Disappointment

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 Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  A twist on the “I hate my body” theme is “I’m not interested in sex because I am not attracted to my spouse.” If your spouse has stopped putting effort into staying in shape and good health, it might be a turn-off to you. Let’s face it: physical attraction is very important. If your spouse’s health habits aren’t what they should be, I will address this issue with him or her later in this book. I will discuss the importance of physical attraction and being in good health when it comes to having a vibrant sex life. I might be able to get through to him or her even though you haven’t. Sometimes it helps to have an outside source saying the same thing you’ve been saying. In the meantime, here are some things you should consider. No matter what physical changes your spouse needs to make for you to feel attraction again, it’s going to take time for those changes to occur. You can’t lose twenty pounds or build muscle overnight. If you wait until s/he reaches his or her goal, your marriage may fall apart. When you see your partner making an effort to get in shape or lead a more healthful lifestyle, you can encourage him or her to stick to the plan by complimenting those efforts and even being affectionate. That will go a long way to increasing your spouse’s stick-to-itiveness. If you’re saying to yourself, “Ah yes, but we’ve been down this road before; s/he never sticks to his or her resolution,” that attitude must go. Research tells us that people who make substantial changes in their lives—lose weight, stop smoking and/or drinking—have many setbacks before they make a healthier lifestyle a way of life (Prochaska, Norcross, and DiClemente, 1994). Stop being critical and pessimistic. Support your spouse’s efforts to change. If you start being more physically affectionate, you will give your partner’s ego the boost it needs to keep the positive changes going. BUT I’VE HAD BAD EXPERIENCES IN THE PAST Sometimes what’s holding you back from having a better sexual relationship with your spouse are painful memories of past physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Traumatic experiences can trigger bad feelings that have a lasting effect. Some people aren’t even aware of the extent to which negative experiences have scarred them emotionally. They fear intimacy. They don’t enjoy being touched. They have a hard time letting their guard down and relaxing with their partners. They experience flashbacks.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Maternal language. But she had seen how these bons mots were ineffective. She had seen Benjamin, as she had seen the men in her family, bristle at some mild word of kindness. On the paddle-tennis court, recently: —Benjamin, she said to a doubles partner, has a serve like a howitzer. At once, he called to her across the court. —Don’t be a dip shit, baby doll. His face like a red balloon, swollen. To start a conversation was to be the messenger of ill. She would no longer feel obliged. She thought about her daughter in the Williamses’ basement. She imagined Wendy with a skirt hiked up, imagined the precise curve of her buttocks, the tuft of blond pubic hair. Wendy’s calves already had a perfect feminine knot, as though she had been wearing high heels for years, and it was clear from the early protrusion of her breasts that she wouldn’t have the small, insignificant bosom that her mother needlessly restrained with under-wire support. Wendy didn’t seem ashamed in the aftermath of this contretemps. She seemed, on the contrary, emboldened by being caught. In secret, Elena admired her daughter’s pluck. Lost in affection, she missed the opportunity to chastise Wendy—who hadn’t asked to be excused. Her daughter was poised at the fridge again, having left her plate and glass in the sink. Again the fridge disappointed Wendy. She turned instead to the cupboard where the cookies and candy were stacked haphazardly. She selected a box of Hot Tamales, a candy that was left over from her Halloween basket. Maybe her final Halloween basket—she was old now for that kind of dressing up. Then Elena’s daughter slunk out of the room. Dulcinea! Dulcinea! was replaced in the library by the distant sound of the television, leaden and excruciating. That it was already time for A Charlie Brown Christmas seemed intolerable to Elena. She and her husband rose together from the table. The dog trotted after them to the sink. —What’s for dessert? Benjamin said. —See for yourself. —No advice from the experts, huh? —Don’t expect me to amuse you tonight, Ben. He idled in the center of the room. —Sounds like we’re in for a good time. His plate slipped out of his hands and into the trash. He fished it out, set it on the counter. —Party time, he said. Kinda wow— —Don’t start, Elena said. —You think I— —I have no idea— She set her plate in the sink a little gingerly. It had a dramatic crash to it she hadn’t intended. The Peanuts theme song—that happy and melancholy piece of jazz—filled the next room. —What’s on your mind? he said. Don’t— —It wouldn’t make it a pleasant evening, she said, if that’s what you’re after. I don’t want to talk about it. Furiously, Benjamin reached into the cupboard, into Wendy’s cache of Halloween treasure and filched an Almond Joy bar. —Well, let’s not talk then. —Surprise, Elena mumbled. And then:—Stupid mustache cup.