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 Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We got out and everything was fine, but it rattled us. Every day we were out in the streets, hustling, trying to act as if we were in some way down with the gangs, but the truth was we were always more cheese than hood. We had created this idea of ourselves as a defense mechanism to survive in the world we were living in. Bongani and the other East Bank guys, because of where they were from, what they looked like—they just had very little hope. You’ve got two options in that situation. You take the retail job, flip burgers at McDonald’s, if you’re one of the lucky few who even gets that much. The other option is to toughen up, put up this facade. You can’t leave the hood, so you survive by the rules of the hood. I chose to live in that world, but I wasn’t from that world. If anything, I was an imposter. Day to day I was in it as much as everyone else, but the difference was that in the back of my mind I knew I had other options. I could leave. They couldn’t. [image file=image_rsrc2UT.jpg] Once, when I was ten years old, visiting my dad in Yeoville, I needed batteries for one of my toys. My mom had refused to buy me new batteries because, of course, she thought it was a waste of money, so I snuck out to the shops and shoplifted a pack. A security guard busted me on the way out, pulled me into his office, and called my mom. “We’ve caught your son shoplifting batteries,” he said. “You need to come and fetch him.” “No,” she said. “Take him to jail. If he’s going to disobey he needs to learn the consequences.” Then she hung up. The guard looked at me, confused. Eventually he let me go on the assumption that I was some wayward orphan, because what mother would send her ten-year-old child to jail? [image file=image_rsrc2UU.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UV.jpg] THE WORLD DOESN’T LOVE YOUMy mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment, and hidings. Every time. For every infraction. You get that with a lot of black parents. They’re trying to discipline you before the system does. “I need to do this to you before the police do it to you.” Because that’s all black parents are thinking from the day you’re old enough to walk out into the street, where the law is waiting. In Alex, getting arrested was a fact of life. It was so common that out on the corner we had a sign for it, a shorthand, clapping your wrists together like you were being put in handcuffs. Everyone knew what that meant. “Where’s Bongani?” Wrist clap. “Oh, shit. When?” “Friday night.” “Damn.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it. With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final decision to permit an execution to proceed or not. The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M. on August 18. I had finally finished the petition and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning. Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion. I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic. I spoke with Herbert regularly during the day by phone to let him know there was no news. I couldn’t rely on the prison to get a message to him if the Court ruled, so I asked him to call me every two hours. Whatever the news, I wanted him to hear it from someone who cared about him.

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

  e basic constitution of the self was indelibly shaped by astral confi gurations; the warmth, the moisture, and thus the sexual proclivities of the body were produced by the elemental forces of the universe. Astrological science promised to submit something so mercurial and intimate as sexual desire to the possibility of fi rm understanding. Th e extent to which free will had become an urgent moral problem in the high Roman Empire is also refl ected in the attention devoted to the dynamics of volition in the romantic literature of the period. Fate is central to the poetics of the romance. A pop u lar fatalism is prominent already in Chariton’s early novel and remains so down to the last of the romances, the Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus. As usual, Achilles Tatius presents the most self- conscious and sardonic treatment of determinism in any of the romances. In book 1, Clitophon launches his fi rst- person narrative with the report of a portentous dream. Th e nocturnal vision prompts a remarkably forthright refl ection on the importance of dreams in a fatalistic universe. “Th e divine spirit loves to speak to men by night, not so that suff ering may be forestalled (for Destiny cannot be overruled), but so that misfortune might be borne more lightly. Th e shock of the sudden and unforeseen stuns the soul, and overwhelms it, while the anticipation of misfortune allows us to brace ourselves and, by degrees, takes away the shock of suff ering.” After the premonitory dream, Clitophon claimed, Fortune initiated her drama. Th e conscious theorization of the tension between Destiny and Fortune, at the very outset of the narration, is remarkable. Th e romances are narratives driven by the dialectic between order and fl ux, displacement and resolution. Fortune authors the suff erings and misadventures that drive the plot, but Destiny prevails in the felicitous ending. Th is passage of Leucippe and Clitophon is remarkable, and revealing, for another reason. It closely mirrors a sentiment that appears in Ptolemy’s  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N astrological treatise. But in the case of Ptolemy, consolation is to be found in astral prognostication, rather than oneirological forewarning. “Events that come about from necessity, if they are unexpected, are especially likely to give rise to extreme disturbance or manic delight, but foreknowledge readies and attunes the soul by preparing the soul for what is not yet present as though it were.” Th e similarity is so striking that it cannot be accidental. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos probably belongs to the 150s or 160s; Achilles Tatius was writing at nearly the same time. We cannot be certain who has imitated whom. Regardless, the parallel with Ptolemy’s programmatic justifi -

