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

  Hoyt lived with the group for 15 years, during which time he broke from his family. He didn’t see his parents for 12 years. After Von Mierers’ AIDS-related death in 1990, the group relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. This was one of Von Mierers’ designated “safe places.” Von Mierers had been the only person with supposed access to the space aliens, so the group became more survivalist in nature. They built a large compound outfitted with bunkers, and stockpiled weapons and a four-year supply of vacuum-packed food. Hoyt escaped the group in the summer of 1999. “I wish I could tell you I woke up one morning and had the realization, ‘Yikes! This is a dangerous cult and I need to get the hell out of here!’” he said. “Actually it took me three attempts to escape before I actually did. My self-esteem was so beaten down. I was constantly being told that I had let down the group and however hard I tried to improve, it was never enough. I had resigned myself to accepting the truth that I was a hopeless cause. I felt I was unfixable and unworthy.” Earlier that year, he had voiced doubts about Von Mierer’s apocalyptic prediction. At the time, he was traveling 300 days a year around the world modeling. “I guess you could say I still had one foot somewhat in reality. However, I paid heavily for expressing my doubts. Even though I was the group’s primary source of income and had given them many millions of dollars over the years, I was instructed to move to their North Carolina compound. I was told I couldn’t model anymore—they shaved my head weekly so I couldn’t work even if I wanted to. I was quarantined to the premises and given every type of slave labor they could think of ‘to teach me humility.’ I had to be the first one up and the last one to bed. I was forced to live in the garage with the dogs on a mat. I was literally and figuratively in the dog house,” he said. “Luckily, I can laugh about it now. But it was a horrible period in my life. I even contemplated suicide. But the crazy part was, as I much I hated being in that situation, I also felt like I deserved it. Even though leaving the group felt like such an act of cowardice, I felt like dead weight—that I was holding them back. I honestly felt that I was wasting their precious time and goodwill. My primary drive to leave the group was not because I thought they were bad or abusing me, but rather to relieve them of the burden of my uselessness.”

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

  Other people leave when they become victims of internal politics or personality conflicts. For example, many people get fed up and exit because they can’t relate to or readily follow their immediate superior. Long-term members often walk out when they feel that group policy is not being fairly and uniformly applied, or if there is a struggle for power. Over the years I have met a large number of people who have walked out of their group because they just couldn’t stand it anymore, yet they still believed in the leader. There are thousands of ex-Moonies who still believe that Moon is the Messiah, but just can’t tolerate the way the cult is run. In their minds they are waiting for the day that the group reforms its policies, so they can return. They do not understand that the group is structured and run the way it is because of Moon. The same pattern applies to ex-Scientologists who leave the group but who still think Ron Hubbard was a genius and that the “technology” works. These people call themselves “independents” or members of the “Free Zone.” If they still believe Hubbard was a great humanitarian and discovered how to be “free”, they are still suffering from undue influence. Over the decades, I’ve met thousands of people who were born into cults, but walked out. Even as children, some of them could never swallow the weird belief system, particularly if they went to public school and had positive relationships with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, coaches, and other caring people. Kick Outs I’ve encountered hundreds of people who were “kicked out” of their mind control groups because they bucked authority and asked too many questions. Others were abused to such an extent that they were damaged and no longer productive for the cult. Still others developed serious physical or psychological problems that cost too much money to be treated. They became a liability to their group. People who have been kicked out are almost always in worse shape than people who walk out or have been counseled out. They feel rejected by the group and its members. In the case of religious cults, they also feel rejected by God Himself. Many of them devoted their lives to their cults, turning over their money and property. They were told that the group was now their family, and believed that it would take care of them for the rest of their lives. Then, years later, they were told that they were not living up to the group’s standards and would have to leave. These people, phobic toward the outside world, felt cast into utter darkness. For many kick outs, suicide seems a realistic alternative to their suffering.180 No one knows how many people have committed suicide because of mind control. I personally knew of a number of people who killed themselves because of their cult involvement. Research should be done, as this is a major public health issue.

