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)

  How could the insights of the Axial Age be integrated into the violent and dishonest world of politics? Plato’s philosophy often seems to be otherworldly and to involve a flight from the mundane to the cold purity of abstraction. Yet Plato did not want his philosophers to retire from the world. Like the Confucians, he believed that a sage should be a man of action and influence public policy. Ideally, a philosopher should rule the people himself. Like the Buddha, Plato insisted that after achieving enlightenment, the sage must return to the agora and work there for the betterment of humanity. After the death of Socrates, Plato traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, hoping for inspiration. He stayed for some time in Megara with Euclides, one of the Eleatic philosophers who had been a disciple of Socrates; he shared Plato’s fascination with Parmenides. Plato was also attracted by the Pythagorean communities, with whom he forged lifelong friendships. He was especially inspired by their passion for mathematics, which trained their minds away from the confusing morass of the particular to a world of pure numbers and geometric forms. He traveled in Egypt and Libya, and in the court of the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, he met Dion, who became very enthusiastic about Plato’s ideas. Plato may have hoped that Dion would become a philosophical activist in Sicily, but his first visit to Syracuse ended badly. It was said that Dionysius had Plato sold into slavery, and that he was rescued only at the last minute by his friends. Bruised by this experience, he returned home to Athens in 387. There was little to cheer him there. Athens had tried to recover from the Peloponnesian War by making an alliance with Thebes against Sparta. But there was no lasting peace. The events of the next thirty years demonstrated the chronic instability of intercity politics on the Greek mainland. The poleis continued to fight, no city was able to implement a coherent foreign policy, and all were debilitated by the ceaseless conflict; trade declined; and there was renewed conflict between rich and poor. These internal disputes sometimes exploded in atrocity. In 370, democrats in Argos brutally clubbed twelve hundred aristocrats to death, and in Tegea the leaders of the oligarchy were slaughtered by a violent mob.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

