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 A Way of Being (1980)

  1. The teachers are the possessors of knowledge, the students the expected recipients. The teachers are the experts; they know their fields. The students sit with poised pencil and notebook, waiting for the words of wisdom. There is a great difference in the status level between the instructors and the students. 2. The lecture, or some means of verbal instruction, is the major means of getting knowledge into the recipients. The examination measures the extent to which the students have received it. These are the central elements of this kind of education. Why the lecture is regarded as the major means of instruction is a mystery to me. Lectures made sense before books were published, but their current rationale is almost never explained. The increasing stress on the examination is also mysterious. Certainly its importance in the United States has increased enormously in the last couple of decades. 3. The teachers are the possessors of power, the students the ones who obey. (Administrators are also possessors of power, and both teachers and students are the ones who obey.) Control is always exercised downward. 4. Rule by authority is the accepted policy in the classroom. New teachers are often advised, “Make sure you get control of your students on the very first day.” The authority figure—the instructor—is very much the central figure in education. He or she may be greatly admired as a fountain of knowledge, or may be despised, but the teacher is always the center. 5. Trust is at a minimum. Most notable is the teacher’s distrust of the students. The students cannot be expected to work satisfactorily without

• From Cultish (2021)

  In 1945, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that language is human beings’ element just as “water is the element of fish.” So it’s not as if Tasha’s foreign mantras and Alyssa’s acronyms played some small role in molding their “cult” experiences. Rather, because words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them. “Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion,” John E. Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to me from Scotland. “These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence.” Without language, there are no “cults.” Certainly, you can hold beliefs without explicitly articulating them, and it’s also true that if Tasha or Alyssa did not want to buy into their leaders’ messages, no collection of words could’ve forced them into it. But with a glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible. The way a person communicates can tell us a lot about who they’ve been associating with, who they’ve been influenced by. How far their allegiance goes. The motives behind culty-sounding language are not always crooked. Sometimes they’re quite healthy, like to boost solidarity or to rally people around a humanitarian mission. One of my best friends works for a cancer nonprofit and brings back amusing stories of the love-bomb-y buzzwords and quasi-religious mantras they repeat on end to keep fund-raisers hyped: “Someday is today”; “This is our Week of Winning”; “Let’s fly above and beyond”; “You are the greatest generation of warriors and heroes in this quest for a cancer cure.” “It reminds me of the way multilevel marketing people talk,” she tells me (referencing culty direct sales companies like Mary Kay and Amway—more on these later). “It’s cultlike, but for a good cause. And hey, it works.” In part 5 of this book, we’ll learn about all sorts of woo-woo chants and hymns used in “cult fitness” studios that may sound extremist to skeptical outsiders, but aren’t actually all that destructive when you take a closer listen. Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics. But wherever there are fanatically worshipped leaders and belief-bound cliques, some level of psychological pressure is at play. This could be as quotidian as your average case of FOMO, or as treacherous as being coerced to commit violent crimes. “Quite frankly, the language is everything,” one ex-Scientologist told me in a hushed tone during an interview. “It’s what insulates you.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I’ve found that “cult” has become one of those terms that can mean something totally different depending on the context of the conversation and the attitudes of the speaker. It can be invoked as a damning accusation implying death and destruction, a cheeky metaphor suggesting not much more than some matching outfits and enthusiasm, and pretty much everything in between. In modern discourse, someone could apply the word “cult” to a new religion, a group of online radicals, a start-up, and a makeup brand all in the same breath. While working at a beauty magazine a few years ago, I promptly noticed how commonplace it was for cosmetics brands to invoke “cult” as a marketing term to generate buzz for new product launches. A cursory search for the word in my old work inbox yielded thousands of results. “Take a sneak peek at the next cult phenomenon,” reads a press release from a trendy makeup line, swearing that the new face powder from their so-called Cult Lab will “send beauty junkies and makeup fanatics into a frenzy.” Another pitch from a skincare company vows that their $150 “Cult Favorites Set” of CBD-infused elixirs “is more than skincare, it’s the priceless gift of an opportunity to decompress and love oneself in order to handle whatever life throws at them.” A priceless opportunity? To handle anything? The promised benefits of this eye cream sound not unlike those of a spiritual grifter. Confusing as this panoply of “cult” definitions might sound, we seem to be navigating it okay. Sociolinguists have found that overall, listeners are quite savvy at making contextual inferences about the meaning and stakes implied whenever a familiar word is used in conversation. Generally, we’re able to infer that when we talk about the cult of Jonestown, we mean something different from the “cult” of CBD skincare or Taylor Swift fans. Of course, there is room for misinterpretation, as there always is with language. But overall, most seasoned conversationalists understand that when we describe certain fitness fiends as “cult followers,” we might be referencing their intense, indeed religious-seeming devotion, but we’re probably not worried that they’re going to drown in financial ruin or stop speaking to their families (at least, not as a condition of their membership). Regarding Swifties or SoulCyclers, “cult” may serve as more of a metaphor, similar to how one might compare school or work to a “prison,” as a way to describe an oppressive environment or harsh higher- ups, without raising concerns about literal jail cells. When I sent my initial interview request to Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford psychological anthropologist and well-known scholar of fringe religions, she responded with “Dear Amanda, I would be happy to talk.

