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.

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• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Chapter ThreeIt’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berries reddening and don’t know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What’s wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember. This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea? Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled ‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  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? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’ Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier. Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’ Such was the fact.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  PERSONAL JOYS AND DIFFICULTIES In this period, I have had some painful and many pleasant experiences. The greatest stress revolves around coping with Helen’s illness, which during the past five years has been very serious. She has met her pain and her restricted life with the utmost of courage. Her disabilities have posed new problems for each of us, both physical and psychological—problems that we continue to work through. It has been a very difficult period of alternating despair and hope, with currently much more of the latter. She is making remarkable progress in fighting her way back, often by sheer force of will, to a more normal life, built around her own purposes. But it has not been easy. She first had to choose whether she wanted to live, whether there was any purpose in living. Then I have baffled and hurt her by the fact of my own independent life. While she was so ill, I felt heavily burdened by our close togetherness, heightened by her need for care. So I determined, for my own survival, to live a life of my own. She is often deeply hurt by this, and by the changing of my values. On her side, she is giving up the old model of being the supportive wife. This change brings her in touch with her anger at me and at society for giving her that socially approved role. On my part, I am angered at any move that would put us back in the old complete togetherness; I stubbornly resist anything that seems like control. So there are more tensions and difficulties in our relationship than ever before, more feelings that we are trying to work through, but there is also more honesty, as we strive to build new ways of being together. So this period has involved struggle and strain. But it has also contained a wealth of positive experiences. There was our golden wedding celebration three years ago—several days of fun in a resort setting with our two children, our daughter-in-law, and all six of our grandchildren. It is such a joy to us that our son and daughter are now not only our offspring, but two of our best and closest friends, with whom we share our inner lives. There have been numerous intimate visits with them individually, and similar visits with close friends from other parts of the country. There is the continuing and growing closeness with our circle of friends here—all of them younger. For me there have been the pleasures of gardening and of long walks. There have been honors and awards, more than I believe I deserve. The most touching was the honorary degree I received from Leiden University on the occasion of its

• 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?

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

  Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive, in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him "Rather the aching toil!" he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he gets from lying still. But exactly similar in form would be his consent to lie and sleep. Often it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it which is the hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his thoughts so far as to think of nothing at all (which can be done), or so far as to imagine one letter after another of a verse of scripture or poetry spelt slowly and monotonously out, it is almost certain that here, too, specific bodily effects will follow, and that sleep will come. The trouble is to keep the mind upon a train of objects naturally so insipid. To sustain a representation, to think, is, in short, the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their thoughts to be crazy, but find them too pressing to be withstood. Compared with them the sane truths are so deadly sober, so cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to look them in the face and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says,

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on. And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead—and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was H.’s landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls; not their arrivals. Chapter Three It’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berries reddening and don’t know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What’s wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember. This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea? Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

• From Cultish (2021)

  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.” In the early 2010s, one of Swan’s longtime mentees named Leslie Wangsgaard stopped taking her antidepressants, started having thoughts of suicide, and approached Swan for guidance. After Swan, this guru she’d trusted for years, told Leslie she didn’t seem to “want” her methods to work and that she either had to “commit fully to life or commit fully to death,” Leslie completed suicide in May 2012. Later, Swan stated that there was “nothing that any healer could ever do for [Leslie’s] type of vibration.” Not her, not anyone. Perversely aligned with her reputation as the “suicide catalyst,” Teal Swan, like Jim Jones, also became a sex sym bol. There have been countless articles written about her “goddesslike” beauty—her long dark hair, her piercing green eyes, her skincare routine (“I can’t stop thinking about her pores ,” reads a line from one New York magazine essay).

• From Cultish (2021)

