Bewilderment

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

  Yet he repudiated the idea of retracting his conscientious convictions. In his address to the people, he allowed the value of indulgences, but only as a recompense for the "satisfaction" given by, the sinner, and urged the duty of adhering, notwithstanding her faults and sins, to the holy Roman Church, where St. Peter and St. Paul, and many Popes and thousands of martyrs, had shed their blood. At the same time, Luther continued the careful study of history, and could find no trace of popery and its extraordinary claims in the first centuries before the Council of Nicaea. He discovered that the Papal Decretals, and the Donation of Constantine, were a forgery. He wrote to Spalatin, March 13, 1519, "I know not whether tho Pope is anti-christ himself, or his apostle; so wretchedly is Christ, that is the truth, corrupted and crucified by him in the Decretals."209 § 37. The Leipzig Disputation. June 27-July 15, 1519. I. Löscher, III. 203–819. Luther’s Works, Walch, XV. 954 sqq.; Weim. ed. II. 153–435 (see the literary notices of Knaake, p. 156). Luther’s letters to Spalatin and the Elector, in De Wette:, I. 284–324. II. Joh. K. Seidemann: Die Leipziger Disputation im Jahre 1519. Dresden and Leipzig, 1843 (pp. 161). With important documents (pp. 93 sqq.) The best book on the subject. Monographs on Carlstadt by Jäger (Stuttgart, 1856), on Eck by Wiedemann (Regensburg, 1865), and the relevant sections in Marheineke, Kahnis (I. 251–285), Köstlin, Kolde, and the general histories of the Reformation. The account by Ranke (I. 277–285) is very good. On the Roman side, see Janssen, II. 83–88 (incomplete). The agreement between Miltitz and Luther was only a short truce. The Reformation was too deeply rooted in the wants of the age to be suppressed by the diplomacy of ecclesiastical politicians. Even if the movement had been arrested in one place, it would have broken out in another; indeed, it had already begun independently in Switzerland. Luther was no more his own master, but the organ of a higher power. "Man proposes, God disposes." Before the controversy could be settled by a German bishop, it was revived, not without a violation of promise on both sides,210 in the disputation held in the large hall of the Castle of Pleissenburg at Leipzig, under the sanction of Duke George of Saxony, between Eck, Carlstadt, and Luther, on the doctrines of the papal primacy, free-will, good works, purgatory, and indulgences. It was one of the great intellectual battles; it lasted nearly three weeks, and excited universal attention in that deeply religious and theological age. The vital doctrines of salvation were at stake. The debate was in Latin, but Luther broke out occasionally in his more vigorous German. The disputation began with the solemnities of a mass, a procession, an oration of Peter Mosellanus, De ratione disputandi, and the singing of Veni, Creator Spiritus. It ended with a eulogistic oration by the Leipzig professor John Lange, and the Te Deum.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Everywhere he looked, he could see examples of greed and selfishness, which, he believed, obstructed the flow of qi and perverted the natural tendency to goodness. The “shoots” resided naturally in the “heart,” the thinking, affective organ, but many people simply threw their hearts away. The common people had been corrupted by cruelty, hunger, and exploitation. The upper classes were so avid for luxury, pleasure, power, and fame that they had neglected the “shoots” and allowed them to shrivel and die. Only the junzi, the mature person, had kept his heart alive. 55 Most people’s hearts resembled Ox Mountain, which had once been covered in luxuriant, leafy groves, but had been stripped bare by reckless, brutal deforestation. It was hard to believe that there had ever been any trees on Ox Mountain, just as it was difficult to imagine that a bestial, selfish person had ever had any good qualities. But the potential had been there. “Given the right nourishment, there is nothing that will not grow, and deprived of it, there is nothing that will not wither away.” 56 Mencius was an optimist. Even if you had lost your heart, it was always possible to find it again. Wu wei (“doing nothing”) was not the answer; the world needed yu wei (“self-effort”), which brought human beings into harmony with Heaven. The purpose of the Confucian education was to search for the compassionate heart that had gone astray. How strange it was that people were unconcerned about this diminution of their humanity! They spent a great deal of time and energy looking for missing chickens or dogs, but did nothing to recover their own hearts. 57 Everybody—without exception—had the capacity to cultivate the four essential virtues and become a sage like Yao or Shun. As soon as it was found and repaired, the sympathetic heart was so constructed that it would blaze forth like a forest fire or burst into the air like a spring that had forced its way up from the depths of the earth. A sage was simply a person who had fully realized his humanity and become one with Heaven. 58 Most of us found compassion difficult at first; we had to nourish our innate virtue by constantly repeated acts of benevolence, reverence, justice, and equity. Each time we acted well, we strengthened the “shoots,” until the cardinal virtues became habitual. A vigorous campaign of yu wei would result in the creation of the “unmoved” or “steadfast” heart, which could keep unruly passions in check.

