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 on the Fourth of July (1976)

  We were both certain that one of our teachers was a secret Communist agent and in our next secret club meeting we promised to report anything new he said during our next history class. We watched him very carefully that year. One afternoon he told us that China was going to have a billion people someday. “One billion!” he said, tightly clenching his fist. “Do you know what that means?” he said, staring out the classroom window. “Do you know what that’s going to mean?” he said in almost a whisper. He never finished what he was saying and after that Castiglia and I were convinced he was definitely a Communist. About that time I started doing push-ups in my room and squeezing rubber balls until my arms began to ache, trying to make my body stronger and stronger. I was fascinated by the muscle-men ads in the beginnings of the Superman comics, showing how a skinny guy could overnight transform his body into a hulk of fighting steel, and each day I increased the push-ups, more and more determined to build a strong and healthy body. I made muscles in the mirror for hours and checked my biceps each day with a tape measure, and did pull-ups on a bar in the doorway of my room before I went to school each morning. I was a little guy, back then, and used to put notches with a penny on the door of my room, little scratches with the coin to remind myself how tall I was and to see each week whether I’d grown. * * * “The human body is an amazing thing,” the coaches told us that fall when we started high school. “It is a beautiful remarkable machine that will last you a lifetime if you care for it properly.” And we listened to them, and worked and trained our young bodies until they were strong and quick. I joined the high-school wrestling team, practicing and working out every day down in the basement of Massapequa High School. The coaches made us do situps, push-ups, and spinning drills until sweat poured from our faces and we were sure we’d pass out. “Wanting to win and wanting to be first, that’s what’s important,” the coaches told us. “Play fair, but play to win,” they said. They worked us harder and harder until we thought we couldn’t take it anymore and then they would yell and shout for us to keep going and drive past all the physical pain and discomfort. “More! More!” they screamed. “If you want to win, then you’re going to have to work! You’re going to have to drive your bodies far beyond what you think you can do. You’ve got to pay the price for victory!

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

  Finally, the relationship between free will and sexual morality presents a privileged vantage on the deep relationship between social structure and Christian sexual ethics. The high notion of absolute freedom that is so deeply embedded in early Christian thinking about sex and sin enjoyed its fullest ascendance in the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion. The fourth century was the golden age of free will. But triumph brought unforeseen challenges. The early Christian notion of free will was a cosmological assertion, forged in opposition to Stoic causality, popular astrology, and gnostic determinism. In its very structure this libertarian model was premised on the separation of the church and the world, and its highest symbol was virginity, as a rejection of all exterior demands on the body. By the later fourth century, with the progressive entanglement of church and society, this model of free will came to look grossly inadequate. In the very generations when Christianity became a majority religion, its leadership was awakened to the insufficiency of the old absolutisms. Discussion of free will changed key, the older cosmological mode giving way to debates over the nature of volition and the absence of material capacities to choose. Augustine came to expound a view of divine grace and original sin that cut against centuries of Christian voluntarism. Moreover, rather suddenly some Christian bishops came to realize that their pure notions of free will were simply incompatible with the realities of life, above all with the centrality of sexual coercion in the Roman sexual economy. The sudden recognition that Christian sexual morality would have to account for those without volition over their sexual fate is a sign of the church’s broader social power from the later fourth century. Most remarkably, this new anxiety led directly to a program of legal reform in which Roman emperors, from Theodosius II to Justinian, attacked coerced prostitution. The campaign against violent sexual procurement is deeply symbolic of the triumph of a Christian logic of sexual morality, rooted in sin, in the order of imperial law and public culture.7