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  It is, in a sense, a tribute to the moral nature of man as well as a proof of his moral limitations; for it is significant that men cannot pursue their own ends with the greatest devotion, if they are unable to attribute universal values to their particular objectives. But men are no more able to eliminate self-interest from their nobler pursuits than they are able to express it fully without hiding it behind and compounding it with honest efforts at or dishonest pretensions of universality. Even a conscious attempt to eliminate dishonest and ambiguous motives is no perfect guarantee against hypocrisy; for there is no miracle by which men can achieve a rationality high enough to give them as vivid an understanding of general interests as of their own. Jeremy Bentham, who gave himself to the hope that men could be weaned from their immediate desires, if only they could be brought to realise that a broad social interest was not in conflict but in ultimate harmony with a wise egoism, found to his disappointment that a prudent self-interest was an achievement almost as rare as unselfishness. When impulse presses toward immediate goals it cannot always be deterred, even though reason try to persuade it that its real ends may be attained in more ultimate and inclusive terms. Writing in 1822, after many of his reform movements had failed to claim the popular support he had anticipated, Bentham confessed: “Now for some years past all inconsistencies, all surprises have vanished. . . . A clue to the interior of the labyrinth has been found. It is the principle of self-preference. Man, from the very constitution of his nature, prefers his own happiness to that of all other sentient beings put together.” 10 The judgment may be a little too pessimistic, expressing a reaction from too romantic hopes, but it is nearer the truth than the early hope of the utilitarians that reason could resolve the conflict between self-interest and social interest. Even when the individual is prompted to give himself in devotion to a cause or community, the will-to-power remains. In the family for instance, it may express itself in part within the family circle and in part through the family. Devotion to the family does not exclude the possibility of an autocratic relationship toward it. The tyranny of the husband and father in the family has yielded only very slowly to the principle of mutuality. And it is significant that women have never been able to overcome the vestigial remnants of male autocracy in modern social life without using other than purely rational weapons against it. It was not until they could avail themselves of the weapon of economic power and independence that they were able to gain a complete victory.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  In discussing this statement of his, I chanced to mention that education in the lower grades was compulsory with us. To this he strongly objected. All compulsion, he said, was wrong. Man must be gotten to do right by the law of love and not by the rule of force. Upon my telling him that but for compulsory education some parents would never send their children to school, he said: "What of it? The children would probably be no less moral and no less happy than those of highest education. I have associated with the learned and the ignorant, and I have found more honor and honesty, more fear of the Lord and more true happiness, among the unlettered than among the lettered. The more of education we cram into the heads of the people the more of the fear of God is crowded out of them. The world lives by the love of God and not by the primer or the multiplication table." "What, if you had had no education?" I ventured to ask. Quickly and feelingly came the answer "The world would have been none the worse, and I would have been the happier." "What if Jesus and the other prophets had had no schooling?" I asked. To which he replied "It was not what they got out of their schools that made them the spiritual and moral powers they became, but what they got out of their hearts. God puts more education into the human heart than man has ever been able to put into the head. Some of the wisest and best people hereabouts are peasants who have never seen the inside of a school, and who do not know one letter from another." "What of Paul," I asked, "who certainly enjoyed the benefits of the Greek schools of his day?" To which he replied "The schools made of Paul a theologian, and Christianity would have been the better without the theology of Paul." Warped by unfavorable surroundings. Other objections to some of his paradoxical views on education suggested themselves to me, but I left them unsaid. I perceived that while tolerant of objections, his opinions were fixed. He apparently judged of world-conditions from the view-point of his limited and unfavorable horizon. Under different conditions, some of his opinions on education, and on a number of other subjects which we discussed, would probably have been quite different. Well informed of political and social conditions in United States. The conversation turned to social conditions in the United States, and on these matters he displayed an amount of knowledge that was amazing. The more I listened the more I wondered, till finally I could not but ask him how he who wrote and worked so much could find time to keep himself so well informed of a country so far away as the United States. To which he replied "Your country has interested me even more than mine.