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

  It turns out that Cranium rarely speaks to any of the people in the sixty- person marketing department. He spends four days a week in the office. On Friday he works from home. He talks to Wingman and apparently to a few other people who are his direct reports, but that seems to be it. He never takes the gang to lunch, never pulls people aside to ask how they’re doing, never sets up a one- on-one just to check in or give you feedback. Instead, he conducts anonymous online surveys. Constantly. Are you happy? How happy are you? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the happiest day in your entire life, how happy are you? What if anything could make you happier? How could HubSpot be better? “More surveys,” I suggest once. Since Cranium is not in contact with me, I am left to get direction from Wingman. But Wingman is equally tuned out. One day he sets a meeting with me to ask how things are going. I tell him I’m not sure what they want me to do. He says I should just write articles for the blog. “Just write about anything you want,” he says. I thought I had been hired to help make the blog better. Apparently not. All Wingman wants me to do is write two articles a week. So that’s what I do. I write articles about anything I want, and I send them to Jan, the grumpy editor, and she publishes them. Day to day, I deal with Zack. Zack has lots of energy. He loves to send out long memos bursting with enthusiasm and peppered with phrases in ALL CAPS about some half-formed idea that he believes will enable us to “conquer the world” and “blow up the Internet.” People at HubSpot love that phrase about blowing up the Internet. They use it all the time. The problem is that Zack changes his mind a lot. We’re heading south! No, we’re going north! We’re taking a plane! No, a train! No, bicycles! One of my colleagues compares Zack to Dug, the peppy dog in the movie Up, who is constantly being distracted by squirrels. Zack realizes that the blog sucks, and he wants to make it better. One day, he asks me to write up a memo explaining what changes we should make. He says he will send the memo to Wingman. Finally, I think, here’s my chance to do something. I write a long, detailed memo explaining all the problems with the blog. The memo isn’t vicious, but it is pretty critical.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They were born defective and unfinished, and could only build themselves up to full strength in the ritual. When he took part in the soma sacrifice, the patron experienced a second birth, and went through an initiation process that symbolically reproduced the various stages of gestation. 78 Before the rite began, he made a retreat, crouched in a hut (representing the womb), dressed in a white garment and black antelope skin (representing the caul and placenta), with his hands clenched into fists, like an embryo. He was fed on milk, and had to stammer when he spoke, like an infant. 79 Finally he sat beside the fire and sweated, as Prajapati had done, in order to effect a new creation. Once he had drunk the intoxicating soma, he experienced an ascent to the gods without having to die a violent death, as in the old ritual. 80 He could not stay long in heaven, but after his death, if he had accumulated sufficient liturgical credit, he would be reborn in the world of the gods. In ritual, therefore, the sacrificer reconstructed his self ( atman ), just as Prajapati had done. In the workshop of sacrifice, he had put together the daiva atman (divine self), which would live on after his death. By performing the rituals correctly, with the knowledge of the bandhus firmly in his mind, the warrior could rebuild his own purusha (person). The Brahmin priests “make the person, consisting of the sacrifices, made of ritual actions,” explained the ritualist. 81 The rites of passage also built up the human being. An Aryan boy had to undergo the upanayana that initiated him into the study of the Veda and the sacrificial procedure, or he would never be able to build a fully realized atman. Only married men could commission a ritual, and begin the process of self-building, so marriage was another rite of passage for both men and women (who could attend the sacrifice only in the company of their husbands). After a person’s death, the corpse resembled the exhausted Prajapati and had to be reconstructed by means of the correct funeral rites. 82 But the system did not work automatically. Unless a person was proficient in ritual science, he would be lost in the next world. He would not be able to recognize the “divine self” that he had created during his lifetime, nor would he know which of the heavenly realms he should go to. “Bewildered by the cremation fire, choked with smoke, he does not recognize his own world. But he who knows, he, indeed, having left this world, knows the atman, saying: ‘This am I’ and he recognizes his own world. And now the fire carries him to the heavenly world.”

