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 The Great Transformation (2006)

  Nevertheless, Gotama did not give up. Henceforth he would rely only on his own insights. This would become one of the central tenets of his spiritual method. He constantly told his disciples that they must not accept anybody’s teachings, no matter how august, if those teachings did not tally with their own experience. They must never take any doctrine on faith or at second hand. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned if they failed to bring followers to enlightenment. If people relied on an authority figure, they would remain trapped in an inauthentic version of themselves and would never attain the freedom of nibbana. So in a moment of mingled despair and defiance, his health broken down by excessive penance, and at a spiritual dead end, Gotama resolved to strike out on his own. “Surely,” he cried, “there must be another way to achieve enlightenment!” And as if to prove that his declaration of independence was indeed the way forward, the beginnings of a new solution declared itself to him.75 He suddenly recalled an incident from his early childhood. His nurse had left him under the shade of a rose apple tree while she watched the ceremonial plowing of the fields before the spring planting. The little boy sat up and saw that young shoots of grass had been torn up by the plow, and insects had been killed. Gazing at the carnage, Gotama had felt a strange pang of grief, as though his own relatives had died.76 The surge of selfless empathy brought him a moment of spiritual release. It was a beautiful day, and the child had felt a pure joy welling up within him. Instinctively, he had composed himself in the yogic position, and entered a tranced state, even though he had never had a yoga lesson in his life. As he looked back on this childhood event, Gotama realized that the joy he had felt that day had been entirely free of craving and greed. “Could this,” he asked himself, “possibly be the way to enlightenment?” If an untrained child could achieve yogic ecstasy and have intimations of nibbana, perhaps the liberation of moksha was built into the structure of our humanity. Instead of starving his body into submission, and making yoga an assault on his psyche, maybe he should cultivate these innate tendencies that led to cetovimutti, the “release of the mind” that was nibbana. He should foster helpful (kusala) states of mind, such as the disinterested impulse of compassion that had surfaced so naturally, and at the same time avoid any mental or physical states that would impede this liberation.77

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Mencius saw a pattern in history. A sage king appeared every five hundred years or so, and in the intervening period people were governed by ordinary “men of renown.” Since it was over seven hundred years since the rule of the early Zhou kings, the new sage ruler was sadly overdue. Mencius was acutely aware that China had changed—in his view, for the worse. “The people have never suffered more under tyrannical government than today,” he lamented. “It must be that Heaven does not desire to bring peace to the world.” But if Heaven did want to save the world, who else but he could do it?43 As a mere commoner, he could not be a sage king, but he did believe that he been appointed Heaven’s messenger to the princes. The people were crying out for good leadership. They would flock to any ruler who treated them kindly, with benevolence and justice. When it was clear that the princes would never take him seriously, Mencius retired and wrote a book that recorded his discussions with the rulers he had tried to serve. He believed that it was impossible to govern by force. The people submitted to coercive rule because they had no choice, but if a peace-loving king came to power, they would flock to him “with admiration in their hearts” because goodness had a “transformative power.”44 Instead of relying on military might, he told King Hui, he should “reduce punishment and taxation, and get the people to plough deeply and weed promptly.” In their spare time, able-bodied young men must learn to live by the family li, and become good brothers and sons. Once they had received this moral grounding, they would, as a matter of course, be loyal subjects and a source of great strength. They would “inflict defeat on the strong armour and sharp weapons” of the larger states, even if they were “armed with nothing but staves.”45 Why? Because all the best ministers would want to serve in the administration of a just and compassionate king; farmers would want to cultivate his lands; merchants to trade in his cities. “Anyone with a grievance against their own rulers would come and complain to your Majesty,” Mencius told King Hui. “If that happens, who could stop it?”46