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

  After being part of a small number of interventions, I believed it was imperative to find another approach. Legal, voluntary access to the cult member was essential. Family and friends are the key. But they need to become knowledgeable about cults and mind control, and they need to be coached in how to communicate effectively with a cult member. The Strategic Interactive Approach, the non-coercive approach I have developed, accomplishes with finesse what deprogramming does with force. However, family members and friends have to work together as a team to plan and implement a strategy for influencing the cult member. Although this approach—like any approach—will not work in every single case, it has proved to be the best option possible. This non-coercive approach requires excellent information in order to succeed. The information gathering and dissemination begins with the first phone call or meeting. Let’s walk through one such story, from relatively early in my career. The O’Brien Family and the International Church of Christ157 In December 1987, Matthew O’Brien called me and expressed his concern about his son George’s involvement with a group known as the Boston Church of Christ. The church was also known as Multiplying Ministries and the International Churches of Christ. (It should not be confused with the mainline Church of Christ, or with the United Church of Christ, an inheritor of the New England Congregational tradition).158 He had heard of me from Buddy Martin, an evangelist then with the Cape Cod Church of Christ (another mainline church), who strongly denounced the authoritarian shepherding/discipleship cult tactics used by the BCC.159 O’Brien told me he had grown more and more worried about his son’s involvement. George had lost a great deal of weight, was always exhausted, and had abandoned his plans to graduate from a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. He was also becoming progressively more incapable of making simple decisions. He had to get his “discipleship” partner’s advice, before doing almost anything. O’Brien asked me about my own background, and whether I thought this particular group was a destructive cult. I told him that I had successfully counseled many dozens of people out of this particular group. He was very happy to hear this. The O’Briens wanted to know what makes a group a destructive cult, and asked several probing questions about my own values and ethics. I told them that encouraging a person to think for themselves was paramount, and that I was always careful not to impose my own belief system on a client. My role was to present information, to do individual and family counseling as needed, and to facilitate family communication.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Did you ever see a synthetic monster on the screen, a Frankenstein realized in flesh and blood? Can you imagine how he might be trained to pull a trigger and see pigeons flying at the same time? Frankenstein is not a myth: Frankenstein is a very real creation born of the personal experience of a sensitive human being. The monster is always more real when it does not assume the proportions of flesh and blood. The monster of the screen is nothing compared to the monster of the imagination; even the existent pathologic monsters who find their way into the police station are but feeble demonstrations of the monstrous reality which the pathologist lives with. But to be the monster and the pathologist at the same time—that is reserved for certain species of men who, disguised as artists, are supremely aware that sleep is an even greater danger than insomnia. In order not to fall asleep, in order not to become victims of that insomnia which is called “living,” they resort to the drug of putting words together endlessly. This is not an automatic process, they say, because there is always present the illusion that they can stop it at will. But they cannot stop; they have only succeeded in creating an illusion, which is perhaps a feeble something, but it is far from being wide awake and neither active nor inactive. I wanted to be wide awake without talking or writing about it, in order to accept life absolutely . I mentioned the archaic men in the remote places of the world with whom I was communicating frequently. Why did I think these “savages” more capable of understanding me than the men and women who surrounded me? Was I crazy to believe such a thing? I don’t think so in the least. These “savages” are the degenerate remnants of earlier races of man who, I believe, must have had a greater hold on reality. The immortality of the race is constantly before our eyes in these specimens of the past who linger on in withered splendor. Whether the human race is immortal or not is not my concern, but the vitality of the race does mean something to me, and that it should be active or dormant means even more. As the vitality of the new race banks down the vitality of the old races manifests itself to the waking mind with greater and greater significance. The vitality of the old races lingers on even in death, but the vitality of the new race which is about to die seems already nonexistent. If a man were taking a swarming hive of bees to the river to drown them . . . . That was the image I carried about in me. If only I were the man, and not the bee! In some vague, inexplicable way I knew that I was the man, that I would not be drowned in the hive, like the others.

