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.

Page 375 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Somehow Johnson was now someone to fear; if they did not give in and remained one of the few holdouts, clearly he could make their lives miserable over the next few years. When it finally became public, the Republicans and the press were astounded at what Lyndon Johnson had accomplished. In a matter of weeks, since assuming the leadership position, he had gained unprecedented powers. He, not the seniority system, controlled committee appointments. He was now the undisputed “Master of the Senate,” and the byword among his colleagues was “Let Lyndon do it.” Drawn into his sphere of influence was the most unlikely cast of characters—from Dick Russell to Hubert Humphrey. But the most astonished person of all must have been Senator Tom Connally himself. In four short years, Johnson had not only risen to the top but had gained control of the Senate Democrats through a slow and steady campaign of accumulating influence, far surpassing the power Connally had accrued in over twenty years of service. • • • Interpretation: From the beginning of his political career, Johnson had a single ambition—to one day become president of the United States. To get there he needed a relatively swift rise to prominence. The younger he reached leadership positions, the more time he would have to spread his name and gain leverage within the Democratic Party. Elected to the House of Representatives at the age of twenty-eight, he seemed on track to get what he wanted, but in the House his career got bogged down. The place was so big and complex, and he was not good at dealing with large groups. He was not an exciting public speaker. He was much more charming in one- on-one situations. He became frustrated and restless. Finally reaching the Senate at the age of forty, he brought with him his impatience, as evidenced by his meeting with Connally. But shortly before his inauguration, he toured the floor of the Senate and had an epiphany: the place was much smaller; it was more like a cozy club for gentlemen. Here he could work one on one and slowly gain power by accumulating influence. To accomplish this, however, he had to transform himself. He was naturally aggressive; he would have to rein this in, slow down, and step back. He would have to stop talking so much and getting into heated arguments. Let other people do the talking; let them feel like the star of the show. Stop thinking of himself; instead, focus completely on his fellow senators as they talked and talked. Assume the inoffensive front of the junior senator learning the ropes, the serious and somewhat dull student of procedure and legislation.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  There is so much we cannot control, particularly with our careers and global trends. The idea that we will die and be quickly forgotten, swallowed up in eternity, is quite intolerable. We want to feel significant in some way, to protest against our natural smallness, to expand our sense of self. What we experienced at the age of three or four unconsciously haunts us our entire lives. We alternate between moments of sensing our smallness and trying to deny it. This makes us prone to finding ways to imagine our superiority. Some children do not go through that second phase in early childhood in which they must confront their relative smallness, and these children are more vulnerable to deeper forms of grandiosity later in life. They are the pampered, spoiled ones. The mother and the father continue to make such children feel like they are the center of the universe, shielding them from the pain of confronting the reality. Their every wish becomes a command. If ever attempts are made to instill the slightest amount of discipline, the parents are met with a tantrum. Furthermore, such children come to disdain any form of authority. Compared with themselves and what they can get, the father figure seems rather weak. This early pampering marks them for life. They need to be adored. They become masters at manipulating others to pamper them and shower them with attention. They naturally feel greater than anyone above them. If they have any talent, they might rise quite far, as their sense of being born with a crown on their head becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike others, they never really alternate between feelings of smallness and greatness; they know only the latter. Certainly Eisner came from such a background, as he had a mother who met his every need, completed his homework for him, and sheltered him from his cold and sometimes cruel father. In the past, we humans were able to channel our grandiose needs into religion. In ancient times, our sense of smallness was not just something bred into us by the many years we spent dependent on our parents; it also came from our weakness in relation to the hostile powers in nature. Gods and spirits represented these elemental powers of nature that dwarfed our own. By worshipping them we could gain their protection. Connected to something much larger than ourselves, we felt enlarged. After all, the gods or God cared about the fate of our tribe or city; they cared about our individual soul, a sign of our own significance. We did not merely die and disappear. Many centuries later, in a similar manner, we channeled this energy into worshipping leaders who represented a great cause and promoted a future utopia, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution, or Mao Zedong and communism.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  This would make people listen closely, as they followed the interesting course of his logic. The style was compelling and calming. Unlike any of the other leaders, Pericles remained in power year after year, decade after decade, putting his total stamp on the city in his quiet, unobtrusive way. He had his enemies. This was inevitable. He had stayed in power so long that many accused him of being a secret dictator. He was suspected of being an atheist, a man who scoffed at all traditions. That would explain why he was so peculiar. But nobody could argue against the results of his leadership. And so now, as he began to address the Assembly that afternoon, his opinion on war with Sparta would carry the most weight, and a hush came over the crowd as they anxiously waited to hear his argument. “Athenians,” he began, “my views are the same as ever: I am against making any concessions to the Peloponnesians, even though I am aware that the enthusiastic state of mind in which people are