Anxiety

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)

  THIRD STORY Melchizedek 1 the Jew, with a story about three rings, avoids a most dangerous trap laid for him by Saladin. 2 Neifile’s story was well received by all the company, and when she fell silent, Filomena began at the queen’s behest to address them as follows: The story told by Neifile reminds me of the parlous state in which a Jew once found himself. Now that we have heard such fine things said concerning God and the truth of our religion, it will not seem inappropriate to descend at this juncture to the deeds and adventures of men. So I shall tell you a story which, when you have heard it, will possibly make you more cautious in answering questions addressed to you. It is a fact, my sweet companions, that just as folly often destroys men’s happiness and casts them into deepest misery, so prudence extricates the wise from dreadful perils and guides them firmly to safety. So clearly may we perceive that folly leads men from contentment to misery, that we shall not even bother for the present to consider the matter further, since countless examples spring readily to mind. But that prudence may bring its reward, I shall, as I have promised, prove to you briefly by means of the following little tale: Saladin, whose worth was so great that it raised him from humble beginnings to the sultanate of Egypt and brought him many victories over Saracen and Christian kings, had expended the whole of his treasure in various wars and extraordinary acts of munificence, when a certain situation arose for which he required a vast sum of money. Not being able to see any way of obtaining what he needed at such short notice, he happened to recall a rich Jew, Melchizedek by name, who ran a money-lending business in Alexandria, and would certainly, he thought, have enough for his purposes, if only he could be persuaded to part with it. But this Melchizedek was such a miserly fellow that he would never hand it over of his own free will, and the Sultan was not prepared to take it away from him by force. However, as his need became more pressing, having racked his brains to discover some way of compelling the Jew to assist him, he resolved to use force in the guise of reason. So he sent for the Jew, gave him a cordial reception, invited him to sit down beside him, and said: ‘O man of excellent worth, many men have told me of your great wisdom and your superior knowledge of the ways of God.

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

  The positive and ecumenical character of the council was really secured only by the subsequent transactions, and the union of the dominant party of the council with the protesting minority of Oriental bishops.1581 Nestorius came first to Ephesus with sixteen bishops, and with an armed escort, as if he were going into battle. He had the imperial influence on his side, but the majority of the bishops and the prevailing voice of the people in Ephesus, and also in Constantinople, were against him. The emperor himself could not be present in person, but sent the captain of his body-guard, the comes Candidian. Cyril appeared with a numerous retinue of fifty Egyptian bishops,

• From Cultish (2021)

  The Harvard Divinity School study named SoulCycle and CrossFit among the groups giving America’s youth a modern religious identity. “It gives you what religion gives you, which is the feeling that your life matters,” Chani Green, a twenty-six-year- old actress and die-hard SoulCycler living in Los Angeles, told me of the exercise craze. “The cynicism we have now is almost antihuman. We need to feel connected to something, like we’re put on earth for a reason other than just dying. At SoulCycle, for forty-five minutes, I feel that.” For those who bristle at the idea of comparing workout classes to religion, know that as tricky as it is to define “cult,” scholars have been arguing even harder for centuries over how to classify “religion.” You might have a feeling that Christianity is a religion, while fitness is not, but even experts have a tough time distinguishing exactly why. I like Burton’s way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about what religions do, which is to provide the following four things: meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Less and less often are seekers finding these things at church. Modern cultish groups also feel comforting in part because they help alleviate the anxious mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too many possibilities for who to be (or at least the illusion of such). I once had a therapist tell me that flexibility without structure isn’t flexibility at all; it’s just chaos. That’s how a lot of people’s lives have been feeling. For most of America’s history, there were comparatively few directions a person’s career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic—everything—could easily go in. But the twenty-first century presents folks (those of some privilege, that is) with a Cheesecake Factory–size menu of decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an era of radical self-creation, when there’s such pressure to craft a strong “personal brand” at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless “what ifs” and “could bes” turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s thirty-three-year-old character confesses to her priest (the hot one) in season 2 of her Emmy-winning series Fleabag. “What to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them.