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  IT IS THE END of the summer when I get back. The days are long and hot and there is still so much restlessness in me. I sit in my parents’ living room and try to watch the baseball game on television. I keep going down to Arthur’s Bar. I begin to think about getting an apartment. I have never lived alone, but I decide to try it now. I get a place in Hempstead near the university. The rent is two hundred dollars, but I never think much about money anymore. I just spend the big checks I get from the government. I go all over Hempstead buying out the furniture stores. I buy an electric typewriter, a huge expensive stereo, a bunch of paintings. I don’t care what things cost. Every morning I wheel into the bathroom of my new apartment and throw up. It frightens me to live alone with my paralyzed body and my thoughts of Vietnam. I am dreaming too often of the dead corporal. The tension and fear are twisted up inside me like a loaded spring. I get into my car and drive around for hours. Sometimes I drive very fast. I have registered at the university and it is much better when classes begin. Maybe all I needed was to be with people again. I begin to look back and think about the summer, about Mexico. Even with all the loneliness, there were times that had been good. My first summer without the war. I tell myself the war and the hospital are behind me now. The best years of my life are still ahead of me. I am more determined than ever to learn to walk on braces and I exercise for hours every day. In the hospital they have shown me a way to stretch my legs a little and I am doing it one evening in my second week of school when I hear something snap. It sounds like the branch of a tree breaking off—and there is my right leg all twisted under me. I panic for the first few minutes, then call my father. He drives over right away and takes me to the hospital, the V.A. hospital in the Bronx. I spend the next six months there. * * * I am alone again. I have been lying in Room 17 for almost a month. I am isolated here because I am a troublemaker. I had a fight with the head nurse on the ward. I asked for a bath. I asked for the vomit to be wiped up from the floor. I asked to be treated like a human being. My leg has swollen to twice its original size. The thigh bone has been completely shattered in the break, leaving the bone sticking out just beneath the surface of my skin.

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

  Another common problem is an overwhelming tendency toward continued dependence (learned helplessness) on others for direction and authority. In groups where members lived communally, most life decisions were made by leaders. Members were encouraged to be selfless and obedient. This form of dependency creates low self-esteem and undermines the healthy desire and ability for personal development. When I first left the Moonies, I didn’t seem to have that difficulty. My deprogrammers had told my parents that they should expect that I would have trouble making decisions. My parents were quite confused when we went out to eat, because I easily knew what I wanted. They told me later that they thought, in some twisted way, that this meant that I hadn’t been deprogrammed. What they hadn’t taken into account was that I had not been a rank-and-file member. I had been a leader and was used to making certain kinds of decisions for myself, as well as for others. Day-to-day decisions were easy for me; bigger decisions, like which college to choose, were more difficult. Like most skills, decision-making becomes easier with practice. In time, people learn how to resume control over their lives. This process can be speeded up by the gentle but firm insistence by family members and friends that ex-members make up their own mind about what they want to eat or do. By bolstering the ex-member’s self-esteem and confidence, the dependency problem is usually overcome. Floating: Dealing With The Cult Identity After Leaving A more difficult problem is a phenomenon known as floating.183 The former cult member suddenly starts to mentally float back in time to the days of their group involvement, and starts to think from within their former identity. The experience is triggered when the ex-group member sees, hears or feels some stimulus that was part of their conditioning process. This can briefly jolt them back into the cult mindset. Here is an example. Margot, a 19-year-old college student, was recruited into Lifespring during a summer job in 1987. Lifespring is a Large Group Awareness Training. She completed the basic course and was one weekend away from completing the leadership training course. Margot’s mother, an ordained Methodist minister, saw some personality changes in her daughter, and was concerned enough to borrow money to initiate a rescue effort. The effort was successful, and Margot soon broke from the group. (As part of an investigation of Lifespring, ABC’s 20/20 interviewed psychiatrist and cult expert Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School. Although Lifespring insists otherwise, Dr. Clark stated that Lifespring does, in his opinion, practice mind control).184