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

  A lot of tech companies do these now. The idea is to figure out what kind of person you are, and what kind of people your co-workers are. Somehow by knowing these things about each other we will be able to work together more effectively. Companies use various tests and methodologies. One popular test is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. HubSpot uses a methodology called DISC, which stands for four basic personality types: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. You can be a mix of more than one trait—a D with a little bit of C mixed in, for example. The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are. You do the test online. In the DISC assessment, you’re presented with statements to which you must answer yes or no. I am a neat and orderly person. I like peace and quiet. I am very persuasive. I am a very modest type. A week or so after filling out my questionnaire I am sent to a meeting where I will find out my results. It’s a group encounter, with about twenty people. I’m the only person from my department. The others seem to be mostly from sales. I don’t know any of them. DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC. Other people picked up Marston’s concepts in the 1950s and 1970s, and used them to create personality assessment tests. The ideas are pretty much hogwash, and to make things worse, they are put into practice by people with no psychological training or expertise. At HubSpot, the assessment program is overseen by Dave, the energetic goateed heavy-metal guitarist who runs the company training program. Dave is assisted by a middle-aged woman named Deb, who sports dramatic eyewear. The day begins with Dave and Deb explaining the four traits to us. No trait is better than any of the others. There are no bad traits and no good traits. They are all just different. We do an exercise where we all have to guess which type we think we are. Then we open our packets and find out the truth. It turns out I’m a D, which means the kind of person who hates sitting through personality assessment encounter groups and team-building exercises. I guessed right. I’m hoping that the meeting is over, but in fact we’re booked to be in this room for half a day, and, sure enough, now that we’ve all opened our packets, it’s time for the dreaded role-playing games. The big theory behind DISC is that if you know what kind of person you’re dealing with, you can understand how to interact with them.

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

  In other words, a blurred picture is just as much a single mental fact as a sharp picture is; and the use of either picture by the mind to symbolize a whole class of individuals is a new mental function, requiring some other modification of consciousness than the mere perception that the picture is distinct or not. I may bewail the indistinctness of my mental image of my absent friend. That does not prevent my thought from meaning him alone, however. And I may mean all mankind, with perhaps a very sharp image of one man in my mind's eye. The meaning is a function of the more I transitive' parts of consciousness, the 'fringe' of relations which we feel surrounding the image, be the latter sharp or dim. This was explained in a previous place (see p. 473 ff., especially the note to page 477), and I would not touch upon the matter at all here but for its historical interest. Our ideas or images of past sensible experiences may then be either distinct and adequate or dim, blurred, and incomplete. It is likely that the different degrees in which different men are able to make them sharp and complete has had something to do with keeping up such philosophic disputes as that of Berkeley with Locke over abstract ideas. Locke had spoken of our possessing 'the general idea of a triangle' which "must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once." Berkeley says: "If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an idea or no."[57] Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as 'the Imagination.' Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not 'The Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail. INDIVIDUALS DIFFER IN IMAGINATION. The first breaker of ground in this direction was Fechner, in 1860. Fechner was gifted with unusual talent for subjective observation, and in chapter xiv of his 'Psychophysik' he gave the results of a most careful comparison of his own optical after-images, with his optical memory-pictures, together with accounts by several other individuals of their optical memory-pictures.[58] The results was to show a great personal diversity. "It would be interesting," he writes, to work up the subject statistically; and I regret that other occupations have kept me from fulfilling my earlier intention to proceed in this way."