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

  Although there is value in trying to assess possibly careless behavior (indeed, we must learn from life’s tragedies), the reality is that the person just might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blaming the victim plays an important psychological role in allowing us to distance ourselves from the person who was hurt. In this way, we say to ourselves, “Such a thing couldn’t happen to me because I am different. I know better.” Often people look at a cult victim and say mistakenly, “What a weak-minded person; he must have been looking for a way to escape responsibility and have someone control his life.” In that way people deny the reality that the same thing could happen to them. People believe that “it can never happen to them” because they want to believe they are stronger and better than the many millions who have fallen victim to mind control. Our need to believe that we are invulnerable, though, is actually a weakness that is easily played upon by cult recruiters. For example, a recruiter could say, “Now, Bill, you strike me as a very intelligent, worldly type of person. You would never allow anyone to force you to do something you wouldn’t want to do. You like to make up your mind for yourself. So you won’t let the biased media scare you with bizarre claims of mind control. You’re too smart for that. So what time do you want to come over for that lecture?” As for the philosophical position that everything is a form of mind control, it is certainly true that we are constantly being influenced by all kinds of people, ideas, and forces. Yet there is actually a continuum of influence. At one end are benign or even helpful influences, such as a friend suggesting that the two of you see a particular movie. At the other end are deeply destructive influences, such as indoctrinating people to kill themselves or harm others. Most of the groups I’m concerned with fall near the destructive end of the continuum. [image file=image_rsrc2PK.jpg] An organization that provides helpful or constructive influence has these essential traits: It routinely seeks the informed consent of its members. Checks and balances are built into its systems of governance, so that no one person or sub-group can seize control. It is transparent about its mission, its finances, its governance, and its decision-making processes. It encourages the growth, health and sanity of its members. Leaders of these organizations are honest, trustworthy, accountable and transparent about what they do and decide, and why. Their approach to leadership respects all group members’ individuality, choice, and free will. They provide members and others with free and open access to information about the group. Ideally, they are also sincerely loving, compassionate, wise (or at least reasonably intelligent) human beings. If we look at a typical organization on the opposite end of the continuum, we find that it exhibits these traits:

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

  Once they explained all this, they would ask George to agree to a three-day period of research, during which be would be free to come and go, take as many breaks as he wanted and decide what topics he wanted to concentrate on. During this time, he would agree to not be in touch with any members of BCC. Most importantly, if he wanted to let people in the group know that he wasn’t coming to services, he would simply call, tell them he was away on important family business, and would be out of touch for a few days. Monday morning found me in a Cape Cod coffee shop with Buddy Martin and Ellen, a former member I had counseled out of the Paris branch of BCC the previous summer. We sat around a table and waited for four hours. Meanwhile, the family was in their home, trying to persuade George to agree to their terms. They called me half a dozen times for support and advice. The family did everything I coached them to do. But George was adamant. He would agree to nothing beyond meeting the three of us for a few hours. We decided to go ahead and do the best we could. Before we left the coffee shop, a bunch of locals told us that we had just set a record for sitting in one spot. I laughed and thought, Boy, if they only knew what was going on! George was flushed, angry and hostile when we walked in and met him. We introduced ourselves, and he was most surprised to meet Buddy. Here was a Bible-toting fundamentalist minister from a Church of Christ. Naturally, he was also scared and confused. We tried our best to make him as comfortable as possible, and to allow him some sense of control. George asked to speak alone with each of us: first me, then Ellen, then Buddy. We agreed. Sitting alone with George, I tried to help him see that this situation was an opportunity for him—to learn, to grow, and to prove to his family that he wasn’t under mind control and knew what he was doing. George proved to be as indoctrinated as anyone from the Boston Church of Christ that I had ever worked with. He was extremely resistant to the idea that he might benefit from anything that was being discussed.

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

  e Ethiopian Tale deliberately builds an aura of latest and greatest. All of the conventional themes are allowed to unravel, in stately fashion. By far the longest of the erotic romances, it is unique in weaving two story patterns into a single narrative. At one level it is the story of Th eagenes and Charicleia, their separation and endurance, their eventual union. Th e Ethiopian Tale is also a homeward journey for Charicleia, who gradually discovers her true identity as the princess of Ethiopia. In the sophistication of its narrative architecture, Th e Ethiopian Tale is without peer among the ancient novels. But it is also distinctive in its fi xation on male bodily purity, and in general its chilly tone toward the pleasures of the fl esh. Th e Ethiopian Tale very consciously redeploys the traditional armory of the erotic romance, but in the ser vice of a hieratic vision of human life. Heliodorus reworks the conventions of romance to serve his own purposes. Th eagenes and Charicleia fi nd themselves enslaved at the palace of a Persian satrap, whose wife has sensual designs on Th eagenes. Th reats to the hero are not uncommon in romance, but this scene is far removed from its direct parallel in Leucippe and Clitophon, which has Clitophon indulge the harmless desires of his seductress, Melite. For Heliodorus, the bodily purity of Th eagenes is supremely important. Earlier in the story he has sworn that he is innocent of experience with a woman. At the end of the story, he too will undergo a virginity test (in fact, a test to ensure that he is pure, so that he can be the victim of a human sacrifi ce!). Th e language of physical and ritual purity, usually reserved for female bodies, is applied to Th eagenes. He faces the threat of seduction as a threat not to his romantic fi delity but rather to his corporal integrity. He is distraught lest he, “without any experience of Charicleia, will be polluted by unlawful intercourse with another woman.” R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D 

