Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 238 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But Hesiod altered the story by adding the Heroic Age, which he inserted between the Bronze Age and the current Age of Iron, the worst era of all. In the Golden Age, at the very beginning of human history, there had been no gulf between men and gods; human beings had lived happy lives, and knew neither sickness nor old age. Death came to them as naturally and as peacefully as sleep. They did not have to work for their living, because “the fertile land gave up its fruits unasked.” This race passed, so the Olympian gods fashioned a Silver race of human beings, who took a very long time to mature, but when they eventually reached their prime lived “brief, anguished lives,” dominated by hubris. They “could not control themselves” and recklessly, heedlessly exploited and injured one another, neglecting the worship of the gods. Angrily, Zeus replaced them with the men of Bronze, who were even worse. They were “strange and full of power,” addicted to “the groans and violence of war,” “terrible men,” their hearts “flinty hard,” their limbs massive and invincible. This society was so self-indulgent and aggressive that the men of the Bronze Age eventually destroyed one another. So Zeus made the race of Heroes. These men were demigods, “just and good,” who turned their backs on the hubris of their forebears, but even so, they fought the terrible Trojan War, which finally destroyed them. Now the heroes lived on in the Blessed Isles at the very edge of the world. The Heroic Age was succeeded by the Age of Iron, the contemporary era. Ours was a world turned upside down, lurching toward inevitable destruction. Life was hard and hopeless. “By day, men work and grieve unceasingly,” Hesiod reflected; “by night they waste away and die.” 50 But the gods still granted human beings some blessings. In the Iron Age, good and evil, pain and pleasure were inseparable: people could eat and thrive only if they engaged ceaselessly in backbreaking toil. It was a time of ambiguity and ambivalence. Everything was mixed up together. But the men of Iron had a choice. They must either submit to the demands of justice or abandon themselves to the aristocratic sin of hubris. If they neglected dike, they would witness the triumph of evil, where might was right, where fathers felt nothing for their sons, where children despised their aged parents, and the old brotherly love of past ages would vanish. “Nothing will be any longer as it was in days past.” 51 The moral of the story was clear. Those races that practiced social justice were loved and honored by the gods. The violent warriors of the Bronze Age were killed; the heroes were transported to a happy, carefree life. Justice brought mortals closer to the gods, so they must behave decently to one another, and honor the Olympians in sacrifice. They must also know their place. The Age of Heroes was over.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  After she slaughtered the enemies of Baal, god of life-giving rain, she adorned herself with rouge and henna, made a necklace of the hands and heads of her victims, and waded knee-deep in blood to attend the triumphal banquet. 37 These violent myths reflected the political realities of agrarian life. By the beginning of the ninth millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct. 38 In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft. 39 Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression has been described as possibly “the most subtle form of violence,” 40 and, according to the World Council of Churches, it is present whenever “resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.” 41 Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history. Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. 42 Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter- gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  About three thousand civilians were killed in the first three months—roughly the same number as had died in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington on September 11. Thousands more displaced Afghans would die later in refugee camps. 83 As the war dragged on, the casualties became catastrophic: it has been estimated that 16,179 Afghan civilians perished between 2006 and 2012. 