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

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

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

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

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

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

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

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

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

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

  The Society was not perfect: it tended to be anti-intellectual, its pronouncements often defensive and self-righteous, its view of the West distorted by the colonial experience, and its leaders intolerant of dissent. Most seriously, it had developed a terrorist wing. After the creation of the State of Israel, the plight of the Palestinian refugees became a disturbing symbol of Muslims’ impotence in the modern world. For some, violence seemed the only way forward. Anwar Sadat, future president of Egypt, founded a “murder society” to attack the British in the Canal Zone. 54 Other paramilitary groups were attached to the palace and the Wafd, and so it was perhaps inevitable that some Brothers should form the “ Secret Apparatus” ( al-jihaz al-sirri ). Numbering only about a thousand, the Apparatus was so clandestine that even most of the Brothers had never heard of it. Banna denounced the Apparatus but could not control it and eventually it would both taint and endanger the Society. 55 When the Apparatus assassinated Prime Minister Muhammad al-Nuqrashi on December 28, 1948, the Society condemned the atrocity in the strongest terms. But the government seized this opportunity to suppress it. On February 12, 1949, almost certainly at the behest of the new prime minister, Banna was gunned down in the street. When Nasser seized power in 1952, the Society had regrouped but was deeply divided. In the early days while he was still unpopular, Nasser courted the Brotherhood, even though he was a committed secularist and an ally of the Soviet Union. When it became clear that he had no intention of creating an Islamic state, however, a member of the Apparatus shot him during a rally. Nasser survived, and his courage under attack did wonders for his popularity. He now felt able to move against the Society, and by the end of 1954 more than a thousand Brothers had been brought to trial, and uncounted others, many of whom had committed no greater offense than distributing leaflets, never had even a day in court but languished in prison uncharged for fifteen years. After Nasser became a hero in the larger Arab world by defying the West during the Suez Crisis of 1956, he intensified his efforts to secularize the country. But this state violence simply spawned a more extreme form of Islam that called for armed opposition to the regime. Religious extremism often develops in a symbiotic relationship with a virulently aggressive secularism. One of the Brothers detained in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Society’s chief propagandist.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  An eye-witness, Stefaneschi, has described the journey to the hermit’s retreat by three bishops who were appointed to notify him of his election. They found him in a rude hut in the mountains, furnished with a single barred window, his hair unkempt, his face pale, and his body infirm. After announcing their errand they bent low and kissed his sandals. Had Peter been able to go forth from his anchoret solitude, like Anthony of old, on his visits to Alexandria, and preach repentance and humility, he would have presented an exhilarating spectacle to after generations. As it is, his career arouses pity for his frail and unsophisticated incompetency to meet the demands which his high office involved. Clad in his monkish habit and riding on an ass, the bridle held by Charles II. and his son, Peter proceeded to Aquila, where he was crowned, only three cardinals being present. Completely under the dominance of the king, Coelestin took up his residence in Naples. Little was he able to battle with the world, to cope with the intrigues of factions, and to resist the greedy scramble for office which besets the path of those high in position. In simple confidence Coelestin gave his ear to this counsellor and to that, and yielded easily to all applicants for favors. His complaisancy to Charles is seen in his appointment of cardinals. Out of twelve whom he created, seven were Frenchmen, and three Neapolitans. It would seem as if he fell into despair at the self-seeking and worldliness of the papal court, and he exclaimed, "O God, while I rule over other men’s souls, I am losing the salvation of my own." He was clearly not equal to the duties of the tiara. In vain did the Neapolitans seek by processions to dissuade him from resigning. Clement I. had abjured his office, as had also Gregory VI. though at the mandate of an, emperor. Peter issued a bull declaring it to be the pope’s right to abdicate. His own abdication he placed on the ground "of his humbleness, the quest of a better life and an easy conscience, on account of his frailty of body and want of knowledge, the badness of men, and a desire to return to the quietness of his former state." The real reason for his resigning is obscure. The story went that the ambitious Cardinal Gaëtani, soon to become Coelestin’s successor, was responsible for it. He played upon the hermit’s credulity by speaking through a reed, inserted through the wall of the hermit’s chamber, and declared it to be heaven’s will that his reign should come to an end.292 As the Italians say, the story, if not true, was well invented, si non è vero è ben trovato.