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  For teachers of psychology, the implications of this study are disheartening. When we teach our students about the behavior of people in the helping experiment, we expect them to learn something they had not known before; we wish to change how they think about people’s behavior in a particular situation. This goal was not accomplished in the Nisbett-Borgida study, and there is no reason to believe that the results would have been different if they had chosen another surprising psychological experiment. Indeed, Nisbett and Borgida reported similar findings in teaching another study, in which mild social pressure caused people to accept much more painful electric shocks than most of us (and them) would have expected. Students who do not develop a new appreciation for the power of social setting have learned nothing of value from the experiment. The predictions they make about random strangers, or about their own behavior, indicate that they have not changed their view of how they would have behaved. In the words of Nisbett and Borgida, students “quietly exempt themselves” (and their friends and acquaintances) from the conclusions of experiments that surprise them. Teachers of psychology should not despair, however, because Nisbett and Borgida report a way to make their students appreciate the point of the helping experiment. They took a new group of students and taught them the procedure of the experiment but did not tell them the group results. They showed the two videos and simply told their students that the two individuals they had just seen had not helped the stranger, then asked them to guess the global results. The outcome was dramatic: the students’ guesses were extremely accurate. To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought. Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Whenever a nation does not completely disinherit its workers, it has been able to count upon their loyalty. The loyalty has been a little more hesitant than that of the middle classes; but it has been, on the whole, more generous than the nation deserved, when the real motives of its martial enterprises are considered. The pretensions of nations, which only the most penetrating intellects among the intellectuals are able to discount, are discounted among the workers only by those who have had the bitterest experiences of national greed and brutality. Lenin’s uncompromising anti-patriotism, during the World War, found an echo in the hearts of the Russian proletariat, because there the workers were completely and obviously disinherited; and the machinary of state was so manifestly inept and corrupt that it could not claim the usual reverence which even disillusioned workers give a government which manages to maintain its functions. In Europe, on the other hand, the patriotic fervor of the workers was dampened without being destroyed. Even when the German monarchial system succumbed to the vicissitudes of defeat, the German workers made a distinction between anti-monarchism and anti-patriotism. The nationalist of every nation brought the charge of treason against both socialistic and communistic workers indiscriminately; and the German nationalists still affect to believe that they would have won the war but for the socialist “stab in the back.” As far as the socialists are concerned, the charge has less foundation in fact than it ought to have had. The modern worker sacrifices his patriotism in almost exact proportion to the measure of social injustice from which he suffers. He disavows the nation only if it has thrust him out of its system of cultural inheritances and economic benefits in the most obvious terms. It may be taken for granted that all workers will be more sophisticated in a future war than in the past one. Social intelligence may prompt disillusionment without the immediate lesson of complete disinheritance. But the degree of anti-nationalism among workers will always depend somewhat upon the measure of social injustice from which they suffer. The exaltation of class loyalty as the highest form of altruism is a natural concomitant of the destruction of national loyalty. The proletarian worker in general, whether socialistic or communistic, makes loyalty to the class a primary claim in his scheme of fealties. Whether class loyalty becomes for him the sole loyalty or only the primary one, whether he conceives the class in such absolute terms that he is able to cut through all of the complexities of social life with a vigorous and potent oversimplification, that again depends upon the degree to which society has cast him out.