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

  Rounding up the right kind of eager-beaver young white people is just the first step. Next, HubSpot applies a two-part process of indoctrination. First the newcomers are reminded how lucky they are to be here. Then comes the threat, which is that HubSpot is so competitive, and so intense, that a lot of people simply can’t make the grade. “Look around the room,” Dave says. “A year from now, a lot of the people around you aren’t going to be here anymore.” At HubSpot only the best survive. Getting in is just the first step. Now we all have to earn our place on the team. For the people who are going to work in the sales department this process will be particularly brutal. The reps have high quotas, and if you fall short, you get cut. Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones— that’s the model. In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things. Nobody can really explain what HubSpotty means, but it is a real word that people use, all the time. Some people are more HubSpotty than others. Some are 100 percent HubSpotty, possessed of a HubSpottiness that is so complete as to be beyond reproach. Those people “bleed orange.” Their ideas cannot be questioned. They can do pretty much anything they want. They are the HubSpot equivalent of a Level 8 Operating Thetan in Scientology. Newcomers are by definition not HubSpotty yet. We have to earn that designation, and it takes time. Nobody just comes in and gets accepted. A big part of establishing your HubSpottiness involves being relentlessly upbeat and positive. HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-up Cult, I began to call it. Instead of ID badges, the company gives out rubber ID bracelets with the HubSpot logo on them. The bracelets contain a transponder that unlocks doors into different parts of the office. It feels ridiculous and cultish to wear a special bracelet, but you can’t get anywhere without one. I’ve spent years writing incredibly over-the-top satire about the technology industry, inventing stories in which Steve Jobs possesses the power to hypnotize people just by staring at them, and depicting Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, as a crazy cult compound policed by rifle-toting public relations people and populated by brainwashed corporate zombies who speak their own private jargon and all truly believe they are doing incredibly important work, making the world a better place. Now I am encountering a real-life version of this, at a company in Kendall Square. It’s amazing.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  42 In political life, people always preferred frenzied activity to doing nothing, knowledge to ignorance, and strength to weakness, but—to the astonishment of his contemporaries, who were intrigued with this novel idea 43 —Laozi insisted that they should do the exact opposite. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place. That the weak overcomes the strong, And the submissive overcomes the hard, Everyone in the world knows, yet no one can put this knowledge into practice. 44 All human effort was directed against passivity, so to do the opposite of what was expected by the aggressively scheming politicians was to return to the spontaneity of the Way. 45 It was a law of nature that everything that went up must come down, so in strengthening your enemy by submission, you actually hastened his decline. The reason why Heaven and Earth endured forever was precisely because they did not struggle to prolong their existence: Therefore the sage puts his person last and comes first. . . . Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends? 46 Such self-emptying required a long mystical training, but once the sage ruler had achieved this interior void, he would become as vital, fluid, and fecund as the so-called weaker things of life. Force and coercion were inherently self-destructive. Here Laozi returned to the spirit of the ancient rituals of warfare, which had urged the warriors to “yield” to the enemy. “Arms are ill-omened instruments, and are not the instruments of the sage,” Laozi maintained. “He uses them only when he cannot do otherwise.” 47 Sometimes war was a regrettable necessity, but if he was forced to fight, the sage must always take up his weapons with regret. There must be no egotistic triumphalism, no cruel chauvinism, and no facile patriotism. The sage must not intimidate the world with a show of arms, because this belligerence would almost certainly recoil on him. The sage must always try to bring a military expedition to an end. “Bring it to a conclusion, but do not boast; bring it to a conclusion, but do not brag; bring it to a conclusion, but do not be arrogant; bring it to a conclusion, but only where there is no choice; bring it to a conclusion, but do not intimidate.” 48 Wu wei, therefore, did not mean total abstinence from action, but an unaggressive, unassertive attitude that prevented the escalation of hatred.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Poseidon sired the horse, while Athena invented the bit and bridle; Poseidon stirred up the waves, and Athena built a ship. And yet because she was also a war goddess, Athena reflected the violence at the heart of any civilization and the struggle of any polis to survive. Poseidon was also coupled with Apollo; together they represented old age and youth, which were polar opposites but also complementary. Hera and Dionysus were profoundly antagonistic to each other; but both were associated with madness, which could be a divine scourge or a liberating ecstasy. Apollo and Dionysus were brothers, who balanced and counterbalanced each other: Apollo standing for form, clarity, definition, and purity, while Dionysus embodied the forces of dissolution—at Delphi he was honored as Apollo’s mysterious, chthonic counterpart. Every single Greek god had a dark and dangerous aspect. None was wholly good; none was concerned about morality. Together they expressed the rich diversity and complexity of life, without evading paradox or denying any part of the world. The Greeks felt no need to develop new forms of religion but remained satisfied by the ancient cult, which survived for seven hundred years after the end of the Axial Age. T he eighth century was also a time of transition in China. In 771, the Qong Rang barbarians, who had been harassing the Zhou court for more than fifty