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

  By 1990, all members of MeK were intensely brainwashed, and forced to divorce their spouses and accept celibacy for the rest of their lives. A year later, in order to destroy any remaining family ties within the group, members were forced to surrender their children, who were adopted by other supporters in Europe and America. Masoud divorced the “love of his life” and was unable to see his children. Finally, in 1994 all members were forced to go through the final stage of Ideological Revolution called “self divorce”—total loss of their individuality and personality, and to act only through blind obedience of their cult identity to leadership. By 1996, after almost 20 years in MeK, Masoud began to wake up, as if from a very bad dream, and was able to find a way to get away. He experienced extreme, crippling back pain, which forced him to distance himself and receive care. There were other ex-members of the MeK and his family who still dearly loved and missed him. By then, almost all members of the group were living in camps in Iraq, isolated from the rest of the world, collaborating with the government of Saddam Hussein against their own country, Iran. In the largest of these, Camp Ashraf, cult leaders Masoud and Maryam Rajavi had created their own imitation Iran, complete with a pseudo-parliament and a replica of the Tehran bazaar. Their members, by now transformed into devoted, unquestioning slaves, helped the two leaders to live out their failed fantasy of being the only true leadership of Iran. In 2009, Camp Ashraf was seized by American forces, and MeK had to surrender all its arms and munitions. In August of 2014, I was invited by Richard E. Kelly of AAWA (Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses) to teach a workshop in London. I invited many of my friends and contacts to come attend. A press conference was also organized about terrorism as a mind control cult phenomenon and many important statements were given by colleagues. The videotape of the press conference can be found on my website.102 While in London, I was fortunate to be able to spend time with Masoud, even meet his ex-wife, who has remarried, and his wonderful daughter and son. It was a heartfelt experience being a part of a healing that continues to unfold. Masoud is dedicated to sharing his life experience to help prevent people being recruited into extremist cults and to develop programs to help those afflicted to exit and be rehabilitated. He is a respected and dear friend. His website is http://www.banisadr.info/ Josh Baran and Shasta Abbey, A Zen Buddhist Cult

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  getting real tired of the whole thing. It was all playing so fast and so hard. It all hurt too much. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He wanted to forget it, but it wouldn’t stop. * * * He went back to the big sandbagged bunker to see the major. “That was a pretty rough night, sergeant,” the major said, looking up from the green plastic maps on his desk. “Yes sir,” he said. “It was pretty bad.” “Ran into a lot of them, didn’t you?” the major said, almost smiling. “Yes, we sure did. I mean they just sort of popped up on us and started firing.” The major looked down at the maps again and frowned slightly. “What happened?” he said. “What happened out there?” “Well, major, like I said, we were moving toward the village and we had just grabbed the woman.” “The woman?” the major said. “Yes, we had just grabbed the pregnant woman.” “She was pregnant?” “Well yes sir, but we didn’t find out until later. We didn’t even think she was a woman. She didn’t have any chest major, she was flat like a board and we tied her hands behind her back. And there was a boy with her, maybe her small son. We tied his hands too.” “And then?” said the major. “And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.” “Didn’t anybody see you?” “Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn’t seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.” “What time was this?” said the major. “Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The dance of the magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect mechanism, the velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the forests dead and mutilated. The Saturday night of the soul’s hollow dance, each jumping jigger a functional unit in the St. Vitus dance of the ringworm’s dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt, her sweet rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and socketed. Inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter they shove the copulating corpse around. And then crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly stops and with the stoppage the dancers come apart, arms and legs intact, like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now the air is blue with words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the empty soul rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees. The air blue with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in sleep through corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope, striped like the zebra, now lying quiet as the mollusk, now spitting flame. Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her parts eaten away, her hair musically enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with muted lips, her words falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarch seated in a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized. Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. The heavy fluted lips of the sea shell, Laura’s lips, the lips of lost Uranian love. All floating shadowward through the slanting fog. Last murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off the Labrador coast, oozing eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine drift. Lost Laura, last of the Petrarchs, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not gray the world, but lackluster, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence. And this in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death’s exquisite rupture with life. From this inverted cone of ecstasy life will rise again into prosaic skyscraper eminence, dragging me by the hair and teeth, lousy with howling empty joy, the animated fetus of the unborn death maggot lying in wait for rot and putrefaction. Sunday morning the telephone wakes me up. It’s my friend Maxie Schnadig announcing the death of our friend Luke Ralston. Maxie has assumed a truly sorrowful tone of voice which rubs me the wrong way. He says Luke was such a swell guy. That too sounds the wrong note for me because while Luke was all right, he was only so-so, not precisely what you might call a swell guy.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  something snap. It sounds like the branch of a tree breaking off—and there is my right leg all twisted under me. I panic for the first few minutes, then call my father. He drives over right away and takes me to the hospital, the V.A. hospital in the Bronx. I spend the next six months there. * * * I am alone again. I have been lying in Room 17 for almost a month. I am isolated here because I am a troublemaker. I had a fight with the head nurse on the ward. I asked for a bath. I asked for the vomit to be wiped up from the floor. I asked to be treated like a human being. My leg has swollen to twice its original size. The thigh bone has been completely shattered in the break, leaving the bone sticking out just beneath the surface of my skin. It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before. The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me. It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy. It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something. Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  When I got there, I sat in my wheelchair staring at myself in the mirror for a long time, thinking back to the promise I had made to myself and the others in the Bronx VA hospital that I would walk again. I had not taken my braces out of the closet or tried to walk in several months, but on that night I was determined to get up again. Sometime after midnight, I took the braces out of the closet, transferred into my bed, and put the braces on, locking them in place. I then transferred back into my wheelchair, grabbed my crutches, and lifted myself slowly out of my chair into an upright position. After taking a deep drunken breath, I began to stubbornly drag myself around the room. I had only gone a few steps when I found myself facing the mirror once again. I remember staring at my twisted and atrophied body and with one last superhuman effort, refusing to be defeated, I spun around angrily, dragging myself across the floor of my room. After several steps I lost my balance and went crashing to the floor. I thought for a moment of getting up again, of making one last vain attempt to walk, but I was too tired and drunk and instead I began to cry, tears streaming down my face, hoping my mother and father wouldn’t hear me. A few minutes later I pulled myself back into my wheelchair where I slowly unstrapped my braces and threw them into the closet. I know the truth is that someday they will find a way to fuse the spine together, but not in my lifetime or the lifetime of the others around me. Our job here is to keep on living, to keep getting up and making it through each day any way we can. END OF EXCERPT More about Hurricane Street ___________________ “The author of Born on the Fourth of July (1976) recounts the brief 1974 movement he initiated to change how Veterans Affairs hospitals cared for wounded soldiers . . . The great strength of this book is that the author never minces words. With devastating candor, he memorializes a short-lived but important movement and the men who made it happen. Sobering reflections on past treatment of America’s injured war veterans.” —Kirkus Reviews “[A] compelling snapshot of early 1980s activism. . . .