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  There is distinct irony in the statement in 7:12 that “the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money.” True, but we need only remind ourselves of the story of Job to see that this too is vanity. Again in 8:10-13, we must wonder whether the confident statement that “it will not be well with the wicked” is ironic. Throughout these chapters, Qoheleth seems to be reciting traditional wisdom and occasionally reminding himself and the reader that it is all vanity. One of the most striking statements in Qoheleth is in 7:16-17: “Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise. . . . Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool.” Here the Hebrew sage adopts the advice of the Delphic oracle: “nothing too much.” In part, the advice may be directed against pretense, against those who are righteous or wise in their own eyes. Such a warning would be quite in line with the teaching of the prophets. But Qoheleth’s warning must also apply to the kind of zeal that is so often praised in the Hebrew Bible. (The paradigm examples are Phinehas, in Numbers 25, and Elijah.) The point can be illustrated by a postbiblical, noncanonical Jewish story, the Testament of Abraham. According to this story, an archangel took Abraham for a ride on a heavenly chariot before he died. Whenever Abraham saw people sinning, he asked God to strike them down, for Abraham had never sinned and had no compassion for sinners. Eventually, God intervened and told the archangel to take Abraham back to earth, lest he destroy all creation. The comment of Qoheleth is apt: “Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning” (7:20). Another striking saying in chapter 7 is less enlightened. “One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found” (7:28). Jewish sages in antiquity (all men) were not especially friendly to the opposite sex. Ben Sira is a much worse offender than Qoheleth in this regard, but the two sages share the prejudices of a male profession in a patriarchal society. Qoheleth returns to his basic insights in chapter 9. The same fate comes to everyone, righeous and wicked. The conclusion follows: eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart. The wording of this passage is especially reminiscent of the story of Gilgamesh, where the hero fails in his quest for eternal life but is told by the barmaid Siduri that the gods have reserved eternal life for themselves and that he should enjoy the life that is given to him (the passage is cited in chapter 1 above). The Concluding Poem Perhaps the most moving part of Qoheleth is the poem on old age at the end of the book. This poem balances the opening poem in 1:1-11 and shares the same theme: all is vanity or vapor.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale himself had deleted the section of tape where Nora had talked about painting on Ranko’s behalf. “One small step,” he said to Roman, “in my journey to becoming Richard Nixon.” The Sharps had come to town for a week in April, and Yale had kept out of their way as best he could. He hid Roscoe over at Asher’s place, where Roscoe got noticeably fatter. Allen, just because he’d called Yale up that one time, felt personally responsible for Yale quitting, despite everything Yale had told them both. They doubled down on their insistence that he stay there. They’d be in Barcelona for the summer anyway. —The morning of the parade, he tried calling Roman with the excuse of talking him into going. When Roman didn’t answer, he found himself unduly disappointed. Out of proportion with how much he actually cared about Roman, which was only somewhat. Roman was fun and maybe Roman was therapy, but Roman certainly wasn’t the only man in the world. Which was another reason to go to the parade himself. At eleven the phone rang, and Yale answered “Sharp residence” as always, although no one ever seemed to call for the Sharps. It was his father’s low, lazy grumble asking how everything was. The way an underpaid nurse might, poking her head into your room to make sure you didn’t need the bedpan changed. Yale said, “I’m fine. I’m great.” “I’m sitting here doing the crossword, myself.” “Okay.” “I’ll, ah, I’ll thank you if you can give me a six-letter word for ‘harpy.’ I was sitting here the longest time thinking it said ‘happy,’ but no, it’s ‘harpy.’” His father was the slowest talker in the world, a trait that drove Yale crazy in adolescence. “I got nothing.” “What are you up to these days?” There was no way to answer. Yale hadn’t told him about the breakup, just the move. He’d never even told him he’d left the Art Institute last summer; the AIC was something his father had actually heard of, something he took some mote of pride in, and although surely he’d heard of Northwestern as well, Yale had figured he’d leave well enough alone. He could have talked about the Cubs game, but instead he said, “I’m on my way to a parade.” Because now that his father’s voice was wrapping its way around his right ear, now that going to a ball game would have felt tainted by his father’s approval, it was true: He was going to the parade. “What kind of parade?” “A really gay one, Dad. A big gay parade.” Yale read in his father’s silence a kind of sarcasm. Listen to yourself , the silence said. Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  of responsibility. But did their beliefs about human nature really change? To find out, Nisbett and Borgida showed them videos of brief interviews allegedly conducted with two people who had participated in the New York study. The interviews were short and bland. The interviewees appeared to be nice, normal, decent people. They described their hobbies, their spare-time activities, and their plans for the future, which were entirely conventional. After watching the video of an interview, the students guessed how quickly that particular person had come to the aid of the stricken stranger. To apply Bayesian reasoning to the task the students were assigned, you should first ask yourself what you would have guessed about the two individuals if you had not seen their interviews. This question is answered by consulting the base rate. We have been told that only 4 of the 15 participants in the experiment rushed to help after the first request. The probability that an unidentified participant had been immediately helpful is therefore 27%. Thus your prior belief about any unspecified participant should be that he did not rush to help. Next, Bayesian logic requires you to adjust your judgment in light of any relevant information about the individual. However, the videos were carefully designed to be uninformative; they provided no reason to suspect that the individuals would be either more or less helpful than a randomly chosen student. In the absence of useful new information, the Bayesian solution is to stay with the base rates. Nisbett and Borgida asked two groups of students to watch the videos and predict the behavior of the two individuals. The students in the first group were told only about the procedure of the helping experiment, not about its results. Their predictions reflected their views of human nature and their understanding of the situation. As you might expect, they predicted that both individuals would immediately rush to the victim’s aid. The second group of students knew both the procedure of the experiment and its results. The comparison of the predictions of the two groups provides an answer to a significant question: Did students learn from the results of the helping experiment anything that significantly changed their way of thinking? The answer is straightforward: they learned nothing at all. Their predictions about the two individuals were indistinguishable from the predictions made by students who had not been exposed to the statistical results of the experiment. They knew the base rate in the group from which the individuals had been drawn, but they remained convinced that the people they saw on the video had been quick to help the stricken stranger.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Strakhof: "I must confess that I was delighted by the success of the last piece of 'Anna Karenina.' I had by no means expected it, and to tell you the truth, I am surprised that people are so pleased with such ordinary and EMPTY stuff." The same year he wrote to Fet: "It is two months since I have defiled my hands with ink or my heart with thoughts. But now I am setting to work again on my TEDIOUS, VULGAR 'ANNA KARENINA,' with only one wish, to clear it out of the way as soon as possible and give myself leisure for other occupations, but not schoolmastering, which I am fond of, but wish to give up; it takes up too much time." In 1878, when the novel was nearing its end, he wrote again to Strakhof: "I am frightened by the feeling that I am getting into my summer mood again. I LOATHE what I have written. The proof-sheets for the April number [of "Anna Karenina" in the "Russky Vyestnik"] now lie on my table, and I am afraid that I have not the heart to correct them. EVERYTHING in them is BEASTLY, and the whole thing ought to be rewritten,—all that has been printed, too,—scrapped and melted down, thrown away, renounced. I ought to say, 'I am sorry; I will not do it any more,' and try to write something fresh instead of all this incoherent, neither-fish-nor-flesh-nor-fowlish stuff." That was how my father felt toward his novel while he was writing it. Afterward I often heard him say much harsher things about it. "What difficulty is there in writing about how an officer fell in love with a married woman?" he used to say. "There's no difficulty in it, and above all no good in it." I am quite convinced that if my father could have done so, he long ago would have destroyed this novel, which he never liked and always wanted to disown. REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY (Part II.)Table of ContentsBY HIS SON, COUNT ILYA TOLSTOYTable of ContentsIN the summer, when both families were together at Yasnaya, our own and the Kuzminsky's, when both the house and the annex were full of the family and their guests, we used our letter-box. It originated long before, when I was still small and had only just learned to write, and it continued with intervals till the middle of the eighties. It hung on the landing at the top of the stairs beside the grandfather's clock; and every one dropped his compositions into it, the verses, articles, or stories that he had written on topical subjects in the course of the week. On Sundays we would all collect at the round table in the zala, the box would be solemnly opened, and one of the grown-ups, often my father himself, would read the contents aloud.