years, overran their capital at Zhouzhuang and killed King Yon. This was not the end of the dynasty, however. King Ping (770–720) succeeded his father and was invested with the mandate of Heaven in the eastern capital, Changzhou. But the Zhou kings were mere shadows of their former selves. The monarch maintained his small impoverished domain around the eastern capital, performed his ritual tasks, but had no real political power. The dynasty survived in this attenuated form for more than five hundred years. The kings remained nominal rulers and retained a symbolic aura, but the princes of the cities had de facto power. Their principalities were getting steadily larger. Increasingly, ritual ( li ) rather than loyalty to the monarch governed the relations between the principalities, which were officially allies but in practice often rivals and competitors. Ancient custom replaced the royal authority, acting as a kind of international law to control wars, vendettas, and treaties, and supervised the interchange of goods and services. This was the start of the era that historians call Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn), the name given to the laconic annals of the principality of Lu, which covered the era from 722 to 481. At the time, it seemed a chaotic period of conflict and fragmentation, but with hindsight we can see that China was making a complex transition from archaic monarchy to a unified empire. We know very little about the eighth century in China, but it seems that these years saw the emergence of a new sensibility. The decline of the monarchy was only one of the unsettling changes of this time.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Humanistic psychologists, fed up with the traditional focus on pathology, emphasize human potential and our capacity for growth. This approach allows people much more freedom to be human, and thus diverse. But the humanists have shockingly little to say about sex, and even less about eroticism. They prefer to talk about love and intimacy, worthy topics to be sure, but made strangely one-sided by ignoring our lustier impulses. I’m humanistically oriented myself and have always been perplexed about how eroticism became the neglected stepchild of humanistic psychology. Could it be that it’s just too messy? Masters and Johnson launched the field of modern sex therapy in 1970.3 They started with the traditional medical model with an emphasis on physiological function and dysfunction. Then from humanism they incorporated an acceptance of sexual variations and an optimistic belief that people gravitate toward health. Using principles of behaviorism they developed practical, step-by-step methods for facilitating change. This mixture proved to be far more effective than traditional approaches in helping people resolve problems with their sexual functioning. Like all new fields, modern sex therapy has limitations, one of which is the fact that it is firmly rooted in the neat-and-clean perspective. Masters and Johnson considered sex to be fundamentally simple—a “natural” function. According to this view, all that is required for a happy sex life is the removal of disruptive impediments, most notably anxiety and guilt. If it ever occurred to them that the same impediments they sought to eliminate might also be turn-ons, they neglected to mention it. Many of today’s sex therapists are still so preoccupied with getting rid of inhibitions that they rarely stop to wonder how sexual passion is actually created and intensified. They assume, for example, that uncomplicated, comfortable sex is the best kind—which, of course, isn’t necessarily so. Neat-and-clean practitioners also believe that the ability to become aroused and to have orgasms should be sufficient for satisfaction. They don’t dwell on the fact that eroticism is intertwined with the untidy struggles of being human and is therefore inherently complex and unpredictable. EMBRACING PARADOXThis book is based on a completely different point of view. Whereas the pathology perspective fails to appreciate the inevitable variability of eroticism, and the neat-and-clean perspective tries to downplay its irrational power, the paradoxical perspective recognizes the joys of eros without denying its intricacies and risks. This new paradigm acknowledges and embraces the contradictory, dual-edged nature of erotic life. It recognizes that anything that inhibits arousal—including anxiety or guilt—can, under different circumstances, amplify it. Consequently, we must view with considerable skepticism any absolute statements about what makes sex either exciting or problematic.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Because nothing was as it appeared, human reason must rise above common sense, prejudice, and unverified opinion; only then could it grasp true reality. 82 But many of his contemporaries felt that he made it impossible to think constructively about anything at all. 83 Parmenides argued that the world could not have developed in the way the Milesians had described, because all change was an illusion. Reality consisted of one, simple, complete, and eternal Being. He insisted that we could say nothing sensible about phenomena that did not exist. Thus, because Being was eternal and not subject to alteration, there was no such thing as change. We could, therefore, never say that something was born, because that implied that previously it had not existed, nor, for the same reason, could we say that it died or ceased to be. It appeared that creatures came into being and passed away, but this was an illusion, because reality was beyond time and change. Again, nothing could “move,” in the sense that at a given moment an object shifted from one place to another. We could never say that something had “developed,” that it had been one way once but become something different. So the universe was not in flux, as Heraclitus claimed; nor did it evolve, as the Milesians had argued. The universe was the same at all times and in all places. It was unchanging, uncreated, and immortal. The Milesians had based their philosophy on their observation of such phenomena as water and air. But Parmenides did not trust the evidence of the senses, and relied, with remarkable, ruthless consistency, on a purely reasoned argument. He cultivated the habit of “second-order thinking,” reflection upon the thought processes themselves. Like many of the Axial sages, he