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Eventually he allowed himself to be dressed in women’s clothes so that he could spy on these revels unobserved. But in their hysteria, the women tore him to pieces with their bare hands, thinking that they had killed a lion. Agaue, Pentheus’s mother, triumphantly carried her son’s head into Thebes at the head of a demented procession. The tragic dramas had often depicted the slaying of kinsfolk, but by making Dionysus, the patron of tragedy, responsible for this unnatural murder, Euripides seemed to be calling the entire genre into question. There was no glimmer of hope at the end of the play. The royal house had been shattered, the women reduced to animals, enlightened reason defeated by savage mania, and Thebes—like Athens at this juncture—seemed doomed. What had been the value of the annual release of emotion in honor of a god who killed, tortured, and humiliated human beings without giving any plausible explanation? Athens was beginning to grow beyond tragedy, and in so doing, was also parting company with the Axial Age. The play warned the polis that it was dangerous to refuse admittance to the outsider. In Oedipus at Colonus (406), Sophocles had shown Athens receiving with honor the polluted, sacred figure of the dying Oedipus, an act of compassion that would be a blessing for the city. But in The Bacchae, Pentheus rejected the stranger and was destroyed. Not only was it politically disastrous, but individuals also had to recognize and accept the stranger that they encountered within themselves during the mystery celebrations. By giving Dionysus his due in the annual festival, Athens had given the alterity that he represented an honored place in the heart of the city; but over the years it had failed to respect the inviolable separateness of the other poleis, had exploited and attacked them, and in the process had fallen prey to hubris. In this last play, Euripides approached the heart of the Axial vision. The chorus of Maenads, the regular worshipers of Dionysus, had been correctly initiated into his cult; they experienced a vision of peace, rapture, and integration. But the women of Thebes, who were unschooled in the disciplines of transformation, were simply out of control, driven mad by the darker regions of their psyche that were unknown to them. As she entered the city, holding aloft the ghastly trophy of her son’s head, Agaue did not achieve ekstasis, but was enchanted only by her own achievements: Great in the eyes of the world, Great are the deeds I have done And the hunt I’ve hunted there. 43 The apotheosis of this barren selfishness was an act of unspeakable, unnatural violence. In this play, Euripides also presented one of the most moving and truly transcendent Greek experiences of the divine. Dionysus might seem amoral, cruel, and alien, yet he was incontrovertibly present onstage, and could neither be willed nor driven away.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  He wanted to show that before Abraham, history had been a succession of disasters; humanity seemed caught in a downward spiral of rebellion, sin, and punishment, but Abraham had reversed this grim trend. The covenant with Abraham had been the turning point of history. Abraham was special to J because he was a man of the south. He had settled in Hebron; his son Isaac lived in Beersheba; and Abraham had been blessed by Melchizedek, king of Salem/Jerusalem. The career of Abraham also looked forward to King David, who was born in the southern town of Bethlehem, was crowned king of Israel and Judah in Hebron, and had made Jerusalem his capital. For the people of Judah, the eternal covenant that God had made with the house of David was far more significant than the covenant with Moses on Sinai. 24 J was much more interested in God’s promise that Abraham would be the father of a great nation and a source of blessing to the whole of humanity than in the Sinai covenant. E’s narrative of the patriarchs, however, never mentioned the covenant with Abraham, and gave more prominence to Jacob, his grandson, whom God renamed “Israel.” But of even greater importance to E was the story of the exodus, in which the little-known god Yahweh had defeated Egypt, the greatest power in the region. It showed that it was possible for a marginal people to overcome oppression and break out of obscurity, as the little kingdom of Israel had become a major power in the Near East during the ninth century. 25 For E, Moses was the prophet par excellence. It was he, not Abraham who turned history around. J was sometimes quite critical of Moses, 26 while E was filled with sympathy for his hero during the long march through the wilderness to the Promised Land. When Yahweh’s anger flared out against his people, E poignantly described Moses’ anguish: “Why do you treat your servant so badly?” he demanded of his god. “I am not able to carry this nation by myself alone. The weight is too much for me. If this is how you want to deal with me, I would rather you killed me! If only I had found favour in your eyes, and not lived to see such misery as this!” 27 There is nothing similar to this in J’s portrait of Moses. Neither J nor E presented Moses as a great lawgiver. When they described the covenant on Mount Sinai, they did not even mention the Ten Commandments.