• From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

  21. At length the Imperial Government, wearied out with a dispute which was interminable, came to the conclusion that the only way of restoring peace to the Church was to abandon the Council of Chalcedon. In the year 482 was published the famous _Henoticon_ or Pacification of Zeno, in which the Emperor took upon himself to determine a matter of faith. The Henoticon declared that no symbol of faith but that of the Nicene Creed, commonly so called, should be received in the Churches; it anathematized the opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, and it was silent on the question of the "One" or "Two Natures" after the Incarnation. This middle measure had the various effects which might be anticipated. It united the great body of the Eastern Bishops, who readily relaxed into the vague profession of doctrine from which they had been roused by the authority of St. Leo. All the Eastern Bishops signed this Imperial formulary. But this unanimity of the East was purchased by a breach with the West; for the Popes cut off the communication between Greeks and Latins for thirty-five years. On the other hand, the more zealous Monophysites, disgusted at their leaders for accepting what they considered an unjustifiable compromise, split off from the Eastern Churches, and formed a sect by themselves, which remained without Bishops (_acephali_) for three hundred years, when at length they were received back into the communion of the Catholic Church. 22.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  larger stories about the workings of the mind. The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. Speaking of the Law of Small Numbers “Yes, the studio has had three successful films since the new CEO took over. But it is too early to declare he has a hot hand.” “I won’t believe that the new trader is a genius before consulting a statistician who could estimate the likelihood of his streak being a chance event.” “The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let’s not follow the law of small numbers.” “I plan to keep the results of the experiment secret until we have a sufficiently large sample. Otherwise we will face pressure to reach a conclusion prematurely.”

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  In 1790, the right of the firstborn and masculine privilege were eliminated; girls and boys became equals regarding succession; in 1792 divorce law was established, relaxing strict marital ties; but these were feeble conquests. Bourgeois women were too integrated into the family to find concrete grounds for solidarity with each other; they did not constitute a separate caste capable of forcing their demands: on an economic level, they existed as parasites. Thus, while women could have participated in events in spite of their sex, they were prevented by their class, and those from the agitating class were condemned to stand aside because they were women. When economic power falls into the hands of the workers, it will then be possible for the working woman to gain the capacities that the parasitic woman, noble or bourgeois, never obtained.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  entire enterprise was misguided: if one salient cognitive illusion could be weakened or explained away, others could be as well. This reasoning neglects the unique feature of the conjunction fallacy as a case of conflict between intuition and logic. The evidence that we had built up for heuristics from between-subjects experiment (including studies of Linda) was not challenged—it was simply not addressed, and its salience was diminished by the exclusive focus on the conjunction fallacy. The net effect of the Linda problem was an increase in the visibility of our work to the general public, and a small dent in the credibility of our approach among scholars in the field. This was not at all what we had expected. If you visit a courtroom you will observe that lawyers apply two styles of criticism: to demolish a case they raise doubts about the strongest arguments that favor it; to discredit a witness, they focus on the weakest part of the testimony. The focus on weaknesses is also normal in political debates. I do not believe it is appropriate in scientific controversies, but I have come to accept as a fact of life that the norms of debate in the social sciences do not prohibit the political style of argument, especially when large issues are at stake—and the prevalence of bias in human judgment is a large issue. Some years ago I had a friendly conversation with Ralph Hertwig, a persistent critic of the Linda problem, with whom I had collaborated in a vain attempt to settle our differences. I asked him why he and others had chosen to focus exclusively on the conjunction fallacy, rather than on other findings that provided stronger support for our position. He smiled as he answered, “It was more interesting,” adding that the Linda problem had attracted so much attention that we had no