Confusion

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

  After some reflection, most people realize that if they were under mind control, it would be impossible to determine it without some help from the outside. In addition, they would need to understand very clearly what mind control is. When I was under mind control, I didn’t understand what it was all about. I assumed that mind control would involve being tortured in a dank basement somewhere, with a light bulb shining in my face. Of course, that never happened to me while I was in the Moonies. Whenever people yelled at me and called me a “brainwashed robot,” I just took it as an expected persecution. It made me feel more committed to the group. At that time, I didn’t have a frame of reference for the phenomenon of mind control. It wasn’t until my deprogramming that I was given a credible model of what it is and how it works. Since I was a member of the Moonies and we regarded Communism as the enemy, I was very interested in the techniques that the Chinese Communist Party used to convert people into Communism during the 1950s. I didn’t resist, then, when my counselors asked to read me parts of Dr. Robert Jay Lifton’s book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.74 Since the book had been published in 1961, I could not accuse Lifton of being anti-Moon. That book had a major impact on my understanding of what had happened to me in the Moonies. Lifton identified eight basic elements of the process of mind control as practiced by the Chinese Communists. My counselors pointed out that no matter how wonderful the cause, or how attractive the members, if any group employed all eight of Robert Jay Lifton’s elements, then it was practicing mind control. I was eventually able to see that the Unification Church used all eight of those elements: milieu control, mystical manipulation or planned spontaneity, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, sacred science, loading of the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence. (In the Appendix of this book, Lifton describes these eight elements in more detail. Two video interviews with Lifton can be found on my website, freedomofmind.com.) Before I could leave the Moonies, though, I had to wrestle with several moral questions. Does the God I believe in need to use deception and mind control? Do the ends truly justify the means? Do the means determine the ends? How could the world become a paradise if people’s free wills are subverted? What would the world truly look like if Moon assumed total power? Through asking myself these questions, I decided I could no longer participate in an organization that used mind control practices. I left behind the fantasy world I had lived in for years.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was in the center of a revolving disk which was whirling so fast that nothing could stay put. What was needed was a mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things were temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and whatnot—sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable clean, or you took clubs and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then to talk of God, or to have a little community sing—maybe even a bonus was justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad for words. But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up the trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills—enough to blow out his rear end if he had had a rear end, but he hadn’t one any more, he only imagined he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger was in a trance. There were a hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the elevated lines. Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop. Some forgot where they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired for New York turned up in Philadelphia a month later, as though it were normal and according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them, in the uniform we had given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I’m a brave man and I want to be brave even with this wound. I want to understand how I can live with it and with everything else that happened over there, the dead corporal from Georgia and all the other crazy things. I find a place on the side of the hospital where the old men sit. The grass is very green and they feed the birds from their wheelchairs. They are the old men from the First World War, I am sure of that, and I sit next to them and feed the birds too. I just want to slow down, the whole thing has been moving much too fast, like some wild spinning top, and now I am trying to catch my breath, I am trying to figure out what this whole terrible thing is about. I read the paper every morning and it always says the war is going on and the president is sending more troops, and I still tell people, whoever asks me, that I believe in the war. Didn’t I prove it by going back a second time? I look them all right in the eye and tell them that we are winning and the boys’ morale is high. But more and more what I tell them and what I am feeling are becoming two different things. I feel them tearing, tearing at my whole being, and I don’t want to talk about the war anymore. I feed the birds and the squirrels. I want things to be simple again, things are just too confusing. The hospital is like the whole war all over again. The aides, the big tall black guys who spit and sit on the toilet bowls all night, they’re doing it again, they’re picking up the paralyzed drunks from the hallways, they’re wheeling them along the halls to the rooms. Now I see them strapping the men into big lifts, hoisting the drunken bodies back into their beds. And the aides are laughing, they’re always laughing the way people laugh at a sideshow, it’s all pretty funny to them. We are like a show of puppets dancing on strings for them, dancing to maddening music. They’re wheeling all the guys in from the halls because it’s late and it’s time for all of the bodies to be put back into the beds, for all the tubes to be hooked up, and the drip of the piss bags to start all over again. There’s a train in the Bronx, somewhere out over the Harlem River, and it sounds so good, it sounds warm and wonderful like the heater back home, like the Long Island train that I used to hear as a kid. Pat, the new guy, is crying for help. He’s puking into the cup again and he’s cursing out everybody, he’s cursing the place and the nurses, the doctors.