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

  While the advance of the slave trade tended to align pederastic eros with the master’s power, the law protected freeborn boys in ever starker terms. Violation of a freeborn boy was illegal in Roman law. What is underappreciated, though, is the extent to which freeborn boys in the east were gradually fenced off by public force. Dio considered sex with a freeborn boy “an assault” and “an even more lawless violation” than the corruption of women. The law “so far exceeds all else in modesty and faith that to it has been vouchsafed the matrimonial bond, the beauty of the virgin, the bloom of boys.” Seduction of freeborn boys became conspicuously dangerous, but the statutory basis of the crime is a little unclear. In the early empire the Romans gave the towns under their sway considerable control over private law, so that the empire was a patchwork of jurisdictions and legal regimes. But Roman rules had an irresistible influence. Roman law applied to the growing number of provincials who earned Roman citizenship, and Roman governors played an ever larger role in the resolution of disputes. Through whatever channels, Roman officials came to preside over the sexual honor of free provincial boys. Lucian reports that the charlatan Peregrinus, having “corrupted a pretty lad,” paid three thousand drachmas to the boy’s parents, “who were poor, to avoid being hauled before the governor of Asia.” 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.17 Whatever the law commanded, sex with freeborn boys went on. Fathers were endlessly anxious about the sexual dangers that lurked in the schools. The “lover of boys,” it was conventional to believe, only had to bribe the pedagogue or attendant and entice his beloved with a little gift. Philosophers, 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 pleasure, some cavorting with concubines, others with prostitutes, most of them with boys.” One sign that older patterns endured is the intense reflection on the protocols of consent. The 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 afforded 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 shameful once the young man was too old, “but between not yet and nevermore you and I have the now.”18

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  This door which the body wears, if opened out onto the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to note—there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel “established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, toward an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead center from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, from here it is seen to be divine. All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of the Amarillo Dance Hall one night, some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be foundered. There was nothing unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse. If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning. If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail.