  and B) he is not like an ordinary person and thus cannot be successfully compared with normal standards or related to as just another person (which the finite mind does not like).” His shouting and cursing, he says, are an expression of divine kindness. “I can scream at you all freely,” he declaims, adding that verbal abuse is a necessary part of the spiritual path, and that questioning it simply reflects the lowly human’s “limited and opinionated mind.” As with Teal Swan, Massaro’s videos also promote unsafe messaging about suicide: “Don’t fear death; be excited about it,” he says in one clip. “Looking forward to death makes you truly come alive. . . . Wake up to something important. Otherwise, kill yourself.” These sentiments mostly flew under the radar until December 2017, when Massaro hosted a spiritual retreat in Sedona that went horribly wrong. The twelve-day New Age boot camp was promised to offer one hundred guests exclusive access to Massaro’s most profound teachings. By then, “cult leader” accusations had already started trickling onto the web. The day before the retreat, a Sedona-based reporter named Be Scofield published an incriminating exposé characterizing Massaro as a “tech bro guru” using growth-hacker marketing to build a quack spiritual consortium : endangering followers’ bodies with ridiculous health advice (like living on nothing but grape juice for weeks—Massaro called this “dry fasting”), manipulating them into cutting off friends and family (“Fuck your relationships. They mean nothing,” he’d say), and trusting him as an all-knowing deity. On the sixth day of the Sedona retreat, an attendee named Brent Wilkins, who’d followed Massaro devotedly for years, broke away from the group. He got in his car, drove to a nearby bridge, and jumped, ending his life. News of Wilkins’s death circulated hastily, and a chorus of Jim Jones comparisons quickly followed. The internet dubbed Massaro an “Instagram douche meets cult leader” and “Steve Jobs meets Jim Jones.” Massaro was quiet for months afterward, until he finally posted a response on Facebook, not addressing the death or any specific concerns but instead firing the “cult” label right back at Be Scofield. In the ultimate battle of thought-terminating clichés, he avowed that Scofield was “part of one of the biggest cults on our planet today: The Average American Cult—indoctrinated by media, scared of just about anything outside of their own family home, and ready to pull a gun out on anyone they do not understand.” The day after Wilkins’s death, detectives showed up at Massaro’s residence to confront him about his questionable suicide messaging. But in the end, no charges were brought against him. In a culture where malignant social media interactions contribute to depression, anxiety, and suicide in such complicated ways, it was ultimately too tricky to place singular, prosecutable blame, even on a figure as disreputable as Massaro.

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

  Based on what I’m seeing, we’re in trouble. Sure, Benioff is full of shit, but so are we, and Benioff is way better at being full of shit than we are. Also, Salesforce.com’s sales are about fifty times what ours are. In terms of hype, the disparity is even greater. Just two months before this, HubSpot’s Inbound drew five thousand people, a tiny fraction of the Dreamforce audience—even after giving away or selling a lot of our tickets at a discount. We’re screwed, I keep thinking. We’re totally, absolutely screwed. Not because the ExactTarget product is better than ours, because who even knows, and who even cares? Having the best product has nothing to do with who wins. What matters is who can put on a great show, who can create the biggest spectacle, who can look huge and unstoppable and invincible, and who is the best at bluster and hype. When it comes to these things, nobody comes close to Benioff. Nobody has cashed in on the bubble as well as he has. In 2012, Salesforce.com lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and in 2013 it will lose almost as much. In 2013 the company is fourteen years old and not making a profit. But its revenues are growing more than 30 percent each year, and growth is what investors are looking for, so even though Salesforce.com is bleeding red ink, its stock has doubled over the past two years, and Benioff’s personal net worth has soared to $2.6 billion. Now, here in the Moscone Center, the P. T. Barnum of the tech industry is giving a master class in how the game is played. It’s the Marc Benioff show, brought to you by Marc Benioff, with special guest Marc Benioff. Fifteen thousand people are packed into this hall. Thousands more are packed into spillover rooms. It feels like a rock concert. In fact it is a rock concert. Before Benioff appears, the lights go down and suddenly Huey Lewis and the News are performing “The Power of Love.” It is nine in the morning. From our seats, way in back, we can barely see the band, but we watch on huge screens, the kind used at football stadiums. Next comes Benioff, making a big high-energy entrance, like some kind of cheesy talk-show host, roaming up and down the aisles, a man of the people. He wears a blue suit and a pair of multitoned shoes, called Cloud Walkers, custom made by Christian Louboutin. He says he chose that Huey Lewis song because the power of love is what Salesforce.com is all about. He doesn’t want to talk about business. He wants to talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars that he and Salesforce.com have donated to worthy causes. “The best drug I ever took,” he says, “was philanthropy.” I suspect that opening with a big-name band is also a form of dick measuring.