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

  Th e heroine, Anthia, is a superlative beauty who suff ers an utterly predictable sequence of threats to her chastity. “Oh dangerous charm, oh ill- starred beauty, why do you persecute me, why do you cause me such evil? Were the tombs and murders, the chains of slavery and the lawlessness of pi- rates not enough?” Having survived all this, the fi nal threat to Anthia’s corporal integrity was to be the most trying, as well as the most melodra- matic. “Now I will be placed in a house of ill- repute, and a pimp will compel me to lose the chastity which I have guarded up to now for Habro- comes.” When she learns that it is her lot to be sold into prostitution, she asks the slave who is the instrument of her fate to kill her. Anthia’s experi- ence of the brothel, and her eventual escape from it, is not only the cli- mactic episode of the Ephesian Tale. It is, in its utter conventionality, a ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  paradigm of the romance, of the genre’s most basic assumptions about the body and society.  Despite her pitiful death wish, Anthia ended up in the clutches of a brothel keeper in Tarentum, Italy. He compelled her to be placed in front of the brothel, and she lamented that she was compelled to play the harlot. But her despair quickly turned to resolve. “Why do I bewail my fate instead of fi nding some contrivance [mēchanē] by which I might preserve the chastity which I have safeguarded up to now?” As the crowd of lustful customers jostled to pay for her ser vices, Anthia, “without any recourse [amēchanē] from this evil, nevertheless found a device for her escape.” She threw herself to the ground and feigned the violent convulsions of an epileptic fi t. Th e dumb- struck crowd felt “pity and fear,” and their erotic aspirations were, temporar- ily, dampened. Th e pimp took her home to recover, and she wove an elabo- rate story to convince him that she was truly affl icted with the disease. Her feint succeeded in creating just enough delay to let the universe resolve itself happily. She remained inviolate, and when she eventually rejoined her hus- band, she could boast to him, “I remain pure for you, having contrived every device [mēchanē] for the preservation of chastity.” He, too, protested his unimpeachable fi delity, and they “easily persuaded each other, since that was what they wanted.”  Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave own- ers and other ruffi ans, recur throughout the entire genre.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You don’t know because you never stop to think. You’re letting people use you up. You’re a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth of what you’ve got I could turn the world upside down. You think that’s crazy, eh? Well, listen to me . . . I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you tonight I thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn’t make much difference whether I do it or not. But anyway, I don’t see much point in doing it now. That won’t bring her back to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I don’t want to kick off yet . . . I want to do some good in the world first. That may sound silly to you, but it’s true. I’d like to do something for others. . . .” He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile. It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something quite alien to me. I thought to myself—if only we could change skins! Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than anything was the thought that he wouldn’t even enjoy the funeral—his own wife’s funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral, sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites. But they weren’t. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they really didn’t grasp it at all—not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an affirmation of the conscious self. Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last moment to surrender all one’s possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind. How are we to stop the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing the other over the precipice? As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading “Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here!”—as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose hands society had placed a Gatling gun. If I performed a good deed it was no different, ultimately, than if I had performed a bad deed. I was like an equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing. I was a rather important, active equals sign, like a general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I could never change into a plus or a minus sign. Nor could anyone else, as far as I could determine. Our whole life was built up on this principle of equation. The integers had become symbols which were shuffled about in the interests of death. Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage—these were the temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles. To stop the endless juggling by turning one’s back on it, or by facing it squarely and writing about it, would be no help either. In a hall of mirrors there is no way to turn your back on yourself. I will not do this. I will do some other thing! Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about not doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know? That was the idea which lodged in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I was most expansive, most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, helpful, sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, and automatically I was saying—“why, don’t mention it. . . . nothing at all, I assure you. . . . no, please don’t thank me, it’s nothing,” etc. etc. From firing the gun so many hundreds of times a day perhaps I didn’t even notice the detonations any more; perhaps I thought I was opening pigeon traps and filling the sky with milky white fowl.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you. In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying, as if by a great recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men, the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one. If one isn’t crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. It’s as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a supernormal life, like the Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don’t even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a streetcar right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy—it is something monstrous and evil. You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This too is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the big issue, and this was always clear to me, even when I denied it. The dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement. The more awake one becomes, as artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything. Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out of the trance. Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a concession to the automatic principle of death. Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico I was able to partake of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate until I was ripe to be born. I understood it perfectly, though I acted blindly and confusedly. I swam back into the stream of human activity until I got to the source of all action and there I muscled in, calling myself personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed the tide of humanity to wash over me like great white-capped breakers. All this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul searching for its target. Everything that came within range had to be destroyed, if I were ever to rise again and ride the waves. This monster which rose now and then to fix its target with deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaslessly would, when the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, would gather unto itself a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods abated, would settle down on the summit of a lofty mountain peak thence to open wide its doors and return to the world what had been preserved from the catastrophe. If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and murdered in my day sleep. I did everything which my nature bade me to do. Nature is eternally whispering in one’s ear—“if you would survive you must kill!” Being human, you kill not like the animal but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need. The men who are the most honored are the greatest killers.