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

  By the strange rules of bubble economics, companies do not have to generate a profit before they can go public, but they do have to demonstrate revenue growth. Every month, every quarter, HubSpot’s sales must keep rising. A start-up that stops growing is like a shark that stops swimming: dead in the water. Unfortunately that is what has been happening at HubSpot in the autumn of 2013, when I arrive in the spider monkey room. Our growth rate has dropped. Nobody is panicking, but Halligan is concerned. One day in October he calls a come-to-Jesus meeting for everyone in sales and marketing, and he makes a big announcement—he’s booting out Karl, the guy who runs sales, and has started searching for a replacement. Karl is not being fired; he is being moved onto a special project. Still, this is a huge deal. Karl was one of Halligan’s first hires. He’s practically a co-founder. He is also one of HubSpot’s top executives. Halligan runs through a litany of problems. The biggest one is growth. HubSpot’s sales grew more than 80 percent in each of the past two years, but in 2013 the growth rate has slowed to about 50 percent. That’s still a lot but apparently it’s not enough. Our rivals are growing faster than we are, Halligan says. We’ve just hit the end of the third quarter, which means results are in for the first nine months of the year and management can estimate what full-year 2013 results will be. My guess is that Halligan and his board of directors have looked at the numbers and are not pleased—and the board has told Halligan to do something about it. That’s the second big piece of news: Halligan says that until he finds a new head of sales he is going to run the sales department himself. He makes it sound like he’s coming back ready to kick ass and take names. “I don’t want to get up in everyone’s shorts, but I’m going to be taking the wheel here for a couple of months,” he says. “The machine is just not working that well.” Slowing growth is only one problem. Our churn rate is too high, meaning too many customers fail to renew. Our close rate is too low, meaning we generate a lot of leads but don’t turn enough of them into customers. Zendesk, a software company on the West Coast that HubSpot’s executives recently visited, has a close rate that is far better than ours. Morale in HubSpot’s sales department has plummeted. “We’re going to make some hard calls,” Halligan says. “There are going to be winners and losers. People will just have to deal. We’re going to make things as fair as we can.

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

  Some people fret that this is leading to bad outcomes, as described in a September 2014 Wall Street Journal article: “It is an increasingly common story: a company makes scaled-back disclosures about itself before going public and gives investors scant time to digest the information. The shares sizzle in their first weeks of trading but start to fizzle within a year.” Venture capitalists and start-up founders love anything that makes it easier to flog their shares to the public. They can sell during the sizzle and run away before the fizzle. Mom and pop maybe should be paying more attention, and if I were still a journalist, I would certainly be warning them to beware of wobbly, money-losing companies floating shares to the public. But I am not a journalist. I am now on the same team as the VCs and founders, and hoping, like them, for a chance to foist off my shares. We can use all the help we can get. I’m curious about what we will discover when HubSpot finally does make its financial information public. At the meeting in October Halligan talked to us about revenue, churn, and customer acquisition cost, but he said nothing about our profit, or lack of profit. I assume we’re losing money, but I have no idea how much. When you work at a privately held company you really only know what management tells you. Officially, the word from Cranium is that everything is awesome. But I’m getting the sense that HubSpot’s financial results might not be very good. Two months before this, in March 2014, I had breakfast with Gordon, a venture capitalist who knew some of HubSpot’s investors. Gordon was not a fan of HubSpot. He told me he had met with Halligan and Shah when they first put the company together and were trying to raise money. “I went back and told my partners, ‘I wouldn’t put a penny into that place. They’re selling snake oil.’ Since then I’ve had to eat my words, because they’ve done pretty well.” Gordon had an engineering background. Before he became a venture capitalist he had built and sold a tech company. He asked me if I believed that HubSpot’s software did what the company claimed. “Do you really think some small-business owner, like a plumber, is going to come home at the end of the day and then write a blog? Do you think that happens?” “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Even if people use the software, do you think it actually works?” I had wondered the same thing. One of the consultants told me it was a mixed bag. Some customers buy the software but don’t use it, because they’re too busy to write a blog. They’re like people who sign up for a gym membership then never go to the gym.