persuaded to enter upon a war is not retained when it comes to action, and that people’s minds are altered by the course of events.” Differences between Athens and Sparta were supposed to be settled through neutral arbitrators, he reminded them. It would set a dangerous precedent if they gave in to the Spartans’ unilateral demands. Where would it end? Yes, a direct land battle with Sparta would be suicide. What he proposed instead was a completely novel form of warfare—limited and defensive. He would bring within the walls of Athens all those living in the area. Let the Spartans come and try to lure us into fighting, he said; let them lay waste to our lands. We will not take the bait; we will not fight them on land. With our access to the sea we will keep the city supplied. We will use our navy to raid their coastal towns. As time goes on, they will grow frustrated by the lack of battle. Having to feed and supply their standing army, they will run out of money. Their allies will bicker among themselves. The war party within Sparta will be discredited and a real lasting peace will be agreed upon, all with minimal expenditure of lives and money on our part. “I could give you many other reasons,” he concluded, “why you should feel confident in ultimate victory, if only you will make up your minds not to add to the empire while the war is in progress, and not to go out of your way to involve yourselves in new perils. What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy but our own mistakes.” The novelty of what he was proposing aroused great debate. Neither hawks nor doves were satisfied with his plan, but in the end, his reputation for wisdom carried the day and his strategy was approved. Several months later the fateful war began.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  bad economic numbers coming from there. “The government is full of Jews,” he told Haldeman. “Most Jews are disloyal.” They were the mainstay of the East Coast establishment that worked so hard against him. Another time he told Haldeman, “Please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. . . . Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?” Auditing them would be in order. He had other harsh ideas for how to hurt Katharine Graham and embarrass Daniel Schorr. Nixon also began to feel increasingly anxious about his public image, so critical to his legacy. He badgered his staff, and even Henry Kissinger, to promote to the press his strong leadership style. In interviews, they should refer to him as Mr. Peace, and Kissinger should not be getting so much credit. He wanted to know what the elites at the parties in Georgetown were saying about him. Were they finally changing their minds in any way about Richard Nixon? Despite his nervousness, by 1972 it was clear that events were lining up well for him. His Democratic opponent in his reelection bid would be Senator George McGovern, a diehard liberal. Nixon was ahead in the polls, but he wanted much more. He wanted a complete landslide and mandate from the public. Certain that men like O’Brien had some tricks up their sleeve, he began to rail at Haldeman to do some spying and get some dirt on the Democrats. He wanted Haldeman to assemble a team of “nutcutters” to do the necessary dirty work with maximum efficiency. He would leave the details up to him. Much to his chagrin, in June of that year Nixon read in the Washington Post of a botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel, in which a group of men had attempted to plant bugs in the offices of Larry O’Brien. This led to the arrest of three men—James McCord, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy—with ties to the committee for the reelection of President Nixon. The break-in was so badly done that Nixon suspected it was all a setup by the Democrats. This was not the efficient team of nutcutters he had advocated. A few days later, on June 23, he discussed the break-in with Haldeman. The FBI was investigating the case. Some of the men arrested were former CIA operatives. Perhaps, Haldeman proposed, they could get top brass in the CIA to put pressure on the FBI to drop the investigation. Nixon approved. He told Haldeman, “I’m not going to get that involved.” Haldeman responded, “No, sir. We don’t want you to.” But Nixon then added, “Play it tough. That’s the way they play and that’s the way we’re going to play it.” Nixon put his counsel, John Dean, in charge of the internal investigation, with clear instructions that he should stonewall the FBI and cover up any connections to the White House. Anyway, Nixon had never directly

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  groups with suspicion. Social media abets this dynamic by making it easier to spread the narrowly focused views and values of the tribe and making them viral. But these tribes don’t last long; they are continually disappearing or regrouping or splitting apart. And so the ancient need to belong is never satisfied and drives us mad. Tribalism has its roots in the deepest and most primitive parts of our nature, but it is now coupled with much greater technological prowess, which makes it all the more dangerous. What allowed us thousands of years ago to bind our group tightly and survive could now easily lead to our extinction as a species. The tribe feels its very existence at stake by the presence of the enemy. There is little middle ground. Battles can be more intense and violent between tribes. The future of the human race will likely depend on our ability to transcend this tribalism and to see our fate as interconnected with everyone else’s. We are one species, all descendants of the same original humans, all brothers and sisters. Our differences are mostly an illusion. Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups. We must see ourselves as one large reality group and experience a deep sense of belonging to it. To solve the man-made problems threatening us will require cooperation on a much higher level and a practical spirit missing from the tribe. This does not mean the end of diverse cultures and the richness that comes with them. In fact, the reality group encourages inner diversity. We must come to the conclusion that the primary group we belong to is that of the human race. That is our inevitable future. Anything else is regressive and far too dangerous. The Court and Its Courtiers Any type of court obviously revolves around the leader, the courtiers’ power depending on the relative closeness of their relationship with this leader. Although leaders come in many varieties, one dynamic is fairly universal: the courtiers (minus the cynical types, see below) will tend to idealize those in power. They will see their leaders as smarter, cleverer, more perfect than is the reality. This will make it easier for them to justify their fawning behavior. This dynamic is similar to what we all experienced in childhood: we idealized our parents in order to feel more secure about the power they had over us. It was too frightening to imagine our parents as weak or incompetent. Dealing with authority figures in the court tends to regress us to our childhood and the family dynamic. The way we adapted to our parents’ power and the presence of our siblings will play itself out again in adult form in the court. If we felt the deep need to please our parents in every way in order to feel more secure, we will become the pleaser type in the court. If we resented our siblings for the parental attention they drew away from