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  [image file=image_rsrc5K2.jpg] Jeremiah hated being a prophet. He seemed compelled, against his will, to cry “Violence and ruin!” all day long; when he tried to stop, it felt as though his heart and bones were on fire, and he was forced to prophesy again. He had become a laughingstock, and wished he had never been born.7 Like Amos and Hosea, he felt that his own subjectivity had been taken over by God; the pain that wracked his every limb was Yahweh’s pain: God also felt humiliated, ostracized, and abandoned.8 Instead of denying his suffering, Jeremiah presented himself to the people as a man of sorrows, opening his heart to the terror, rage, and misery of his time, and allowing it to invade every recess of his being. Denial was not an option; it could only impede enlightenment. Shortly after the first deportation, in 597, Jeremiah heard that there were some so-called prophets at work in Babylon, who were giving the exiles false hope. So he wrote an open letter to the deportees. They were not going to return home in the near future; in fact, Yahweh was going to destroy Jerusalem. They must resign themselves to at least seventy years in captivity, so they should settle down, build houses, take wives, and have children. Above all, the exiles must not give way to resentment. This was Yahweh’s message. “Work for the good of the city to which I have exiled you; pray to Yahweh on its behalf, since on its welfare yours depends.” If they could face facts, turn their backs on false consolation, and refuse to allow their hearts to be poisoned by hatred, they would enjoy “a future full of hope.”9 Jeremiah was convinced that it was the exiles of 597, not the people who had remained behind, who would save Israel. If they could come through this time of trial, they would develop a more interior spirituality. Yahweh would make a new covenant with them. This time it would not be inscribed on stone tablets, like the old covenant with Moses: Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, “Learn to know Yahweh!” No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest.10 Having lost everything, some of the people of Israel were turning within. Each individual must take responsibility for him- or herself; they were starting to discover the more interior and direct knowledge of the Axial Age.

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

  Morale in HubSpot’s sales department has plummeted. “We’re going to make some hard calls,” Halligan says. “There are going to be winners and losers. People will just have to deal. We’re going to make things as fair as we can. But if you’re not performing, we’re going to put you on a plan.” Being put on a plan is the first step toward getting fired. Most people who get put on a plan don’t recover. It’s really a way to give you a few weeks to find another job. It seems to me that the problem is not that HubSpot’s salespeople aren’t working hard enough. The problem is that (a) HubSpot’s software isn’t that good and that (b) the way we sell it is inefficient. Despite all its rhetoric about reinventing how products are sold, HubSpot itself relies on an old-fashioned business model based on brute-force lead-generation tactics. We’re working too hard and getting too little back for it. Generating tens of thousands of new leads every month is ridiculous in and of itself; by definition most of those leads are shitty and worthless. The sales department tries to winnow out the best 20 percent and focus on those, but that still means the sales department is trying to chase ten thousand leads every month. “Boiling the ocean” is the business cliché for the way HubSpot hunts for new customers, and it’s only one problem. Another is that our software isn’t very intuitive, and people can’t figure out how to use the programs on their own. So we have to assign consultants to teach new customers how to use the product. This is all incredibly labor-intensive, and that effort is reflected in the amount we spend to acquire each new customer. This metric is called customer acquisition cost, or CAC, and HubSpot’s is soaring. The numbers are going in the wrong direction. The irony of this is that we tout our software as a modern miracle that lets companies attract new customers and grow faster, while spending less. Our sales pitch is basically Jack and the Beanstalk : Buy our magic software, and your business grows to the sky. You’ll get more customers, and save money. That’s what we tell people. But we use our software. Our business is built on top of our software. We “eat our own dog food,” as they say in the tech industry—or, as Cranium likes to put it, “We drink our own Champagne.” If our software really does what we claim, why are we working so hard to find new customers? Why do we need an army of sales reps and an army of marketers and an army of consultants? For that matter, why, after seven years in business, does HubSpot still not make a profit? Why does it cost us more to make, sell, and deliver our software than customers will pay to use it?