reason to complain. Speaking of Less is More “They constructed a very complicated scenario and insisted on calling it highly probable. It is not—it is only a plausible story.” “They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.” “In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Abruptly, Paul called her baby doll and signed off. It happened all at once. There was a lonesome sound to his farewell, and it reminded her of the way her father would never say good-bye on the phone, the way he hastened to disconnect first. Wendy wanted to tell Paul she missed him, that she had survived the long, painful stretches of junior high with tales of his good life away from home. Though she had sent him this letter one time, this letter explaining her feelings, she was never sure if it had been received. She thought Paul got all the breaks. He was the smarter one, the badly adapted one. There was no discussion of her being sent away, too. Wendy was a beauty, a pixie, a nymph, a sorceress, but she wasn’t going to be any captain of industry. She could work the rooms of the P.T.A. Paul got sent away back at some moment when Valley Road was different, when family life was different, when there was movement between the generations, when there was exchange of sentiment and gifts and ideas and stories. Or that’s how Wendy thought sometimes. It was pretty obvious, actually, that no such time had ever existed. In an interminable commercial break, Wendy gathered up the blanket and set out about the unheated and unlit portions of the house, looking for a sweater she’d left down here somewhere. She surveyed the exposed beams and warped floors, the masonry and wrought-iron latches of historic construction. The house was as cold as a tomb. The ghost of Mark Staples, repressive Episcopal minister and one-time owner of 129 Valley Road, tracked her movements. As Wendy imagined him, he was a Chiller Theater ghost, a flapping white sheet, with strings exposed and tennis shoes peeking from beneath. He was so like a Hood—so trapped in indecision, so glum, such a professional bumbler—that he was the perfect ghost for them, the perfect ancestor. She could feel his Halloween exoskeleton girding her. She was creeped out. Forget her sweater. It was lost. She didn’t need it. The decision to head back to the Williamses came soon after this tour. She foolishly settled in to watch first the grasping hand, and then the arm, of the buried woman from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies struggling up from beneath the surface of her tomb. A team of policemen and paramedics were racing toward the spot where she was buried—they had been tipped off somehow. In the meantime, in the woman’s back brain, in the most obscure recesses of cognition, she had effected an escape. Her hands, independent of the rest of her, pushed up through soft earth, grasping. In a malevolent dusk, the buried woman stood now on a narrow spit of earth, shreds of some Beverly Hills evening gown barely concealing her transparent flesh. Shroud of Turin. What was left of her, as she reached out, covered with shit and pitch and dirt?

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  Game night was tomorrow. She wanted to go, to be part of the group and have fun that was only complex in the sense that it involved special dice and keeping track of spell damage. But wasn’t she supposed to want to go to wine tastings and the theater department chair’s wife’s literary salon? The symphony and museums? Wealthy life in the big city? She loved all those things. Aaron gave her all those things, but he came with so many strings attached. He had potential, yes, but it was just possible he’d already wasted it. People didn’t really change their fundamental natures all that much in their forties. Hell, most people didn’t change their natures much past puberty. Ed had mentioned being a curmudgeon since middle school. Beth would be willing to bet he hadn’t really been one then either, because he certainly wasn’t one now. He was a hedgehog, bristling on the outside, softer inside, viewing the world with skepticism and keeping one big idea in mind. Not necessarily a positive idea, his notion that all people are stupid unless proven otherwise, but not an entirely impractical one either. He protected his feelings and kept them out of sight sometimes, but he did have them. And he didn’t blame people who didn’t meet his high standards, he mostly just avoided relying on them. He surrounded himself with people he thought highly of, which was a good thing. He had included Beth in that group, and that flattered her. His presentation might be rough, but his character was sound. Aaron, like the fox in Isaiah Berlin’s model, had no single defining principle except whatever worked best for him at the time. Proposing with negging? That hadn’t worked. Cue the romantic proposal. No? The practical proposal. She was almost curious as to what he might come up with next. But, she realized with a sudden flash like a lightbulb going on, she would still say no. Because Aaron’s character was not sound. It was all presentation, flash, with no substance to back it up. He had apologized to her and to Ed only when doing so was clearly his only viable social option. He was a chasm into which she could throw her emotional energy forever and never get a thing back. That was the opposite of a foundation on which to build a life.