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

  [223] Just so, a pair of spectacles held an inch or so from the eyes seem like one large median glass. The faculty of seeing stereoscopic slides single without an instrument is of the utmost utility to the student of physiological optics, and persons with strong eyes can easily acquire it. The only difficulty lies in dissociating the degree of accommodation from the degree of convergence which it usually accompanies. If the right picture is focussed by the right eye, the left by the left eye, the optic axes must either be parallel or converge upon an imaginary point same distance behind the plane of the pictures, according to tile size and distance apart of the pictures. The accommodation, however. has to be made for the plane of the pictures itself, and a near accommodation with a far-off convergence is something which the ordinary use of our eyes never teaches us to effect.[224] These two observations prove the law of identical direction only for objects which excite the foveæ or lie in the line of direct looking. Observers skilled in indirect vision can, however, more or less easily verify the law for outlying retinal points.[225] This essay, published in the Philosophical Transactions, contains the germ of almost all the methods applied since to the study of optical perception. It seems a pity that England, leading off so brilliantly the modern epoch of this study, should so quickly have dropped out of the held. almost all subsequent progress has been made in Germany, Holland, and, longo intervallo, America.[226] This is no place to report this controversy, but a few bibliographic references may not be inappropriate. Wheatstone's own experiment is in section 12 of his memoir. In favor of his interpretation see Helmholtz, Phys. Opt., pp. 737-9 ; Wundt, Physiol. Psychol., 2te Aufl. p. 144; Nagel, Sehen mit zwei Augen, pp. 78-82. Against Wheatstone see Volkmann. arch. f. Ophth., v. 2-74, and Untersuchungen, p. 286; Hering, Beiträge zur Physiologie, 29-45, also in Hermann's Hdbch. d Physiol., Ed. iii. 1 Th. p. 435; Aubert, Physiologie d. Netzhaut, p. 322 ; Schön. Archiv f. Ophthal., xxiv. 1. pp. 56-65; and Donders, ibid. xiii 1. p. 15 and note.[227] When we see the finger the whole time, we usually put it in the line joining object and left eye if it be the left huger, joining object and right eye if it be the right finger.

• From Cultish (2021)

  It’s a sanctuary.” Publicly crying, eulogizing lost loved ones, confessing wrongdoings, and testifying to how the group changed one’s life are customs regularly found and embraced within studio walls. “I want the next breath to be an exorcism,” is among the supernatural catchphrases SoulCycle instructors preach in class. A few years ago, I spoke with Taylor and Justin Norris, the founders of LIT Method, an up-and-coming indoor rowing brand. The peppy husband-and-wife duo cut the ribbon on their West Hollywood studio in 2014, aiming to replicate SoulCycle’s success. (They’re still working on it.) When I asked how they felt about the association between their business and the word “cult,” they said, in unison, “We love it.” “They call us the Bolt Cult on Instagram because our logo is a lightning bolt.” Taylor beamed, flashing a telegenic grin. “I know there’s a negative connotation to ‘cult,’ but we see it in a very positive way.” ii.When I first began investigating workout cults, it was their aggressively worshipful language—the chanting and screaming, the woo-woo jargon and pump-up monologues—that triggered my System 1 impulses. A cult is like porn: You know it when you hear it. SoulCycle’s theatrically uplifting maxims (“You can climb this mountain! You’re a boss!” “Change your body, change your mind, change your life!”) seemed like the bogus waffling of a self-help blowhard. Like something out of Midsommar , The Class by Taryn Toomey is known for encouraging students to scream at the top of their lungs as they perform burpees and pike push-ups and instructors coo New Age–y encouragement: “Notice how you’re feeling,” “Release what’s stagnant and ignite a new fire.” intenSati’s blend of zingy rhyming affirmations with metaphysical yoga vocabulary sounds like occultists casting spells. To folks with low cringe thresholds who have a hard time suspending their disbelief (the Montells, for example), the fanatical chanting and cheering trigger tableaus of religious extremism and pyramid scheme rallies. To outsiders, just knowing their friends and family are capable of conforming to such behaviors can feel unsettling. Across the board, “cult workout language” tends to be ritualistic and rarefied because it’s good for business. The loaded mantras and monologues are designed to create an experience so stirring that people can’t resist coming back and spreading the word. Certainly, exercise brands have always capitalized on peer pressure to generate return customers—group weigh-ins, fitness trackers. When my parents got Apple Watches, I beheld them ruthlessly vie for the highest number of steps every day for a summer. But competition alone, research suggests, is not enough to keep folks committed. Exercisers driven only by numbers tend to quit within twelve months. It’s when elements of belonging, self-worth, and empowerment enter the picture that members are moved to renew their fitness memberships year after year. Language is the glue that binds that “addictive” combo of community and motivation.

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

  But I had made many firm friends among them and I hardly believed that I should be able to avert an open rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.