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

  Masoud wrote his story in the 2004 book, Masoud: Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel. Since then he has dedicated his life to intensive scholarly study of cults and terrorism, culminating in the publication of another book, Destructive and Terrorists Cults: A New Kind of Slavery, in 2014. In this book, Masoud paints a gripping portrayal of the dynamics of cults and their megalomaniac leaders. Here is a short summary of his story. Masoud Banisadr was born into a prominent, educated, and liberal-minded Iranian family. He was 25 years old, in the final year of his mathematics Ph.D. in the UK—happily married, and the father of a two-year-old daughter—when he attended a political meeting organized by the Iranian revolutionary organization, Mojahedin e Khalq, or MeK. It was during the Iranian revolution and he supported what he thought was the group’s purely political cause. Iran had finally overthrown the dictatorship of the Shah. It didn’t take long for Masoud and his family to be sucked into the mind control of the group. Soon he had transformed into an obedient cult member, sacrificing everything he had to the ambitions of the group’s leader. MeK was originally a political organization that mixed Islam with Marxism. MeK played a prominent part in the mass demonstrations and paramilitary activity that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. To recruit new members, especially young students from schools and universities, MeK’s slogans focused on democracy, freedom and human rights. After the revolution, as an aspect of recruitment, MeK supported Ayatollah Khomeini and the new establishment. Over time, MeK changed from a small guerrilla organization into a mass political movement with the support of hundreds of thousands of young students. On June 20, 1981, Rajavi, the leader of the group, felt he could follow Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover of government. He demanded his supporters to pour into the streets to overthrow the new revolutionary government and make him the new Iranian leader. The attempt failed. It also cost many lives, especially among young students. After this futile endeavor, MeK changed dramatically. It became a clandestine terrorist group, turning some of its young members into human bombs. A young member (perhaps the first female “suicide bomber”) blew herself up inside a mosque. A month later, Rajavi, and many high-ranking members fled to France. After Rajavi sided with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, he lost almost all his support, both inside and outside of Iran. In 1985, in an attempt to hold on to its remaining members and supporters, MeK followed a more totalistic destructive path and initiated the process of Ideological Revolution. This process of mind manipulation escalated with the announcement of the marriage of Rajavi to Maryam, the former wife of his close aide and friend Abrishamchi. In 1986, Masoud Banisadr was made the representative of MeK to United Nations’ agencies and human rights organizations, and later its representative in the United States, meeting well-known politicians.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “Well, I told them people I got plenty of cars, plenty of cars.” He spoke emphatically, with much more excitement than I’d heard from him in a while. “All different colors, shapes, and sizes. The man say, ‘Your cars don’t work.’ I told him my cars do work, too.” He looked at me. “You may have to talk to that man about my cars, okay?” I nodded and thought of his field of metal. “You do have lots of cars—” “I know!” He cut me off and started laughing. “See, I told them people, but they didn’t believe me. I told them.” He was smiling and chuckling now, but he looked confused and not himself. “Them people think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I know exactly what I’m talking about.” He spoke defiantly. We reached his room, and he sat down on his bed while I pulled up a chair. He became still and quiet and suddenly looked very worried. “Well, it looks like I’m back here,” he said with a heavy sigh. “They done put me back on death row.” His voice was mournful. “I tried, I tried, I tried, but they just won’t let me be.” He looked me in the eye. “Why they want to do somebody like they’re doing me is something I’ll never understand. Why are people like that? I mind my own business. I don’t hurt nobody. I try to do right, and no matter what I do, people come along, put me right back on death row…for nothing. Nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” He was becoming agitated so I put my hand on his arm. “Hey, it’s okay,” I said as gently as I could. “It’s not as bad as it seems. I think—” “You’re going to get me out, right? You’re going to get me off the row again?” “Walter, this isn’t the row. You haven’t been feeling well, and so you’re here so you can get better. This is a hospital.” “They’ve got me again, and you’ve got to help me.” He was starting to panic, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then he started crying. “Please get me out of here. Please? They’re going to execute me for no good reason, and I don’t want to die in no electric chair.” He was crying now with a forcefulness that alarmed me. I moved to the bed next to him and put my arm around him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Walter, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  putting on the braces and dragging myself around the yard less and less, feeling depressed and spending more time getting drunk at Arthur’s Bar. One night in late August I came home very drunk and pushed myself back into my house, up the wooden ramp my father had built when I was at the hospital. I pushed my wheelchair down the hallway to my room, trying not to wake my mother and father or any of my brothers and sisters. When I got there, I sat in my wheelchair staring at myself in the mirror for a long time, thinking back to the promise I had made to myself and the others in the Bronx VA hospital that I would walk again. I had not taken my braces out of the closet or tried to walk in several months, but on that night I was determined to get up again. Sometime after midnight, I took the braces out of the closet, transferred into my bed, and put the braces on, locking them in place. I then transferred back into my wheelchair, grabbed my crutches, and lifted myself slowly out of my chair into an upright position. After taking a deep drunken breath, I began to stubbornly drag myself around the room. I had only gone a few steps when I found myself facing the mirror once again. I remember staring at my twisted and atrophied body and with one last superhuman effort, refusing to be defeated, I spun around angrily, dragging myself across the floor of my room. After several steps I lost my balance and went crashing to the floor. I thought for a moment of getting up again, of making one last vain attempt to walk, but I was too tired and drunk and instead I began to cry, tears streaming down my face, hoping my mother and father wouldn’t hear me. A few minutes later I pulled myself back into my wheelchair where I slowly unstrapped my braces and threw them into the closet. I know the truth is that someday they will find a way to fuse the spine together, but not in my lifetime or the lifetime of the others around me. Our job here is to keep on living, to keep getting up and making it through each day any way we can. END OF EXCERPT