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

  A reporter at the New York Times figured out who was writing the Fake Steve blog and confronted me, and I came clean. There were profiles about me all over the place, from the New York Times to Der Spiegel in Germany and El Mundo in Spain. Conferences started inviting me to give speeches. Then I got hired at Newsweek, which led to even more speaking engagements, and I was on TV all the time, opining on Fox Business or CNBC or Al Jazeera. I published a Fake Steve novel, sold the rights to a Hollywood production company, and found myself in Los Angeles, developing a cable TV comedy while still working at Newsweek. Then things went south. My cable TV show got killed before it even got off the ground. The Washington Post, which had owned Newsweek since 1961, sold the magazine to a new owner. The new owner merged Newsweek with a website called the Daily Beast, whose brilliant but crazy editor, Tina Brown, became the editor of Newsweek. Most of my colleagues left or got booted out. I hung on, but things were chaotic. People came and went. During the next two years I had a half dozen editors. Sometimes I had no editor at all and just floated around, trying to place stories into the magazine. It was not a happy time, but I kept hoping that things would turn around. In March 2012, that seemed to happen. My old pal Abby was hired back and installed as the executive editor, and I was reporting to her. My job, which had felt precarious under the new ownership, began to feel secure. Finally, I had an ally, a friend in New York who would look out for me. That was a foolish thing to believe. Two When the Ducks Quack Losing my job sends me into a tailspin. On the surface I’m okay, or at least I am trying very hard to pretend to be okay. Inside I feel like I’m barely holding it together, even with daily doses of Ativan. “You’ll land on your feet,” people keep telling me, and I want to believe them, but as time goes by I’m not sure. So far I’ve had a disastrous interview at a big PR firm, with a vice president who invited me down to New York, kept me waiting for an hour, then told me that he didn’t like to hire journalists. At Forbes, an editor who less than a year ago was trying to poach me away from Newsweek now offers me a contract job that pays $32,000 a year and carries no health benefits. At night I lie awake in bed, unable to sleep, secretly afraid that I might never get hired again. That Newsweek story about “beached white males” wasn’t a work of fiction. I know guys my age whose careers are over.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  “And there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom, but you are cast out; and people will come from east and west and from north and south and recline at table in the kingdom of God.” (Q: Luke 13:23-29; cf. Matt. 8:11-12) II. While the arrival of the kingdom was “good news” for Jesus’ followers, it was not good news for everyone. In a mighty act of judgment, evil rulers will be toppled and punished, and the oppressed will be raised up. A. This judgment will be universal in scope. Compare the saying in our earliest Gospel: “And in those days, after that affliction, the sun will grow dark and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11 heaven, and the powers in the sky will be shaken; and then they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send forth his angels and he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of earth to the end of heaven.” (Mark 13:24-27) B. This coming judgement is the subject of a number of Jesus’ parables. Consider this one that is multiply attested in Matthew and Thomas: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, they hauled it ashore, and sitting down chose the good fish and put them into containers, but the bad fish they threw away. That’s how it will be at the completion of the age. The angels will come and separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and cast them into the fiery furnace. There people will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Matt. 13:47-50) B. As seen in these references, Jesus calls this coming agent of judgment, who is regularly accompanied by angels, the “Son of Man,” a title deriving from a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Dan. 7:13-14. 1. In some of the sayings about the future coming of the Son of Man, Jesus does not appear to be speaking about himself. These sayings, pass the criterion of dissimilarity, because Christians would be unlikely to make up sayings in which it was unclear that Jesus himself was the future judge. 2 . These sayings also pass the criterion of contextual credibility — cf. Enoch, ch. 69, a contemporaneous Jewish apocalyptic prophecy referring to the “son of man” as an agent of God’s judgment. 3 . In other sayings, though, Jesus clearly does speak about himself using the term “son of man.” These obviously do not pass the criterion of dissimilarity.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Conversely, language can also prompt someone to die. The causal relationship between a charismatic figure’s speech and another person’s suicide was judicially confirmed in 2017 during the controversial Michelle Carter court case, where a young woman was convicted of manslaughter for convincing her high school boyfriend to kill himself via text message—an act described as “coerced suicide.” The Michelle Carter case inspired the nation to have one of its first serious, country-wide debates about the deadliness of words alone. Year after year, we ask: What makes people join cults like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate? What makes them stay? What makes them behave in wild, baffling, sometimes gruesome ways? Here’s where the answer starts: Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion, with language as their ultimate power tool, Jones and Applewhite were able to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying a finger on them. Across the influence continuum, cultish language works to do three things: First, it makes people feel special and understood. This is where the love- bombing comes in: the showers of seemingly personalized attention and analysis, the inspirational buzzwords, the calls for vulnerability, the “YOU, just by existing, have been tagged to join the elite Away Team destined for the Kingdom of God.” For some people, this language will instantly sound like a scammy red flag, and others will decide it just doesn’t resonate; but a few will have this transformative experience where all of a sudden, something “clicks.” In a moment, they become filled with the sense that this group is their answer, that they can’t not come back. This tends to happen all at once, and it’s what makes a person “join.” This is called conversion. Then, a different set of language tactics gets people to feel dependent on the leader, such that life outside the group doesn’t feel possible anymore. This is a more gradual operation, and it’s called conditioning—the process of subconsciously learning a behavior in response to a stimulus. It’s what makes people stick by the group far longer than anyone on the outside can understand. And last, language convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self. An ends-justify-the- means ethos is embedded, and in the worst cases, it results in devastation. This is called coercion. The first key element of cultish language?