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

  While the rest of the country is still licking its wounds from the worst recession in nearly a century, things here are buzzing. Start-ups are everywhere, and they’re all raising money. For a few years after the stock market crash in 2008, it was impossible for companies to pull off initial public offerings of stock. Without IPOs, the venture capital firms that put money into start-ups could not get a return on their investments, so venture funding fell off. But now things are loosening up. In May 2011, LinkedIn, a social network, went public and saw its shares more than double in their first day of trading. Later in 2011 Groupon and Zynga floated the biggest IPOs since Google in 2004. In May 2012 Facebook went public, in the biggest IPO in the history of the tech industry, one that placed a value of more than $100 billion on the social network that Mark Zuckerberg had started on a lark in his Harvard dorm room eight years before. Now everyone is trying to spot the next Facebook, and a new tech frenzy is taking shape. Back on the East Coast, where I spend my weekends, there is a vague sense that maybe things are getting a little bit frothy out in the Bay Area. Here in San Francisco there is no doubt. There’s money everywhere. Any college dropout with a hoodie and a half-baked idea can raise venture funding. Scooter rentals, grilled cheese sandwiches, a company that sends subscribers a box of random dog-related stuff every month—they’re all getting checks. Blue Bottle Coffee, popular among the cool kids in San Francisco, has raised $20 million (and over the next two years will raise $100 million more) and brews coffee using Japanese machines that cost $20,000 each. A cup of joe costs seven bucks. There is always a line. Thanks to all this new disposable income, San Francisco is bubbling with weirdo delights, like twee little shops selling liquid nitrogen ice cream and trendy bakeries making artisanal toast. Every morning, walking to work, I dodge a river of hipsters in skinny jeans and chunky eyewear riding skateboards— grown men! riding skateboards!—while carrying five-dollar cups of coffee to their jobs at companies with names that sound like characters from a TV show for little kids: Kaggle and Clinkle, Vungle and Gangaroo. The place feels a bit too much like it did back in the late 1990s, during the first dotcom bubble. I have the eerie sense that we are about to live through that nightmare all over again. Back then I was a technology reporter at Forbes. I had spent years writing about business and learning the traditional methods by which companies are valued. During the bubble I felt like a sane person who had been thrown into an asylum. The economics of these companies made no sense. Their valuations were completely irrational. I wasn’t the only one pounding the table about this. Yet the stock market kept going up and up.

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

  Presumably the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley know what will happen when they invest in young, inexperienced founders, and they simply don’t care. Sexual harassment scandals are easy enough to fix: Fine the founder, fire the founder, issue an apology, settle the lawsuits. From the perspective of the investors, this still works out best. If you just want to build something quickly and cash out, this probably all makes sense. What’s great for VCs may not be so great for the rest of us, however, especially as these companies make their way into the public markets. The last dotcom bubble led to a crash that wiped out the entire stock market. This time the amounts are even bigger. When AOL paid $10 billion for Netscape at the very peak of the dotcom mania, it seemed that the world had lost its mind. Yet Uber has raised more than $8 billion in private funding and is valued at more than $60 billion. By the end of 2015, Facebook’s market value stands at $300 billion, more than Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, and Wells Fargo, and about the same as General Electric. Twitter, which has yet to report an annual profit, is nonetheless valued at $16 billion, about the same as Fiat Chrysler, which makes an actual profit by selling actual cars, and more than stalwarts like Alcoa and Whirlpool. Just like last time, lots of smart people in Silicon Valley keep insisting that this all makes perfect sense and there’s nothing to worry about. This time it’s different. This time these are real companies with real businesses. Sixteen Ritual Humiliation as Rehabilitation Two weeks after my Facebook fiasco, in which I blasted Halligan for saying that gray hair and experience are overrated, it’s time to face the music. It’s the middle of December, a week before Christmas. Trotsky sets a meeting with me, in a conference room on the fourth floor. I assume this is the end. Cranium never likes to fire anyone himself. It would be his style to wait for Trotsky to come on board and then have Trotsky do it. But Trotsky assures me this is not the case and that I’m not being fired. I find this hard to believe. “I’m sure they want me to leave,” I say. “Maybe they can’t fire me, but my guess is they want you to have a talk with me and start paving the way for me to get out of here. The sad thing is, I really wanted to make a go of it here. And I was looking forward to working with you. Anyway, it’s my own fault. I should have just kept my mouth shut about the Halligan thing.” “Why do you keep talking in the past tense?” Trotsky says. “You’re talking like your time here is over.” I’ve been reading Going Clear, Lawrence Wright’s book about Scientology.