• 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 The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Yours, Anne M. Frank MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1944 My dearest Kitty, It’s like a nightmare, one that goes on long after I’m awake. I see him nearly every hour of the day and yet I can’t be with him, I can’t let the others notice, and I have to pretend to be cheerful, though my heart is aching. Peter Schiff and Peter van Daan have melted into one Peter, who’s good and kind and whom I long for desperately. Mother’s horrible, Father’s nice, which makes him even more exasperating, and Margot’s the worst, since she takes advantage of my smiling face to claim me for herself, when all I want is to be left alone. Peter didn’t join me in the attic, but went up to the loft to do some carpentry work. At every rasp and bang, another chunk of my courage broke off and I was even more unhappy. In the distance a clock was tolling’ ‘Be pure in heart, be pure in mind!” I’m sentimental, I know. I’m despondent and foolish, I know that too. Oh, help me! Yours, Anne M. Frank WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 1944 Dearest Kitty, My own affairs have been pushed to the background by . . . a break-in. I’m boring you with all my break-ins, but what can I do when burglars take such pleasure in honoring Gies & Go. with their presence? This incident is much more complicated than the last one, in July 1943. Last night at seven-thirty Mr. van Daan was heading, as usual, for Mr. Kugler’s office when he saw that both the glass door and the office door were open. He was surprised, but he went on through and was even more astonished to see that the alcove doors were open as well and that there was a terrible mess in the front

• 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 The Great Transformation (2006)

  The yogins interpreted their meditative discoveries differently. Those who subscribed to the teachings of the Upanishads believed that they had finally become one with the brahman; those who followed the Samkhya philosophy claimed that they had liberated the purusha. But the basic experience remained the same. Whatever they thought they had done, the yogins had opened up new possibilities. An acute appreciation of the suffering that was endemic to the human condition had led these extraordinarily ambitious men to find a radical way out. They had evolved a spiritual technology that would free them of dukkha. Yoga was not for everybody, however. It was a full-time job that could not be combined with the demands of everyday life. But other sages would later find a way to develop a yoga that would give the laity intimations of enlightenment. Meanwhile, China was in crisis. When Chu had defeated the armies of the league of Chinese states in 597, the region became engulfed in an entirely new kind of aggression. The gloves were off. Chu had no time for the old ritualized warfare, and the other large states also began to cast aside the constraints of tradition, determined to expand and conquer more territory, even if this meant the destruction of the enemy. Warfare became very different from the stately campaigns of the past. In 593, for example, during a lengthy siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their own children. The old principalities faced political annihilation. They knew that they could not compete with the bigger states but were drawn into the fray against their will, as their territories became a battleground of competing armies. Qi, for example, so frequently encroached on the tiny principality of Lu that Lu was forced to appeal to Chu for aid—but all to no avail. By the end of the sixth century, Chu had been defeated and Qi had become so dominant that the duke of Lu only managed to retain a modicum of independence with the help of the western state of Qin.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Yudishthira ruled for fifteen years, but the light had gone from his life. He could never reconcile the kshatriya’s violent vocation with the dharma of ahimsa and compassion that he found in his heart. There are innumerable passages in the Mahabharata that defend the warrior’s vocation and that exult in fighting and killing, but fundamental doubts remain. The epic shows the unsettling effect of the Axial spirituality on some of the laypeople in India, who felt thrust into a limbo. Trapped in a worldly dharma, they could not join the renouncers and yogins, but found that the old Vedic faith could no longer sustain them. Indeed, it sometimes seemed demonic: Aswatthaman’s ecstatic “self-sacrifice” had almost destroyed the world. The story of his night raid—with its evocation of massacre, martyrdom, escalating retaliation, and the reckless firing of weapons—has almost prophetic resonance for us today. A destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and economy with the truth could lead to tragic nihilism: The goddess Earth trembled and the mountains shook. The wind did not blow, nor did the fire, though kindled, blaze forth. And even the constellations in the sky, agitated, wandered about. The sun did not shine; the lunar disc lost its splendour. All confounded, space became covered with darkness. Then, overcome, the gods did not know their domains, the sacrifice did not shine forth, and the Vedas abandoned them.74 The only thing that had saved the world from destruction was the Axial spirit of the two sages, who desired “the welfare of all creatures and of all the worlds.” Somehow this spirit had to become more accessible to the ordinary warrior and householder, some of whom were in danger of falling into despair. When Socrates was put to death by the democracy of Athens in 399, his pupil Plato was thirty years old. The tragedy made an indelible impression on the young man and profoundly affected his philosophy.75 Plato had hoped for a political career. Unlike his hero Socrates, he came from a rich, aristocratic family: his father was a descendant of the last king of Athens; his stepfather had been a close friend of Pericles; and two of his uncles had been active in the government of the thirty tyrants after Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War. They had invited Plato to join them. It seemed a great opportunity, but Plato could see the flaws of this disastrous administration. He was delighted when the democracy was restored, and believed that his time had come, but the trial and death of Socrates so shattered his hopes that he became disillusioned and withdrew from public life in disgust. Wherever he looked, in any polis, the system of government was bad: Hence I was forced to say . . . that the human race will not see better days until either the stock of those who rightly and genuinely follow philosophy acquire political authority, or else the class who have political control be led by some dispensation of providence to become real philosophers.76