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

  The imposition of intense milieu control is closely connected to the process of change. (This partly explains why there can be a sudden lifting of the cult identity when a young person who has been in a cult for some time is abruptly exposed to outside, alternative influences.) One can almost observe the process in some young people who undergo a dramatic change in their prior identity, whatever it was, to an intense embrace of a cult’s belief system and group structure. I consider this a form of doubling: a second self is formed that lives side by side with the prior self, somewhat autonomously from it. Obviously there must be some connecting element to integrate oneself with the other—otherwise, the overall person could not function; but the autonomy of each is impressive. When the milieu control is lifted by removing, by whatever means, the recruit from the totalistic environment, something of the earlier self reasserts itself. This leave-taking may occur voluntarily or through force (or simply, as in one court case, by the cult member moving across to the other side of the table, away from other members). The two selves can exist simultaneously and confusedly for a considerable time, and it may be that the transition periods are the most intense and psychologically painful, as well as the most potentially harmful. A second general characteristic of totalistic environments is what I call “mystical manipulation” or “planned spontaneity.” It is a systematic process that is planned and managed from above (by the leadership) but appears to have arisen spontaneously within the environment. The process need not feel like manipulation, which raises important philosophical questions. Some aspects—such as fasting, chanting, and limited sleep—have a certain tradition and have been practiced by religious groups over the centuries. There is a cult pattern now in which a particular “chosen” human being is seen as a savior or a source of salvation. Mystical manipulation can take on a special quality in these cults because the leaders become mediators for God. The God-centered principles can be put forcibly and claimed exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs become the only true path to salvation. This can give intensity to the mystical manipulation and justify those involved with promulgating it and, in many cases, those who are its recipients from below.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeonholes were empty and all the drawers were empty; there wasn’t a thing on the desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a pothook. When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith. A phantom struggle, because they weren’t dreaming of such a thing as the paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let go. We’re like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box. I think if I had been crazy I couldn’t have hit upon a better scheme to consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the middle of the parlor. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me—crude ciphers from the old stone age—because the contact was through the head and the head is a useless appendage unless you’re anchored in midchannel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the life buoy, was a Herculean task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression—I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  With the exception of that initial burst of writing and rare moment of stability in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974, I continued to be extremely restless back then, frantically moving from one place to the next, living on the edge, racing in cabs to the airport, flying from city to city on my monthly compensation check, suddenly showing up at friends’ houses in the middle of the night and sleeping on their couches—always carrying the manuscript with me and always frightened, desperately needing to escape the demons that were closing in on me. Over the next year and a half I wrote several additional chapters of Born on the Fourth of July. Some of the stories were ones I had told my mother when I first came home from the hospital and would lay on our couch in the living room when I couldn’t sleep, which was often back then. Night after night I would repeat the story of how I was wounded that day in Vietnam, describing every single detail. My dear mother would sit patiently in her chair, listening to her son who had come home paralyzed from the war, trying her best to understand. I attempted to write at my friends Skip and Ginny’s place on Mohegan Lake, in their laundry room, but couldn’t seem to get started. I wrote most of the chapter about my childhood at a little hotel not far from Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, and the ambush chapter, the most painful but one of the best, at Connie’s apartment in L.A. I wrote the Memorial Day chapter one afternoon in San Francisco at the Sam Wong Hotel on Broadway, just down the street from Enricos Café in North Beach. I can still remember the open window of my hotel room and the noise of passing cars and trucks in the street below, the fumes, the honking horns, but that became a very beautiful chapter and I still enjoy reading it to this day. I dictated the very first page of the first chapter to my friend Roger at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, and the remainder of the chapter up in Mendocino where he and Mary were living at the time. I had driven all the way up in a used car I had just bought in L.A. and later abandoned in their driveway. It was deep in the woods, quiet and peaceful, so very different from the war and the hospitals and all that I had been through. The air was fresh and there was a pond behind their cottage where I dictated to Roger, and I remember feeling exhausted as he held me in his arms and I began to cry in the midst of all that stillness. It was a painful but beautiful birth.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day. From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take off, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming of her itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvelous machine so that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-off, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight toward some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward toward those whom she was abandoning.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Their house was only a few steps from the new library with which I had just endowed Athens, and which offered every aid to meditation, or to the repose which must precede it: comfortable chairs and adequate heating for winters which are often so sharp; stairways giving ready access to the galleries where books are kept; a luxury of alabaster and gold, quiet and subdued. Particular attention had been paid to the choice of lamps, and to their placing. I felt more and more the need to gather together and conserve our ancient books, and to entrust the making of new copies to conscientious scribes. This noble task seemed to me no less urgent than aid to veterans or subsidies to prolific families of the poor; I warned myself that it would take only a few wars, and the misery that follows them, or a single period of brutality or savagery under a few bad rulers to destroy forever the ideas passed down with the help of these frail objects in fiber and ink. Each man fortunate enough to benefit to some degree from this legacy of culture seemed to me responsible for protecting it and holding it in trust for the human race. During that period I read a great deal. I had encouraged Phlegon to compose a series of chronicles, under the name of Olympiads, which would continue Xenophon's Hellenica and which would come down to my reign, a bold plan in that it reduced Rome's vast history to a mere sequel of that of Greece. Phlegon's style is annoyingly dry, but it would already be something done to have untangled and assembled the facts. The project inspired me to reread the historians of other days; their works, judged in the light of my own experience, filled me with somber thoughts; the energy and good intentions of each statesman seemed of slight avail before this flood so fortuitous and so fatal, this torrent of happenings too confused to be foreseen or directed, or even appraised. The poets, too, engaged me; I liked to conjure those few clear, mellow voices out of a distant past. Theognis became a friend, the aristocrat, the exile, observing human activities without illusion and without indulgence, ever ready to denounce the faults and errors which we call our woes. This clear-sighted man had known love's poignant delights; his liaison with Cyrnus, in spite of suspicions, jealousies, and mutual grievances, had endured into the old age of the one and the mature years of the other: the immortality which he was wont to promise to that youth of Megara was more than an empty assurance, since their two memories have come down to me through a space of more than six centuries.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I’m sure you will come through it all okay.” I AM IN A NEW hospital now. Things are very different than in the last place. It is quiet in the early morning. There is no reveille here. The sun is just beginning to come in through the windows and I can hear the steady dripping of the big plastic bags that overflow with urine onto the floor. The aide comes in the room, a big black woman. She goes to Willey’s bed across from me, almost stepping in the puddle of urine. She takes the cork out of the metal thing in his neck and sticks the long rubber tube in, then clicks on the machine by the bed. There is a loud sucking slurping sound. She moves the rubber tube around and around until it sucks all the stuff out of his lungs. After she is done she puts the cork back in his throat and leaves the room. There are people talking down at the end of the hall. The night shift is getting ready to go home. They are laughing very loud and flushing the toilets, cursing and telling jokes, black men in white uniforms walking past my door. I shut my eyes. I try to get back into the dream I was having. She is so pretty, so warm and naked lying next to me. She kisses me and begins to unbutton my hospital shirt. “I love you,” I hear her say. “I love you.” I open my eyes. Something strange is tickling my nose. It is Tommy the enema man and today is my day to get my enema. “Hey Kovic,” Tommy is saying. “Hey Kovic, wake up, I got an enema for you.” She kisses my lips softly at first, then puts her tongue into my mouth. I am running my hands through her hair and she tells me that she loves that. She is unbuttoning my trousers now and her small hand is working itself deep down into my pants. I keep driving my tongue into her more furiously than ever. We have just been dancing on the floor, I was dancing very funny like a man on stilts, but now we are making love and just above me I hear a voice trying to wake me again. “Kovic! I have an enema for you. Come on. We gotta get you outta here.” I feel myself being lifted. Tommy and another aide, a young black woman, pick me up, carefully unhooking my tube. They put my body into the frame, tying my legs down with long white twisted sheets. They lay another big sheet over me. The frame has a long metal bar that goes above my head. My rear end sticks out of a slit that I lie on. “Okay,” shouts Tommy in his gravel voice. “This one’s ready to go.” The aide pushes me into the line-up in the hallway.