had arrived at a new, critical awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Parmenides had also embarked on the philosophical quest for pure existence. Instead of contemplating individual creatures, he was trying to put his finger on quintessential being. But in the process, he created a world in which it was impossible to live. Why would anybody undertake any course of action, if change and movement were illusory? His disciple Melissus was a naval commander: How was he supposed to guide his moving ship? How should we evaluate the physical changes that we note within ourselves? Were human beings really phantoms? By divesting the cosmos of qualities, Parmenides had also deprived it of heart. Human beings do not respond to the world with logos alone; we are also emotional creatures, with a complex subconscious life. By ignoring this and cultivating his rational powers exclusively, Parmenides had discovered a void: there was nothing to think about. Increasingly, as philosophers of the Axial Age practiced sustained logical reflection, the world became unfamiliar and human beings appeared strange to themselves.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings. Not yet of course. The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the strings out of my hands. But the fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase. The flower-bed on the other hand is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality, just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was. As H. was. Or as H. is. Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? The vast majority of the people I meet, say, at work, would certainly think she is not. Though naturally they wouldn’t press the point on me. Not just now anyway. What do I really think? I have always been able to pray for the other dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H., I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. The reason for the difference is only too plain. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new light on what I called my ‘confidence’ in him. I discovered that there was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith—I thought it faith—which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not. Yet I thought I did. But there are other difficulties. ‘Where is she now?’ That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body—and the body I loved is certainly no longer she—she is in no place at all. And ‘the present time’ is a date or point in our time series.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Apart from in the Bois – even there, as we’ve seen, even there! – you don’t mix with people until you have greeted them first, until you have respected a transitional moment in which a few words are exchanged, where each person maintains just the time and space between themselves and the others to offer them a glass or hand them an ashtray. I always wanted to abolish this suspense, but there were some rituals that I tolerated better than others. Armand used to make me laugh because, while everyone else was still at the chatting stage, he would strip completely naked, a few minutes ahead of all the others, and would fold his clothes as carefully as a butler. Or I would comply with what I thought was a stupid policy of one group who would not swing until they had dined, always in the same restaurant, like an old school reunion; and what made their evening was to ‘de-knicker’ or ‘de-tight’ one of the women in their party while the waiter was going round the table. On the other hand, I thought it was obscene to tell salacious stories at an orgy. Was it because I instinctively made a distinction between the playlets presented as a prelude to a play – the better to prepare you for it – and the play-acting which serves only to delay it? The acts performed in the one are never performed in the other where they really would be ‘out of place’.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I have suggested that I came to meet Éric having got to know his friends, and heard what they had to say about him. Amongst these friends was Robert whom I met while putting together a piece on art foundries. In the event, he took me to Le Creusot where he was having a monumental sculpture cast. We travelled back at night and, during the trip, Robert joined me in the back of the car and lay full length on top of me. I didn’t turn a hair. It was a narrow car and I was sitting sideways in my seat with Robert’s head resting on my abdomen, and my pelvis over the edge to facilitate his groping. From time to time I would put my head down and he would give me little kisses. Glancing in the rear view mirror, the driver commented that I didn’t seem to be on top of things. In fact the situation left me as dumbfounded as the visits to the foundries with their gigantic ovens. I saw Robert almost daily for quite a long time and he introduced me to a lot of people. I could instinctively distinguish between those with whom the relationship could take a sexual turn and those with whom it could not. An instinct that Robert also had; as a way of putting some of them off, he had come up with the idea of warning them that, as an art critic, I was beginning to wield some power. It was Robert who told me about that myth of Parisian life, Madame Claude. I have fantasised a great deal about being a high-class prostitute although I knew I was neither tall or beautiful, which I had been told you needed to be, nor distinguished enough for the job. Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curiosity; he would say that I would be able to write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was Éric. But in the end, I met the latter through a mutual friend of theirs, a very edgy boy, one of those men who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity, and someone with whom I had spent exhausting nights. In the morning, as if that wasn’t enough, he would take me to the huge studio he shared with his work partner, and there, languidly tired, I would let this other man come over and take me in a silent, almost serious way. One evening this friend invited me to go and have dinner with him and Éric. As we already know, Éric introduced me to more men than anyone else, friends, colleagues and strangers. For the sake of accuracy, I must add that, at the same time, he introduced me to a rigorous way of working to which I still adhere.