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Look, Simone sets herself up for disaster. She always has. Then she tries to drag anyone within range into it.” They gnawed their food righteously. Jane still had her elbow up and her hand blocking her face. “How’s the job search going?” she asked. “It looks good so far. Like I said, I think I did all right at Ardis films. And I know somebody who used to work there. The only thing about that place is that the people are so pretentious. Everybody there is a ‘close personal friend’ of Herzog or Beth B. or somebody. Everybody has this certain pompous accent, especially when they say ‘film.’ ” “That’s professional New York,” said Jane. “People who work in the arts are always that way.” “Maybe I’ll just come work in the museum with you.” “If we’re not on strike. And it looks like we’re going to be.” “Could you survive on free-lance work if that happened?” “Maybe.” She dropped the hand at her chin, exposing her face to him. “I don’t know.” He got up from the table, looking straight ahead, and slowly gathered his coat around his shoulders. He could sense no movement of her head turning to look at him as he left the restaurant. He wouldn’t realize that he’d left the bag containing the bunny sweater-guard and Sylvia’s watch under the table until he arrived home in Westchester. An Affair, EditedWhen he saw her on the way to work in the morning, he ignored her, even though he hadn’t seen her for four years. They had met at the University of Michigan. It had been such a brief, disturbing affair that he didn’t even think of her as an old girlfriend. His memory of her was like a filmy scrap of dream discovered on the floor during the drowsy journey from bed to toilet, or a girl in an advertisement that catches in the cluttered net of memory and persists, waiting to commit sex acts with you later that night. Her slight body and pale movements intensified his impression. He had his Walkman on when they passed each other, and his blotted hearing made it easier for him to ignore her. She approached, her face tilted toward him, quizzical and apprehensive. She passed him and vanished, replaced by a girl in a suit and two staring, striding men with briefcases. She did not seem to notice that he ignored her; in fact she might have ignored him too. Their affair had ended badly. He descended into the dank grayness of the subway, relishing slightly her surprise appearance. He had never gone to work this way before. It was probably the route she always took.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I turn round and rub my hand over the iron surface. It almost seems to speak to me. It is a human lamppost. It belongs , like the cabbage leaf, like the torn socks, like the mattress, like the kitchen sink. Everything stands in a certain way in a certain place, as our mind stands in relation to God. The world, in its visible, tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life is love. Love, love, love. And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man, myself, who is none other than Gottlieb Leberecht Müller. Gottlieb Leberecht Müller! This is the name of a man who lost his identity. Nobody could tell him who he was, where he came from or what had happened to him. In the movies, where I first made the acquaintance of this individual, it was assumed that he had met with an accident in the war. But when I recognized myself on the screen, knowing that I had never been to the war, I realized that the author had invented this little piece of fiction in order not to expose me. Often I forget which is the real me. Often in my dreams I take the draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander forlorn and desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine. And sometimes between the dream and reality there is only the thinnest line. Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes and, like a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage of my rootless self. In this condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of life—of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household, of entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing military service, and so on and so forth. In this condition I am capable, if needs be, of killing in cold blood, for the sake of my family or to protect my country, or whatever it may be. I am the ordinary, routine citizen who answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport. I am thoroughly irresponsible for my fate. Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my own behavior nor that of my neighbors, nor do I understand why the governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be. At such moments I am born anew, born and baptized by my right name: Gottlieb Leberecht Müller! Everything I do in my right name is looked upon as crazy. People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even. I am forced to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged to break camp.