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

  The recruiter wants to draw as much information as possible from the potential convert, to determine the most effective way to bring them into the group. An effective recruiter knows how to hone in on potential weak spots (called ‘finding the ruin’ in Scientology). These may involve a boyfriend or girlfriend, parents, family members, job, or school; the death of a close friend or relative; a move to a new town, and any other significant transition or dislocation. An effective recruiter knows how to make the target comfortable, so more willing to disclose highly personal and confidential information. Meanwhile, the recruiter reveals as little as possible about themselves and (especially) the group, unless it is absolutely necessary. Most of the information comes from the person being recruited. This unbalanced flow of information is always a signal that something is wrong. By far the most common impression potential recruits have is that they are making a new friend. However, in the real world, friendships take time to develop. Over time, each person shares more and more personal information in a reciprocal manner, giving and taking in a balanced way. There is also no hidden agenda. Once a potential convert is invited to a cult function, there is a great deal of pressure, both overt and subtle, to make a commitment as soon as possible.143 Cult recruiters, like good con artists, move in for the kill quickly, once they have sized up a person. It is not in their best interest to encourage thoughtful reflection. In contrast, legitimate groups do not lie to potential converts or pressure them into making a quick commitment. A destructive group will recruit new members through the use of mind control techniques. Control of the individual’s experience is essential in order to break them down, indoctrinate them, and build them up again in the cult image. During cult recruitment, the person’s identity framework makes a dramatic shift. During the indoctrination, sometimes the person doesn’t contact family and friends for days or weeks. When they eventually do, a radical personality change is evident. The individual often changes his style of clothes and speech patterns and behaves in an uncharacteristically distant manner. Often, the person’s sense of humor is blunted. Previous interests, hobbies and goals may be abandoned “because they are no longer important.” This personality change does seem to wear off a bit over time, if the individual doesn’t continue to contact the group or participate in its activities. However, when the person maintains contact, the new identity can and does grow ever stronger. To family and friends, the person seems not only more distant, but deceitful and evasive. Sometimes the person can be coaxed into revealing what he now believes. Frequently, though, the new member asks family members and friends to talk to older members or leaders, because “they can explain it better.”