84 There was a second wave of terrorist incidents, directed by the “ second generation” of al-Qaeda, which included the failed plot of British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid (December 2001), the Djerba bombing in Tunisia (April 2002), and the Bali nightclub attack (October 2002), which killed over two hundred people. After Iyman Faris’s foiled plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents. 85 But just as the situation seemed to be improving, in March 2003, the United States, Britain, and their allies invaded Iraq, despite considerable opposition from the international community and strong protests throughout the Muslim world. The reasons for this invasion were allegations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had furnished support for al-Qaeda, both of which eventually proved to be groundless. Again, the United States presented itself as the bearer of freedom. “If we must use force,” Bush had promised the American people, “the United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq.” 86 “We don’t seek an empire,” he insisted on another occasion. “Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.” 87 Cheered on by such neoimperialist intellectuals as Niall Ferguson, the Bush regime believed that it could use the colonial methods of invasion and occupation for purposes of liberation. 88 America would force Iraq into the free global economy and change the politics of the Middle East by creating a liberal, democratic, and pro-Western Arab state, one that would also support Israel, embrace market capitalism, and at the same time provide the United States with a military base and access to vast oil reserves. On May 1, 2003, Bush’s Viking jet swooped onto the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, where the president announced a victorious end to the Iraq War.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Hesiod also fixed the place of human beings in the divine scheme, by telling the story of the Titan Prometheus.54 During the Golden Age, gods and human beings had lived on equal terms and had regularly feasted together. But at the end of the Golden Age, the gods began to recede from the world of men; now the only way for humans to maintain contact with the Olympians was the ritual of animal sacrifice, when gods and men consumed their allotted portions of the victim. But Prometheus thought that the arrangement was unfair and wanted to help humans to improve their lot. After one of these sacrifices, he tried to trick Zeus into accepting the inedible bones of the victim, so that men could enjoy the meat. But Zeus saw through the ruse: gods did not need food; they could sustain themselves on the smoke that rose when the victim’s bones were burned on the altar. Sacrifice, therefore, revealed the gods’ superiority to mortals, who could survive only by eating the flesh of dead animals. Angered by Prometheus’s crafty stratagem, Zeus decided to penalize humans by depriving them of the fire they needed to cook their food. Yet again, Prometheus defied him, stole the fire, and gave it back to humanity. Zeus took his revenge by chaining Prometheus to a pillar, and this time he punished humans by sending them a woman who had been put together by the divine craftsman Hephaestus. In the Golden Age, there had been no division between the sexes; humans had not been defined by gender. Pandora, the first woman, was a “beautiful evil.” She carried a jar that she opened “and scattered pains and sufferings among men.” Men were fatally paired with womankind, who brought sickness, old age, and suffering into their world. This is one of the few overtly misogynous moments of the Axial Age. Hesiod intended it to illustrate the ambiguous nature of life in the Iron Age, representing humanity’s fall from grace.55 Henceforth good and evil were inextricably combined. Sacrifice brought men and gods together, but it also revealed the impassable distinction between them. Suffering was now an inescapable fact of life—a major theme of the Axial Age. In India, the sages were determined to create the spiritual technology that would enable human beings to transcend pain and mortality. Hesiod had no such ambition. Indeed, he was convinced that men should not seek to ascend to the divine world. The story of Prometheus put humans firmly in their place, midway between gods and animals and surrounded on all sides by the evils released by Pandora. Men of the Iron Age could not escape their suffering. They might want to rebel like Prometheus, but hubris was self-destructive: all that Prometheus’s rebellion had achieved was pain for himself and ceaseless toil for humanity.