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

  Another example of a double bind is, “If you admit there are things in your life that aren’t working, then by not taking the seminar, you are giving those things power to control your life.” The message is: Just being here proves you are incompetent to judge whether or not to leave. Exercises such as guided meditations, personal confessions, prayer sessions, vigorous calisthenics and even group singing can also aid unfreezing. Typically, these activities start out quite innocuously, but gradually become more intense and directed. They are almost always conducted in a group. This enforces privacy deprivation and thwarts a person’s need to be alone, think and reflect. At this stage of unfreezing, as people are weakening, most cults bombard them with the idea that they are seriously flawed—incompetent, mentally ill or spiritually fallen. Any problems that are important to the person, such as doing poorly in school or at work, being overweight, or having trouble in a relationship, are blown out of proportion to prove how completely messed up the person is. Some groups can be quite vicious in their attacks on individuals at this stage, often humiliating them in front of the whole group. Once a person is broken down, they are ready for the next phase. Changing Changing consists of imposing a new personal identity—a new set of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions—to fill the void left by the breakdown of the old one. Indoctrination in this new identity takes place both formally (for instance, through seminars and rituals) and informally (by spending time with members, reading, and listening to recordings and videos). Many of the same techniques used in the unfreezing phase are also carried into this phase. Repetition, monotony, rhythm: these are the lulling, hypnotic cadences in which the formal indoctrination is generally delivered. Material is repeated over and over and over. If the lecturers are sophisticated, they vary their talks somewhat in an attempt to hold interest, but the message remains pretty much the same. During the changing phase, all this repetition focuses on certain central themes. The recruits are told how bad the world is and that the unenlightened have no idea how to fix it. This is because ordinary people lack the new understanding that has been provided by the leader. The leader is the only hope of lasting happiness. Recruits are told, “Your old self is what’s keeping you from fully experiencing the new truth. Your old concepts are what drag you down. Your rational mind is holding you back from fantastic progress. Surrender. Let go. Have faith.’’ Scientologists are told that they must put their minds under the control of a counselor, to show that their minds can be controlled.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Almost crying now, he shouted to the crowd that they couldn’t give up in Vietnam. “We have to win . . . ” he said, his voice still shaking; then pausing, he pointed his finger at him and Eddie Dugan, “. . . because of them! ” Suddenly it was very quiet and he could feel them looking right at him, sitting there in his wheelchair with Eddie all alone. It seemed everyone—the cub scouts, the boy scouts, the mothers, the fathers, the whole town—had their eyes on them and now he bent his head and stared into his lap. The commander left the podium to great applause and the speeches continued, but the more they spoke, the more restless and uncomfortable he became, until he felt like he was going to jump out of his paralyzed body and scream. He was confused, then proud, then all of a sudden confused again. He wanted to listen and believe everything they were saying, but he kept thinking of all the things that had happened that day and now he wondered why he and Eddie hadn’t even been given the chance to speak. They had just sat there all day long, like he had been sitting in his chair for weeks and months in the hospital and at home in his room alone, and he wondered now why he had allowed them to make him a hero and the grand marshal of the parade with Eddie, why he had let them take him all over town in that Cadillac when they hadn’t even asked him to speak. These people had never been to his war, and they had been talking like they knew everything, like they were experts on the whole goddamn thing, like he and Eddie didn’t know how to speak for themselves because there was something wrong now with both of them. They couldn’t speak because of the war and had to have others define for them with their lovely words what they didn’t know anything about. He sat back, watching the men who ran the town as they walked back and forth on the speakers’ platform in their suits and ties, drinking their beer and talking about patriotism. It reminded him of the time in church a few Sundays before, when Father Bradley had suddenly pointed to him during the middle of the sermon, telling everyone he was a hero and a patriot in the eyes of God and his country for going to fight the Communists. “We must pray for brave boys like Ron Kovic,” said the priest. “And most of all,” he said, “we must pray for victory in Vietnam and peace throughout the world.” And when the service was over, people came to shake his hand and thank him for all he had done for God and his country, and he left the church feeling very sick and threw up in the parking lot.