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  He was lord of all he surveyed and seemed wholly invincible—except for the grim fact of death, which brought home his real helplessness. If he forgot this, he would fall prey to hubris, and walk “in solitary pride to his life’s end.” 100 The Axial peoples were all becoming acutely aware of the limitations of the human condition, but in other parts of the world, this did not stop them from reaching for the highest goals or developing a spiritual technology that would enable them to transcend the suffering of life. Indeed, it was the agonizing experience of their inherent vulnerability that impelled many of them to find the absolute within their own fragile selves. But the Greeks, it seemed, could see only the abyss. Once Antigone realized that there was nothing more she could do, she accepted her destiny as the daughter of Oedipus, acknowledging that she too was helpless before the miasma that had infected the entire family. Instead of wavering, like her sister Ismene, Antigone proudly took possession of her suffering and—literally—“walked in solitary pride” into her tomb. The dream of enlightenment, Sophocles seemed to be telling his polis, was an illusion. Despite their extraordinary cultural and intellectual achievements, human beings still faced overwhelming pain. Their skills, their principles, their piety, and their reasoning powers could not save them from dukkha, which they experienced not as the result of their own karma, but from a divine source outside themselves. Mortal men and women were not in charge of their destiny. They must do everything in their power to avoid tragedy—as Antigone did. But when they had come to the end of endeavor, they could only accept their fate unflinchingly and with courage. This, Sophocles suggested, was what constituted human greatness. But in India, the dream of enlightenment was not dead. Indeed, it was becoming a tangible reality to more people than ever before. A spiritual vacuum had also opened up in India, and new sages worked energetically, even desperately, to find a fresh solution. By the late fifth century, the doctrine of karma, which had been controversial at the time of Yajnavalkya, was now universally accepted. 101 Men and women believed that they were all caught up in the endless cycle of death and rebirth; their desires impelled them to act, and the quality of their actions would determine their state in the next life. Bad karma would mean that they could be reborn as slaves, animals, or plants. Good karma would ensure their rebirth as kings or gods. But this was not a happy ending: even gods would exhaust this beneficial karma, would die and be reborn in a less exalted state on earth. As this new concept took hold, the mood of India changed and many became depressed. They felt doomed to one transient life after another.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  [image file=image_rsrcBK.jpg] And yet, not quite together. There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’ You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain. What you feel may be bad. It might conceivably be as bad as what the other felt, though I should distrust anyone who claimed that it was. But it would still be quite different. When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can’t be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love passages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about one another. We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic-regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself. And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, ‘Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you’re so afraid of.’ Of course she didn’t know, any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote ‘Alone into the Alone.’ She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Yes, that sounds very well. But there’s a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts—real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant—in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back—to be sucked back—into it? Today I had to meet a man I haven’t seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well—how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, ‘Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that—or disliked this, or knew so-and-so—or jerked his head back that way.’ I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again. 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.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  No one could live a wholly isolated life—not even a hermit: Zhuangzi himself had been so busy taking aim at the magpie that he had not noticed the appearance on the scene of a gamekeeper, who angrily chased him out of the park. The incident made a great impression on Zhuangzi, and for three months he was depressed. He could now see that the Yangist creed was based on an illusion: it was impossible to protect yourself in the way Yangzi taught. We were conditioned to destroy and be destroyed, to eat and be eaten. We could not escape our destiny. Until we became reconciled to the endless process of destruction and dissolution, we would have no peace. After the incident in the park, Zhuangzi found that he looked at the world quite differently. He began to realize that everything was in flux and constantly in the process of becoming something else—yet we were always trying to freeze our thoughts and experiences and make them absolute. This was not how the Way of Heaven operated. Anything that tried to close itself off from the endless transformation of life in an attempt to become autonomous and self-contained was going against the natural rhythm of the cosmos. Once he had fully appreciated this, Zhuangzi felt an exhilarating freedom. He found that he was no longer afraid of death, because it was futile to try to preserve your life indefinitely. Death and life, joy and sorrow succeeded each other, like day and night. When he died and ceased to be “Zhuangzi,” nothing would change. He would remain what essentially he had always been: a tiny part of the endlessly mutating pageant of the universe. Zhuangzi sometimes used shock tactics to bring this truth home to friends and disciples. When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi came to pay a condolence call, and was horrified to find him sitting cross-legged, singing rowdily, and bashing a battered old tub—flagrantly violating the dignified ceremonies of the mourning period. “She was your wife! She bore your children!” protested Huizi. “The least you can do is shed a tear for her!” Zhuangzi smiled. When she first died, he had mourned his wife like everybody else. But then he cast his mind back to the time before she was born, when she had simply been part of the endlessly churning qi, the raw material of the universe. One day there had been a wonderful change: the qi had mingled together in a new way, and suddenly, there was his dear wife! Now she was dead and had simply gone through another alteration. “She is like the four seasons in the way that spring, summer, autumn and winter follow each other,” Zhuangzi reflected. She was now at peace, lying in the bosom of the dao, the greatest of mansions.