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  In September of grade twelve, the matric dance was coming up. Senior prom. This was the big one. I was again faced with the dilemma of Valentine’s Day, confronting another strange ritual I did not understand. All I knew about prom was that, according to my American movies, prom is where it happens. You lose your virginity. You go and you ride in the limousine, and then you and the girl do the thing. That was literally my only reference. But I knew the rule: Cool guys get girls, and funny guys get to hang out with the cool guys with their girls. So I’d assumed I wouldn’t be going, or if I did go it wouldn’t be with a date. I had two middlemen working for me in my CD business, Bongani and Tom. They sold the CDs that I copied in exchange for a cut. I met Tom at the arcade at the Balfour Park mall. Like Teddy, he lived nearby because his mom was a domestic worker. Tom was in my grade but went to a government school, Northview, a proper ghetto school. Tom handled my CD sales over there. Tom was a chatterbox, hyperactive and go-go-go. He was a real hustler, too, always trying to cut a deal, work an angle. He could get people to do anything. A great guy, but fucking crazy and a complete liar as well. I went with him once to Hammanskraal, a settlement that was like a homeland, but not really. Hammanskraal, as its Afrikaans name suggests, was the kraal of Hamman, what used to be a white man’s farm. The proper homelands, Venda and Gazankulu and Transkei, were places where black people actually lived, and the government drew a border around them and said, “Stay there.” Hammanskraal and settlements like it were empty places on the map where deported black people had been relocated. That’s what the government did. They would find some patch of arid, dusty, useless land, and dig row after row of holes in the ground—a thousand latrines to serve four thousand families. Then they’d forcibly remove people from illegally occupying some white area and drop them off in the middle of nowhere with some pallets of plywood and corrugated iron. “Here. This is your new home. Build some houses. Good luck.” We’d watch it on the news. It was like some heartless, survival-based reality TV show, only nobody won any money. One afternoon in Hammanskraal, Tom told me we were going to see a talent show. At the time, I had a pair of Timberland boots I’d bought. They were the only decent piece of clothing I owned. Back then, almost no one in South Africa had Timberlands. They were impossible to get, but everyone wanted them because American rappers wore them. I’d scrimped and saved my tuck-shop money and my CD money to buy them. As we were leaving, Tom told me, “Be sure to wear your Timberlands.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  After spending another long day in Monroeville tracking down a few final witnesses, Michael and I went back to the office to plot out how to present all of the evidence in the narrow amount of time the judge was giving us. We needed to make the complexity of the case and the multiple ways that Walter’s rights had been violated coherent and understandable to the judge. Another concern was Myers and his love of fantastical narration, so we sat down with him a few days before the hearing and tried to make it as plain as possible. “No long excursions about police corruption,” I said. “Just answer the questions accurately and honestly, Ralph.” “I always do,” Ralph said confidently. “Wait, did you just say you always do?” Michael asked. “What are you talking about, you always do? Ralph, you lied through your ass the entire trial. That’s what we’re going to expose at this hearing.” “I know,” Myers said coolly. “I meant I always tell y’all the truth.” “Don’t freak me out, Ralph. Just testify truthfully,” Michael said. Ralph had been calling our office almost daily with an unending stream of strange thoughts, ideas, and conspiracies. I was frequently too busy to talk to him, so Michael had been fielding most of the calls and had become increasingly worried about Ralph’s unique perspective on the world. But we could do no more about it. We arrived at the courthouse the morning of the hearing early and anxious. We were both dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and muted ties. I usually dressed as conservatively as possible for court. I was a young, bearded black man, and even when there was no jury I still tried to meet the court’s expectation of what a lawyer looked like, if only for the sake of my clients. We first went to check on Myers to make sure he had arrived safely and was in a stable state of mind before the hearing began. The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Department deputies had brought Ralph from the prison in St. Clair County to the courthouse the night before the hearing. The five-hour trip through the nighttime roads of southern Alabama had clearly unnerved Ralph. We met with him in his holding cell; he was palpably anxious. Worse, he was quiet and reserved, which was even more unusual. After we finished that unsettling meeting, I went to see Walter, who was also at the courthouse in one of the holding cells. Being back at the courthouse where his fate had seemingly been sealed four years earlier had shaken him as well, but he forced himself to smile when I walked in. “Was the trip okay?” I asked. “Everything is good. Just hoping for something better than the last time I was here.” I nodded sympathetically and reviewed with him what I thought would unfold over the next few days.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I knelt over him with the chaplain when they brought his body in. He was covered with a raincoat. There was a small bullet hole in his forehead and the whole back of his head had been shot out. He was dead like all the rest, and for some reason right then I felt something big was about to happen. The major called me over and told me to get the men ready to move out. We were going north across the river. When I got back to the tent, Michaelson told me he would see me in heaven after today. He was to die that afternoon. Every one of us seemed to have a funny feeling. I kept thinking over and over that I was going to get hit—that nothing would be quite the same after this day. We went to get some chow and I remember the major yelled at me for not putting helmets on the men. We’d never used them in the past and I couldn’t understand why on this day the major wanted us to wear helmets and flak jackets. We had to walk all the way back to our tents and put the stuff on. We felt like supermen in the cumbersome jackets as we got into the truck that took us to the southern bank of the river. We all got out and waited for a while and then a small boat took us to the other side, where everybody else was getting ready to sweep up north to where the lieutenant’s squad had been wiped out. I remember moving along the beach beside the ocean later. There were sand dunes that reminded me of home and lots of scrub pine trees. The men were in a very sloppy formation. It seemed everyone was carrying far too much equipment. The sky was clear and the Vietnamese were walking and fishing. Except for the noise of the tanks and Amtracs that were moving slowly along with us, it seemed like a Sunday stroll with everyone dressed up in costume. It was hard to remember that at any moment the whole thing might bust wide open and you might get killed like all the other dead losers. There was that salt air that smelled so familiar. Then the whole procession suddenly came to a stop and we were told to go back. There was something happening in the village on the north bank of the river. A big fight was going on and the Popular Forces were pinned down and in lots of trouble. I ran up to the captain who had given the order and asked him was he sure we weren’t supposed to continue going up north. The men didn’t want to go back, I said. Was it the major who had given the order? I asked. The captain said he’d try to get confirmation. I waited with the Amtrac engines roaring in my ears while he radioed the rear.