• From Cultish (2021)

  At the end of the visit, Ryan and his crew returned to the small Jonestown airstrip to leave, and several residents followed them, trying to escape. Jones had ordered his militia to tail the defectors, and as soon as they began to board, thinking they were in the clear, the squad turned on them. They opened fire and killed five people: one Jonestown defector, three journalists, and Congressman Ryan. This event sparked the infamous “suicide.” Contrary to popular belief, the tragedy wasn’t premeditated, at least not how the press painted it to be. And most of its victims did not die voluntarily. Popular Jonestown coverage spun a story that Jones regularly hosted ghoulish suicide rehearsals known as White Nights, where his mind-controlled minions would line up like lobotomized communicants and swallow cups of punch in preparation for the “real” suicide on November 18, 1978. But this wasn’t what happened at all. Surviving Peoples Templers contend that the real White Nights were much subtler events, and you didn’t have to be “mind controlled” to participate. Originally, Jones used the phrase “White Night” to denote any sort of crisis, and the possibility of death as a result of that crisis. He chose this particular phrase to subvert the fact that our language tends to equate the color black with negativity: blacklist, blackmail, black magic. He decided the phrase “White Night” destabilized that concept. Not a bad point, but a really bad motive. Over time, as Jones grew more deranged and power-starved, the term evolved to mean a slew of insidious things. Some say White Night described occasions when Jones convinced followers to arm themselves with makeshift weapons and stay up for days on end, prepared to defend their Promised Land to the death against attacks he swore were coming but never did. Others remember the term referencing the dozen or so meetings when people approached a microphone and declared their willingness to die—that very night, if necessary—for the Cause (the Peoples Temple term for living in service of the group, not the self). There’s also the story that White Nights were weekly events when Jones would keep the group up all night to discuss community concerns. And then there are those who’ve said a White Night was simply any meeting in which Jones mentioned death. The congressman’s visit confirmed what Jones had suspected for a long time: He couldn’t keep this thing up forever. Jonestown was a failure. Too many people were trying to leave. He was doomed to be found out and dethroned. So he gathered everyone in the main pavilion and told them the enemy was on their way to ambush them. “They’ll shoot some of our innocent babies. . . . They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this,” he announced. It was too late to escape: “We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  “WHAT I REALLY AM IS UNLOVABLE” One important element which keeps people locked in their loneliness is the conviction that their real self—the inner self, the self that is hidden from others —is one which no one could love. It is easy enough to trace the origin of this feeling. The spontaneous feelings of a child, his real attitudes, have so often been disapproved of by parents and others that he has come to introject this same attitude himself, and to feel that his spontaneous reactions and the self he truly is constitute a person whom no one could love. Perhaps an incident which occurred recently in a group of high school girls and some of their faculty members will illustrate the way in which loneliness gradually comes to light and is discovered, by both the individual and the group, and the deep fear, even in a person outwardly decidedly lovable, that inwardly she would not be accepted. Ann was a rather quiet girl in this group, but obviously a sincere and serious one. She was a good student, an effective leader in the organization which had elected her as an officer. Rather early in the weekend encounter she had expressed some of the difficult times she was going through. She had found herself questioning her religious faith, questioning some of her values, feeling very uncertain as to the answers to these questions, and expe riencing a certain element of despair. She knew that the answers must come from within herself, but they did not seem to be coming, and that frightened her. Some members of the group attempted to reassure her, but this had little effect. At another point she mentioned how frequently other students came to her with their problems. She felt that she was quite available to them and that she found satisfaction when she could be of help to another person. The next day some very moving feelings were expressed, and the group paused for quite a time in silence. Ann finally broke into it with some highly intellectual questions—perfectly reasonable, but somehow not at all appropriate to what was going on. I felt, at some intuitive level, that she was not saying what she wanted to say, but she gave no clue as to what her real message might be. I found myself wanting to go over and sit next to her, but it seemed a crazy impulse, since she was not in any obvious way asking for help. The impulse was so strong, however, that I took the risk, crossed the room, and asked if I could sit by her on the couch, feeling that there was a large chance I would be rebuffed. She made room forme, and as soon as I sat down she leaped into my lap, threw her head over my shoulder, and burst into sobs.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  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. Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on. And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead—and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was H.’s landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls; not their arrivals.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. And I must surely admit—H. would have forced me to admit in a few passes—that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it. But then the Cosmic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now? Indeed it’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes—when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them? As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable?