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

  It is unsurprising that the inchoate sexual code of the Christian gospel—terse yet austere—came to a head here. More surprising are the extremes around which members of the Corinthian community had polarized, in full belief that their radically divergent views were consistent with the demands of the messianic religion. Such fundamental conflict was to characterize Christian thinking on sex into the fourth century, even as Paul’s views would exert a continuous and irresistible pull toward the compromise he forged in his fateful response to the crisis in Corinth. Paul’s approach in First Corinthians was shaped by his decision to steer a middle course between an element within the Christian church who tended toward libertinism and another group who espoused strict continence as an urgent ideal. Between those who said “All things are lawful for me” and others who insisted “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” Paul sought a defensible middle ground.11 Paul’s reply, because it is an epistolary intervention rather than a treatise on sexual ethics, assumes more than it reveals. In some sense the entire Christian conversation on sexuality has been a search for the unstated assumptions of Paul’s delicate guidance in the three central chapters of First Corinthians. At the core of Paul’s thought is the term porneia, fornication, a word packed with connotations less obvious to us than to his contemporary audience. Porneia is the cornerstone of the sexual ethics of First Corinthians. Paul’s whole attitude toward sex—not to mention his place in Jewish tradition and his distinctiveness against the backdrop of the Roman Empire—is destined to remain opaque unless we demystify the word porneia. It is not easy to do so, and a cottage industry has been devoted to unlocking the meaning of this primary Christian term. To translate it as “fornication” is mere convenience. Fornication is ecclesiastical argot—and always has been. Even in the astonishingly rich sexual vernacular of Latin, there was no word ready to hand to translate porneia, and an equivalent had to be hastily contrived. Fornicatio was derived from fornix, literally an arch and figuratively a den of venal sex. No classical author used the term fornicatio. Likewise, porneia has no classical pedigree. In classical Greek, porneia is the activity of prostituting oneself, not the institution of commercial sex or any class of forbidden acts. Before its adoption by religiously inspired sexual activists, porneia referred squarely to the production, not the consumption, of venal sex. Likewise, in classical Greek the pornos was the male prostitute—the gigolo, not the john. Tellingly, for Paul it was the reverse, and it can be confidently asserted that the meaning of porneia, for Paul, was not derived from the classical heritage.12

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

  Information is usually compartmentalized, to keep members from knowing the big picture. In larger groups, people are told only as much as they “need to know” in order to perform their jobs. A member in one city therefore does not necessarily know about an important legal decision, media story, or internal dispute that is creating turmoil in the group somewhere else. Cult members naturally feel they know more about what’s going on in their group than outsiders, but in counseling ex-members, I have found that they often know far less than almost anyone else. Moonies are often ignorant of their cult’s involvement in arms manufacture, and Scientologists of the imprisonment of eleven leaders for the largest infiltration of government agencies ever undertaken. Destructive organizations also control information by having many levels of “truth.” Cult ideologies often have “outsider” doctrines and “insider” doctrines. The outsider material is relatively bland stuff for the general public or new converts. The inner doctrines are gradually unveiled, as the person is more deeply involved and only when the person is deemed “ready” by superiors. For example, Moonies always said publicly that they were pro-American, pro-democracy and pro-family. The Moonies were pro-American, in that they wanted what they thought was best for America, which was to become a theocracy under Moon’s rule. They believed democracy was instituted by God to allow the Unification Church the space to organize a theocratic dictatorship. They were pro-family in believing that every human being’s true family was Moon, his wife and his spiritual children. Yet the inner doctrine was—and still is—that America is inferior to Korea and must become subservient to it; that democracy is a foolish system that “God is phasing out”;85 and that people must be cut off from their “physical” (as opposed to “spiritual”) families if they are at all critical of the cult. A member can sincerely believe that the outer doctrines are not lies, but just a different level of truth. By creating an environment where truth is multileveled, cult directors make it nearly impossible for a member to make definitive, objective assessments. If they have problems, they are told that they are not mature or advanced enough to know the whole truth yet. But they are assured that all will become clear shortly. If they work hard, they’ll earn the right to understand the higher levels of truth. But often there are many inner levels or layers of belief. Often an advanced member who thinks they know a cult’s complete doctrine is still several layers away from what the higher ups know. Questioners who insist on knowing too much too fast, of course, are redirected toward an external goal until they forget their objections or they object too loudly and are kicked out and vilified. Thought Control