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

  In the early second century, a Roman prefect of Egypt, a member of the most genteel social circles in the empire, was himself undone after seducing the seventeen- year- old scion of a respectable Alexandrian family; the scandal became a cause célèbre in a culture with a ready taste for judicial drama, and stylized transcripts of the trial, before what judge we do not know, still remain.  What ever the law commanded, sex with freeborn boys went on. Fathers were endlessly anxious about the sexual dangers that lurked in the schools. Th e “lover of boys,” it was conventional to believe, only had to bribe the pedagogue or attendant and entice his beloved with a little gift. Phi los o- phers, whose position gave them opportunity, were regularly accused of taking improper liberties with their charges; “in sum all their doctrines are mere words and they are enslaved to plea sure, some cavorting with concu- bines, others with prostitutes, most of them with boys.” One sign that older patterns endured is the intense refl ection on the protocols of consent. Th e ideal partner was one who knew “the art of assenting and refusing at the same time.” Poets, anyway, could profess to believe that the life cycle still aff orded a brief window of indeterminacy: it was wrong to lure a boy into sin in the years before his moral reason was developed, and twice as shame- ful once the young man was too old, “but between not yet and nevermore you and I have the now.”  Th e impossibility of honorable consent is at the heart of Plutarch’s Ero- tikos, by any mea sure a crucial document of sexual life in the high empire.  FROM SHAME TO SIN Th e Erotikos is a dialogue set within the frame story of a young widow’s ef- forts to lure a handsome young man into marriage. Th e backdrop is essen- tial, for Plutarch construes the woman as a sort of female lover pursuing her beloved according to the rules of classical pederasty. Th e story occasions an extended discussion of the relative merits of marriage and the love of boys. Th e defenders of pederasty give an apology as dramatic as any classical antecedent. True eros, claim its defenders, has nothing to do with women. Marriage is a domestic arrangement, more about keeping accounts and enjoying enervating pleasures between daily squabbling than the soul’s as- cent; bonding between males, they argue, is the true way to nurture virtue.