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

  Some dysfunctional relationships, marriages, and families are essentially mini-cults of a few people. I’ve learned that many domestic abuse victims were forced into a nearly totally dependent relationship, often kept away from family and friends who might be critical of the controlling partner’s behavior. Some people were not allowed to have access to money, to learn how to drive a car, or to work outside the home. Whenever they tried to communicate their wants or needs, they were beaten. They were made to feel that any problem in their marriage was entirely their fault, and that if they only worked harder to please their spouse, everything would be fine. These people’s self-esteem became so low that they came to believe there was no future for them without their partner. Some people had spouses who planted phobias in their minds, so they could never leave the marriage; in some cases, they were also told that they would be hunted down and killed if they ever left. Some controllers threatened to kill themselves if their victim ever left. Asking Questions: The Key To Protecting Yourself Learning to be an educated consumer can help save you time, energy and money. In the case of destructive cults, being an educated consumer can help protect your mind and possibly save your life. Thorough online research is your best first option. However, if you are ever approached by someone who tries to pry information out of you or invites you to participate in a program, you can ask some very specific questions which will help you avoid over 90% of cult recruiters. Simply asking these assertively will help you deflect recruiters, who will quickly realize that you are not a promising use of their time. These questions work best if you ask them in a very direct yet friendly manner, and demand very specific answers. Although most cults use deception while recruiting, most cult members don’t realize that they are lying to potential new members. By asking these direct questions one after another, you can usually discover that either 1) you are not being told a straight story, or 2) the person doesn’t have the straight story to begin with. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses recruit by asking people if they would like to study the Bible with them. But what they do not say is that they use the New World Translation, published by the Watchtower, which is not accepted by Biblical scholars outside the cult. Of course, they have been told it is a better translation than all other Bibles.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  There was no excuse for him to have shot someone, but it didn’t make sense to kill him. I began to get angry about it. Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right? I tried not to let Mr. Dill hear me crying. I tried not to show him that he was breaking my heart. He finally got his words out. “Mr. Bryan, I just want to thank you for fighting for me. I thank you for caring about me. I love y’all for trying to save me.” When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  When I lay on my bed to take my nap, my body felt dense and heavy, as though it would be very hard to move again, which was just as well, since I didn’t feel like moving. When Donna banged on my door and yelled “Dinner!” I didn’t answer. She put her head in and asked if I was asleep, and I told her I didn’t feel like eating. I felt so inert, I thought I’d go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I lay awake through the sounds of argument and TV and everybody going to the bathroom. Bedtime came, drawers rasped open and shut, doors slammed, my father eased into sleep with radio mumble. The orange digits on my clock said 1:30. I thought: I should get out of this panty hose and slip. I sat up and looked out into the gray, cold street. The shrubbery on the lawn across the street looked frozen and miserable. I thought about the period of time a year before when I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking that someone was going to break into the house and kill everybody. Eventually that fear went away and I went back to sleeping again. I lay back down without taking off my clothes, and pulled a light blanket tightly around me. Sooner or later, I thought, I would sleep. I would just have to wait. But I didn’t sleep, although I became mentally incoherent for long, ugly stretches of time. Hours went by; the room turned gray. I heard the morning noises: the toilet, the coughing, Donna’s hostile muttering. Often, in the past, I had woken early and lain in bed listening to my family clumsily trying to organize itself for the day. Often as not, their sounds made me feel irrational loathing. This morning, I felt despair and a longing for them, and a sureness that we would never be close as long as I lived. My nasal passages became active with tears that didn’t reach my eyes. My mother knocked on the door. “Honey, aren’t you going to be late?” “I’m not going to work. I feel sick. I’ll call in.” “I’ll do it for you, just stay in bed.” “No, I’m going to call. It has to be me.” I didn’t call in. The lawyer didn’t call the house. I didn’t go in or call the next day or the day after that. The lawyer still didn’t call. I was slightly hurt by his absent phone call, but my relief was far greater than my hurt. After I’d stayed home for four days, my father asked if I wasn’t worried about taking so much time off. I told him I’d quit, in front of Donna and my mother. He was dumbfounded. “That wasn’t very smart,” he said. “What are you going to do now?”