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

  The cashier looked at me skeptically. “Wait your turn, boy. I’m still helping this lady.” “No,” I said. “She’s buying it for me.” My mother turned to me. “Who’s buying it for you?” “You’re buying it for me.” “No, no. Why doesn’t your mother buy it for you?” “What? My mother? You are my mother.” “I’m your mother? No, I’m not your mother. Where’s your mother?” I was so confused. “You’re my mother.” The cashier looked at her, looked back at me, looked at her again. She shrugged, like, I have no idea what that kid’s talking about. Then she looked at me like she’d never seen me before in her life. “Are you lost, little boy? Where’s your mother?” “Yeah,” the cashier said. “Where’s your mother?” I pointed at my mother. “She’s my mother.” “What? She can’t be your mother, boy. She’s black. Can’t you see?” My mom shook her head. “Poor little colored boy lost his mother. What a shame.” I panicked. Was I crazy? Is she not my mother? I started bawling. “You’re my mother. You’re my mother. She’s my mother. She’s my mother.” She shrugged again. “So sad. I hope he finds his mother.” The cashier nodded. She paid him, took our groceries, and walked out of the shop. I dropped the toffee apple, ran out behind her in tears, and caught up to her at the car. She turned around, laughing hysterically, like she’d really got me good. “Why are you crying?” she asked. “Because you said you weren’t my mother. Why did you say you weren’t my mother?” “Because you wouldn’t shut up about the toffee apple. Now get in the car. Let’s go.” By the time I was seven or eight, I was too smart to be tricked, so she changed tactics. Our life turned into a courtroom drama with two lawyers constantly debating over loopholes and technicalities. My mom was smart and had a sharp tongue, but I was quicker in an argument. She’d get flustered because she couldn’t keep up. So she started writing me letters. That way she could make her points and there could be no verbal sparring back and forth. If I had chores to do, I’d come home to find an envelope slipped under the door, like from the landlord. Dear Trevor, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” —Colossians 3:20 There are certain things I expect from you as my child and as a young man. You need to clean your room. You need to keep the house clean. You need to look after your school uniform. Please, my child, I ask you. Respect my rules so that I may also respect you. I ask you now, please go and do the dishes and do the weeds in the garden. Yours sincerely, Mom

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  She gave me her phone number and told me she had two kids and if I wasn’t doing anything the next week to drop by. She was a schoolteacher and her name was Helen. We called each other every day that week and one night I went over to her house. I kissed her in her driveway with the motor still running in my fancy Oldsmobile. It was the first time I had been close to a woman since Mexico. She called me the next day and told me she loved me. I thought it was pretty silly at first. I went up to the mountains with a group of Quakers soon after that. I remember staying up all night at a house near their training school. It was a house that belonged to this crippled guy—I think he’d had polio. His wife had divorced him, but she was up there that weekend in his house with her boyfriend, making it on the couch. The guy in the wheelchair wasn’t there, but even if he had been, they said he wouldn’t have minded. I remember they gave me his room to stay in, and there were shelves in it with hundreds of books. I stayed awake all night and when I finally got up the next morning I threw up in the toilet bowl. I was thinking about the guy’s wife on the couch with her boyfriend, and about Helen who said she loved me. I called her up as soon as I got back. It was really nice to have someone love me, I said, and I listened to her tell it to me again. I went over to her house that night and slept with her in her bed. She had this little room that was near the kitchen and she had a photograph in it, a wedding photograph of herself and her ex–old man all dressed up in the finest things. She said he was a drifter but she still cared about him. He just wasn’t responsible enough to take care of her and the two kids. I remember she played soft music on the radio. The whole thing gave me a funny empty feeling. I slept with her the second time just before I went back to New York. I told her I was leaving and that I would see her in a month or two. I didn’t tell her it bothered me that she was calling me all the time now telling me she loved me. I said I’d had enough of California. * * * I remember freaking out a couple of times when I got home, crying in front of my mother, telling her about the babies I had killed. I thought I was losing my mind. The dead corporal from Georgia was finally catching up with me and hanging me in almost all my dreams. Every day I woke up with a pain in my chest. I felt scared and shaky.

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

  The more sophisticated specimens of ancient romance, especially the works of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, are in such total command of the tradition that it is illuminating to consider how they exploit the tensions inherent in the standard repertoire of the genre. Leucippe and Clitophon is an arch melodrama, a wry, winking, sensational elaboration of the erotic romance. Its most notable idiosyncrasies form carefully wrought statements on the conventions of romantic literature. For example, the first two books of the novel are conducted according to the rules of classical pederasty, as Clitophon is tutored in seduction by his expert cousin Clinias. Achilles Tatius exploits the rich possibilities offered by this conceit. It allows him to burlesque Plato, and it serves as a kind of valediction to same-sex eros before the heterosexual romance is able to proceed. But the first two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are also a deliberate manipulation of the rules of the romantic genre, especially the delicate protocols of feminine respectability. The scenes of Clitophon’s tutelage in the arts of seduction call into question the distinction between volition and coercion, a distinction that is a foundational prop of the romantic genre. The classical model of pederasty, which institutionalized a certain amount of bluff and ambiguity around the question of the boy’s consent, provided a ready contrast to the strident unwillingness of the romantic heroine to consent to anything but marriage. Clinias tells Clitophon that “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force deflect the shame of consent.” If the girl’s resistance is “hearty,” Clinias warns not to use “force, because she is not yet persuaded.” But “as soon as her will begins to weaken, act your role in this play, lest your drama fail to reach its conclusion.” The theatrical metaphor is clever, for the astute reader will realize that Clinias does not know exactly what sort of drama he has been cast in. His assumptions about the will—as a murky and pliable thing—contradict the social grammar of female respectability and of the romance in general.18