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

  He admits that he cannot explain all the errors in detail, and that we "stand before results which seem surprising and not to be unravelled, because we cannot analyze the elements which enter into the complex sensation which we receive." But he has no doubt whatever of the general fact "that the movements of the eyes and the sense of their position when fixed exert so decisive an influence on our estimate of the spaces seen, that the errors cannot possibly be explained by anything else than tire movement-feelings and their reproductions in the memory" (pp. 166, 167). It is presumptuous to doubt a man's opinion when you haven't had his experience; and yet there are a number of points which make me feel like suspending judgment in regard to Herr M.'s dictum. He found, for example, a constant tendency to underestimate intervals lying to the right, and to overestimate intervals lying to the left. He ingeniously explains this as a result of the habit of reading, which trains us to move our eyes easily along straight lines from left to right, whereas in looking from right to left we move them in curved lines across the page. As we measure intervals as straight lines, it costs more muscular effort to measure from right to left than tile other way, and an interval lying to the left seems to us consequently longer than it really is. Now I have been a reader for more years than Herr Münsterberg; and yet with me there is a strongly pronounced error the other way. It is the rightward-lying interval which to me seems longer than it really is. Moreover, Herr M. wears concave spectacles, and looked through them with his head fixed. May it not be that some of the errors were due to distortion of the retinal image, as the eye looked no longer through the centre but through the margin of the glass P In short, with all the presumptions which we have seen against muscular contraction being definitely felt as length, I think that there may be explanations of Herr M.'s results which have escaped even his sagacity; and I call for a suspension of judgment until they shall have been confirmed by other observers. I do not myself doubt that our feeling of seen extent may be altered by concomitant muscular feelings.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And it’s always changing, branching off into different “dialects” of QAnon-ese, in order to accommodate new additions to the belief system . . . and, so that social media algorithms don’t catch up, flag the language, and block or shadowban the accounts using it. New code words, hashtags, and rules for how to use them are introduced all the time. QAnon followers (some of whom are influencers with acolytes of their own) stand by for updates, often choosing to post only in their ephemeral Instagram Stories—the social media equivalent of “this message will self-destruct in 24 hours.” This creates an even deeper level of exclusivity for the followers following them. To put it crudely, with QAnon, there are cults inside cults inside cults inside cults; it’s the ultimate cult-ception, and social media made it possible. Depending on their subsect of beliefs, QAnon participants feel free to define the broad talk of “sheeple” and “5D” in whatever way “resonates.” After all, for them, “truth is subjective.” It doesn’t matter to them that some interpretations of this language have led to enough real-world violence* that QAnon has become one of the most threatening domestic terror groups of our time. It also doesn’t matter that at its core, QAnon is just another madcap apocalyptic cult in a line of them that goes back centuries. The updated cast of characters is new, and so is the medium of social media, but baseless doomsday predictions and ideas of dark forces secretly controlling everything are practically trite. All this and still, those wrapped up in the QAnon-to-conspirituality “culture of shared understanding” will find a way to keep rolling with it no matter what. Any question or wrinkle can be conveniently dismissed with one of their go-to thought-terminating clichés, like “Trust the plan,” “The awakening is bigger than all of this,” “The media is propaganda,” and “Do your research,” which refers to the process of falling down an obsessed, confirmation-biased rabbit hole online, revealing a fantasy world of explanations for things that feel inexplicable. If this all sounds like a dystopian video game , that’s part of the “fun.” There’s a reason Q’s original timbre was so conspiratorial it sounded like a made-for-TV movie: “Follow the money,” “I’ve said too much,” “Some things must remain classified to the very end.” QAnon has been described as “an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game” where online users play their imaginary roles as bakers, hungrily anticipating the puzzle of each new crumb. According to UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, this sort of virtual treasure hunt creates a form of conditioning called a variable-ratio schedule, where rewards are dispensed at unpredictable intervals. Like online gaming or gambling or even the erratic intoxication of when you’ll get your next social media “like”—that feeling that keeps you refreshing your feed—QAnon’s immersive experience generates a kind of compulsive behavior similar to addiction.