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Heroic Age was succeeded by the Age of Iron, the contemporary era. Ours was a world turned upside down, lurching toward inevitable destruction. Life was hard and hopeless. “By day, men work and grieve unceasingly,” Hesiod reflected; “by night they waste away and die.”50 But the gods still granted human beings some blessings. In the Iron Age, good and evil, pain and pleasure were inseparable: people could eat and thrive only if they engaged ceaselessly in backbreaking toil. It was a time of ambiguity and ambivalence. Everything was mixed up together. But the men of Iron had a choice. They must either submit to the demands of justice or abandon themselves to the aristocratic sin of hubris. If they neglected dike, they would witness the triumph of evil, where might was right, where fathers felt nothing for their sons, where children despised their aged parents, and the old brotherly love of past ages would vanish. “Nothing will be any longer as it was in days past.”51 The moral of the story was clear. Those races that practiced social justice were loved and honored by the gods. The violent warriors of the Bronze Age were killed; the heroes were transported to a happy, carefree life. Justice brought mortals closer to the gods, so they must behave decently to one another, and honor the Olympians in sacrifice. They must also know their place. The Age of Heroes was over. It was, therefore, Hesiod implied—though he did not explicitly say so—time to abandon the old, self-destructive warrior ethos. The men of Iron could not behave as if they were Achilles or Odysseus; they were mere farmers, tillers of the soil, involved in a humbler kind of strife (eris), the struggle with the land. Instead of trying to emulate their rivals’ military prowess, they should be spurred on to healthy competition with a neighbor who had produced a good crop. This was the strife that made the farmer dear to the gods. This period of history was different from the Golden Age, when there had been no need to plow a field. In the Iron Age, Zeus had decreed that men could thrive only if they accomplished the hard, disciplined toil of husbandry, which was a form of sacrifice, a daily act of devotion to the gods.52

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The battle was this sacrifice; its victims—the warriors who died during the fighting—would put history back on track, by returning the sovereignty to Yudishthira. But the war could not be won by ordinary means: Drona and Bhishma, Krishna pointed out, were supermen who “could not have been slain in a fair fight.” 69 His desperate stratagems were like the special ritual procedures employed by a priest to put the sacrifice back on course. In terms of the old Vedic ethos, Krishna’s argument was impeccable; he was even able to cite the precedent of Indra, who had resorted to a similar lie when he slew the monster Vritra and brought order out of chaos. But Yudishthira was a man of the Axial Age, and was not convinced by this archaic ritual lore. He was inconsolable. Throughout the poem, he persisted in his despairing cry: “Nothing is more evil than the kshatriya’s dharma.” 70 Warfare was not a blood sacrifice acceptable to the gods; it was an atrocity. The epic story showed that violence bred more violence; and that one dishonorable betrayal led to another. Crazed with sorrow, Drona’s son Aswatthaman vowed to avenge his father’s death, and offered himself to Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous people of India, as “self-sacrifice” (atmayajna). His martyrdom was a horrible parody of the nonviolent renunciation of self practiced by the renouncers. Shiva handed Aswatthaman a glittering sword, and took possession of his body, which now shone with unearthly radiance. In a divine frenzy, Aswatthaman entered the Pandavas’ camp while everybody was asleep, and began to slaughter his enemies in a raid that was as dishonorable as Yudishthira’s betrayal of his father. Aswatthaman was a Brahmin; he experienced the massacre as a holy ritual, but in fact it was a sacrifice that was out of control. In Vedic ritual, the animal was supposed to be killed swiftly and painlessly. But when Aswatthaman seized his first victim—the man who had decapitated his father—he kicked him to death, refusing to finish him quickly, and “made him die the death of an animal . . . grinding off his head.” 71 The Pandava brothers escaped the raid, because Krishna had advised them to sleep outside the camp that night, but most of their family—including the children—were slaughtered. When the Pandavas finally caught up with Aswatthaman, they found him sitting serenely beside the Ganges in a ritual garment, in classic Brahminical pose, with a group of renouncers. As soon as he saw the Pandavas, Aswatthaman plucked a blade of grass and transformed it into a brahmasiris, a weapon of mass destruction, which he released with the cry “Apandavaga!”—“For the annihilation of the Pandavas!” There was an immediate fiery conflagration that threatened to engulf the world.