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

  The president discovered that his economic and political assault on the Egyptian people had inadvertently spawned political Islamist movements that were dangerously hostile to his regime. One of these was the Society of Muslims, founded in 1971 by Shukri Mustafa, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, after his release from prison. 28 He would be one of the most misguided “free lances” that stepped into the vacuum created by the ulema’s marginalization. By 1976 the Society had about two thousand members, men and women convinced that they were divinely commissioned to build a pure ummah on the ruins of Sadat’s jahiliyyah. Taking Qutb’s program in Milestones to the limit, Shukri declared not only the government but the entire Egyptian population to be apostate, and he and his followers withdrew from the mainstream, living in caves in the desert outside Cairo or in the city’s most deprived neighborhoods. Their experiment ended in violence and lethal immorality when members killed defectors from the group and Shukri murdered a respected judge who had condemned the Society. Yet deeply misguided as it was, Shukri’s society held up a mirror image that revealed the darker side Sadat’s regime. Shukri’s excommunication of Egypt was extreme, but in Quranic terms, Sadat’s systemic violence was indeed jahili. The hijrah to the most desperate quarters of Cairo reflected the plight of many young Egyptians who felt there was no place for them in their country; the society’s communes were supported by young men who, like so many others, were sent to work in the Gulf States. The Society condemned all secular learning as a waste of time, and there was a grain of truth in this since a lady’s maid in a foreign household could earn more than a junior lecturer. Far more constructive than the Society of Muslims, however, were the jamaat al-islamiyyah, the student organizations that dominated the university campuses during Sadat’s presidency, which tried to help themselves in a society that ignored the needs of the young. By 1973 they had organized summer camps at nearly all the major universities, where students could immerse themselves in an Islamic milieu, studying the Quran, keeping night vigils, listening to sermons about the Prophet, and attending classes in sport and self-defense—creating an Islamic alternative to the inadequacies of the secular state.