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

  What about Waco, David Koresh, and Branch Davidians? Heaven’s Gate? The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo and their sarin gas attack in the subways of Tokyo?” No, no. Sadly, no. They are not alone in not knowing. The world has changed. While the names of the big cults of the 1970s and 1980s have disappeared from the headlines, even more, insidious names—Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony—have taken their place. In fact, my traveling companions ask me about ISIS, also known as Islamic State or Daesh—it seems to them that it might be a cult. Yes! I tell them that, in my opinion, it is a political cult that uses religion to lure and influence people. It exhibits many of the classic signs—recruiting people through deception, whisking them away to isolated locations, giving them new names, clothes, controlling their access to food and information, implanting phobias, and making false promises. We talk about North Korea, its nuclear arms development, and assassinations of enemies, cyber attacks against Sony Pictures, whose movie, The Interview, casts the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in a decidedly unflattering light. I tell them that North Korea is a classic example of a mind control regime. They are entirely dependent and obedient to their “great leader,” and his picture is everywhere. North Korean dictator Kim and President Trump, ignoring criminal human rights abuses, decided to meet in person. This event fascinates me as the United States’ unorthodox move follows some of my significant principles of the Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) including communicating directly in person rather than through others, or phone or email, rapport and trust building by giving respect. I also liked the 4 minute video shown to Kim of a future of economic promise. We then discuss human trafficking—one of the most common felonies committed in the United States, second only to identity theft. Sex and labor trafficking are now multibillion-dollar industries. It is finally getting significant media attention. However, it seems everyone is missing the core issue. The human trafficking racket is accurately understood as a “commercial cult” phenomenon. Pimps are business people who operate like cult leaders. They use psychological techniques to recruit, indoctrinate, and control their members. I tell my companions about a book sold on Amazon, written by a pimp, showing men how to use mind control on women to get them to be sex slaves. I tell them that human trafficking has become a focus of my energies over the past few years.

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

  Some long-term members do burn out without actually quitting. These people can no longer take the burden or pressure of performance. They may be permanently reassigned to manual labor in out-of-the-way places, where they are expected to remain for the rest of their lives. Or, if they become a burden, they may be asked (or told) to leave. One man I counseled had been sent home to his family after ten years of cult membership, because he started to demand more sleep and better treatment. They kicked him out because, as they told him, they didn’t want him to “infect” other members, who might start making demands as well. Changes in Time Orientation An interesting dynamic of cults is that they tend to change people’s relationship to their past, present and future. Cult members tend to look back at their previous life with a distorted memory that colors everything dark. Even the most positive memories are skewed toward the bad. The cult member’s sense of the present is manipulated, too. They feel a great sense of urgency about the tasks at hand. I remember well the constant feeling that a time bomb was ticking beneath my feet, and that the world might become a heaven or a hell, depending on how well I performed in my current project. Many groups teach that the apocalypse is just around the corner. Some say they are preventing the apocalypse; others merely believe that they will survive it. When you are kept extremely busy on critical projects all the time—for days, weeks or months—everything becomes blurred. To a cult member, the future is a time when they will be rewarded, once the great change has finally come. Or else it will be the time when they will be punished. In most groups, the leader claims to control—or at least have unique knowledge of—the future. He knows how to paint visions of future heaven and hell that will move members in the direction he desires. If a group has a timetable for the apocalypse, it will likely be two to five years away—far enough not to be discredited any time soon, but near enough to carry emotional punch.93 In many cults, these predictions have a way of fading into the background as the big date approaches. In other groups, the timetable is believed right until it actually fails to come true. Often the leader just issues a new timetable that moves the big event up a few years. After he does this a few times, a few long-term members may become cynical. Of course, by then there is a whole set of new members who are unaware that the leader has been shifting the timetable. The Jehovah’s Witnesses failed in many predictions for the end of the world, yet it remains one of the largest contemporary cults, numbering millions.