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

  Trotsky can give me a score of negative one zillion and I won’t care. “Well,” I say, “those scores all sound very fair.” I’d really like to leave now, but the scores are only the beginning. Trotsky has a few more tricks up his sleeve. I’m starting to feel as if I am being detained by the police and subjected to interrogation without legal representation. Shouldn’t I get one phone call? Or something? In his very solemn voice, the one he uses when he’s really going to say something mean, and when he wants me to know that he really feels sorry that he has to tell me something so terrible about my character, Trotsky says there is another part to the performance review. For every review, he is required to get feedback about an employee from his or her peers. Oh shit. Here it comes. I figure he’s going to open his laptop and read some quotes about me that are going to go straight through my rib cage and into my heart. Maybe they really did come from a peer, or maybe he will have just made them up. Either way, this is going to suck. I steel myself. “So I asked two people,” he says. “I asked two people who work with you to give me comments about you. I sent them email, and they didn’t respond. I emailed them again, and asked them a few times, but they never responded.” “Oh,” I say. “Do you think maybe they just forgot to do it?” He winces, and shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. He waits. I wait. I’m not quite sure what to say. “So I got no feedback at all about you. What do you think that says about you?” This sounds like it could be a rhetorical question, but from the look on his face he seems to expect me to say something. “Well,” I say, “I guess it’s not good, right?” I slump a little bit in my chair. I let the information sink in. “I mean, if people say nothing, that’s almost worse than if they say something bad, right? I mean supposedly the worst thing that can happen to you in the workplace is that you get shunned by your peers, or ignored. So I guess it tells me that people here really do not like me, and they really don’t want me here. I mean, not a single person would say even a single nice thing? Really?”

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

  Many other symptoms, supposed by their observers to be independent of mental expectation, are described, of which I only will mention the more interesting. Opening the eyes of a patient in lethargy causes her to pass into catalepsy. If one eye only be opened, the corresponding half of the body becomes cataleptic, whilst the other half remains in lethargy. Similarly, rubbing one side of the head may result in a patient becoming hemilethargic or hemicataleptic and hemisomnambulic. The approach of a magnet (or certain metals) to the skin causes these half-states (and many others) to be transferred to the opposite sides. Automatic repetition of every sound heard ('echolalia') is said to be produced by pressure on the lower cervical vertebræ or on the epigastrium. Aphasia is brought about by rubbing the head over the region of the speech-centre. Pressure behind the occiput determines movements of imitation. Heidenhain describes a number of curious automatic tendencies to movement, which are brought about by stroking various portions of the vertebral column. Certain other symptoms have been frequently noticed, such as a flushed face and cold hands, brilliant and congested eyes, dilated pupils. Dilated retinal vessels and spasm of the accommodation are also reported.

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

  His auditory memory was always deficient, or at least secondary. He had no taste for music. A year and a half previous to examination, after business-anxieties, loss of sleep, appetite, etc., he noticed suddenly one day ail extraordinary change in himself. After complete confusion, there came a violent contrast between his old and his new state. Everything about him seemed so new and foreign that, at first he thought he must be going mad. He was nervous and irritable. Although he saw all things distinct, he had entirely lost his memory for forms and colors. On ascertaining this, he became reassured as to his sanity. He soon discovered that he could carry on his affairs by using his memory in an altogether new way. He can now describe clearly the difference between his two conditions. Every time he returns to A., from which place business often calls him, he seems to himself as if entering a strange city. He views the monuments, houses, and streets with the same surprise as if he saw them for tile first time. Gradually, however, his memory returns, and he finds himself at home again. When asked to describe the principal public place of the town, he answered, "I know that it is there, but it is impossible to imagine it, and I can tell you nothing about it." He has often drawn the port of A. To-day he vainly tries to trace its principal outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, lie reflects, says it is a square tower, and draws, rudely, four lines, one for ground, one for top, and two for sides. Asked to draw an arcade, he says, " I remember that it contains semi-circular arches, and that two of them meeting at an angle make a vault, but how it looks I am absolutely unable to imagine." The profile of a man which he drew by request was as if drawn by a little child; and yet he confessed that he had been helped to draw it by looking at the bystanders. Similarly lie drew a shapeless scribble for a tree. He can no more remember his wife's and children's faces than he can remember the port of A. Even after being with them some time they seem unusual to him. He forgets his own face, and once spoke to his image in a mirror, taking it for a stranger. He complains of his loss of feeling for colors. "My wife has black hair, this I know; but I can no more recall its color than I can her person and features." This visual amnesia extends to dating objects from his childhood's years—paternal mansion, etc., forgotten. No other disturbances but this loss of visual images. Now when he seeks something in his correspondence, he must rummage among the letters like other men, until he meets the passage.