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

  Cassian outlined six degrees of chastity through which the monk might, with the infusion of divine grace, seek perfection: fi rst, not to be struck down by car- nal sin; second, not to let his mind dilate on thoughts of plea sure; third, not to let the sight of a woman move him to lust; fourth, not to suff er a “little movement of the fl esh” while awake; fi fth, when some occasion for thought of human generation occurred, such as a suggestive passage of the reading, not to give the “slightest assent” to sensual thoughts; and fi nally, not to be tormented by seductive visions of women while sleeping. For Cassian, a con- cern with nocturnal emissions that had quietly percolated in ecclesiastical and monastic circles for centuries suddenly lurches into the foreground, as the supreme test of having transcended physical desire. For Cassian, invol- untary discharges were not a matter of purity and pollution, in any physical sense. Rather, they were a sign of the monk’s interior state, a privileged win- dow into the murkiness of the self in an intense system of self- scrutiny.  What captivated Foucault was not simply the repressive agenda of this monastic found er but the sense in which sexuality has become a deep and only semiconscious source of the self, something that must be sought and controlled through an elaborate technology of surveillance. Cassian pre- scribed an encompassing regime of transformation, physical and spiritual. It entailed diet and meditation. It specifi ed grids of evaluation that seem extraordinarily detailed: three emissions a year was a modest goal for the monk earnestly in pursuit of chastity. It required forceful modes of intro- spection that could be achieved in dialogue between the monk and his su- perior. Here Cassian’s model of chastity foreshadows the confessional, a place where the deepest recesses of the self were to be searched with the sure guidance of an experienced master. Th e goals of this spiritual exercise were tranquility and transparency. Th e healed patient could hope to reach a state where “he is found to be the same in the night as in the day, whether read- CONCLUSION  ing or praying, when solitary or surrounded by the crowd, so that he never sees himself in secret in such a way that he would blush to be seen by others, and fi nally so that the eye from which there is no fl ight will never catch him in anything which he would wish to be hidden from human sight.” Here the notion of the sexual being, constantly before the face of God, receives its purest expression.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I’ve been thinking about that little affair now for quite some time. I have a hunch as to who took that money, but I’m not absolutely sure. . . . And then he’ll probably give you a beady eye and abruptly change the conversation to something else. He’ll probably tell you a little story about a crook he knew who thought he was very smart and getting away with it. He’ll draw that story out for you until you feel as though you were sitting on hot coals. By that time you’ll be wanting to beat it, but just when you’re ready to go he’ll suddenly be reminded of another very interesting little case and hell ask you to wait just a little longer while he orders another dessert. And hell go on like that for three or four hours at a stretch, never making the least overt insinuation, but studying you closely all the time, and finally, when you think you’re free, just when you’re shaking hands with him and breathing a sigh of relief, he’ll step in front of you and, planting his big square feet between your legs, he’ll grab you by the lapel and, looking straight through you, he’ll say in a soft, winsome voice—now look here, my lad, don’t you think you had better come clean? And if you think he’s only trying to browbeat you and that you can pretend innocence and walk away, you’re mistaken. Because at that point, when he asks you to come clean, he means business and nothing on earth is going to stop him. When it gets to that point I’d recommend you to make a clean sweep of it, down to the last penny. He won’t ask me to fire you and he won’t threaten you with jail—hell just quietly suggest that you put aside a little bit each week and turn it over to him. Nobody will be the wiser. He probably won’t even tell me. No, he’s very delicate about these things, you’ll see. “And supposing,” says Curley suddenly, “that I tell him I stole the money in order to help you out? What then?” He began to laugh hysterically. “I don’t think O’Rourke would believe that,” I said calmly. “You can try it, of course, if you think it will help you to clear your own skirts. But I rather think it will have a bad effect. O’Rourke knows me . . . he knows I wouldn’t let you do a thing like that.” “But you did let me do it!” “I didn’t tell you to do it. You did it without my knowledge. That’s quite different. Besides, can you prove that I accepted money from you? Won’t it seem a little ridiculous to accuse me, the one who befriended you, of putting you up to a job like that? Who’s going to believe you? Not O’Rourke. Besides, he hasn’t trapped you yet. Why worry about it in advance?