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

  It’s the craziest, best thing ever. I love this place the way I love movies like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth and anything with Nicolas Cage—movies that are so bad you can’t believe they exist, yet you’re glad they do, movies that are so bad that they’re good. Five HubSpeak So I can be the DRI on this, or Jan and I can be DRIs together, and we’ll coordinate with Courtney to work up some potential KPIs, and then we can all meet again in like a week or two and we’ll present some ideas and then we can develop an SLA. Does that sound good?” This is Marcia, the senior member of the blog team, talking to the content team, of which I am now a member. I’m about one month into my time at the company. I’ve finished my training program. I’ve still never heard anything from Cranium about what he wants me to do. So every day I just show up and say yes to every meeting that I’m invited to attend. There are lots of meetings. Endless meetings. Entire days book up with meetings. This meeting is taking place in a conference room on the second floor. We’re sitting around a table, each of us with a laptop open. In attendance are the three women from the blog team—Marcia, Jan, and Ashley—and three women who write e-books, plus Paige, who has been hired to do market research. Zack is nominally in charge. He has called the meeting because he wants the blog team to start coordinating its efforts with the e-book writers. The truth is that Zack is new and he’s young, and two of the women on the blog team have been here for years and they can’t stand the women who write the e-books and they have no intention of doing anything that Zack says. So Marcia is just yessing him to death, and filling the air with gibberish and jargon, things like KPI, DRI, SLA, TOFU, MOFU, SFTC, and SMB. I have no idea what any of this means. Afterward I pull Zack aside and ask him for a translation. “TOFU and MOFU refer to the sales funnel—top of funnel and middle of funnel,” he says. “SFTC means solve for the customer. SMB is small and medium-size business. SLA means a service-level agreement. DRI means directly responsible individual—it means the person who will be in charge of this task.

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

  Penny tells her to take a seat. The woman sits down next to me but then, in a minute, gets scooped up and called to her meeting. Meanwhile, I sit. And sit. Penny looks at me. “I’m still checking,” she says. I smile and tell her it’s no problem. Penny keeps making calls, glancing up at me and then glancing away, trying to figure out what to do with this gray- haired guy who just showed up claiming to be an employee. Finally, a few phone calls later, a guy named Zack arrives. He’s sorry that Wingman and Cranium aren’t here today, but he wants to give me a tour around the offices. Zack is in his twenties. He has a friendly smile and gelled hair. He reminds me of the interns at Newsweek, recent college graduates who did background research for the writers. I figure he must be someone’s assistant. The building we’re in also houses a venture capital firm and a few other small companies, including Sonos, which makes wireless home stereo equipment. But HubSpot keeps growing, spreading out, and colonizing more of the building. The engineers are on one floor, marketing on another, sales on another. HubSpot has five hundred employees and is hiring like crazy. It has been named one of the best places to work in Boston, with perks like unlimited vacation and Blue Cross health insurance that is fully paid for by the company. The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall. The office-as-playground trend started at Google but now has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can’t just be work; work has to be fun. HubSpot is divided into “neighborhoods,” each named after a section of Boston: North End, South End, Charlestown. One neighborhood has a set of musical instruments, in case people want to have an impromptu jam session, which Zack says never happens; the instruments just sit there. Every neighborhood has little kitchens, with automatic espresso machines, and lounge areas with couches and chalkboard walls where people have written things like “HubSpot = cool” alongside inspirational messages like “There is a reason we have two ears and one mouth. So that we listen twice as much as we speak.” On the ground floor, an enormous conference room doubles as a game room, with the requisite foosball table, Ping-Pong table, indoor shuffleboard, and video games. The cafeteria next door boasts industrial refrigerators stocked with cases of beer, cabinets with bagels and cereal, and, on one wall, a set of glass dispensers that hold an assortment of nuts and candy. It’s called the “candy wall,” and Zack explains that HubSpotters are especially proud of it.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “I know all about at-home workouts.” My mother beams, gathering her hair into a neat bun. “I signed up for Peloton, you know.” intenSati was recommended to me by Natalia Petrzela, a student turned instructor who started following Moreno (both physically and ideologically) in 2005. I was inclined to listen to Natalia, who seemed more down-to-earth than the “cult workout” stereotype I’m used to seeing in Los Angeles: the Equinox-subscribed wellness crusader who goes to SoulCycle three times a week and CorePower Yoga the other four days, lives in Lululemon leggings, and hasn’t ingested a simple carbohydrate since season twelve of The Bachelor . Natalia is a fitness historian at the New School in New York City with a PhD from Stanford, who relatably identifies as “not athletic” and “alienated by sports.” She promised that if I, a feminist killjoy who’s intimidated by exercise, were going to fall in love with any cult workout, she’s pretty sure intenSati would be the one. “I was just as skeptical of this culty workout stuff as you,” Natalia swears. “I remember intenSati was first described to me as ‘using voices and visualizations to transform your body and your outlook,’ and I was like, ‘Hell no, this is so woo-woo.’” “All right, all right,” I respond. “I’ll give it a whirl.” The marriage of mystical self-help messaging with a hard-core exercise class might not seem remarkable now, but when Natalia found intenSati in the mid-aughts, the two concepts had only just become acquainted. Moreno didn’t know it when she created the workout in 2002, but its launch was perfectly timed: At the turn of the twenty-first century, boutique fitness was just beginning to erupt as a major industry. In the 1980s and ’90s, most Americans got their exercise in big-box gyms or community centers like the YMCA; small, pricier workout classes with charismatic instructors, strong branding, and transcendent benefits were not yet the norm. As recently as the 1950s, the medical community didn’t even universally recommend exercise for women (much less that they sweat their asses off while shouting empowering things about themselves in public multiple times a week). In the 1920s and ’30s, one of the only successful American fitness salons was a chain called Slenderella, whose philosophy was entirely built on slimming women’s bodies daintily, without sweat, and purely for cosmetic purposes. Classes offered rhythmics (light stretching and dance), promising to trim female clients “in all the right places” minus the “toil and suffering” of real exertion, which was ruled to be contemptuously unfeminine, leading to big “manly” muscles and reproductive risks. American women instead developed a fixation with “reducing” (and ever since, weight loss has remained a dismal “cult” of its own). It wasn’t until the late 1960s when everyday Americans fully came around to the idea that working out to the point of perspiration was good for everyone. In 1968, the blockbuster fitness book Aerobics helped convince the public that exercise was indeed beneficial for both men and women.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Father Gianni was therefore obliged to bed down on a heap of straw in the stable, alongside his mare and Pietro’s donkey. Pietro’s wife, knowing of the hospitality which the priest accorded to her husband in Barletta, had offered on several occasions, when the priest came to stay with them, to go and sleep with a neighbour of hers called Zita Carapresa di Giudice Leo, so that the priest could sleep in the bed with her husband. But the priest wouldn’t hear of it, and on one occasion he said to her: ‘My dear Gemmata, don’t trouble your head over me. I am quite all right, because whenever I choose I can transform this mare 3 of mine into a fair young maid and turn in with her. Then when it suits me I turn her back into a mare. And that is why I’d never be without her.’ The young woman was astonished, believed every word of it, and told her husband, adding: ‘If he’s as good a friend as you say, why don’t you get him to teach you the spell, so that you can turn me into a mare and run your business with the mare as well as the donkey? We should earn twice as much money, and when we got home you could turn me back into a woman, as I am now.’ Being more of a simpleton than a sage, Neighbour Pietro believed all this and took her advice to heart; and he began pestering Father Gianni for all he was worth to teach him the secret. Father Gianni did all he could to talk him out of his folly, but without success, and so he said to him: ‘Very well, since you insist, tomorrow we shall rise, as usual, before dawn, and I shall show you how it’s done. To tell the truth, as you’ll see for yourself, the most difficult part of the operation is to fasten on the tail.’ That night, Pietro and Gemmata were looking forward so eagerly to this business that they hardly slept a wink, and as soon as the dawn was approaching, they scrambled out of bed and called Father Gianni, who, having risen in his nightshirt, came to Pietro’s tiny little bedroom and said: ‘I know of no other person in the world, apart from yourself, for whom I would perform this favour, but as you continue to press me, I shall do it. However, if you want it to work, you must do exactly as I tell you.’ They assured him that they would do as he said. So Father Gianni picked up a lantern, handed it to Neighbour Pietro, and said: ‘Watch me closely, and memorize carefully what I say. Unless you want to ruin everything, be sure not to utter a word, no matter what you may see or hear.