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

  Sacrifice to the ancestors was deemed essential to the kingdom, because the fate of the dynasty depended on the goodwill of their deceased kings who could intercede with Di on its behalf. So the Shang held lavish “hosting” ( bin ) ceremonies at which vast quantities of animals and game were slaughtered—sometimes as many as a hundred beasts in a single ritual—and gods, ancestors, and humans shared a feast. 16 Meat eating was another privilege strictly reserved for the nobility. The sacrificial meat was cooked in exquisite bronze vessels that, like the bronze weapons that had subjugated the min, could be used only by the nobility and symbolized their exalted position. 17 The meat for the bin ceremony was supplied by the hunting expeditions, which, as in other cultures, were virtually indistinguishable from military campaigns. 18 Wild animals could endanger the crops, and the Shang killed them with reckless abandon. Their hunt was not simply a sport but a ritual that imitated the sage kings, who, by driving the animals away, had created the first civilization. A considerable part of the year was devoted to military campaigning. The Shang had no great territorial ambitions but made war simply to enforce their authority: extorting tribute from peasants, fighting invaders from the mountains, and punishing rebellious cities by carrying off crops, cattle, slaves, and craftsmen. Sometimes they fought the “ barbarians,” the peoples who surrounded the Shang settlements and had not yet assimilated to Chinese civilization. 19 These militant circuits around the kingdom were a ritualized imitation of the sage kings’ annual processions to maintain cosmic and political order. The Shang attributed their victories to Di, the war god. Yet there also seems to have been considerable anxiety, because it was impossible to rely on him. 20 As we can see from the surviving oracle bones and turtle shells on which the royal diviners inscribed questions for Di, he often sent drought, flooding, and disaster and was an undependable military ally. Indeed, he could “confer assistance” on the Shang but just as easily support their enemies. “The Fang are harming or attacking us,” mourned one oracle. “It is Di who orders them to make disaster for us.” 21 These scattered pieces of evidence suggest a regime constantly poised for attack, surviving only by ceaseless martial vigilance. There are also references to human sacrifice: prisoners of war and rebels were routinely executed and, although the evidence is not conclusive, may have been offered up to the gods. 22 Later generations certainly associated the Shang with ritual murder. The philosopher Mozi (c. 480–390 BCE) was clearly revolted by the elaborate funerals of a Shang aristocrat: “As for the men who are sacrificed in order to follow him, if he should be a [king], they will be counted in hundreds or tens.

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

  The girl drops the cane and raises her hands to heaven, crying. Is she supposed to be cured of something? Everyone shouts “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and I am shouting it too, surprised at myself, but getting into the spirit of the thing. It’s very nice, this silly tent church. It’s not so stuffy, like the Catholic Church. It’s like a happy party with music. I think I like it. Maybe no one wants to kill me after all. But I will be careful. I am still trying to get my nose back, snorting and wiggling it. I don’t see Daniel anymore and I am too ruined to smell him out in this aromatic labyrinth. “I was a stranger and you took me in.” The preacher man starts it all up again. “And the Lord said when you take the least of these in you take me in. Hallelujah! Blessed are the broken in spirit for they will be comforted. Hallelujah! I feel the spirit moving and the Holy Spirit has put it on my heart what to speak to you tonight, of the broken heart. The broken heart. The stranger with a broken heart — hallelujah! — the homeless with a broken heart — hallelujah! — the parent with a broken heart, the child with a broken heart — hallelujah! — to speak to you — hallelujah! — baa babaabbahey! — of the enemy hidden among us.” Oh no. I see it now. A trap. It’s been a long time since this happened to me. I came here only for one person, I didn’t plan to hurt these people but I will have to. I see the best escape, over there where the tables will slow them down, unable to surround me, forcing them to come at me one by one. The first kill will be the most important. They will be underestimating me because of my small size and delicate beauty. All but one. Let them think I’m weak as long as possible, feeling out the hidden leader. He will be the one with the angry eyes, who does not stink of fear. He will be their strength, so his death must be precise, vicious and ghastly, a big show to take the heart out of them. Take out his eyes, then his breath, then I will tear him to pieces at will for them to see. It will put the mob into a panic, The Lady and the Unicorn 505 buying me time to make the woods. Once there, we are in my arena and I can play in the shadows, picking them off. Did Daniel betray me to them? Et tu kuschelbaer? No, he would not do that. And if he did, I would not want to go on anymore.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  though we may think some of them absurd (like reincarnation) or dangerous (like communism), we cannot help but be aware of them. No longer can we exist in a secure cocoon, knowing that we all see the world in the same way. Because of this change, I want to raise a very serious question: Can we today afford the luxury of having “a” reality? Can we still preserve the belief that there is a “real world” upon whose definition we all agree? I am convinced that this is a luxury we cannot afford, a myth we dare not maintain. Only once in recent history has this been fully and successfully achieved. Millions of people were in complete agreement as to the nature of social and cultural reality—an agreement brought about by the mesmerizing influence of Hitler. This agreement about reality nearly marked the destruction of Western culture. I do not see it as something to be emulated. In Western culture during this century—especially in the United States—there has also been an agreed-upon reality of values. This gospel can be stated very briefly: “More is better, bigger is better, faster is better, and modern technology will achieve all three of these eminently desirable goals.” But now that credo is a crumbling disaster in which few believe. It is dissolving in the smog of pollution, the famine of overpopulation, the Damocles’ sword of the nuclear bomb. We have so successfully achieved the goal of “a bigger bang for a buck” that we are in danger of destroying all life on this planet. Our attempts, then, to live in the “real world” which all perceive in the same way have, in my opinion, led us to the brink of annihilation as a species. I will be so bold as to suggest an alternative. It appears to me that the way of the future must be to base our lives and our education on the assumption that there are as many realities as there are persons, and that our highest priority is to accept that hypothesis and proceed from there. Proceed where? Proceed, each of us, to explore open-mindedly the many, many perceptions of reality that exist. We would, I believe, enrich our own lives in the process. We would also become more able to cope with the reality in which each one of us exists, because we would be aware of many more options. This might well be a life full of perplexity and difficult choices, demanding greater maturity, but it would be an exciting and adventurous life. The question may well be raised, however, whether we could have a community or a society based on this hypothesis of multiple realities. Might not such a society be a completely individualistic anarchy? That is not my opinion. Suppose my grudging tolerance of your separate world view became a full acceptance of you and your right to have such a view. Suppose that instead of shutting out the realities of others as absurd or dangerous or heretical or stupid, I was willing to explore and learn about those realities? Suppose you were willing