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

  “Ham and cheese will be okay,” he hurriedly said. He was served, he paid, and she retreated to her station at the far end of the bar. As he chewed on his sandwich Brian noticed the brass plaques which were fixed above the bar, the sort that were common to many pubs, each bearing some motto or legend. He scanned them distractedly, expecting them to be of the usual “you don’t have to be crazy to work here” kind, but instead he saw them to be refreshingly more original. “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires, ’ read one. “To make a fetish potent outside its cult is precisely the function of the aesthetic,” said another. And perhaps most amusing of all: “I may be a cruel heartless bitch ... but at least ’m good at it.” Amusing? Perhaps that was the wrong choice of word, for he had yet to recognize any humour in his hostess, either in her manner or the set of her lips. She went efficiently about her business but he had yet to see her smile or have anything pleasant to say to any of her customers. Perhaps he was intrigued then, rather than amused, as he read the motto again: “I may be a cruel heartless bitch ... but at least I’m good at it.” “Pretentious piffle,’ Brian heard, the words spoken in slurred A Cruel Heartless Bitch > 251 tones, and turned to see the pub’s first customer at his shoulder. “Pay no heed, take no notice, it’s all a load of bullshit and will fuck up your mind.” And with that he was gone, lurching towards the door, shoulders hunched and shuffling, as if his feet were shackled together or his nuts were in a knot. Brian watched him leave, then turned to the landlady with a wry smile on his face, expecting her to share his amusement and maybe give some explanation of the man’s eccentricity. She was dealing with another customer though, serving him with what Brian now took to be her customary cold and efficient way. She may well have been the “cruel heartless bitch” of the legend above the bar. Other meetings were conducted, Brian’s afternoon was busy, but as well as he had planned his visit there were still: matters left pending. Fortunately he had anticipated this, that nothing ever goes to plan, had had the foresight to pack an overnight bag and so checked into a hotel. "i It was one of those TraVelodges*which could have been anywhere, clean and comfortable enough but each room the same and totally devoid of character. He showered then, changed, went back out but found himself in a city which was much like any other. There was the drawback of travelling so much, of conducting business in so many different places, that ultimately everywhere seemed much like everywhere else. But then he remembered the tiny little pub which seemed somehow

• From Cultish (2021)

  If they told me about aliens when I first got there, I would have been out, and it would have saved me a lot of money.” For this reason, Scientology’s intro courses—Overcoming Ups and Downs in Life, Communication—are all quite broad, and delivered in plain English. To ease you into the ideology, the vernacular is introduced bit by bit. “They start just by shortening a lot of words,” Cathy told me. Indeed, Scientology’s lexicon is replete with insider-y acronyms and abbreviation s. If a word can be shortened, they do it: ack (acknowledgment), cog (cognition), inval (invalidation), eval (evaluation), sup (supervisor), R-factor (reality factor), tech (technology), sec (security), E-Meter (electropsychometer), OSA and RFP (parts of the organization), TR-L and TR-1 (training routines), PC, SP, PTS, and so on ad nauseam. Spend ten or twenty years committed to the church, and your vocabulary will be replaced wholesale by Hubbardese. Take a look at this dialogue, an example of an entirely plausible conversation between Scientologist s that Margery Wakefield composed for her 1991 book Understanding Scientology . Translations (by yours truly) are in brackets. Two Scientologists meet on the street. “How’re you doing?” one asks the other. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been a bit out ruds [rudiments; tired, hungry, or upset] because of a PTP [present time problem] with my second dynamic [romantic partner] because of some bypassed charge [old negative energy that’s resurfaced] having to do with my MEST [Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, something in the physical universe] at her apartment. When I moved in I gave her an R-Factor [reality factor, a harsh talking-to] and I thought we were in ARC [affinity, reality, and communication; a good state] about it, but lately she seems to have gone a bit PTS so I recommended she see the MAA [an officer in the SEA-Org] at the AO [Advanced Organization] to blow some charge [get rid of engram energy] and get her ethics in [getting your Scientology shit together]. He gave her a review [auditing assessment] to F/N [floating needle, sign of a completed audit] and VGIs [very good indicators] but she did a roller coaster [a case that improves and worsens], so I think there’s an SP somewhere on her lines [auditing and training measures]. I tried to audit her myself but she had a dirty needle [an irregular E-Meter reading] . . . and was acting really 1.1 [covertly hostile] so I finally sent her to Qual [Qualifications Division] to spot the entheta on her lines [something that happens if you’ve recently consumed black PR]. Other than that, everything’s fine . . . In the beginning, learning this private terminology makes speakers feel, well, cool. “In the early days, it was really fun . . . or ‘theta,’ as we’d say,” Cathy told me, referencing Scientology’s slang term for “awesome.” Who doesn’t love a secret language?