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  On a nonverbal level, you feel their eyes probing you for clues. You begin to wonder: Do I fit in? Have I said the right things? What do they think of me? The first and primary effect on you in any group is the desire to fit in and cement your sense of belonging . The more you fit in, the less you pose a challenge to the group and its values. This will minimize the scrutiny you face and the anxiety that comes with it. The first way you do this is through appearances. You dress and present yourself more or less as the others do in the group. There are always a small percentage of people who like to stand out in their look but manage to conform when it comes to ideas and values. Most of us, however, are uncomfortable looking too different, and we do what we can to blend in. We adopt the clothes and looks that say the right thing—I’m serious, I work hard, I may have style but not so much of it that I stand out. The second and more important way you fit in is by adopting the ideas, beliefs, and values of the group. You may begin to use similar verbal expressions as others, a sign of what’s happening below the surface. Your own ideas slowly shape themselves to those of the group. Some people may outwardly rebel against such conformity, but they are usually the types who are eventually fired or marginalized. You may hold on to a few peculiar beliefs or opinions that you largely keep to yourself, but not on issues important to the group. The longer you are in the group, the stronger and more insidious this effect. If you observed this group from the outside, you would notice an overall uniformity of thinking that is quite surprising, considering that as individuals we all differ quite a bit from one another in temperament and background. This is a sign of the subtle molding and conformity that takes place. You might have joined a group because you share their ideas and values, but you will find over time that the parts of your thinking that were a little different from others, reflecting your uniqueness, are slowly trimmed way, like a shrub made to match the others, so that on almost all issues you agree with the group. You are not aware of all this as it is happening to you. It occurs unconsciously. In fact, you will tend to vociferously deny such conformity has ever taken place.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  had his team monitor every penny that Ovitz spent on such things, and watch his every move. Was Ovitz contacting other executives behind Eisner’s back? He would not nurture another Katzenberg at his breast. Soon the following dynamic developed: Ovitz would approach him with some potential deal, and Eisner would not discourage him from exploring it. But once it came time to agree to the deal, Eisner would give a firm no. Slowly word spread through the industry that Ovitz had lost his touch and could no longer close a deal. Ovitz began to panic. He wanted desperately to prove he had been worthy of the choice. He offered to move to New York to help manage ABC, since the merger of the two companies was not working out so smoothly, but Eisner said no. He told his lieutenants to keep their distance from Ovitz. He was not a man to be trusted—he was the son of a liquor salesman in the San Fernando Valley, and like his father, Ovitz was just a smooth salesman. He was addicted to attention from the media. Within the company, Ovitz had become completely isolated. As the months dragged on in this saga, Ovitz could see what was happening, and he complained bitterly to Eisner. He had left his agency for Disney; he had staked his reputation on what he would do as president, and Eisner was destroying his reputation. Nobody respected him any longer in the business. Eisner’s treatment of Ovitz was downright sadistic. In Eisner’s mind, however, Ovitz had failed the test he had laid out; he had not proven himself to be patient; he was no Frank Wells. In December of 1996, after a mere fourteen months on the job, Ovitz was fired, taking with him an enormous severance package. It was a dizzying and rapid fall from grace. Finally liberated from this great mistake, Eisner began to consolidate power within the company. ABC was not doing so well. He would have to intervene and take some control. He began to attend programming meetings; he talked of his own golden days at ABC and of the great shows he had created there, such as Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days . ABC needed to go back to that earlier philosophy and create high-concept shows for the family. As the internet began to take off, Eisner had to get involved in a big way. He nixed the purchase of Yahoo!, pushed by his executives. Instead Disney would start its own internet portal, called Go. Over the years he had learned the lesson—it was always best to design and run your own show. Disney would dominate the internet. He had proven himself a turnaround genius twice before, and with Disney now in a slump, he would do it a third time. Soon, however, a wave of disasters hit the corporation, one after another. After being fired, Katzenberg had sued Disney for the bonus —based on performance—he was due under his contract. When he