• From Cultish (2021)

  AA wasn’t Synanon, of course; it was changing my friend’s life for the better. But its conquest of her vocabulary was impossible to unhear. Instincts aren’t social science, though—and in truth, I didn’t actually “know” AA was a “cult.” But I had a strong inkling that there was something mighty and mysterious going on there. I had to look deeper. I had to understand: How did the group’s language take such rapid hold of my friend? How does language work, for better and for worse, to make people submerge themselves in zealous ideological groups with unchecked leaders? How does it keep them in the whirlpool? I began this project out of the perverse craving for cult campfire tales that so many of us possess. But it quickly became clear that learning about the connections across language, power, community, and belief could legitimately help us understand what motivates people’s fanatical behaviors during this ever- restless era—a time when we find multilevel marketing scams masquerading as feminist start-ups, phony shamans ballyhooing bad health advice, online hate groups radicalizing new members, and kids sending each other literal death threats in defense of their favorite brands. Chani, the twenty-six-year-old SoulCycler, told me she once saw one teenager pull a weapon on another over the last pair of sneakers at an LA hypebeast sample sale. “The next Crusades will be not religious but consumerist,” she suggested. Uber vs. Lyft. Amazon vs. Amazon boycotters. TikTok vs. Instagram. Tara Isabella Burton put it well when she said, “If the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those between religion and culture are more porous still.” The haunting, beautiful, stomach-twisting truth is that no matter how cult- phobic you fancy yourself, our participation in things is what defines us. Whether you were born into a family of Pentecostals who speak in tongues, left home at eighteen to join the Kundalini yogis, got dragged into a soul-sucking start-up right out of college, became an AA regular last year, or just five seconds ago clicked a targeted ad promoting not just a skincare product but the “priceless opportunity” to become “part of a movement,” group affiliations—which can have profound, even eternal significance—make up the scaffolding upon which we build our lives. It doesn’t take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure. Again, we’re wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language. “We have always used language to explain what we already knew,” wrote English scholar Gary Eberle in his 2007 book Dangerous Words, “but, more importantly, we have also used it to reach toward what we did not yet know or understand.” With words, we breathe reality into being.