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

  Do I not understand the protocol of how to deal with a C-level executive? A conference in Peru wants me to come give a talk. A HubSpot user group in San Diego wants me to come out. I say yes, of course, I want to help promote the brand. But no! Trotsky says I’ve screwed up again! Why am I accepting invitations to speak at conferences when I’m supposed to be hunkered down and focusing on the podcast? It’s all just crazy-making. The podcast is not a big deal, it’s not hard to do, and frankly nobody is ever going to listen to it, since it will be hosted by Cranium. I’m guessing he will draw about the same size audience as he used to attract with his HubSpot TV video podcast, meaning no one. This is basically a vanity project for our boss, and I’m happy to do it, but there’s no point in getting carried away and believing this jackass is going to be the host of the biggest business podcast in the world. There is also no point in setting unrealistic goals that will almost guarantee that I will fall short and fail, unless that’s the whole point, which I suspect it is. I try to distance myself from the abuse. I pretend I’m an anthropologist. How does the tribe behave when the chief has decided that one of the members must be driven off? I imagine that I’m a research psychologist and that the HubSpot marketing department is a laboratory exercise, a corporate version of the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment at Yale. I imagine that I am studying the way a corporate department goes about getting rid of an unwanted employee, using myself as the subject of the experiment. I’ve heard horror stories about people who have gone through this, but I’ve never experienced it myself, and I don’t know how it is done, specifically. I study Trotsky’s tactics and techniques, the way he will make a point of ignoring me—he sits only a few desks away from me and will sit there without acknowledging my presence. I admire the way he berates me without raising his voice and in fact takes the opposite approach and speaks more softly than usual, in a lower register, sometimes adopting the paternal tone of a teacher admonishing a student. He’ll wait until no one is around and then will pull up a chair, lean close, and explain to me that I’m really trying his patience with my behavior. Why did I ask him that question during that meeting? Was I trying to embarrass him in front of the others? He really wishes I would shape up and stop being so aggressive and hostile.

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

  There were riots, and converso property was seized, the violence caused by financial and social jealousy as much as by religious allegiance. 22 The monarchs were not personally anti-Semitic but simply wanted to pacify their kingdom, which had been shaken by civil war and now faced the Ottoman threat. Yet the Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to achieve stability. As often happens when a nation is menaced by an external power, there were paranoid fears of enemies within, in this case of a “fifth column” of lapsed conversos working secretly to undermine the kingdom’s security. The Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations. Such interference with the religious practice of their subjects was entirely new in Spain, where confessional uniformity had never been a possibility. After centuries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims “living together” ( convivencia ), the monarchs’ initiative met with strong opposition. Yet while there was no public appetite for targeting observant Jews, there was considerable anxiety about the so-called lapsed “secret Jews,” known as New Christians. When the Inquisitors arrived in a district, “apostates” were promised a pardon if they confessed voluntarily, and “Old Christians” were ordered to report neighbors who refused to eat pork or work on Saturday, the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.” Many conversos who were loyal Catholics felt it wise to seize the opportunity of amnesty while the going was good, and this flood of “confessions” convinced both the Inquisitors and the public that the society of clandestine “Judaizers” really existed. 23 Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis. After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community. The fervid patriotism unleashed by the Christian triumph led to more hysterical conspiracy fears. 24 Some remembered old tales of Jews helping the Muslim armies when they had arrived in Spain eight hundred years earlier and pressured the monarchs to deport all practicing Jews from Spain. After initial hesitation, on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice of baptism or deportation. Most chose baptism and, as conversos, were now harassed by the Inquisition, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire. 25 Under papal pressure. Ferdinand and Isabella now turned their attention to Spain’s Muslims. In 1499 Granada was split into Christian and Muslim zones, Muslims were required to convert, and by 1501 Granada was officially a kingdom of “New Christians.” But the Muslim converts ( Moriscos ) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam.