• From Cultish (2021)

  Fringe groups from the ’70s now boast a sort of perversely stylish vintage cachet. At this point, being obsessed with the Manson Family is akin to having an extensive collection of hippie-era vinyl and band tees. At an LA salon the other week, I eavesdropped on a woman telling her stylist that she was going for a “Manson girl” hair look: overgrown, brunette, middle-parted. A twentysomething acquaintance of mine recently hosted a cult-themed birthday party in New York’s Hudson Valley—the site of numerous historical “cults” (including The Family,* NXIVM, and countless witches), as well as the Woodstock music festival. The dress code? All white. Filtered photographs of guests sporting ivory slips and glassy-eyed “oops, I didn’t know I was haunted” expressions flooded my Instagram feed. Over the decades, the word “cult” has become so sensationalized, so romanticized, that most experts I spoke to don’t even use it anymore. Their stance is that the meaning of “cult” is too broad and subjective to be useful, at least in academic literature. As recently as the 1990s, scholars had no problem tossing around the term to describe any group “considered by many to be deviant.” But it doesn’t take a social scientist to see the bias built into that categorization. A few scholars have tried to get more precise and identify specific “cult” criteria: charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, an us-versus-them mentality toward nonmembers, and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy. Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, adds that “cult” has typically been applied to groups that have some degree of supernat ural beliefs, though that isn’t always the case. (Angels and demons don’t usually make their way into, say, cosmetics pyramid schemes. Except when they do . . . more on that in part 4 .) But Kent says the result of all these institutions is the same: a power imbalance built on members’ devotion, hero worship, and absolute trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders. The glue that keeps this trust intact is members’ belief that their leaders have a rare access to transcendent wisdom, which allows them to exercise control over their systems of rewards and punishments, both here on earth and in the afterlife. Based on my conversations, these qualities seem to encapsulate what many everyday folks view as a “real cult” or “the academic definition of a cult.” But as it turns out, “cult” doesn’t have an official academic definition. “Because it’s inherently pejorative,” Rebecca Moore, a religion professor at San Diego State University, clarified during a phone interview. “It’s simply used to describe groups we don’t like.” Moore comes to the subject of cults from a unique place: Her two sisters were among those who perished in the Jonestown massacre; in fact, Jim Jones enlisted them to help pull off the event. But Moore told me she doesn’t use the word “cult” in earnest because it’s become inarguably judgment-laden.

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

  Who’s in charge? Nobody. Everybody. One day we are told the company will focus on big enterprise customers and that this decision has been etched in stone and will not change. Two weeks later, we’re going back to selling to small businesses. “I’m worried,” I tell him. “This place seems out of control.” Harvey says everything I’m describing about HubSpot is absolutely normal. “You know what the big secret of all these start-ups is?” he tells me. “The big secret is that nobody knows what they’re doing. When it comes to management, it’s amateur hour. They just make it up as they go along.” Examples abound of tech start-ups trying to bring in more experienced people who end up leaving, sometimes citing a lack of “culture fit.” Evan Spiegel, the twenty-five-year-old founder of Snapchat, a photo sharing application, raised $1 billion in venture funding and realized, or was told by his investors, that he needed to hire people who could run a business and make money. Spiegel brought in veterans from Facebook and Google, then lost eight top executives in less than a year, with some people lasting only six months, according to Business Insider. Then there is twenty-two-year-old Lucas Duplan, whose wildly overhyped start-up, Clinkle, hired a well-known VP of engineering only to have the guy quit after one day. Soon after that, five other executives also abandoned ship. Even some of the biggest and best-known new tech companies are totally dysfunctional. Twitter, for example, seems to have survived in spite of its management rather than because of it. The company is valued at $13 billion and not long ago was valued at more than $30 billion. Yet Twitter has never reported an annual profit, and has lost billions of dollars. For nine years Twitter has undergone wave after wave of management upheaval, hiring and firing CEOs, reshuffling, reorganizing, announcing new business plans, making acquisitions. The people responsible for this mess have become incredibly wealthy. Two of Twitter’s co-founders, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, are billionaires. Dorsey once had blue hair and played music in the street. For a while he went around dressing like Steve Jobs. Then he was obsessed with Japanese culture. Then he was going to become a fashion designer. Then he reportedly wanted to be mayor of New York. After being pushed out of Twitter he started a payment company called Square, which raised $590 million in venture funding and in November 2015 successfully sold shares to the public, despite having lost nearly $500 million—half a billion dollars!—in just four years. In 2015, Dorsey became CEO of Twitter again, so he now runs two companies. Williams left Twitter and founded Medium, but by 2015, after three years in business, he still was not sure what he wanted that company to be, and he started firing people he had just hired.