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

  The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming saturated with the sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only sensations bring. But I cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency in Question consists in concomitant emotional and motor impulses. The ' impression' may come quite suddenly and depart quickly; it may carry no emotional suggestions, and wake no motor consequences beyond those involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is somewhat paradoxical, and no conclusion can be come to until more definite data are obtained. Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the following. The subject of the observation, Mr. P., is an exceptionally intelligent witness, though the words of the narrative are his wife's.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “I was like, ‘I don’t get this,’ so they made me word-clear everything, until I finally was sent to Ethics because I disagreed,” she recalled. The whole process was expensive and defeating. “Can you imagine?” Cathy continued. “You’re in a course, and you have one or two evenings a week to be in there, and you get stuck on one word, which takes you the whole three hours to clear? At a certain point, you don’t want to question stuff. You’re like, ‘Just go through it. Just agree with it.’” v.Personally, when I think of cultish religious language, I don’t think of kooky acronyms or mantras or Word Clearing. I think of one thing and one thing only: speaking in tongues. I’ve been haunted by this practice, desperately curious to understand it, ever since I was fourteen and first watched the documentary Jesus Camp . Filmed in North Dakota, Jesus Camp profiles a Pentecostal summer camp where little kids learn how to “take back America for Christ.” My parents rented the DVD in late 2006 and I watched it twice, back to back, rubbernecking like mad, just to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated these adults preaching the evils of evolution, public school, Harry Potter, homosexuality, and abortion to kids barely old enough to read. In one scene, a perspiring male preacher in his fifties repeats a quote from Doctor Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who —“A person’s a person, no matter how small”—delivering a pro-birth sermon with such emotional gravity that it brings the young campers to tears. The preacher beckons the children to join him in a roaring chant—“Jesus, I plead your blood over my sins and the sins of my nation. God, end abortion and send revival to America.” He rouses them to demand that God raise up righteous judges to overturn Roe v. Wade . The children crowd around the preacher bellowing, “Righteous judges! Righteous judges!” He places red tape over their mouths, scrawled with the word “Life,” and they suspend their little palms in the air, pleading. While that was all wildly engrossing to my fourteen-year-old self, by far my favorite part of the movie was when the kids spoke in tongues. Scholars tend to use the term “glossolalia” to describe this practice, in which a person utters unintelligible sounds that seem to approximate words from some perceived foreign language during states of religious intensity. Glossolalia is commonly found in certain Christian sects like Pentecostalism, in addition to fringier, more controversial religious groups like The Way International. Among believers, glossolalia is typically thought to be a heavenly gift. Their belief is that the “words” pouring from the speaker’s mouth are from an angelic or ancient holy language, which is then “translated” by someone else, as interpretation is a separate gift.

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

  The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the Lamarckian theory remains the a priori one urged by Spencer in his little work (much the solidest thing, by the way, which he has ever written) 'The Factors of Organic Evolution.' Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental variations of all parts of the body are independent of each other, if the entire organization of animals mere due to such accidental variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and harmony that we now find there could hardly possibly have come about in any finite time. We must rather suppose that the divers varying parts brought the other parts into harmony with themselves by exercising them ad hoc, and that the effects of the exercise remained and were passed on to the young. This forms, of course, a great presumption against the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental variations exclusively. But it must be admitted that in favor of the contrary view, that adaptive changes are inherited, we have as yet perhaps not one single unequivocal item of positive proof. I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our mental structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so-called Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. No more if we take ancestral experiences into account than if we limit ourselves to those of the individual after birth, can we believe that the couplings of terms within the mind are simple copies of corresponding couplings impressed upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathematical, ethical, æsthetical, and metaphysical propositions go, such an assertion is not only untrue but altogether unintelligible; for these propositions say nothing about the time—and space-order of things, and it is hard to understand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by thinking men. The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all grown up in ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant enough. And the more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night." THE END