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

  They made prank phone calls, dialing a local Thai restaurants to order “penis sauce” or calling a hardware store in the Castro section of San Francisco to inquire about black caulk. Eventually I got caught. A reporter at the New York Times figured out who was writing the Fake Steve blog and confronted me, and I came clean. There were profiles about me all over the place, from the New York Times to Der Spiegel in Germany and El Mundo in Spain. Conferences started inviting me to give speeches. Then I got hired at Newsweek , which led to even more speaking engagements, and I was on TV all the time, opining on Fox Business or CNBC or Al Jazeera. I published a Fake Steve novel, sold the rights to a Hollywood production company, and found myself in Los Angeles, developing a cable TV comedy while still working at Newsweek . Then things went south. My cable TV show got killed before it even got off the ground. The Washington Post , which had owned Newsweek since 1961, sold the magazine to a new owner. The new owner merged Newsweek with a website called the Daily Beast, whose brilliant but crazy editor, Tina Brown, became the editor of Newsweek . Most of my colleagues left or got booted out. I hung on, but things were chaotic. People came and went. During the next two years I had a half dozen editors. Sometimes I had no editor at all and just floated around, trying to place stories into the magazine. It was not a happy time, but I kept hoping that things would turn around. In March 2012, that seemed to happen. My old pal Abby was hired back and installed as the executive editor, and I was reporting to her. My job, which had felt precarious under the new ownership, began to feel secure. Finally, I had an ally, a friend in New York who would look out for me. That was a foolish thing to believe. Two [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] When the Ducks QuackL osing my job sends me into a tailspin. On the surface I’m okay, or at least I am trying very hard to pretend to be okay. Inside I feel like I’m barely holding it together, even with daily doses of Ativan. “You’ll land on your feet,” people keep telling me, and I want to believe them, but as time goes by I’m not sure. So far I’ve had a disastrous interview at a big PR firm, with a vice president who invited me down to New York, kept me waiting for an hour, then told me that he didn’t like to hire journalists. At Forbes , an editor who less than a year ago was trying to poach me away from Newsweek now offers me a contract job that pays $32,000 a year and carries no health benefits.

• From Cultish (2021)

  This term is one of many Jones distorted in order to emotionally wrangle his followers. “Revolutionary suicide” was, in fact, the very last phrase he uttered before their deaths. Coined by Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton in the late 1960s, “revolutionary suicide” initially described the act of a demonstrator dying at the hands of their oppressor. The idea was that if you took to the streets to protest the Man, the Man might shoot you down, but the rebel behind you would pick up the banner and keep going. They might get shot down, too, but the movement would continue, until one day, one of your successors would carry that banner all the way to freedom. “Revolutionary suicide,” as Newton meant it, was a phrase most Peoples Temple followers could get on board with, so Jones slowly perverted it, using it in various contexts depending on what he wanted out of them. On some occasions, Jones described revolutionary suicide as an appropriate alternative to being taken prisoner or being enslaved by the Man. Other times he used it to describe the act of walking into a crowd of enemies wearing a bomb and detonating it. But most famously, Jones invoked the phrase on the day of the massacre, framing death for his followers as a political statement against the Hidden Rulers (evil secret heads of government), rather than a coerced fate they had no say in. By November 18, 1978, many of Jones’s followers had already lost faith in him. His mental and physical health had long been in decline; he’d been abusing a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and suffered from a host of medical ailments (which are hard to keep track of, since he exaggerated and lied about a great many of them, including telling acolytes he had lung cancer and then “curing” himself of it). Not to mention Jonestown’s brutal living conditions. As it turned out, the “Promised Land” followers expected to find in Guyana was not conducive to growing crops. Children were starving and their parents were brutally overworked, sleep deprived, and desperate to leave. That’s why Congressman Ryan came to town. Having received tips from followers’ families that they were being held captive against their will, Ryan decided to fly down and check in, and he brought a few reporters and some delegates along with him. Jones, impresario that he was, did everything to conceal the rotten truths of the place while putting on a show for the Congressman (a lavish dinner, confident banter). But Jones knew there was no way they’d let him off the hook.