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

  He says he admires Halligan and Shah, and that while they may not be the best software developers in the world, they’re certainly good at sales and marketing. “They’ve done an amazing job,” he says. “I never thought they’d make it as far as they have.” I ask Thomas about something that puzzles me, which is that it seems pretty clear to me that HubSpot is losing a lot of money, and yet Halligan and Shah keep squandering money on ridiculous things—the parties, the beer, the nap room, the free massages, the fancy offices. HubSpot has an enormous kitchen on the first floor, and loads of little satellite kitchens all over the rest of the building, yet now Halligan is remodeling the second floor of the building and will install another kitchen, this one with taps for beer and hard cider. Just to be kooky, HubSpot is also building a replica of a bright red British telephone box, where people can have privacy for making phone calls. I could see living large if you were running a company like Google, which throws off more than $1 billion in profit—not revenue, but profit—every month. But HubSpot is a relatively tiny company that’s losing money. Shouldn’t HubSpot be running lean, trying to make their VC money last as long as possible? Shouldn’t they be spending their money on software development rather than beer blasts? Why aren’t the VCs imposing any financial discipline? “Do the investors ever visit and walk around? Do they know how out of control things are?” “They may or they may not,” Thomas says. Board members don’t always know everything about a company, he says. They only know what the management team tells them, and sometimes that is not too much. “I tell my board as little as possible,” he says. “I treat them like mushrooms, I keep them in the dark and feed them shit. I don’t want them meddling in my business and telling me what to do.” For that matter, the board members usually don’t want to start getting involved in the day-to-day running of the company. Some have their own companies to run. Others are retired, and sit on boards as a kind of hobby. The VCs who sit on HubSpot’s board have skin in the game, but it’s not in their interest to interfere too much. “You don’t want to get into a battle with the founders. That’s a last resort. If a founder leaves, or gets thrown out, investors get spooked. It sends a bad message,” Thomas says. Founders and investors need each other, but they’re also wary of each other. It’s an uneasy partnership. The founders see VCs as a necessary evil, tricksters who will try to cheat founders or even steal their companies away from them. VCs see founders the way music labels see bands, or the way Hollywood studios see movies—they’re the talent, the way you make money.

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

  Williams also runs a venture capital firm, Obvious Ventures, which in 2015 raised $123,456,789—get it?—from limited partners such as noted technologist Leonardo DiCaprio. A third Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, has a net worth of $200 million and since leaving Twitter has launched two companies, Jelly and Super. Nobody, including Stone himself, seems to understand what these companies do. In one interview, trying to explain Super, Stone said: “I know this is eye-rollingly, hallucinogenically optimistic... but our mission is to build software that fosters empathy.” Now that is some pure, unadulterated bozo talk. Unfortunately, such rhetoric has become the rule rather than the exception inside tech start-ups. By the occasion of the inaugural Fearless Friday I’ve come to realize that HubSpot is just as crazy as the rest of them. But all of HubSpot’s lofty bullshit about inspiring people and being remarkable and creating lovable content might actually be part of a cynical, and almost brilliant, strategy. HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups. HubSpot is feeding the ducks. The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos. “HubSpot was the first software company I worked for, and it was extremely eye-opening,” says a salesperson who joined the company during its early days and has since worked for other early-stage tech companies, which were equally clueless and out of control. “People in these companies live day-to-day. They don’t know how to run a sales team. They don’t have a sales process. They don’t even know what the product itself is going to be. The product itself keeps changing. It’s mind-boggling, the amount of time and money that gets wasted.” Nine In Which I Make a Very Big Mistake By August, four months into my tenure at HubSpot, I am ready to give up. I’m stuck in the content factory writing articles for imbeciles. I cannot do this for a living. I’ve already appealed to Wingman and pitched him on a project that would be a better use of my time—the one where we launch an online magazine called Inbound, with me in charge—and he has rejected it outright. As I see it, there is only one way out at this point. I can leap over Wingman and go straight to the top. I will pitch my idea directly to Halligan and Shah. They’re the guys who run the company. And they are the ones who hired me. To be sure, Wingman isn’t going to appreciate me doing an end run around him. On the other hand, what do I have to lose? I’m not going to stay in the content factory, banging out listicles and how-to articles for Marketing Mary.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Unlike shaving your head, relocating to a commune, or even changing your clothes, adopting new terminology is instant and (seemingly) commitment-free. Let’s say you show up to a spiritual meeting out of curiosity, and the host starts off by asking the group to repeat a chant. Odds are, you do it. Maybe it feels odd and peer pressure–y at first, but they didn’t ask you to fork over your life savings or kill anyone. How much damage can it do? Cultish language works so efficiently (and invisibly) to mold our worldview in the shape of the guru’s that once it’s embedded, it sticks. After you grow your hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special vocabulary is still there. In part 2 of this book, we’ll meet a man named Frank Lyford, a survivor of the 1990s “suicide cult” Heaven’s Gate, who, twenty-five years after defecting and disowning its belief system, still calls his two former leaders by their monastic names, Ti and Do; refers to the group as “the classroom”; and describes its members’ haunting fate with the euphemism “leaving Earth,” just as he was taught to do over two decades ago. The idea to write this book occurred to me after my best friend from college decided to quit drinking and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She lived three thousand miles away from me at the time, so I only saw her a few times a year, and from afar, I couldn’t tell how committed she was to this no-drinking thing, or really what to make of it. That is, until the first time I went to visit her after she got sober. That night, we were having trouble figuring out dinner plans, when the following sentence exited her mouth: “I’ve been HALTing all day, I caught a resentment at work, but trying not to future-trip. Ugh, let’s just focus on dinner: First things first, as they say!” I must have looked at her as if she had three heads. “HALT”? “Future-trip”? “Caught a resentment”? What on earth was she saying? * Three months in AA, and this person who was so close to me I could’ve accurately distinguished the meanings of her different exhalations was suddenly speaking a foreign language. Instantly, I had a heuristic reaction—it was the same instinct I felt looking at those old photos of Tasha Samar in the desert; the same response my dad had the day he first stepped onto Synanon’s grounds. A Jonestown survivor once told me, “They say that a cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” Or, if you’re like me, you know it when you hear it. The exclusive language was the biggest clue.