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

  Those who unsuccessfully attempt suicide are typically given a psychiatric evaluation. Many are incorrectly diagnosed as having schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. Of course, some people do have these disorders, but my experience is that cults avoid recruiting people who cannot be controlled and rendered dependent and obedient, so most are suffering acute psychosis brought on by mind control. Uninformed mental health professionals can hardly be blamed for this. How else could they diagnose a person who screams for Satan to come out of them? How could they know, unless they investigate, that the person had been doing silent, high-speed chanting for hours, and that it was causing them to be so spaced out that they appeared catatonic? One occult group ex-member I worked with was convinced that her spiritual body was disintegrating and that she was dying. She suffered tremendous anxiety attacks, particularly in the middle of the night, and felt pains in her chest. Doctors had tested her for every conceivable problem, and it was determined that the difficulty was all “in her mind.” The group had programmed her to self-destruct if she ever left it. Once she was out, that was exactly what started to happen—until she began to learn about cults and mind control. When people who have walked out or been kicked out cannot receive specialized counseling, their suffering is usually prolonged. Still, with the help of family and friends, many manage to pick up the pieces and move forward with their lives. However, if these people never come to understand mind control and how it was used to recruit and indoctrinate them, in my opinion, they will never be able to live as full a life as they might. These people may have temporarily put their cult experience on a shelf and tried to forget about it. At some point, though, it could burst back into their lives. Rick was one of these people. After a six-year complete involvement, he walked out of the Children of God with his wife and three kids. Five years later, a piece of cult literature turned up in his mailbox. All his cult indoctrination was triggered by this one letter from the leader. His mind started racing out of control. A voice in his head told him to go upstairs and choke his children. Fortunately, Rick got help and was able to keep his children safe. Today, he is a successful computer consultant.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “Sir, you don’t understand. Your mother has been shot. In her brain. She’ll be in ICU. One night in ICU could cost you fifteen, twenty thousand rand.” “Lady, are you not listening to me? This is my mother’s life. This is her life. Take the money. Take all of it. I don’t care.” “Sir! You don’t understand. I’ve seen this happen. Your mother could be in the ICU for weeks. This could cost you five hundred thousand, six hundred thousand. Maybe even millions. You’ll be in debt for the rest of your life.” I’m not going to lie to you: I paused. I paused hard. In that moment, what I heard the nurse saying was, “All of your money will be gone,” and then I started to think, Well…what is she, fifty? That’s pretty good, right? She’s lived a good life. I genuinely did not know what to do. I stared at the nurse as the shock of what she’d said sunk in. My mind raced through a dozen different scenarios. What if I spend that money and then she dies anyway? Do I get a refund? I actually imagined my mother, as frugal as she was, waking up from a coma and saying, “You spent how much? You idiot. You should have saved that money to look after your brothers.” And what about my brothers? They would be my responsibility now. I would have to raise the family, which I couldn’t do if I was millions in debt, and it was always my mother’s solemn vow that raising my brothers was the one thing I would never have to do. Even as my career took off, she’d refused any help I offered. “I don’t want you paying for your mother the same way I had to pay for mine,” she’d say. “I don’t want you raising your brothers the same way Abel had to raise his.” My mother’s greatest fear was that I would end up paying the black tax, that I would get trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence that came before me. She had always promised me that I would be the one to break that cycle. I would be the one to move forward and not back. And as I looked at that nurse outside the emergency room, I was petrified that the moment I handed her my credit card, the cycle would just continue and I’d get sucked right back in. People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 2: He who renounces all his possessions for Christ’s sake exposes himself to no danger, neither spiritual nor corporal. For spiritual danger ensues from poverty when the latter is not voluntary; because those who are unwillingly poor, through the desire of money-getting, fall into many sins, according to 1 Tim. 6:9, “They that will become rich, fall into temptation and into the snare of the devil.” This attachment is put away by those who embrace voluntary poverty, but it gathers strength in those who have wealth, as stated above. Again bodily danger does not threaten those who, intent on following Christ, renounce all their possessions and entrust themselves to divine providence. Hence Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 17): “Those who seek first the kingdom of God and His justice are not weighed down by anxiety lest they lack what is necessary.” Reply to Objection 3: According to the Philosopher (Ethic. ii, 6), the mean of virtue is taken according to right reason, not according to the quantity of a thing. Consequently whatever may be done in accordance with right reason is not rendered sinful by the greatness of the quantity, but all the more virtuous. It would, however, be against right reason to throw away all one’s possessions through intemperance, or without any useful purpose; whereas it is in accordance with right reason to renounce wealth in order to devote oneself to the contemplation of wisdom. Even certain philosophers are said to have done this; for Jerome says (Ep. xlviii ad Paulin.): “The famous Theban, Crates, once a very wealthy man, when he was going to Athens to study philosophy, cast away a large amount of gold; for he considered that he could not possess both gold and virtue at the same time.” Much more therefore is it according to right reason for a man to renounce all he has, in order perfectly to follow Christ. Wherefore Jerome says (Ep. cxxv ad Rust. Monach.): “Poor thyself, follow Christ poor.”

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

  proposing to solve through myth some of the most impossible theological conundrums of late antiquity. It is telling that the Manichean threat called forth Augustine’s tract On the Free Choice of the Will, a work whose principal agenda is to exonerate God by assigning the origins of evil to human will, which Augustine already in this early work, more clearly than any of his pre de ces sors, construes as a faculty rather than a condition of being. It is equally telling that within a few years the Pelagians will attempt to throw Augustine’s own arguments back in his face and accuse him of being, under the bishop’s cloak, still a Manichean. Th e primitive embrace of free will would crumble in the generations on either side of AD 400, in the period of rapid Christianization. Two blows were to bring the edifi ce tumbling to the ground. Th ough in very diff erent ways, both arose from the expansion of the church and the need to reconcile the religion with mainstream society. Th e fi rst was the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians, a theological controversy that unraveled with astonishing force in the 410s. Th e polemics over original sin had little pur- chase in the Greek- speaking east, though Augustinian pessimism would be offi cially ratifi ed as orthodox doctrine at the Council of Ephesus. But the triumph of original sin over Pelagian optimism undercut the ancient models of free will, ultimately providing a new model of “the will” as a faculty lodged in the fl esh and disobedient to reason. Th e stakes of the debate were so high, not least because “Pelagius and Augustine were both religious geniuses. Both made unambiguous sense of a conglomerate of ideas and attitudes which men of a previous age had been content to leave undefi ned. Both men were revolutionaries, and the controversy which followed their disagreement, far from being a purely academic wrangle, was a crisis in which the spiritual landscape of Western Christendom can be clearly seen for the fi rst time.” In the course of the Pelagian debate, human sexuality, which had for centuries of Christian apologetics been a paradigm of human freedom, rapidly becomes, in the hands of Augustine, the paradigm of human bondage to the fl esh. Th at Augustine was capable of rebuilding entrenched Christian assumptions out of the elements of Christian orthodoxy in so short a space of time is testimony not only to his individual genius but also to the subtly rearranged position of the church in the world. Th e Pelagian debates erupted unexpectedly, and at fi rst murkily, out of a brew of unsettled questions, which guaranteed that the storm was to be a multidimensional aff air. Th e Origenist controversy continued to reverber-