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

  After a few years, Josh received “dharma transmission”—a formal endorsement to teach Zen—and was named one of Kennett’s “dharma heirs.” Josh noted, “I could set up my own Zen center if I wanted, but it was also obvious to me that I wasn’t enlightened. Maybe I was a tiny bit enlightened. I was a little bit more than a beginner, but, frankly, at most, I was an advanced beginner. I wasn’t any kind of master. I wasn’t a guru.” After those initial years, Kennett changed. She was suffering from chronic illness, and her friendly manner disappeared. She became authoritarian and self-aggrandizing. As Shasta Abbey grew, so did her grandiosity. Eventually, she demanded absolute loyalty from everyone. No one was permitted to question or challenge her. “I think she was frankly stressed out and didn’t know what to do,” Josh observed. “The way I saw it was that she came to the end of what she knew how to teach. She only had three or four years of experience in Japan and a very limited insight…In her mind, she had to be this fully enlightened Buddha.” Not surprisingly, the group changed as well. It became more institutional, hierarchical, and rigid. Eventually, loyalty became the group’s absolute value. Even the slightest questioning of Kennett would provoke an extreme reaction. Monks would be yelled at, punished or demoted. However, Kennett’s rages were seen as skillful, ego-busting Zen teachings. The only acceptable response was to bow and accept the emotional attack. Josh thought the Buddhist teachings were great, and he still liked some of what Kennett taught. But he was dogged by questions. Why is this place so toxic? Why is Kennett abusive and cruel and cold? If she’s so enlightened, why is she such a bully? Is this genuinely Zen, or is it a complex and confused mess of half-baked Zen, monotheism, occultism, and self-adoration—a very strange personality cult? Eventually, in 1976, Josh knew it was time to leave. At the time, he was president of the organization, the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. There weren’t any prohibitions against leaving, but senior members who had left earlier were invariably vilified as failures and losers, too weak to follow the Soto Zen path. But in Zen there is something called angya, a kind of pilgrimage or walkabout in which longtime practitioners go away for an extended period. Josh told Kennett that, after much personal meditation and reflection, he felt that it was time to do an extended angya. She acquiesced, but she was obviously not happy—and from that day on, she tried to persuade Josh to cancel or delay his trip. But Josh held firm to his decision. A week before his departure, Kennett invited Josh to tea. She said she wanted to give him a “going-away present.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day—I suppose purely to amuse himself—he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn’t part with it for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt—which by the way she never referred to at all—as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labeled fuck. You might diddle and piddle, but you might not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn’t really think because your mind was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theater on which the owner has left his opera hat. Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at mealtimes to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.