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  of adrenaline, the blood pumping extra hard to the brain and through the nervous system. This focuses the mind to a much higher level and we notice new details, see people’s faces in a new light, and sense the impermanence in everything around us, deepening our emotional responses. This effect can linger for years, even decades. We cannot reproduce that experience without risking our lives, but we can gain some of the effect through smaller doses. We must begin by meditating on our death and seeking to convert it into something more real and physical. For Japanese samurai warriors, the center of our most sensitive nerves and our connection to life was in the gut, the viscera; it was also the center of our connection to death, and they meditated on this sensation as deeply as possible, to create physical death awareness. But beyond the gut, we can also feel something similar in our bones when we are weary. We can often sense its physicality in those moments before we fall asleep—for a few seconds we feel ourselves passing from one form of consciousness to another, and that slip has a deathlike sensation. There is nothing to be afraid of in this; in fact, in moving in this direction, we make major advancements in diminishing our chronic anxiety. We can use our imagination in this as well, by envisioning the day our death arrives, where we might be, how it might come. We must make this as vivid as possible. It could be tomorrow. We can also try to look at the world as if we were seeing things for the last time—the people around us, the everyday sights and sounds, the hum of the traffic, the sound of the birds, the view outside our window. Let us imagine these things still going on without us, then suddenly feel ourselves brought back to life—those same details will now appear in a new light, not taken for granted or half perceived. Let the impermanence of all life forms sink in. The stability and solidity of the things we see are mere illusions. We must not be afraid of the pangs of sadness that ensue from this perception. The tightness of our emotions, usually so wound up around our own needs and concerns, is now opening up to the world and to the poignancy of life itself, and we should welcome this. As the fourteenth-century Japanese writer Kenko noted, “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” Awaken to the shortness of life. When we unconsciously disconnect ourselves from the awareness of death, we forge a particular relationship to time—one that is rather loose and distended. We come to imagine that we always have more time than is the reality.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  RELIGION AND POLITICS õ Many Protestants lived in Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire. Over the years they had won some freedoms from the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Matthias, who was also king of Bohemia. But in 1617, the aging Matthias transferred his crown as king of Bohemia to his younger relative Ferdinand II. õ Ferdinand was a very passionate Catholic who surrounded himself with Jesuit advisors and was no friend to Protestants. The Bohemian Protestants wanted to depose Ferdinand and replace him with his cousin, a Protestant champion named Frederick V. Frederick’s main adviser was a mystical Protestant German prince named Christian of Anhalt. õ The empire was not a highly centralized, modern state; it was a jumble of hundreds of different entities spanning central Europe. These territories were governed by various kings, princes, dukes, bishops, and other characters that, in theory, were loyal to the emperor, but in practice were usually trying to take power away from him. õ The emperor couldn’t just assume his eldest son or other chosen heir would inherit his crown. In the Holy Roman Empire, the emperor was an elected office. The most important of the empire’s mini-rulers, known as electors, got the right to vote for him. The rules were that he had to be a man of noble blood (in practice, he had to be part of the Habsburg dynasty). And any serious candidate for the title of emperor had to be generous with bribes of land and money in order to round up enough votes. õ The empire’s government never worked very well, but by the 1610s things were becoming very shaky because more and more noblemen had become Protestant and wanted more power. No Protestant had ever been elected emperor. If Ferdinand II were deposed and Frederick V accepted the Bohemian Protestants’ invitation to become their king, he would become an elector of the empire, and finally the Protestants would have a majority. Lecture 7—War and Witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire 61 THE WAR õ The Protestant revolt in Bohemia did not catch Ferdinand by surprise, and he raised a formidable army thanks to the help of Catholic kings and princes across Europe. In November 1620, at a place called White Mountain just outside Prague, the imperial army faced Protestant forces commanded by Protestant Christian of Anhalt. The Catholics had their own charismatic religious leader: a passionate monk named Domenico a Jesu Maria, who led them under the banner of the Virgin Mary. The Battle of White Mountain lasted only an hour, and the emperor’s forces crushed the rebels. õ Ferdinand and his Catholic allies got greedy. They thought this victory gave them the chance to finally eradicate Protestants from the empire once and for all. Additionally, this conflict merged with an ongoing feud: The Protestant Dutch were waging an intermittent 62 The History of Christianity II

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Cross-culturally speaking, it simply is not true that the individual physical body alone or the genealogical circumstances of one’s “birth” and the distinguishing features of one’s peculiar “flesh” would suffice in most human communities to explain who one actually—socially—“is.” At the same time, it appears to be true that at least for the last few centuries across Western Europe and North America—whether under the aegis of the Cartesian cogito or as a governing assumption of liberal democratic nation-states; in the form of explicit racism or as the emergent right to gender-election; whether as a basic tenet of post- WWII consumer society or within a generalized cultural anxiety (tabu) about death as an experience of totally meaningless loss 21 —it has become broadly assumed (however exceptional this assumption may be shown to be historically) that the individual physical body would constitute the principal (theoretical) framework within which different issues of social and personal identity are to be defined and debated. Moreover, since the individual physical body is understood within this frame of reference to be a discrete or functionally independent (however complex) organic whole—how else to say that it actually “ex-ists” as such?