• 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 Erotic Mind (1995)

  Depression makes one feel dull, lifeless, and helpless. In stark contrast, peak eroticism always fosters energy and vitality. Sabrina’s lively story couldn’t have been more out of step with her chronic blue moods, and I sensed she was struggling with that contradiction. I was pleasantly surprised when she brought up her story again the following week. “You think I had something to do with Ted and I acting so differently that day, don’t you?” The conviction in her voice told me she knew she had. Over many weeks Sabrina catalogued how she had somehow set aside her usual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting during that peak experience. She interpreted Ted’s working in the garden as endearing rather than a sign of rejection. She allowed herself to be moved by the beautiful morning. She actively participated in creating a playful atmosphere. And most important of all, she seized the opportunity to become vibrantly erotic. Gradually, Sabrina embraced her peak experience as evidence of what could happen if she stopped clinging to her lonely fate and recognized her abilities to make things different. She read the story to Ted and taped it to her bedroom mirror as a reminder. Anyone who’s ever been seriously depressed knows how difficult it is to move beyond feelings of helplessness. Sabrina’s situation was complicated by the fact that she had selected a husband who matched her expectations; he often was emotionally distant and uncomfortable with closeness. Yet as Sabrina slowly reconnected with her vitality she became more approachable—and a lot more fun to be with. Sometimes Ted responded positively, and she would practice taking in his affection without critiquing it. When he was preoccupied and unavailable she learned to separate her mood from Ted’s personality quirks. Sabrina saw welcome improvements in their marriage and sex life, although neither was perfect. She did, however, cultivate a more active stance in her world, which made her far less despairing. Fred used his peak turn-ons to discover new information about his eroticism, whereas Sabrina used hers as inspiration. I have found these to be the two most common therapeutic benefits of exploring peak eroticism. But anyone who takes the time to examine the nuances of peak turn-ons will gain valuable insights into how the erotic mind creatively expresses our innermost needs and potentials. This knowledge, however, doesn’t necessarily come easily.

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

  I came to HubSpot with grandiose ideas about creating a new kind of corporate journalism. I was going to give speeches and write books and become a big-shot brand evangelist marketing guru. Instead, at the age of fifty-two, I’m writing lead-generation copy. In the world of publishing, lead-gen is about as low as you can go, a step down from writing copy for clothing catalogs. It’s hack work. It’s worse than what I was doing twenty-five years ago when I was toiling away in a computer industry trade magazine. I wrack my brain trying to figure out how this has happened. Why did Halligan hire me, if they were just going to stick me over here, doing this? My theory is that Halligan wanted to hire me but he didn’t want to manage me, so he passed me off to Cranium, but Cranium wanted nothing to do with me, so he handed me off to Wingman, and Wingman realized that Cranium didn’t consider me important, so he stuck me in the content factory working under Zack and hoped I would just go away. Wingman doesn’t want to hear my ideas about how to improve the blog by producing higher-quality articles written by real journalists. The only improvement Wingman cares about is our lead-generation number. That’s what Wingman gets paid to do. That’s how he gets measured and how he gets rewarded. He has zero incentive to change anything. After mulling things over a bit I come up with a solution that will let us attract the audience that Halligan wants to reach without interfering with the marketing blog and Jan’s lead-generation goals. My idea is that HubSpot should create a separate, high-end publication, a new website with beautiful graphics and video elements—an online magazine—and put me in charge of it. I write Wingman a long memo pitching him the idea. I suggest we call the magazine Inbound . I mention the idea to Tracy, the vice president who runs the brand and buzz department and organizes the annual Inbound conference. My online magazine dovetails perfectly with the conference. Tracy says she loves the idea. Wingman waits a week and writes back saying no. I think this is the wrong decision for the company, but it’s even worse for me. I suppose I could appeal to Cranium, but I’m pretty sure Cranium is the one who made this call. Wingman doesn’t really have a lot of autonomy. He does what Cranium tells him to do. Even if Wingman did make the decision, I doubt Cranium will overrule him. One thing I’ve started to figure out is that the top guys, like Halligan, might really want to change things, but below them there are middle managers like Cranium and Wingman, and entrenched veterans like Marcia and Jan, and these people want nothing to do with newcomers and new ideas. They don’t want change. They like things the way things are. After all, they’re the ones who made things that way.