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  There would be more distrust, more animosity, and more injustice. Walter’s family and most poor black people in his community were similarly burdened by Walter’s conviction. Even if they hadn’t been at his house the day of the crime, most black people in Monroeville knew someone who had been with Walter that day. The pain in that trailer was tangible—I could feel it. The community seemed desperate for some hope of justice. The realization left me anxious but determined. — I’d gotten used to taking calls from lots of people concerning Walter’s case. Most were poor and black, and they offered encouragement and support, and my visit with the family generated even more of those calls. And occasionally, a white person for whom Walter had worked would call to offer support, like Sam Crook. When Sam called, he insisted that I come and see him the next time I was back in town. “I’m a rebel,” he said toward the end of our call. “Part of the 117th division of the Confederate Army.” “Sir?” “My people were heroes of the Confederacy. I’ve inherited their land, their title, and their pride. I love this county, but I know what happened to Walter McMillian ain’t right.” “Well, I appreciate your call.” “You’re going to need some backup, someone who knows some of these people you’re going against, and I’m going to help you.” “I’d be very grateful for your help.” “I’ll tell you something else.” He lowered his voice. “Do you think your phone is being tapped?” “No, sir, I think my phone is clear.” Sam’s voice rose in volume again. “Well, I’ve decided I ain’t going to let them string him up. I’ll get some boys, and we’ll go cut him down before we let them take him. I’m just not going to stand for them putting a good man down for something I know he didn’t do.” Sam Crook spoke in grand proclamations. I hesitated over how to respond. “Well…thank you,” was all I could manage. When I later asked Walter about Sam Crook, he just smiled. “I’ve done a lot of work for him. He’s been good to me. He’s a very interesting guy.” I saw Walter just about every other week for those first few months, and I learned some of his habits. “Interesting” was Walter’s euphemism for odd people, and having worked for hundreds of people throughout the county over the years, he’d encountered no shortage of “interesting” people. The more unusual or bizarre the person was, the more “interesting” they would become in Walter’s parlance. “Very interesting” and “real interesting” and finally “Now, he’s reeeeaaaalll interesting” were the markers for strange and stranger characters. Walter seemed reluctant to say anything bad about anyone. He’d just chuckle if he thought someone was odd.

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

  Th e Christian ideal is not to experi- ence desire at all. Th e aim is not for one to prove as strong as one’s desires, but rather somehow to be continent from desire. Th ere is no way to achieve this continence except through the grace of God.” Th is is as lucid a self- perception as might be hoped for.  Clement’s sexual ideology is closer to the monastic desert than we might suppose. “Our antagonists are Olympian in stature and sting, as is said, more sharply than a wasp. Above all plea sure, which not only by day but also by night, in our dreams, bites us and aims to deceive us with its sor- cery.” But Clement’s asceticism is lodged within marriage, within the city. Th e endless stream of minute directives for Christian living proff ered by Clement amount to a monastic rule for the Christian house hold. Clement clasped enthusiastically to the Paul of the pastoral letters, who had off ered “so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of house craft.” Paul’s commands are exuberantly expanded into a punctilious rubric for the Christian life. Time, place, and manner restric- tions are unmercifully imposed on the sexual act. Sex was not for the day- time, but neither was the darkness of night to be a veil for hidden excess. Immemorial patterns of sociability are wrapped in new rules of Christian modesty: Clement could prescribe which sorts of dinners to attend and how to behave. If women had to attend social gatherings, they should be entirely covered; the “gravest calumny” that could be leveled against an unmarried THE WILL AND THE WORLD  woman was that she was present at a symposium. If young men were pres- ent, they were to sit motionless, look down, and keep their legs uncrossed. Men were to eat and drink moderately, but also slowly, with a cultivated air of self- control, pausing frequently, never reaching for food, sharing gener- ously, and departing early. For Clement, the Christian sage could pass through life amid the city, but exposure to so many temptations required unfailing vigilance and supreme control of the will.  Clement has what might seem an embarrassing amount of advice on the proper consumption of food and drink. His interest in dietetics and medi- cal lore places him in the mainstream of imperial culture. Clement admired those who abstained from wine completely in the name of chastity and “thought it best if boys and girls are kept apart from this drug completely. It is not advisable to pour liquid heat on smouldering youth. . . . Ramped up by its infl uence, their privates expand and their breasts swell, so that their genitals are an omen, the image of fornication.”