “These are setbacks,” he says. I keep expecting the old Trotsky to appear, burst out laughing, and say, “Shit, buddy, I’m just kidding!

• 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.