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Sebastos, however, does not mean the “Worshiping One,” but the “Worshipful One,” and Theos Sebastos means the “God Who Is to Be Worshiped.” Amid all the ancient gods and goddesses that crowd Olympus, Augustus is not some Johnny-come-lately god, but the one who (above all others?) is to be worshiped. All other divinized mortals, said Horace to Augustus, achieved that status only after death but, “Upon you…while still among us, we already bestow honors, set up altars to swear by in your name, and confess that nothing like you will arise after you or has arisen before you” (Epistles 2.1:12–17). Roman imperial theology had no problem with a human being who was, on the one hand, Son of God and, on the other, God Incarnate. It also never imagined convening a council—at Nicea maybe?—to decide how a person could be at the same time fully human and fully divine. Roman theologians—poets and artists all—would have scorned any submission of Roman theology to Greek philosophy. And so did Paul for Christian theology in 1 Corinthians 1–4. We already have our first and most fundamental insight into Roman imperial theology from that single inscription. It is, of course, centered on and incarnated in the divine ruler. But titles such as Son of God or God Incarnate depend on that first title of Imperator, so that it must always come first. If Paul looked up, for example, as he passed through the southeastern gate of the public forum of Ephesus, the first word he would have seen on its dedicatory inscription was the abbreviation IMP, “to the Imperator as the All-Conquering One.” That Priene inscription says nothing about peace. It simply presumed and emphasized that Caesar’s transcendental titles—Son of God and God Incarnate—derived from and depended upon that first—and it was always first—title of Imperator as World Conqueror. What sort of peace derived from and was incarnated in such a divine conqueror? FROM TENT SITE TO TEMPLE WALL In the middle of the first century BCE, almost a century of bitter social unrest and venomous class warfare had degenerated into Rome’s worst nightmare, a terrible civil war with legionary forces on both sides. It looked like it was all over. Rome was doomed, the Roman Empire was finished, and, in the horrors of its dissolution, it would destroy the Mediterranean world. In his contemporary Epodes Horace asked, “Does some blind frenzy drive us on, or some stronger power, or guilt?” (7.13–14). Does Rome’s inaugural and fratricidal murder of Remus by Romulus mean that “a bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother’s murder…be a curse upon posterity”? (7.17–20). Now, he said, “a second generation is being ground to pieces by civil war, and Rome through her own strength is tottering” (16.1–2). Maybe Rome, “this selfsame city we ourselves shall ruin, we, an impious generation, of stock accurst,” until wild animals and wilder barbarians will wander through “the ashes of our city” (16.9–12).

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  To recap: sex is bad a lot. The badness of sex often stems from the ritual neglect of our own desires and sensations, because that’s how we’ve been socialized. We feel bad about this badness because popular media has convinced us that everyone is having more and better sex than we are, and that synchronized orgasm is standard after seven seconds of penis-in-hole intercourse. We are burned out—on sex and everything else—and we don’t even care that much, because how could we, when the world is crumbling down around us? Anhedonia, the clinical inability to experience pleasure, is on the rise. The media is oversexed yet we are over sex. We’ve refused to take the recycling out for weeks because we cannot bear the thought of doing an activity. If this all rings depressing to you, that’s because it is. There are, however, glimmers of hope. One glimmer is the growing number of sex psychologists, coaches, and educators emerging in the relatively new field of sex therapy. This is fantastic news for people with the cash to outsource sexual problem-solving, and still pretty good news for the rest of us: many of the tools and exercises used in sessions are seeping into the popular consciousness—at a glacial pace, but a pace nonetheless. In 2019, for example, Teen Vogue published an in-depth guide to anal sex and the requisite preparations. The only sex-adjacent awareness-building I recall from the magazines of my girlhood is just page after page of humiliating reader-submitted stories about periods—girls getting their period on their crush’s back during a flirty piggyback ride, girls getting their period during gym class (swim unit), girls getting their period on their crush’s back during gym class (swim unit). My aim for this book is to illuminate some of the more promising practices within the field of sex therapy that help treat, or at least investigate, sexual dissatisfaction, both within relationships and outside of them. One tool that is near and dear to my heart? Taking sex off the table entirely. Given that so many of us are sex-recessing already, why don’t we congratulate ourselves for what we were already doing? To consciously sex-recess, we need to understand why we’re having sex in the first place. A couple years after returning from Croatia, and for years, I slept with a male acquaintance quarterly, even though he was rude to me and the sex was obnoxious: he choked without asking (a theme) and kissed like a vacuum. I had vowed to stop, but how could I when I didn’t understand why I was doing it? I knew our irregular, emotionally confusing hookups would lead to nothing, and I wanted something—but what? The hooking up felt okay in the moment, dreamy right after (were we together??), and then terrible after the right after. When enough time passed after the terrible, I would reactivate the cycle, my memory effectively wiped.