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

  But the underlying assumptions about the order of the universe were the same.  Th e inviolability of the heroine’s sexual integrity is the deep premise of the ancient romance. Leucippe was said to have endured “every indignity and outrage against her body, except one.” It went without saying what single disgrace she had been spared. Th e physical integrity of the female protagonist was the convention, in a genre of conventions. Th e great literary critic Northup Frye has observed of the genre, that “with romance it is much harder to avoid the feeling of convention, that the story is one of a family of similar stories. Hence in the criticism of romance we are led very quickly from what the individual work says to what the entire convention it belongs to is saying through the work.” Th e insight is crucial, but it requires an important amendment. Frye simply underestimated the sophistication of some ancient romances. To compare, for example, naive texts like the Ephesian Tale with more artful confections like Leucippe and Clitophon, without recognizing the entirely diff erent literary registers of the texts, is to ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  miss the supreme command of the medium that authors like Achilles Ta- tius display. Th e Ephesian Tale and Leucippe and Clitophon use the same set of conventions but use them to vastly diff erent eff ect. What they share is a generic syntax, out of which the meaning of the individual work is created.  Th e ancient romances are stories of eros, a consuming physical passion that binds two beautiful lovers, a young man and young woman, in mutual attraction. Th e protagonists are unfailingly of high birth, born into the civic aristocracies of a broadly Hellenic Mediterranean. Th e stories are set against the backdrop of a physically familiar but temporally irreal Greek past, what Bakhtin called “adventure time.” Eros is the driving force of the story: a force of nature that, unbeckoned, guides human destiny. Th e novels celebrate eros as a gift of nature; they ponder the stark mystery that replen- ishing the city with new generations should also be a source of the greatest plea sure. Th e romances are unhesitantly carnal: eros is the ecstatic joy of bodily friction. At the same time the eros they admire is a force that has been safely caged in matrimony— if just barely. Th e novels are conservative, but hardly frigid. Th e novels unabashedly celebrate sex itself. Th e romances are idealizing.

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

  e pursuit of chastity entailed a demanding regimen to control both “the heat of the body” and the “motion of the soul.” For Cassian, the monk could transcend sexual desire only by reaching a state of exalted love for his own purity; to resist plea sure was mere abstinence, but to rebuild the self as a creature untouched by its temptations was true chastity. 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 carnal 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 concern 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, involuntary 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 window 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 prescribed 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 introspection that could be achieved in dialogue between the monk and his superior. 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- C O N C L U S I O N 

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

  What are members expected to do once they join? Do I have to quit school or work, or donate my money and property, or cut myself off from family members and friends who might oppose my membership? What did you do for a living before you joined the group, and what do you do for a living now? If you are being approached by a destructive cult, the person you meet may tell you that you will be expected to do little or nothing once you join. However, this question will make most cult members very uncomfortable and defensive. Watch the recruiter’s non-verbal reaction carefully when you ask this question. Ask the person what they did when they first met the group and what they are doing now. Is your group considered controversial by anyone? If other people are critical of it, what are their main objections? These are nicely open-ended questions that allow you to probe just how much the person knows or is willing to discuss. If you ask these questions politely and with a smile, the person may say, “Oh, some people think we’re a cult and that we’re all brainwashed. Isn’t that silly? Do I look brainwashed?” To that question you might respond, “So how are people supposed to look if they are brainwashed?” When I ask that question, the person I’m speaking to usually becomes very uncomfortable and, if I continue to probe, finds some excuse to leave. How do you feel about former members of your group? Have you ever sat down to speak with a former member to find out why they left the group? If not, why not? Does your group impose restrictions on communicating with former members? This is one of the most revealing sets of questions you can ask. Any legitimate organization would never discourage contact with former members, particularly family and friends. Likewise, any legitimate group would support a member’s right to leave, even though they might not like it. Destructive cults, on the other hand, do not accept any reason for a person’s departure, no matter what it is. Likewise, cult groups make sure to instill fear in members, insuring that they stay away from critics and former members. Although you might hear some experienced cult recruiters say, “Sure, some of my best friends have left,” when you probe further and ask them for specifics, you may find out they have been lying. I always pursue such a response with questions such as “What specific reasons did they give for leaving?” and “Do they say that they are happier now that they have left?” Again, the recruiter is usually at a loss for words. What are the three things you like least about the group and its leader?