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

  It is not only those technically classed imbeciles and dements who exhibit this promptitude of impulse and tardiness of inhibition. Ask half the common drunkards you know why it is that they fall so often a prey to temptation, and they will say that most of the time they cannot tell. It is a sort of vertigo with them. Their nervous centres have become a sluice-way pathologically unlocked by every passing conception of a bottle and a glass. They do not thirst for the beverage; the taste of it may even appear repugnant; and they perfectly foresee the morrow's remorse. But when they think of the liquor or see it, they find themselves preparing to drink, and do not stop themselves: and more than this they cannot say. Similarly a man may lead a life of incessant love-making or sexual indulgence, though what spurs him thereto seems rather to be suggestions and notions of possibility than any overweening strength in his affections or lusts. He may even be physically impotent all the while. The paths of natural (or it may be unnatural) impulse are so pervious in these characters that the slightest rise in the level of innervation produces an overflow. It is the condition recognized in pathology as 'irritable weakness.' The phase known as nascency or latency is so short in the excitement of the neural tissues that there is no opportunity for strain or tension to accumulate within them; and the consequence is that with all the agitation and activity, the amount of real feeling engaged may be very small. The hysterical temperament is the playground par excellence of this unstable equilibrium. One of these subjects will be filled with what seems the most genuine and settled aversion to a certain line of conduct, and the very next instant follow the stirring of temptation and plunge in it up to the neck. Professor Ribot well gives the name of 'Le Règne des Caprices' to the chapter in which he describes the hysterical temperament in his interesting little monograph 'The Diseases of the Will.' Disorderly and impulsive conduct may, on the other hand, come about where the neural tissues preserve their proper inward tone, and where the inhibitory power is normal or even unusually great. In such cases the strength of the impulsive idea is preternaturally exalted, and what would be for most people the passing suggestion of a possibility becomes a gnawing, craving urgency to act. Works on insanity are full of examples of these morbid insistent ideas, in obstinately struggling against which the unfortunate victim's soul often sweats with agony, ere at last it gets swept away. One instance will stand for many; M. Ribot quotes it from Calmeil:[489]

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Unlike the Confucians, Mozi had nothing positive to say about war. From a poor man’s perspective, it made no sense at all. Warfare ruined harvests, killed multitudes of civilians, and wasted weapons and horses. Rulers claimed that the conquest of more territory enriched the state and made it more secure, but in fact only a tiny proportion of the population benefited, and the capture of a small town could result in such heavy casualties that there was nobody left to farm the land.77 Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order. But humans were egotists: they would adopt jian ai only if they were convinced by irrefutable arguments that their own well-being depended on the welfare of the entire human race, so that jian ai was essential to their own prosperity, peace, and security.78 Hence The Book of Mozi included the first Chinese exercises in logic, all dedicated to proving that warfare was not in a ruler’s best interests. In words that still ring true today, Mozi insisted that the only way out of the destructive cycle of warfare was for rulers “not to be concerned for themselves alone.”79 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] In ancient China, Mozi was revered more than Confucius, because he spoke so directly to the problems of this violent time. By the fifth century, the small principalities were surrounded by seven large Warring States—Jin, which had split into the three kingdoms of Han, Wei, and Zhao; Qi, Qin, and its neighbor Shu in the west; and Chu in the south. Their huge armies, iron weaponry, and lethal crossbows were so formidable that any state that could not match them was doomed.80 Their engineers built defensive walls and fortresses manned by professional garrisons along their frontiers. Supported by strong economies, their armies fought with a deadly efficiency based on unified command, skillful strategy, and trained troops. Brutally pragmatic, they had no time for ren or ritual, and in battle they spared no one: “all who have or keep any strength are our enemies, even if they are old men,” one commander maintained.81 Yet on purely pragmatic grounds, their new military experts advised against excessive plunder and violence,82 and in their campaigns they were careful not to endanger agricultural output, the state’s primary resource.83 Warfare was no longer a courtly game governed by li to curb aggression; instead it had become a science, governed by logic, reason, and cold calculation.84

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  For centuries, the Hittites and Egyptians had divided the Near East between them. The Egyptians had controlled the whole of southern Syria, Phoenicia, and Canaan, while the Hittites had ruled Asia Minor and Anatolia. By 1130, Egypt had lost most of its foreign provinces; the Hittite capital was in ruins; the large Canaanite ports of Ugarit, Megiddo, and Hazor had been devastated; and in Greece, the Mycenaean kingdom had disintegrated. Desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed the region in search of employment and security. The terrible finality of the crisis made an indelible impression on everybody who had experienced it. Two of the Axial peoples emerged during the ensuing dark age. A new Greek civilization rose from the rubble of Mycenae, and a confederation of tribes called Israel appeared in the highlands of Canaan. Because this really was a dark age, with few historical records, we know very little about either Greece or Israel during this period. Until the ninth century, we have virtually no reliable information about the Greeks, and only a few, fragmentary glimpses of early Israel. The collapse of Canaan had been very gradual. 