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

  them so light-fingered. Little children, eight- and eleven- year-olds, smash the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. People don’t dare leave the house for even five minutes, since they’re liable to come back and find all their belongings gone. Every day the newspapers are filled with reward notices for the return of stolen typewriters, Persian rugs, electric clocks, fabrics, etc. The electric clocks on street corners are dismantled, public phones are stripped down to the last wire. Morale among the Dutch can’t be good. Everyone’s hungry; except for the ersatz coffee, a week’s food ration doesn’t last two days. The invasion’s long in coming, the men are being shipped off to Germany, the children are sick or undernourished, everyone’s wearing worn-out clothes and run-down shoes. A new sole costs 7.50 guilders on the black market. Besides, few shoemakers will do repairs, or if they do, you have to wait four months for your shoes, which might very well have disappeared in the meantime. One good thing has come out of this: as the food gets worse and the decrees more severe, the acts of sabo- tage against the authorities are increasing. The ration board, the police, the officials-they’re all either helping their fellow citizens or denouncing them and sending them off to prison. Fortunately, only a small percentage of Dutch people are on the wrong side. Yours, Anne FRIDAY, MARCH 31, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Just imagine, it’s still fairly cold, and yet most people have been without coal for nearly a month. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? There’s a general mood of optimism about the Russian front, because that’s going great guns! I don’t often write about the political situation, but I must tell you where the Russians are at the moment. They’ve reached the Polish border and the Prut River in Romania. They’re close to Odessa, and they’ve surrounded Ternopol. Every night we’re expecting an extra communique from Stalin. They’re firing off so many salutes in Moscow, the city must be rumbling and shaking all day long. Whether they like to pretend the fighting’s nearby or they simply don’t have any other way to express their joy, I don’t know!

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But the Mahabharata also reflects the terror inspired by the sacrificial contests, before they had been reformed by the ritualists. At the beginning of the story, Yudishthira, the oldest Pandava brother, having won the kingdom by force of arms, summoned the chieftains to his royal consecration (rajasuya). He had to prove that he possessed the brahman by submitting to the challenge and ordeal of the ritual. He was duly consecrated and anointed king, but the rajasuya had a disastrous outcome. Overcome with envy, Duryodhana challenged Yudishthira to the dice game that was mandatory during the rites, but the gods loaded the dice against Yudishthira, who lost his wife, his property, and his kingdom. The Pandavas were forced into exile for twelve years, and the war that would almost result in the destruction of the world became inevitable. The story’s catastrophic view of the sacrificial contest gives us some insight into the anxiety that inspired the ritual reform of the Brahmanas. The plight of Yudishthira shows that the Mahabharata was not, after all, untouched by the Axial Age. He seems to have been profoundly affected by the new ideals. He was—to the frequent exasperation of his brothers—gentle, tolerant, and singularly lacking in the warrior ethos. He not only had no desire to assert himself and trumpet his ego in the conventional way, but appeared to find it well-nigh impossible to do so and regarded war as evil, savage, and cruel.63 Yudishthira was a man of the Axial Age, and this proved to be an almost intolerable handicap. He could not go off to the forest and practice ahimsa. He was the son of the god Dharma, a manifestation of Varuna, who upheld the order that made life possible. As his earthly representative, it was Yudishthira’s inescapable duty to achieve the sovereignty that alone could bring order to the world. As the son of Dharma, he was also obliged to practice the traditional virtues of absolute truthfulness and fidelity to his sworn word, without which the social order could not be maintained. Yet during the war, Yudishthira was forced—quite disgracefully—to lie. In the course of the eighteen-day battle, the Pandavas had to kill two of the generals fighting on the Kaurava side. As the epic was set in the heroic age, none of these men were ordinary mortals; they were demigods, with supernormal powers. When the Pandavas rode into battle, for example, their chariots did not touch the earth. Warriors were not subject to the same constraints as the human beings of our own debased Kali Yuga; and Bhishma and Drona, who led the Kaurava troops, could not be killed by regular means. They had inflicted so many casualties on the Pandavas’ army that the brothers despaired of victory. The future of the world hung in the balance, because if Yudishthira failed to achieve sovereignty, the divine order would be hopelessly violated. At this terrible moment, Krishna stepped in with advice that filled the brothers with dismay.