—we also appear to think (certainly in political practice) that a person’s “real” identity can only be singular; hence, for example, the proliferating tendency to defend a previously denied right to be recognized as decidedly x or y. A person with more than one identity must therefore be either lying as a fraud or is sick, for example, with a borderline or multiple personality disorder. To be sure, the preceding paragraph does not adequately represent ongoing scholarly debates about the socially constructed character of all human identities including their inherent vagueness or malleability or lingering uncertainty. But my purpose here is not to comment on this growing complexity of the academic use of the category of “identity.” Instead, I am trying to underscore that within the growing complexity, there yet prevails an unquestioned assumption about the putative fact that by Paul that the displacing identity equally took place “in me” (Gal 1:16; 6:17; further, 4:6, 14), which is to say: in the same “me” that otherwise still was “naturally Jewish.” 20 I depend here on Marshall Sahlins’ review of the pertinent anthropological literature. 21 See Norbert Elias, De døendes ensomhet (trans. Niels Magnus Bugge; Oslo: Pax, 1984; German original: Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen); also Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (trans. Patricia M. Ranum; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  place a premium value on effort. The first thought or idea that comes to you is most often incomplete and inadequate. Think more thoroughly and deeply about your ideas, some of which you must discard. Do not become attached to your initial ideas, but rather treat them roughly. Keep in mind that your life is short, that it could end any day. You must have a sense of urgency to make the most of this limited time. You don’t need deadlines or people telling you what to do and when to finish. Any motivation you need comes from within. You are complete and self-reliant. When it comes to operating with this inner authority, we can consider Leonardo da Vinci our model. His motto in life was ostinato rigore , “relentless rigor.” Whenever Leonardo was given a commission, he went well beyond the task, poring over every detail to make the work more lifelike or effective. No one had to tell him to do this. He was ferociously diligent and hard on himself. Although his interests ranged far and wide, when he attacked a particular problem, it was with complete focus. He had a sense of a personal mission—to serve mankind, to contribute toward its progress. Impelled by this inner authority, he pushed beyond all of the limits that he had inherited—being an illegitimate son with little direction or education early on in his life. Such a voice will likewise help us push beyond the obstacles that life places in our path. It might seem at first glance that having such a voice from within could lead to a rather harsh and unpleasant life, but in fact it is the opposite. There is nothing more disorienting and depressing than to see the years pass by without a sense of direction, grasping to reach goals that keep changing, and squandering our youthful energies. Much as the outer authority helps keep the group unified, its energy channeled toward productive and higher ends, the inner authority brings you a sense of cohesion and force. You are not gnawed by the anxiety that comes with living below your potential. Feeling the higher self in ascendance, you can afford to indulge that lower self, to let it out at moments to release tension and not become a prisoner of your Shadow. And most important, you no longer need the comfort and guidance of a parent or leader. You have become your own mother and father, your own leader, truly independent and operating according to your inner authority. The select man, the excel ent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts. . . . We distinguished the excel ent man from the common man by saying that the former is one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  one. We see a reflection of ourselves in others. We can relax. At our core we feel validated. Not needing to turn inward and defensive, we can direct our minds outward, beyond our ego—to a cause, a new idea, or the happiness of the other. Understand: Creating this feeling of validation is the golden key that will unlock people’s defenses. And we cannot survive and thrive in this highly competitive world without possessing such a power. We continually find ourselves in situations in which we need to move people from their resistant positions. We need their assistance, or we need the ability to alter their ugly behavior. If we flail about, improvising in the moment, trying to plead, cajole, and even make people feel guilty, we are more than likely only making them more defensive. If we somehow succeed in getting what we want through these methods, their support is thin, with an undercurrent of resentment. We have taken from them—time, money, ideas—and they will close themselves off to further influence. And if we go through long stretches of time continually butting up against people’s resistance and getting nowhere, we can face a very dangerous dynamic in life—mounting frustration at the apparent indifference of people. This subtly infects our attitude. When we find ourselves in situations needing to influence people, they sense our neediness and insecurity. We try too hard to please. We seem ever so slightly desperate, defeated before starting. This can turn into a negative self-fulfilling dynamic that will keep us marginalized without ever being aware of the source of the problem. Before it is too late we must turn this dynamic around, as Johnson did at the age of forty. We must discover the power that we can possess by giving people the validation they crave and lowering their defenses. And the key to making this happen in a realistic and strategic manner is to fully understand a fundamental law of human nature. This law is as follows: People have a perception about themselves that we shall call their self-opinion . This self-opinion can be accurate or not—it doesn’t matter. What matters is how people perceive their own character and worthiness. And there are three qualities to people’s self-opinion that are nearly universal: “I am autonomous, acting of my own free will”; “I am intelligent in my own way”; and “I am basically good and decent.” When it comes to the first universal (I am acting of my own free will), if we join a group, or believe something, or buy a product, it is because we choose to do so. The truth might be that we were manipulated or succumbed to peer pressure, but we will tell ourselves something else. If we ever feel consciously coerced—as in having to obey a boss—we either tell ourselves we have chosen to obey or we deeply resent being forced and manipulated. In the latter case, we might smile and obey, but we will find a way to secretly