• From Untrue (2018)

  “Working with Non-Monogamous Couples” was held at a nondescript family services center in a nowhere neighborhood between Midtown West and Chelsea. (I later learned that it fell within what was once called “the Tenderloin,” Manhattan’s entertainment and red-light district in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, and that the particular street had once housed a row of brothels. Reformers had referred to the area as “Satan’s Circus” and “modern Gomorrah.”) The center’s building was near a sushi restaurant and a handbag wholesaler. Having attended a talk in the same series (“Sex Therapy in the City”) in the same venue about a year before, I knew I would be surrounded by therapists who were there for certification credits and to learn from an expert in their field about the best approaches to issues that were likely to come up in their work. I also knew a little bit about consensual non-monogamy: I knew that it was for people who didn’t want to be monogamous, and who didn’t want to lie about it. It was presumably for “consenting adults,” which made it sound a little sexy and a little unsexy and clinical at the same time. As I checked in with Michael Moran, one of the program’s organizers—a high-energy, friendly psychotherapist with chic, short salt-and-pepper hair—he observed that whereas in previous years he had mainly worked with gay men for whom non-monogamy “was often more or less a given,” he had recently noted an uptick in his practice and in general of heterosexual couples seeking solutions to their monogamy quandaries.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  God, help us! And they threw them into a barbershop that was more like a factory where there was hair flying all over the place, his hair, everyone’s hair, all the hair of the boys who had come to be marines that day. Men as angry and as cold as the sergeants shaved the hair off their heads until he could feel the warm soft wind that swept through the hangar on his head too. They had made them completely bald, and he looked around as he sat on the chair, and the guys who were cutting, the guys who were shaving all their hair off, weren’t even looking at the heads, but just cutting like guys shearing sheep. “Get the fuck up!” screamed the barber. “Next!” he shouted, and the next young boy jumped into the chair staring straight ahead. He found himself being swept along with all the young boys, now strange looking, naked like himself. Young bodies tense and twisted naked together, grasping on to each other, holding on like children. Where were they going? he thought. What were they becoming? Shoved and pushed by the drill instructors, they continued to move, from the barbershop where their heads had been shaved, through the long metal hallways of the hangar into the showers. “Wash all that scum off!” screamed the sergeant. “I want you maggots to wash all that civilian scum off your bodies forever!” And now he felt the soothing hot water streaming down his back and onto his legs. Oh, he could feel it splash hot against his bald head. It felt so good, so warm and different from their angry screams. And before he could begin to even feel comfortable, someone was shouting at him again and telling him to get out of the shower, back into the place where he had been before, in front of his box again. And he ran with the others, their bodies naked and dripping with water, all eighty shaved and washed clean and their clothing packed tightly to be mailed back home. And now they all stood rigid at attention, their hands at their sides, facing the boxes with the painted numbers. “Awright people, awright people!” said the sergeant. “We’re gonna issue you clothing.” There were marine privates walking past the boxes throwing in green belts and trousers, utility caps and long black socks. “Awright ladies!” screamed the sergeant. “We are going to begin today by learning how to dress. I want you to look down into your boxes and I want you to look for a pair of black socks. Do you see that pair of black socks, ladies?” “Yessir!” screamed the eighty boys. “Again!” shouted the sergeant. “Yessir!” screamed the young men. “Now I want you to grab that pair of black socks, when I tell you to,” he said, almost hesitating. “And when I tell you to grab them I want you to put them on.