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

  But when scientific and moral postulates war thus with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never to hope for any other method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this particular truth will therefore probably be open to us to the end of time, and the utmost that a believer in free-will can ever do will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive. That they are seductive, I am the last to deny; nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they press upon it, upright in the mind. There is a fatalistic argument for determinism, however, which is radically vicious. When a man has let himself go time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderating influence of circumstances, hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions over what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. "All is fate," he then says; "all is resultant of what pre-exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the instable molecules passively tumbling in their preappointed way. It is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any new force coming in; and less, perhaps, than anywhere else under the sun is there anything really mine in the decisions which I make." This is really no argument for simple determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force which might make things otherwise from one moment to another, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide. A person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has the acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible independent power. How else could he be so conscious of its absence and of that of its effects? But genuine determinism occupies a totally different ground; not the impotence but the unthinkability of free-will is what it affirms. It admits something phenomenal called free effort, which seems to breast the tide, but it claims this as a portion of the tide. The variations of the effort cannot be independent, it says; they cannot originate ex nihilo, or come from a fourth dimension; they are mathematically fixed functions of the ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism, which conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent variable that might come from a fourth dimension, if it would come but that does not come, is a very dubious ally for determinism. It strongly imagines that very possibility which determinism denies.

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

  As often in times of flux, a new spirituality emerged, and it had three interrelated themes: dukkha, moksha, and karma. Surprisingly, despite this prosperity and progress, pessimism was deep and widespread. People were experiencing life as dukkha—“unsatisfactory,” “flawed,” and “awry.” From the trauma of birth to the agony of death, human existence seemed fraught with suffering, and even death brought no relief because everything and everybody was caught up in an inescapable cycle (samsara) of rebirth, so the whole distressing scenario had to be endured again and again. The great eastward migration had been fueled by the Aryans’ experience of claustrophobic confinement in the Punjab; now they felt imprisoned in their overcrowded cities. It was not just a feeling: rapid urbanization typically leads to epidemics, particularly when the population rises above 300,000, a sort of tipping point for contagion.57 No wonder the Aryans were obsessed by sickness, suffering, and death and longed to find a way out. Rapid change of circumstance also made people more conscious of cause and effect. They could now see how the actions of one generation affected the next, and they began to believe that their deeds (karma) would also determine their next existence: if they were guilty of bad karma in this life, they would be reborn as slaves or animals, but with good karma, they might become kings or even gods next time. Merit was something that could be earned, accumulated, and finally “realized” in the same way as mercantile wealth.58 But even if you were reborn as a god, there was no real escape from life’s dukkha, because even gods had to die and would be reborn to lower status. In an attempt to shore up the now-vulnerable class system, perhaps, the Brahmins tried to reconfigure the concepts of karma and samsara: you could enjoy a good rebirth only if you strictly observed the dharma of your class.59 Others would draw upon these new ideas to challenge the social system. In the Punjab, the Aryans had tried to fight their way to “liberation” (moksha); now some, building on the internalized spirituality of the Brahmanas, were looking for a more spiritual freedom and would investigate their inner world as vigorously as the Aryan warriors had once explored the untamed forests. The new wealth gave the nobility the time and leisure that was essential for such introspective contemplation. The new spirituality was, therefore, strictly for the aristocracy; it was one of the civilized arts that relied on the state’s structural violence. No shudra or chandala would be permitted to spend hours in the meditations and metaphysical discussions that between the sixth and second centuries BCE produced the texts known as the Upanishads.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But the war could not be won by ordinary means: Drona and Bhishma, Krishna pointed out, were supermen who “could not have been slain in a fair fight.” 69 His desperate stratagems were like the special ritual procedures employed by a priest to put the sacrifice back on course. In terms of the old Vedic ethos, Krishna’s argument was impeccable; he was even able to cite the precedent of Indra, who had resorted to a similar lie when he slew the monster Vritra and brought order out of chaos. But Yudishthira was a man of the Axial Age, and was not convinced by this archaic ritual lore. He was inconsolable. Throughout the poem, he persisted in his despairing cry: “Nothing is more evil than the kshatriya’s dharma. ” 70 Warfare was not a blood sacrifice acceptable to the gods; it was an atrocity. The epic story showed that violence bred more violence; and that one dishonorable betrayal led to another. Crazed with sorrow, Drona’s son Aswatthaman vowed to avenge his father’s death, and offered himself to Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous people of India, as “self-sacrifice” ( atmayajna ). His martyrdom was a horrible parody of the nonviolent renunciation of self practiced by the renouncers. Shiva handed Aswatthaman a glittering sword, and took possession of his body, which now shone with unearthly radiance. In a divine frenzy, Aswatthaman entered the Pandavas’ camp while everybody was asleep, and began to slaughter his enemies in a raid that was as dishonorable as Yudishthira’s betrayal of his father. Aswatthaman was a Brahmin; he experienced the massacre as a holy ritual, but in fact it was a sacrifice that was out of control. In Vedic ritual, the animal was supposed to be killed swiftly and painlessly. But when Aswatthaman seized his first victim—the man who had decapitated his father—he kicked him to death, refusing to finish him quickly, and “made him die the death of an animal . . . grinding off his head.” 71 The Pandava brothers escaped the raid, because Krishna had advised them to sleep outside the camp that night, but most of their family—including the children—were slaughtered. When the Pandavas finally caught up with Aswatthaman, they found him sitting serenely beside the Ganges in a ritual garment, in classic Brahminical pose, with a group of renouncers. As soon as he saw the Pandavas, Aswatthaman plucked a blade of grass and transformed it into a brahmasiris, a weapon of mass destruction, which he released with the cry “ Apandavaga! ”—“For the annihilation of the Pandavas!” There was an immediate fiery conflagration that threatened to engulf the world. In order to neutralize the effect of Aswatthaman’s missile, Arjuna immediately fired off a brahmasiris of his own, and it too blazed up like the fire at the end of a yuga. 72 There was a deadly impasse, and yet again, the fate of the world was in the balance.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  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. Not even good karma could save them. When they looked around their community, they could see only pain and suffering. Even wealth and material pleasure was overshadowed by the grim reality of impending old age and mortality. In fact, they believed, worldly goods “sap . . . the energy of all the senses,” and hastened their decline.102 As this gloom intensified, people struggled to find a way out.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Not even good karma could save them. When they looked around their community, they could see only pain and suffering. Even wealth and material pleasure was overshadowed by the grim reality of impending old age and mortality. In fact, they believed, worldly goods “sap . . . the energy of all the senses,” and hastened their decline. 102 As this gloom intensified, people struggled to find a way out. More and more people became disenchanted with the old Vedic rituals, which could not provide a solution to this problem. The best they could offer was rebirth in the world of the gods, but in the light of the new philosophy, this could only be a temporary release from the relentless recurrence of suffering and death. Further, people were beginning to notice that the rites did not even produce the material benefits they promised. Some rejected the ritual science of the Brahmanas. The Upanishads promised final liberation, but this spirituality was not for everybody. It was based on a close familiarity with the minutiae of Vedic thought that most people simply did not have, and many were doubtful about the identity of the brahman and atman, on which the whole system depended. Yoga offered moksha, but how did the yogin interpret the tranced states that he experienced? Could they be reconciled with Vedic orthodoxy? The Upanishads that were composed at about this time asserted that they could. The Katha Upanishad claimed that the atman (the true self) controlled the body in the same way as a rider managed his chariot. The yogin learned to keep his mind and senses under control like the good horses of a chariot driver. In this way, a person who “has understanding is mindful and always pure,” and would achieve release from the endless cycle of rebirth. 103 But others were convinced that yoga was not enough. Something more was needed. Yoga was a full-time job. It demanded hours of effort each day, and was clearly incompatible with the duties of a householder. By the sixth century, most people thought that the householder had no chance of achieving moksha, because he was a slave to karma, compelled by the duties of his class to perform one action after another, each fueled by the desire that was the root of the problem. A householder could not beget children without desire. He could not wage war, grow his crops, or engage in business without wanting to succeed.

• 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?