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

  All three of Babiki’s older sisters spoke English, and her younger sister Lerato spoke a little. So whenever we hung out with Babiki and her sisters and their friends, a lot of the conversation was in English. The rest of it was going right by me in Pedi or in Sotho, but that’s completely normal in South Africa so it never bothered me; I got enough of the gist of the conversation from everyone’s English to know what was going on. And the way my mind works with language, even when I’m hearing other languages, they get filtered into English as I’m hearing them. My mind stores them in English. When my grandmother and great-grandmother were hysterically praying to God to destroy the demon that had shit on their kitchen floor, all of that transpired in Xhosa, but it’s stored in English. I remember it as English. So whenever I lay in bed at night dreaming about Babiki and the moments we’d spent together, I felt like it had transpired in English because that’s how I remembered it. And Tom had never said anything about what language she spoke or didn’t speak, because why would he care? He just wanted to get his free CDs and get with the sister. Which is how I’d been dating a girl for over a month—the girl I very much believed was my first girlfriend—without ever having had a single conversation with her. Now the whole night came rushing back and I saw it from her point of view, and it was perfectly obvious to me why she didn’t want to get out of the car. She probably hadn’t wanted to go to the dance with me in the first place; she probably owed Tom a favor, and Tom can talk anyone into anything. Then I’d left her sitting and waiting for me for an hour and she was pissed off. Then she got into the car and it was the first time we had ever been alone, and she realized I couldn’t even hold a conversation with her. I’d driven her around and gotten lost in the dark—a young girl alone in a car in the middle of nowhere with some strange guy, no idea where I was taking her. She was probably terrified. Then we got to the dance and she didn’t speak anyone’s language. She didn’t know anyone. She didn’t even know me. Bongani and I stood outside the car, staring at each other. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to her in every language I knew. Nothing worked. She only spoke Pedi. I got so desperate that I started trying to talk to her using hand signals. “Please. You. Me. Inside. Dance. Yes?” “No.” “Inside. Dance. Please?” “No.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.” For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.” Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal—not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later. Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the Voice, and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake. Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other. Sexually, they seemed to be on the same level. She couldn’t tell if this was disappointing to him or not. And the money issue was beginning to disturb her again, now that she was working for the magazine. He’s not someone who comes to my house and is nice to me, she thought as she lay alone in bed. He’s someone who pays me to fuck him. She had an image of herself, sprawled half on and half off a bed at Christine’s, her upside-down head patiently looking back at her from the mirror as some galoot humped her. This vision blended discordantly with the idea of herself at her desk at the magazine and she was unable to separate them. Despite this ambiguity, she was curiously reluctant to drop the affair. He only saw her once or twice a week, he was not demanding, he liked her favorite authors and was somehow very reassuring. Reassuring of what, she didn’t know, but it was connected to her old feeling that he thought of her as a representative of the exciting avant-garde—although it also seemed that if he had any brains at all, he would’ve realized by now that she was just a bewildered human. “I think I know why you go to places like Christine’s,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or lent me money, as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about. Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically nonexistent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to everyone else. I couldn’t afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way—the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come! The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practiced by certain low forms of life, the marvelous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round.

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

  Each component has a powerful effect on the other two: change one, and the others will tend to follow. Succeed in changing all three, and the individual will be swept away. However, from my experience in researching destructive cults, I have added one more component that is vital: control of information. If you control the information someone receives, you restrict his ability to think for himself. These four components of mind control serve as the basic reference points for understanding how mind control works. Cognitive dissonance theory is not as forbidding as its name might sound. In 1950, Festinger summarized its basic principle this way: “If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance.”84 What did Festinger mean by “dissonance?” In basic terms, he was referring to the conflict that occurs when a thought, a feeling or a behavior is altered in contradiction to the other two. A person can tolerate only a certain amount of discrepancy between his thoughts, feelings and actions, which after all make up the different components of his identity. Festinger’s theory states—and a great deal of later research has confirmed—that if any one of the three components changes, the other two will shift to reduce the dissonance. How does this kind of shift apply to the behavior of people in cults? Festinger looked for a place to examine his ideas in the real world. In 1956 he published a book, When Prophecy Fails, about a Wisconsin flying saucer cult, whose leader had predicted the end of the world. The cult leader claimed to be in mental contact with aliens from another planet. Followers sold their homes, gave away their money, and stood at the appointed date on a mountainside, waiting all night to be picked up by flying saucers before a flood destroyed the world the next morning. When morning came with no saucers and no flood—just a spate of satirical news stories about the group—the followers might have been expected to become disillusioned and angry. And a few did—but they were fringe members who had not invested much time or energy. Most members, however, became more convinced than ever. Their leader proclaimed that the aliens had witnessed their faithful vigil and decided to spare the Earth. Members wound up feeling more committed to the leader, even after they took a dramatic public stance that resulted in public humiliation. Most Jehovah’s Witnesses responded to the failure of the group’s many prophecies of the end of the world with renewed faith. Cognitive dissonance theory helps explain why this heightened commitment occurred. According to Festinger, people need to maintain order and meaning in their life. They need to think they are acting according to their self-image and their own values. If their behavior changes for any reason, their self-image and values change to match. The important thing to recognize about cult groups is that they deliberately create dissonance in people this way and exploit it to control them.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  They got to the place where the march was to begin and he saw the cub scouts and the girl scouts, the marching bands, the fathers in their Legion caps and uniforms, the mothers from the Legion’s auxilliary, the pretty drum majorettes. The street was a sea of red, white, and blue. He remembered how he and all the rest of the kids on the block had put on their cub scout uniforms and marched every Memorial Day down these same streets. He remembered the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks, everyone standing and cheering and waving their small flags, his mother standing with the other mothers on the block shouting for him to keep in step. “There’s my Yankee Doodle boy!” he’d hear her shouting, and he’d feel embarrassed, pulling his cap over his eyes like he always did. There were scouts decorating the Cadillac now with red, white, and blue crepe paper and long paper banners that read WELCOME HOME RON KOVIC AND EDDIE DUGAN and SUPPORT OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM. There was a small sign, too, that read: OUR WOUNDED VIETNAM VETS . . . EDDIE DUGAN AND RON KOVIC. When the scouts were finished, the commander came running over to the car with a can of beer in his hand. “Let’s go!” he shouted, jumping back in with the heavy guy. They drove slowly through the crowd until they were all the way up in the front of the parade. He could hear the horns and drums behind him and he looked out and watched the pretty drum majorettes and clowns dancing in the street. He looked out onto the sidewalks where the people from his town had gathered just like when he was a kid. But it was different. He couldn’t tell at first exactly what it was, but something was not the same, they weren’t waving and they just seemed to be standing staring at Eddie Dugan and himself like they weren’t even there. It was as if they were ghosts like little Johnny Heanon or Billy Morris come back from the dead. And he couldn’t understand what was happening. Maybe, he thought, the banners, the ones the boy scouts and their fathers had put up, the ones telling the whole town who Eddie Dugan and he were, maybe, he thought, they had dropped off into the street and no one knew who they were and that’s why no one was waving. If the signs had been there, they’d have been flooding into the streets, stomping their feet and screaming and cheering the way they did for him and Eddie at the Little League games. They’d have been swelling into the streets, trying to shake their hands just like in the movies, when the boys had come