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  For almost anything that we choose to believe or choose to do, we’ll have the option to change our mind or walk away at some point in the future. When we face that decision, we’ll generally have much better information than at the time we made the original choice to start. But that option to quit is only helpful if we actually use it. The problem is that we don’t, and here we see why. Once we start, we put ourselves in the losses. We’re short of our goal, the progress along the way counting for almost nothing. That makes us keep heading toward the finish line, broken leg be damned. Fixed Objects in a Changing WorldExacerbating the pass-fail problem is that once we establish a goal, we rarely revisit it. Goals tend to be set-it-and-forget-it. The finish line doesn’t move. If there were no uncertainty and the world didn’t change, that wouldn’t be a problem, because whatever North Star you were striving for would not only be the exact right North Star for you but also would remain as such. Of course, the world is uncertain and the world does change. That means that our goals ought to change in response. But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information. Whenever we set a goal, we’re making trade-offs. There are all sorts of different things that we value—money, time with our family, time for hobbies, time for friends, our health, the feeling of helping other people, so on and so forth. There is no goal we can set that can allow us to maximize every single thing that we value. By their nature, goals will privilege certain things we value over others. Essentially, we’re asking ourselves, “What do I want to achieve, and what am I willing to give up to get it?” Presumably, the benefits of pursuing the goal will outweigh the costs. A goal is the expression of that balancing act. In other words, we’re trying to maximize our expected value and the goals that we set for ourselves are supposed to help us do that. As an example, if you set a goal to complete a marathon, there are things you expect to get and things you expect to give up. The sense of accomplishing something hard could be important to you. Or the goal reflects the importance you place on fitness. Or it could be how great it feels to you to be outside running. Or it could be lots of other things. What you want and its relative importance are specific to you. The same is true for what you’re willing to sacrifice in terms of other things you might value. Training for a marathon will naturally mean sacrificing time with your family or your friends, or pursuing other hobbies you might enjoy. Most of us value our physical comfort and you clearly have to give up some degree of that. Routine discomfort and injuries are part of distance running and training.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  He inherited a program in which his student athletes played or practiced six days a week, which was the status quo for college basketball teams. The NCAA mandates that Division I players get a minimum of one day off athletic activities each week, and pretty much every NCAA coach treats that minimum as a maximum. After many years of losing, the Huskies had rebounded in the previous two seasons under coach Kevin McGuff (who brought Neighbors in as an assistant). When McGuff took the head coaching job at Ohio State, it was on Neighbors to fulfill the rising expectations. His team immediately stumbled, losing its first two games, including a horrific loss, 91–77, in the home opener to the University of Portland, a team the Huskies beat by 20 points the year before under Coach McGuff. They improved a little, going into the Christmas break 6–4, but Neighbors could see he needed to make some changes. Minor injuries were piling up and he realized his starters couldn’t play heavy minutes in games given the intensity of practices. During the holiday break, he had the time and space to mull over how he might turn things around, and on the cross-country flight back to Washington, he decided to make a drastic change. He resolved to cut out one additional day of practice a week, giving his players two days off instead of one. He decided to make this unconventional move because his team was plagued by injuries. Their bodies were wearing out, and he knew from all his years as an assistant coach that those injuries would accumulate as the season went on. He surmised that the extra day of rest would get his players more time on the court when it mattered most—during games. To understand the boldness of this decision, you have to realize that no other Division I coach was doing this. This was at the end of 2013, long before the language of self-care became part of the zeitgeist. He knew he was taking a risk and he would take the blame if this decision didn’t work. But in his words, if the Huskies, and his coaching career, were going down, they were going to go down his way. After the Huskies returned from break, when most coaches were trying to squeeze every single moment of practice out of players that the NCAA rules would let them get away with, Coach Neighbors shocked the program with the announcement of his plan to give the team an extra day off. Coach Neighbors was immediately criticized from every direction. He heard, from within the men’s basketball program, “They’re just giving up. They’re not even trying.” When he let his mentors know about this plan, they told him, “Man, you do that and you’re going to get fired.” His top recruit and best player, freshman Kelsey Plum, fought him on the decision: “We’re not practicing hard enough. This is weird.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  communing with God. Most Protestants rejected monks and nuns when they threw off the authority of Rome, but in Pietism, they tried to recover some of monasticism’s insights. õ A man named Philipp Jakob Spener is often considered the grandfather of the Pietist movement. By the time he was appointed chief pastor of the Lutheran church in Frankfurt, Germany in 1666, he was pretty concerned about the direction of so-called Lutheran orthodoxy. õ He was worried that emphasis on rationalistic theological argument could lead to a bone-dry faith with no real life in it. In 1675, he published a book called Pia Desideria, or Pious Wishes. According to Spener, Lutherans should focus on teaching laypeople how to truly understand and feel the faith in their hearts, using tactics like small-group Bible study. õ Many of his disciples remained in Lutheran churches. This was one way to be a Pietist: Stay in your institution, grumble a bit about its imperfections, but basically follow its rules and work to create little Pietist communities and renew the church from the inside. õ But in the decades after Spener’s death, a different stream of Pietism emerged. This one called followers to break from established churches that had gone astray, to pull away from the corrupt world, and to start from scratch in order to build a Christian community truly modeled on the life of Christ and his apostles. õ An example of such a community is the Brethren, who read the account of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River and thought that is how it has to be done: total immersion in the running water of a real river. Important 134 The History of Christianity II