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

  This means that in everything you do, you should be putting the needs of your customers ahead of everything else. To remind his HubSpot colleagues of that, Dharmesh has acquired a teddy bear, and he sits her at the table during meetings as a stand-in for the customer. Her name is Molly. Dharmesh goes on to say that he started out just placing an empty chair at the conference table and pretending that the chair was a customer. But the empty chair wasn’t enough, he decided. So now he has taken his innovation to the next level and brought in Molly. Dharmesh’s LinkedIn article even includes a photograph of Molly sitting at a meeting, next to Cranium. In the photo, Cranium is the big guy in the white shirt at the right side, and Molly is the little one next to him, drinking what appears to be a Red Bull and looking like she’s ready to carve someone a new asshole. I cannot believe this. Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear. And I am working with these people. No: worse! I am working for them. At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation. How do people sit in a meeting and not make fun of this? Who can read this bullshit on LinkedIn about a teddy bear and not burst out laughing? Who could respond to this kind of inanity with anything other than complete and total derision? Does the teddy bear have a mind of its own? Does she ever disagree with Dharmesh, and if so, what happens then? Does she ever contradict the other members of the management team? How, exactly, does Molly lobby on behalf of customers? If you really want actual customer feedback, you could create a customer advisory panel and ask for their input, which is something that other companies actually do. People on LinkedIn can post comments under the articles, and I figure that Dharmesh will get savaged. But I’m wrong. In fact people seem to think that Molly the teddy bear is a fantastic idea. People post glowing comments saying what a brilliant idea this is, and vowing that they, too, will start bringing teddy bears, or perhaps different stuffed animals, to their meetings. I feel like Mugatu, Will Ferrell’s character in the movie Zoolander, when he finally loses his patience and screams out: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” My colleagues see nothing ridiculous about the teddy bear. Even Zack will not joke about it. This surprises me, because Zack is still sort of new here, and he has worked at other companies, including Google.

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

  "Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular delusions or impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the existence of latent or embryo faculties, other than the five senses, I should explain them on that ground. Being totally blind, his other perceptions are abnormally keen and developed, and given the existence of a rudimentary sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also should be more acute in him than in others. One of the most interesting of his experiences in this line was the frequent apparition of a corpse some years ago, which may be worth the attention of your Committee on that subject. At the lime Mr. P. had a music-room in Boston on Beacon Street, where he used to do severe and protracted practice with little interruption. Now, all one season it was a very familiar occurrence with him while in the midst of work to feel a cold draft of air suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation at the roots of his hair, when he would turn from the piano, and a figure which he knew to be dead would come sliding under the crack of the door from without, flattening itself to squeeze through and rounding out again to the human form. It was of a middle-aged man, and drew itself along the carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back till it reached the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments, but vanished s if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The most singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. Be might expect it on any day between two and four o'clock, and it came always heralded by the same sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the same figure which went through the same movements. He afterwards traced the whole experience to strong tea. He was in the habit of taking cold tea, which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on giving up this practice whenever saw this or any other apparition again. However, even allowing, as is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves first fatigued by over work and then excited by this stimulant, there is one point which is still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting to me. Mr. P. has no memory whatever of sight, nor conception of it. It is impossible for him to form any idea of what we mean by light or color, consequently he has no cognizance of any object which does not reach his sense of hearing or of touch, though these are so acute as to give a contrary impression some-times to other people. When he becomes aware of the presence of a person or an object, by means which seem mysterious to outsiders, he can always trace it naturally and legitimately to slight echoes, perceptible only to his keen ears, or to differences in atmospheric pressure, perceptible only to his acute nerves of touch; but with the apparition described, for the only time-in his experience, he was aware of presence, size, and appearance, without the use of either of these mediums. The figure never produced the least sound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he knew that it was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that it wore a full beard, which, like the thick curly heir, was partially gray; also that it war, dressed in the style of suit known as 'pepper and salt.' These points were all perfectly distinct and invariable each time. If asked how he perceived them, he will answer he cannot tell, he simply knew it, and so strongly and so distinctly that it is impossible to shake the opinion as to the exact details of the man's appearance. It would seem that in this delusion of the senses he really saw, as he has never done in the actual experiences of life, except in the first two years of childhood."