• From Cultish (2021)

  But America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all on their own. Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally minded groups to surge. This pattern of American unrest was also responsible for the rise of cultish movements throughout the 1960s and ’70s, when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and both Kennedy assassinations knocked US citizens unsteady. At the time, spiritual practice was spiking, but the overt reign of traditional Protestantism was declining, so new movements arose to quench that cultural thirst. These included everything from Christian offshoots like Jews for Jesus and the Children of God to Eastern-derived fellowships like 3HO and Shambhala Buddhism to pagan groups like the Covenant of the Goddess and the Church of Aphrodite to sci-fi-esque ones like Scientology and Heaven’s Gate. Some scholars now refer to this era as the Fourth Great Awakening. (The first three were a string of zealous evangelical revivals that whirred through the American Northeast during the 1700s and 1800s.) Different from the earlier Protestant awakenings, the fourth was populated by seekers looking toward the East and the occult to inspire individualistic quests for enlightenment. Just like twenty-first-century “cult followers,” these seekers were mostly young, countercultural, politically divergent types who felt the powers that be had failed them. If you subscribe to an astrology app or have ever attended a music festival, odds are that in the 1970s, you’d have brushed up against a “cult” of some kind. Ultimately, the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed for a very long time, and cultish groups have always sprung up during cultural limbos when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What’s new is that in this internet- ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults—from obsessed workout studios to start-ups that put the “cult” in “company culture”— would start sprouting like dandelions. For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone. iv. A couple of years ago, amid a conversation about my decision in college to quit the competitive (and quite cultish) theater program at my university in favor of a linguistics major, my mother told me that my change of heart really came as no surprise to her since she’d always considered me profoundly “un-culty.” I chose to take this as a compliment, since I definitely wouldn’t want to be characterized the opposite way, but it also didn’t fully digest as praise. That’s because, juxtaposed with the dark elements, there’s a certain sexiness surrounding cults—the unconventional aspect, the mysticism, the communal intimacy. In this way, the word has almost come full circle. “Cult” hasn’t always carried ominous undertones.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “I’ll try never to suspect anything or be jealous again,” she went on, “it’s a hateful feeling, isn’t it? But I want to see your class-room: would you take me up once to the University?” “Why, of course”, I cried, “I should be only too glad; I’ll take you tomorrow afternoon, or better still”, I added, “come up the hill at four o’clock and I’ll meet you at the entrance.” And so it was settled and Kate went back to her room as noiselessly as she had come. The next afternoon I found her waiting in the University Hall ten minutes before the hour; for our lectures beginning at the hour always stopped after forty-five minutes to give us time to be punctual at any other class-room. After showing her everything of interest, we walked home together laughing and talking, when, a hundred yards from Mrs. Mayhew’s, we met that lady, face to face. I don’t know how I looked, for being a little shortsighted I hadn’t recognized her till she was within ten yards of me; but her glance pierced me. She bowed with a look that took us both in, I lifted my hat and we passed on. “Who’s that?” exclaimed Kate, “what a strange look she gave us!” “She’s the wife of a gambler,” I replied as indifferently as I could, “he gives me work now and then” I went on, strangely forecasting the future. Kate looked at me probing, then: “I don’t mind; but I’m glad she’s quite old!” “As old as both of us put together!” I added traitorously, and we went on. These love-passages with Mrs. Mayhew and Kate, plus my lessons and my talks with Smith, fairly represent my life’s happenings for this whole year from seventeen to eighteen, with this solitary qualification that my afternoons with Lorna became less and less agreeable to me. But now I must relate happenings that again affected my life. I hadn’t been four months with the Gregorys when Kate told me that my brother Willie had ceased to pay my board for more than a fortnight; she added sweetly: “It doesn’t matter, dear, but I thought you ought to know and I’d hate any one to hurt you, so I took it on myself to tell you.” I kissed her, said it was sweet of her, and went to find Willie; he made excuses voluble but not convincing and ended up by giving me a cheque while begging me to tell Mrs. Gregory that he, too, would come and board with her.