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  For discussion of any Jewish identity after the Holocaust, which includes the subsequent establishment of the modern State of Israel, the peril remains to end up positioning Paul’s description of himself as someone who indubitably was Ioudaios on the side of whatever is deemed to have been “normal” social life in antiquity, thereby inevitably turning Paul’s sense of himself as a “Jew” into a “normalizing” posture, which is to say a more restrictive, less expansive, more demanding mode of social existence. And this, in turn, will have us almost immediately or at least implicitly lapsing back into a description of Paul’s other experience “in Christ” as a response to whatever must have been wrong or dissatisfying with his former identity. And thus Paul would become, for the umpteenth time, yet again the originating archetype or architect of an all-too-familiar Christian supersessionism. And even if I have no desire to support such a manoeuver and say so here explicitly, which I now do, one would still have to conclude correctly that such a disclaimer hardly obviates the ideological danger at hand. Moreover, I have no ready solution to the ongoing political conundrum that results from imagining a person like Paul, as I also want to do, as someone who would not simply have been another “normal” Second Temple “Jew.” I do not think that any sort of Christian supercessionism is acceptable. And neither do I think—in this case, for specifical y exegetical reasons on the basis of “what Paul himself said” about himself as someone who would be obviously Ioudaios as was argued in the second section of the present essay—that Paul was this “Jew” in accordance with any current “ethnic” definition of that identity. Paul was clearly not “Jewish” in the modern Zionist racialized “Israeli” sense of the word.

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

  When Hurricane Ivan hit coastal Alabama and blew chaos and calamity into Marsha’s life, she thought things were as bad as they could get. Ivan spawned 119 tornadoes and created over $18 billion dollars in damage. With six children to protect, she had no time to panic over the loss of their home or the violent destruction of everything around them. It was the uncertainty that worried Marsha. Where would she or her husband find work? How long would the kids be out of school? What would they do for money? What would they do for food? Everyone on the Gulf Coast was feeling vulnerable in the face of such an uncertain future. The constant wave of tropical storms and hurricanes that menaced coastal Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the summer of 2004 turned their relaxed Southern coastal life into an apocalyptic struggle for survival. Marsha and Glen Colbey were living in a crowded trailer with their children, and they knew they were at risk when the hurricane warnings were announced. They weren’t alone; plenty of other families shared their situation, which offered some consolation. But when Ivan destroyed the Colbey home in September, there was little comfort in finding herself in line with thousands of other people seeking assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Aid eventually came. The Colbeys were given a FEMA camper trailer as temporary housing, and they put it on their property so the kids could stay in their nearby schools. Marsha and Glen had found construction work and roofing jobs at the start of the summer, but now it would be weeks before rebuilding jobs would be available. Marsha could also tell that she was pregnant. She was forty-three years old and hadn’t planned on having another child. All she could think about was how in a few months the pregnancy would limit her ability to do construction work. Her worry sometimes tipped over into a deeper anxiety that triggered an old temptation: drugs. But there were too many people depending on her, and there was too much to manage to give in. Five years earlier, police were called after nurses had found cocaine in her system when she was pregnant with her youngest son, Joshua, and the authorities had terrified her with accusations and threats of criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and the seizure of her children. She was not going to risk that again.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  He insulted close friends behind their backs, indulged in wild bouts of paranoia and revenge fantasies, waffled over the simplest decisions. He was a man who greatly feared the slightest internal leak and suspected betrayal in almost anyone around him, and yet he entrusted his fate to tapes that he believed would never be made public in an unedited form. Even when it seemed that they could become public and he was advised to destroy them, he held on to them, mesmerized by this other Nixon that had emerged. It was as if he secretly desired his own punishment, the child and the dark side taking revenge for being so deeply denied. Understand: The story of Nixon is closer to you and your reality than you might like to imagine. Like Nixon, you have crafted a public persona that accentuates your strengths and conceals your weaknesses. Like him, you have repressed the less socially acceptable traits you naturally possessed as a child. You have become terribly nice and pleasant. And like him, you have a dark side, one that you are loath to admit or examine. It contains your deepest insecurities, your secret desires to hurt people, even those close to you, your fantasies of revenge, your suspicions about others, your hunger for more attention and power. This dark side haunts your dreams. It leaks out in