85 The large city-states of the coastal plain, which had been part of the Egyptian empire since the fifteenth century, disintegrated one by one as Egypt withdrew—a process that could have taken over a century. Again, we do not know why the cities collapsed after the Egyptians left. There may have been conflict between the urban elite and the peasants who farmed the land on which the economy depended. There could have been social unrest within the cities, or rivalries between the city-states as Egyptian power declined. But the fall of these cities had one important effect. Shortly before 1200, a network of new settlements was established in the highlands, stretching from the lower Galilee in the north to Beersheba in the south. 86 These villages were not imposing: they had no city walls; were not fortified; had no grand public buildings, palaces, or temples; and kept no archives. The modest, uniform houses indicate that this was an egalitarian society, where wealth was fairly evenly distributed. The inhabitants had to struggle with a stony, difficult terrain. Their economy was based on cereal crops and herding, yet it seems from the archaeological record that the settlements prospered. During the eleventh century, there was a population explosion in the highlands that peaked at about eighty thousand. Scholars agree that the inhabitants of the villages were the people of “Israel” mentioned in the victory stele of Pharaoh Mernepteh (c. 1210). This is the first nonbiblical mention of Israel, and it indicates that by this time, the inhabitants of the highlands were regarded by their enemies as distinct from the Canaanites, Hurrians, and Bedouins who also inhabited the country.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  As he walked down the road to Magadha, Gotama probably hailed other renouncers in the usual way, asking who their master was and what dhamma they followed, because he was looking for a teacher to instruct him in the rudiments of “homelessness.” First he studied in Vaishali with two of the greatest yogins of the day, Alara Kalama and Uddalaka Ramaputta. He was an excellent pupil, and to the delight of his teachers soon achieved the very highest states of trance, but he could not accept their interpretations of these experiences. They followed the teachings of Samkhya, and believed that once they had entered these peak planes of the psyche, they had liberated the purusha from the bonds of nature. But Gotama, all his life, had been skeptical of metaphysical doctrines: How could this trance be the unconditioned and uncreated purusha when he knew perfectly well that he had manufactured it for himself, by his yogic expertise? Further, when he returned to himself, he found that there had been no real transformation. He was still his unregenerate, greedy, yearning self. His trance was not nibbana, because nibbana could not be temporary. Gotama had no problem with yoga, but he would not accept interpretations that did not coincide with his own experience.73 Gotama left his teachers and joined a group of ascetics. With them he practiced severe extremities that gravely damaged his health. He lay on a mattress of spikes, ate his own urine and feces, and fasted so rigorously that his bones stuck out “like a row of spindles . . . or the beams of an old shed.” At one point, he became so weak that he was left for dead beside the road.74 But all to no avail. However severe his penances—perhaps even because of them—his body still clamored for attention, and he continued to be plagued by the lust and cravings that bound him to the grim cycle of rebirth. There was no hint of the peace and liberation he sought.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Each action led to a new round of duties that bound him to the inexorable cycle of samsara. The only way to find release was to “go forth” into the forest and become a hermit or a mendicant, who had none of these tasks. People in India did not regard the renouncers as feeble dropouts, but revered them as intrepid pioneers, who, at considerable cost to themselves, were trying to find a spiritual solution for humanity. Because of the prevailing despair in the region, many were longing for a Jina, a spiritual conqueror, or a Buddha, an Enlightened One, who had “woken up” to a different dimension of existence. The spiritual malaise was exacerbated by a social crisis. Like the Greeks, the peoples of north India were undergoing major political and economic change. The Vedic system had been the spirituality of a highly mobile society, engaged in constant migration. But by the sixth and fifth centuries, people were settling down in ever larger permanent communities and were seriously engaged in agriculture. The introduction of iron technology, including the heavy plow, made it possible to reclaim more fields, to irrigate them, and to clear the dense forests. The villages were now surrounded by carefully supervised plots of land with a network of ditches. New crops were produced: fruit, rice, cereal, sesame, millet, wheat, grains, and barley. Farmers were becoming richer. 104 There was also political development. By the end of the sixth century, the small chiefdoms had been absorbed into larger units. The largest of these new kingdoms were Magadha in the southeast and Kosala in the southwest. They were ruled by kings who had, very gradually, imposed their rule by force and had slowly changed the old patterns of allegiance from clan loyalty to an incipient patriotism that focused on territory rather than kinship. As a result, the kshatriya warrior class, which was responsible for defense and administration, had become even more prominent. The new kings were no longer as deferential to the Brahmins as their forebears had been, though they might still pay lip service to the older ideals. Monarchy was not the only form of government. To the east of the new kingdoms, a number of differently run states had also emerged, ruled by an assembly ( sangha ) of the elders of the old clans ( ganas ).