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

  No, you must kill him.” 110 An Israelite town guilty of this idolatry must be put under the “ban,” burned to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered. 111 This was all so novel that in order to justify these innovations, the Deuteronomists literally had to rewrite history. They began a massive editorial revision of the texts in the royal archives that would one day become the Hebrew Bible, changing the wording and import of earlier law codes and introducing new legislation that endorsed their proposals. They recast the history of Israel, adding fresh material to the older narratives of the Pentateuch and giving Moses a prominence that he may not have had in some of the earlier traditions. The climax of the Exodus story was no longer a theophany but the gift of the Ten Commandments and the sefer torah. Drawing on earlier sagas, now lost to us, the reformers put together a history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah that became the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which “proved” that the idolatrous iniquity of the northern kingdom had been the cause of its destruction. When they described Joshua’s conquests, they depicted him slaughtering the local population of the Promised Land and devastating their cities like an Assyrian general. They transformed the ancient myth of the ban so that it became an expression of God’s justice and a literal rather than a fictional story of attempted genocide. Their history culminated in the reign of Josiah, the new Moses who would liberate Israel from Pharaoh once again, a king who was even greater than David. 112 This strident theology left an indelible trace on the Hebrew Bible; many of the writings so frequently quoted to prove the ineradicable aggression and intolerance of “ monotheism” were either composed or recast by these reformers. Yet the Deuteronomist reform was never implemented. Josiah’s bid for independence ended in 609 BCE, when he was killed in a skirmish with Pharaoh Neco. The new Babylonian empire replaced Assyria and competed with Egypt for control of the Middle East. For a few years Judah dodged between these great powers, but eventually, after an uprising in Judah in 597, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, deported eight thousand Judean aristocrats, soldiers, and skilled artisans. 113 Ten years later he destroyed the temple, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and deported five thousand more Judeans, leaving only the lower classes in the devastated land. In Babylonia the Judean exiles were reasonably well treated. Some lived in the capital; others were housed in undeveloped areas near the new canals and could, to an extent, manage their own affairs. 114 But exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. In Judah the deportees had been the elite class; now they had no political rights, and some even had to work in the corvée.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  At times Jamie gave way to deep depression, hating the beautiful city of her exile. Homesick unto death she would suddenly feel for the dour little Highland village of Beedles. More even than for its dull bricks and mortar would she long for its dull and respectable spirit, for the sense of security common to Sabbaths, for the kirk with its dull and respectable people. She would think with a tenderness bred by forced absence of the greengrocer’s shop that stood on the corner, where they sold, side by side with the cabbages and onions, little neatly tied bunches of Scottish heather, little earthenware jars of opaque heather honey. She would think of the vast, stretching, windy moorlands; of the smell of the soil after rain in summer; of the piper with his weather-stained, agile fingers, of the wail of his sorrowful, outlandish music; of Barbara as she had been in the days when they strolled side by side down the narrow high street. And then she would sit with her head in her hands, hating the sound and the smell of Paris, hating the sceptical eyes of the concierge, hating the bare and unhomely studio. Tears would well up from heaven alone knew what abyss of half-understood desolation, and would go splashing down upon her tweed skirt, or trickling back along her red wrists until they had wetted her frayed flannel wristbands. Coming home with their evening meal in a bag, this was how Barbara must sometimes find her. 2Jamie was not always so full of desolation; there were days when she seemed to be in excellent spirits, and on one such occasion she rang Stephen up, asking her to bring Mary round after dinner. Every one was coming, Wanda and Pat, Brockett, and even Valérie Seymour; for she, Jamie, had persuaded a couple of negroes who were studying at the Conservatoire to come in and sing for them that evening—they had promised to sing Negro Spirituals, old slavery songs of the Southern plantations. They were very nice negroes, their name was Jones—Lincoln and Henry Jones, they were brothers. Lincoln and Jamie had become great friends; he was very interested in her opera. And Wanda would bring her mandolin—but the evening would be spoilt without Mary and Stephen. Mary promptly put on her hat; she must go and order them in some supper. As she and Stephen would be there to share it, Jamie’s sensitive pride would be appeased. She would send them a very great deal of food so that they could go on eating and eating. Stephen nodded: ‘Yes, send them in tons of supper!’ 3At ten o’clock they arrived at the studio; at ten thirty Wanda came in with Brockett, then Blanc together with Valérie Seymour, then Pat wearing serviceable goloshes over her house shoes because it was raining, then three or four fellow students of Jamie’s, and finally the two negro brothers.