moments of inexplicable depression, unusual anxiety, touchy moods, sudden neediness, and suspicious thoughts. It comes out in offhand comments you later regret. And sometimes, as with Nixon, it even leads to destructive behavior. You will tend to blame circumstances or other people for these moods and behavior, but they keep recurring because you are unaware of their source. Depression and anxiety come from not being your complete self, from always playing a role. It requires great energy to keep this dark side at bay, but at times unpleasant behavior leaks out as a way to release the inner tension. Your task as a student of human nature is to recognize and examine the dark side of your character. Once subjected to conscious scrutiny, it loses its destructive power. If you can learn to detect the signs of it in yourself (see the following sections for help on this), you can channel this darker energy into productive activity. You can turn your neediness and vulnerability into empathy. You can channel your aggressive impulses into worthwhile causes and into your work. You can admit your ambitions, your desires for power, and not act so guiltily and stealthily. You can monitor your suspicious tendencies and the projection of your own negative emotions onto others.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As opposed to feeling entitled to touch others, they will tend to touch themselves in what is known as pacifying behavior. They will touch their hair, their neck, their forehead, all in an attempt to soothe their nerves. People trying to hide their insecurities will assert themselves a little too loudly in a conversation, their voices rising. As they do this, they look around nervously, eyes wide open. Or as they talk in an animated way, their hands and bodies are unusually still, always a sign of anxiety. They will inevitably give off mixed signals, and you must pay greater attention to those that signal underlying insecurity. Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France (2007–2012), was someone who liked to assert his presence through body language. He would pat people on the back, be the one to direct them where to stand, fix them with his stare, interrupt what they were saying, and generally try to dominate the room. During one meeting with him in the midst of the euro crisis, Chancellor Merkel saw his usual domineering act but could not help but notice his foot nervously jiggling the entire time. The extra assertive style was perhaps his way of distracting others from his insecurities. This was valuable information Merkel could put to use. People’s actions will often contain dominance and submission cues. For instance, people will often show up late to indicate their superiority, real or imagined. They are not obligated to be on time. Also, conversation patterns reveal the relative position people feel they occupy. For instance, those who feel dominant will tend to talk more and interrupt frequently, as a means of asserting themselves. When there’s an argument that turns personal, they will resort to what is known as punctuation—they will find an action on the other side that started it all, even though clearly it is part of the relationship pattern. They assert their interpretation of who is to blame through their tone of voice and piercing looks. If you observe a couple from the outside, you will frequently notice one person who is in the dominant position. If you converse with them, the dominant one will make eye contact with you but not with his or her partner, and will appear to only half listen to what the partner says. Smiles can also be a subtle cue for indicating superiority, especially through what we shall call the tight smile. This usually comes in response to something someone said, and it is a smile that tightens the facial muscles and indicates irony and contempt for the person they see as inferior but gives them the cover of appearing friendly. One final but very subtle nonverbal means of asserting dominance in a relationship comes through the symptom . One partner suddenly develops headaches or some other illness, or starts drinking, or generally falls into a negative pattern of behavior.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  To show signs otherwise is to risk great disapproval. If all of this were true—if people were rational and morally superior—the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves. Rationality and ethical qualities must be achieved through awareness and effort. They do not come naturally. They come through a maturation process. Step Two: Beware the Inflaming Factors Low-grade emotions continually affect our thinking, and they originate from our own impulses—for instance, the desire for pleasing and comforting thoughts. High-grade emotion, however, comes at certain moments, reaches an explosive pitch, and is generally sparked by something external—a person who gets under our skin, or particular circumstances. The level of arousal is higher and our attention is captured completely. The more we think about the emotion, the stronger it gets, which makes us focus even more on it, and so on and so forth. Our minds tunnel into the emotion, and everything reminds us of our anger or excitement. We become reactive. Because we are unable to bear the tension this brings, high-grade emotion usually culminates in some rash action with disastrous consequences. In the middle of such an attack we feel possessed, as if a second, limbic self has taken over. It is best to be aware of these factors so that you can stop the mind from tunneling and prevent the releasing action that you will always come to regret. You should also be aware of high-grade irrationality in others, to either get out of their way or help bring them back to reality. Trigger Points from Early Childhood In early childhood we were at our most sensitive and vulnerable. Our relationship to our parents had a much greater impact on us the further back in time we go. The same could be said for any early powerful experience. These vulnerabilities and wounds remain buried deep within our minds. Sometimes we try to repress the memory of these influences, if they happen to be negative—great fears or humiliations. Sometimes, however, they are associated with positive emotions, experiences of love and attention that we continually want to relive. Later in life, a person or event will trigger a memory of this positive or negative experience, and with it a release of powerful chemicals or hormones associated with the memory. Take, for example, a young man who had a distant, narcissistic mother.