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  It does not lie in a solid knowledge of those around us. It is not found in the organizations or customs or rituals of any one culture. It is not even in our own known personal worlds. It must take into account mysterious and currently unfathomable “separate realities,” incredibly different from an objective world. I, and many others, have come to a new realization. It is this: The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive and experience it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perceive and experience it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many “real worlds” as there are people! This creates a most burdensome dilemma, one never before experienced in history. From time immemorial, the tribe or the community or the nation or the culture has agreed upon what constitutes the real world. To be sure, different tribes or different cultures might have held sharply different world views, but at least there was a large, relatively unified group which felt assured in its knowledge of the world and the universe, and knew that this perception was true. So the community frowned upon, condemned, persecuted, even killed those who did not agree, who perceived reality differently. Copernicus, even though he kept his findings secret for many years, was eventually declared a heretic. Galileo established proof of Copernicus’s views, but in his seventies he was forced to recant his teachings. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for teaching that there were many worlds in our universe. Individuals who deviated in their perception of religious reality were tortured and killed. In the mid-1800s, Ignaz Semmelweis, an intense young Hungarian physician-scientist, was driven insane by his persecutors because he made the then absurd claim that childbed fever, that dread scourge of the maternity room, was carried from one woman to another by invisible germs on the hands and instruments of the doctors. Obvious nonsense, in terms of the reality of his day. In our own American Colonies, those who were even suspected of having psychic powers were considered witches and were hanged or crushed under great stones. History offers a continuing series of examples of the awful price paid by those who perceive a reality different from the agreed-upon retd world. Although society has often come around eventually to agree with its dissidents, as in the instances I have mentioned, there is no doubt that this insistence upon a known and certain universe has been part of the cement that holds a culture together. Today we face a different situation. The ease and rapidity of worldwide communication means that every one of us is aware of a dozen “realities”; even

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

  It is one of the suggestions which most promptly succeed, even with quite fresh ones. A systematized amnesia of certain periods of one's life may also be suggested, the subject placed, for instance, where he was a decade ago with the intervening years obliterated from his mind. The mental condition which accompanies these systematized anæsthesias and amnesias is a very curious one. The anæsthesia is not a genuine sensorial one, for if you make a real red cross (say) on a sheet of white paper invisible to an hypnotic subject, and yet cause him to look fixedly at a dot on the paper on or near the cross, he will, on transferring his eye to a blank sheet, see a bluish-green after-image of the cross. This proves that it has impressed his sensibility. He has felt it, but not perceived it. He had actively ignored it, refused to recognize it, as it were. Another experiment proves that he must distinguish it first in order thus to ignore it. Make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he not looking, surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes slid omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the new strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to which he is blind be doubled by a prism of sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open), he will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direction in which the image seen through the prism lies. Obviously, then, he is not blind to the kind of stroke in the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of that kind in a particular position on the board or paper,—that is, to a particular complex object; and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it when the others are brought near. He 'apperceives' it, as a preliminary to not seeing it at all! How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy.

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

  We observe an identical difference between men as a whole and women as a whole. A young woman of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude and security in all the usual circumstances in which she may be placed.[359] Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a great extent, the same that they will be through life. Her character is, in fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy of twenty in all these respects! His character is still gelatinous, uncertain what shape to assume, 'trying it on' in every direction. Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express it, he is, when compared with his sister, a being of no definite contour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. The very lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground on which general principles and heads of classification grow up; and the masculine brain deals with new end complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and rapidly as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to core with. In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feel show intimately connected it is with conception; and one realizes more than ever the deep reach of that principle of selection on which so much stress was laid towards the close of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.

• 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.