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

  Opinion has been divided about the judgment of the author who included a copy of this law in his comparison of Mosaic and Roman jurisprudence. Was the spirit of the Theodosian constitution, indeed, akin to religious injunctions against same-sex love, or was the compiler overreaching in his effort to bend the law into a point of contact between the “spirit of Moses” and the Roman state? In other words, was the Theodosian measure inspired by religious homophobia, or by the immemorial ideals of Roman manhood? On the one hand, the attack came at a moment pregnant with change, as Theodosius I was transforming the Roman state into a Christian one, and the official conflagration of a whole class of sexual outcasts was uncharacteristic of Roman jurisprudence. On the other hand, the language of the law could not possibly be more emphatic about its roots in Roman tradition, and it would be a dodge to explain this rhetoric as a cloak for a clandestine Christian agenda. The official who actually drafted the language of the law was, in fact, one of the most visible pagans around the court. But most tellingly, the object of regulation was sexual passivity, and in the form of public prostitution. The categories of regulation are fundamentally, undeniably Roman.10 The chemistry of the Theodosian measure was complex, and it simply cannot be broken down into discrete proportions of the constituent elements, classical masculinity and unfamiliar malevolence. The law raises the most profound questions about the passage from an ancient legal and cultural regime, whose protocols required men to play the dominant role in sexual encounters, to a legal and cultural regime that treated the gender of the participants as the primary fact of any sexual conjunction. The gradual transition from a classical to a Christian regulatory system produced many complex harmonies along the way, of which the law of 390 is a signal example. It can only be explained by considering the maturation of Christian attitudes toward same-sex eros. In late antiquity Christian opposition to same-sex love developed far beyond the brief, violent injunctions of the scriptural tradition that ascribed the habits of same-sex eroticism to the fallen confusion of polytheistic cultures. The eradication of sexual sin became the object of a nascent penitential discipline; simultaneously, same-sex love became pathologized to an unprecedented degree, spoken of as a disease that threatened to contaminate the body politic. Indeed, a new concern for the sexual behavior of the populace as such grows up in the fourth century. At the same time, the process of legal change cannot be understood apart from the specific mechanisms and traditions of regulation in Roman law, the place of prostitution in the public order, and the subtle institutional shifts in late antiquity that enabled more aggressive attempts at the legal control of sexual morality. In short, a host of much broader changes within Christianity and within the state converged to ignite the awful blaze of 390.11