• From Cultish (2021)

  Both Applewhite and Jones kept their followers from conversing not only with the outside world but also with each other. It didn’t take long after settling in Jonestown for Peoples Templers to notice that this Promised Land was a sham. But bonding over their shared misery? Not allowed. Jones enforced a “quiet rule ,” so whenever his voice played over the camp PA system (which was often), no one was allowed to talk. In Heaven’s Gate, too, followers’ speech was heavily monitored. Frank Lyford remembers that everyone was expected to speak at a low volume, or not at all, so that they wouldn’t disturb other members. No communication, no solidarity. No chance to figure a way out. iv.Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a placebo pill. And there are a host of reasons why it might be likelier to “work” on certain people and not others. We’ll investigate some of these factors throughout this book, but one of them has to do with a type of conditioning most of us have experienced: the conditioning to automatically trust the voices of middle-aged white men. Over the centuries, we’ve been primed to believe that the sound of a Jim Jones–type voice communicates an innate power and capability—that it sounds like the voice of God. In fact, during the heyday of television broadcasting, there was a known style of delivery labeled “the voice of God ,” which applied to the deep, booming, exaggerated baritones of newscasters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. It doesn’t take much analysis to notice that the voices of history’s most destructive “cult leaders” largely fit this description. That’s because when a white man speaks confidently in public about big topics like God and government, many listeners are likely to listen by default—to hear the deep pitch and “standard” English dialect and trust it without much questioning. They fail to nitpick either the delivery or the content, even if the message itself is suspect. In Lindy West’s essay collection The Witches Are Coming , there is a chapter titled “Ted Bundy Wasn’t Charming—Are You High?,” which criticizes America’s frightfully low standards for men’s charisma. As long as someone is white, male, and telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll follow even “the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe,” West says. Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy. Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland. Even racist fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones. Admittedly, it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific dange r. Jonestown, cult scholars agree, was a singularly extraordinary tragedy, which had never happened before and remains unreplicated to this day.

• From Cultish (2021)

  But the attraction is often more complex than ego or desperation, having more to do with a person’s stake in the promises they were originally told. In Jonestown, for instance, the reason why Black women perished in disproportionate numbers on that fateful day in 1978 was not that their despair made them easier to “brainwash.” The targets of a complicated political storm, Black women in the ’70s had an extremely hard time amplifying their voices above those of the white (often unwelcoming) second-wave feminist activists, as well as the civil rights movement’s mostly male leaders. Jim Jones, who had ties to all the right people (Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the reactionary Nation of Islam, many left-leaning Black pastors in San Francisco, not to mention his own “Rainbow Family”), seemed to offer a rare opportunity to be heard. “Black women were especially vulnerable because of their history of sexist/racist exploitation, as well as their long tradition of spearheading social justice activism in the church,” explains Sikivu Hutchinson. The reason so many of these women died was because they had so much to gain from a movement that turned out to be a lie. Laura Johnston Kohl readily admitted that no one forced her to buy what Jim Jones was selling; she willingly heard the buzzwords and thought-terminators she wanted to hear and tuned out the rest. “I was [in Jonestown] for political reasons, so Jim thought, ‘Every time I see Laura sitting in a meeting, I have to address politics.’ I let him address my priorities, and put blinders on for other things,” she told me. Letting people tell us only what we want to hear is something we all do. It’s classic confirmation bias: an ingrained human reasoning flaw defined by the propensity to look for, interpret, accept, and remember information in a way that validates (and strengthens) our existing beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing anything that controverts them. Experts agree that not even the most logical minds—not even scientists—can escape confirmation bias completely. Common human irrationalities like hypochondria, prejudice, and paranoia are all forms of confirmation bias, where every little thing that happens can be interpreted as an illness, a reason to deride a whole demographic of people, or proof that something is out to get you. This phenomenon also explains why, to a willing listener, even the vaguest astrological horoscopes, psychic readings, and indistinctly “relatable” social media posts seem to resonate uniquely.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There ensued a series of disasters. The Athenian navy was blockaded in the harbor at Syracuse, and the troops were incarcerated in nearby stone quarries. At a stroke, Athens lost about forty thousand men and half its fleet. In 411, a pro-Spartan cabal overturned the democratic government in Athens. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was restored the following year, but it was a sign of Athens’s new vulnerability. The war with Sparta continued until 405, when the Spartan general Lysander forced Athens to surrender. Yet again, an oligarchy was established under a government of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who killed so many citizens in the ensuing reign of terror that it was overthrown, and democracy reestablished after only a year. Athens had regained its independence, its democracy, and its fleet, but its power was broken, the empire dismantled, and Pericles’ great defensive wall demolished. Against this terrifying backcloth, two great tragedies were enacted in Athens. Just before Athens conceded defeat in 406, Euripides died, and his final dark, bitter plays, lurid with a sense of looming catastrophe, were performed posthumously. The last was The Bacchae, presented in 402.42 As the play opened, the god Dionysus arrived incognito in Thebes, the city that had rejected his mother, Semele, when she had fallen pregnant, and had consistently prohibited his cult. But now most Thebans were enchanted by the fascinating stranger who had suddenly turned up in their midst. The women of the city, who had not been properly initiated into the Dionysian mystery, abandoned themselves to unbridled frenzy, roaming through the woods, clad in animal pelts. The young king Pentheus tried to restore order, but to no avail. Eventually he allowed himself to be dressed in women’s clothes so that he could spy on these revels unobserved. But in their hysteria, the women tore him to pieces with their bare hands, thinking that they had killed a lion. Agaue, Pentheus’s mother, triumphantly carried her son’s head into Thebes at the head of a demented procession. The tragic dramas had often depicted the slaying of kinsfolk, but by making Dionysus, the patron of tragedy, responsible for this unnatural murder, Euripides seemed to be calling the entire genre into question. There was no glimmer of hope at the end of the play. The royal house had been shattered, the women reduced to animals, enlightened reason defeated by savage mania, and Thebes—like Athens at this juncture—seemed doomed. What had been the value of the annual release of emotion in honor of a god who killed, tortured, and humiliated human beings without giving any plausible explanation?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  And poor C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words were, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She had not always been. And she never lied. And she wasn’t easily deceived, least of all, in her own favour. I don’t mean that. But why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? More than half the Christian world, and millions in the East, believe otherwise. How do they know she is ‘at rest?’ Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend. Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view ‘good,’ telling lies may be ‘good’ too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.

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

  Down and to the left, the light in a room is on. The shades are drawn but the drapes are open, and Dominique sees shadows passing by the window in the yellowish light. - She tips the bellman and locks the door behind him. She takes off her jacket and shoes and walks into the bathroom. The floor and walls are of Italian marble, the fixtures harmonious with the eighteenth-century decor, but all apparently new. An enormous shower, a toilet, a sink and a bidet. She runs water into the enormous claw-foot tub, pouring in some lilac salts from the collection on the tub’s edge. While the bath fills, she unpacks some things, then undresses, carefully hanging up her clothes as if she’s aware of the symbolism of the act. She wants to remember this moment of arrival. She wants to remember what she feels like right now, before anything has happened. She wraps a robe around her and goes back into the bathroom, sits on the edge of the tub and watches the suds accumulate in the steaming water. 4 Valerie Grey She’d tried so hard to make it work. She had assumed from the start that Michael was the one, and even after he’d disappointed her time and again she’d refused to give up hope. In the end it had turned ugly and even degrading, and Dominique had clung to him, terrified of being alone after having given so much of herself. Her clinging had gained her nothing, and the more she gave, the less she had left of herself. Finally she lost Michael, all she had given, and a great deal more as well. She’d lost parts of herself she didn’t think he’d even had access to, parts she had thought were safe. She takes off her robe and hangs it behind the door, then eases herself into the tub, enjoying the sting of the hot water against her skin. She scrubs the grime of travel from her body and then soaks in the fragrant warmth, trying to think of nothing. She’s lost so much that sometimes the integrity of her body surprises her. It’s as if she expects to see a missing limb or vast scar running between her breasts, but no: her body remains surprisingly healthy in spite of all she’s been through. She emerges from the tub and takes a warm towel from the heater and dries herself, then wraps her robe around her body and walks into her sitting room, drying her hair. From her make-up case she takes three bottles of sleeping pills and puts them on the bedside table, next to the phone, lining them up like soldiers.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  It is as if she were on a journey without me and I said, looking at my watch, ‘I wonder is she at Euston now.’ But unless she is proceeding at sixty seconds a minute along this same timeline that all we living people travel by, what does now mean? If the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference, when we speak of them, between was and is and will be? Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them—that is, in earthly life—they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’ Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’

• From Cultish (2021)

  Not everyone who “follows” Swan becomes a follower-follower, but those who do might receive an invitation to the Teal Tribe, her exclusive Facebook group dedicated to her most committed adherents. Eventually, they might attend one of her in-person workshops or fly down to her pricey retreat center in Costa Rica to undergo the Completion Process, her signature trauma- healing technique. Swan has no mental health accreditation; she uses an assortment of dubious psychological treatments, like “recovered memory therapy” (the controversial practice of unearthing “repressed memories,” which was popular during the Satanic Panic and which Swan claims to have undergone as a child to uncover lost flashbacks of “Satanic ritual abuse”). Most modern psychologists say this exercise actually implants false memories and can be deeply traumatic for patients. But Swan’s unique vocabulary of “Tealisms” helps her establish herself as a trustworthy spiritual and scientific authority. Like Jim Jones, who could use the Bible to preach socialism, Swan invokes Eastern metaphysics to diagnose mental health disorders. She blurs mystical talk of “synchronicity,” “frequency,” and “the Akashic records” with the formal language of the DSM: borderline, PTSD, clinical depression. For people struggling with their mental health, who haven’t found a solution through traditional therapy and pharmaceuticals, her brand of occultic psychobabble creates the impression that she is tapped into a power higher than science. (This marriage of medical jargon with supernatural-speak is nothing new, either; it’s a strategy problematic gurus from Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard to NXIVM’s Keith Raniere have employed for decades. In the social media age, a throng of shady online oracles have followed in Swan’s footsteps, using this speech style to capitalize on Western culture’s resurrected interest in the New Age. We’ll meet some of her controversial contemporaries in part 6.) Swan hasn’t caused any mass suicides, but at least two of her mentees have taken their own lives. Critics attribute these tragedies to the fact that Swan uses a range of highly triggering terms to talk about suicide: “I can see your vibrations, and you’re passively suicidal” and “The hospitals and suicide helpline do nothing” are a sampling of her signature thought-terminating clichés. Although she claims not to support or encourage suicide, Swan touts these sayings in combination with emotionally loaded metaphors like “Death is a gift you give yourself” and “Suicide is pushing the reset button.” As Swan posted on her blog, suicide happens because “we all intuitively (if not mentally) know what is waiting for us after death is the pure positive vibration of source energy.” Suicide, she pens, is a “relief.”

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  What does it matter how this grief of mine evolves or what I do with it? What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish. Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never believed before—I thought it immensely improbable—that the faithfulest soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has rattled in the throat. It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to take up that belief now. H. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter. But oh God, tenderly, tenderly. Already, month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet enough? The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, we’re for it. What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist? Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles—‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?