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Poor Marianne, languid and low from the nature of her malady, and feeling herself universally ill, could no longer hope that tomorrow would find her recovered; and the idea of what tomorrow would have produced, but for this unlucky illness, made every ailment severe; for on that day they were to have begun their journey home; and, attended the whole way by a servant of Mrs. Jennings, were to have taken their mother by surprise on the following forenoon. The little she said was all in lamentation of this inevitable delay; though Elinor tried to raise her spirits, and make her believe, as she then really believed herself, that it would be a very short one. The next day produced little or no alteration in the state of the patient; she certainly was not better, and, except that there was no amendment, did not appear worse. Their party was now farther reduced; for Mr. Palmer, though very unwilling to go as well from real humanity and good-nature, as from a dislike of appearing to be frightened away by his wife, was persuaded at last by Colonel Brandon to perform his promise of following her; and while he was preparing to go, Colonel Brandon himself, with a much greater exertion, began to talk of going likewise.—Here, however, the kindness of Mrs. Jennings interposed most acceptably; for to send the Colonel away while his love was in so much uneasiness on her sister’s account, would be to deprive them both, she thought, of every comfort; and therefore telling him at once that his stay at Cleveland was necessary to herself, that she should want him to play at piquet of an evening, while Miss Dashwood was above with her sister, &c. she urged him so strongly to remain, that he, who was gratifying the first wish of his own heart by a compliance, could not long even affect to demur; especially as Mrs. Jennings’s entreaty was warmly seconded by Mr. Palmer, who seemed to feel a relief to himself, in leaving behind him a person so well able to assist or advise Miss Dashwood in any emergence. Marianne was, of course, kept in ignorance of all these arrangements. She knew not that she had been the means of sending the owners of Cleveland away, in about seven days from the time of their arrival. It gave her no surprise that she saw nothing of Mrs. Palmer; and as it gave her likewise no concern, she never mentioned her name.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The morale of the workers The existence of a large class of population without property rights in the material they work upon and the tools they work with, and without claim to the profits resulting from their work, must have subtle and far-reaching effects on the character of this class and on the moral tone of the people at large. A man’s work is not only the price he pays for the right to fill his stomach. In his work he expresses himself. It is the output of his creative energy and his main contribution to the common life of mankind. The pride which an artist or professional man takes in his work, the pleasure which a housewife takes in adorning her home, afford a satisfaction that ranks next to human love in delightsomeness. One of the gravest accusations against our industrial system is that it does not produce in the common man the pride and joy of good work. In many cases the surroundings are ugly, depressing, and coarsening. Much of the stuff manufactured is dishonest in quality, made to sell and not to serve, and the making of such cotton or wooden lies must react on the morals of every man that handles them. There is little opportunity for a man to put his personal stamp on his work. The mediæval craftsman could rise to be an artist by working well at his craft. The modern factory hand is not likely to develop artistic gifts as he tends his machine. It is a common and true complaint of employers that their men take no interest in their work. But why should they? What motive have they for putting love and care into their work? It is not theirs. Christ spoke of the difference between the hireling shepherd who flees and the owner who loves the sheep. Our system has made the immense majority of industrial workers mere hirelings. If they do conscientious work nevertheless, it is a splendid tribute to human rectitude. Slavery was cheap labor, it was also dear labor. In ancient Rome the slaves on the country estates were so wasteful that only the strongest and crudest tools could be given them. The more the wage worker approaches their condition, the more will the employer confront the same problem. The finest work is done only by free minds who put love into their work because it is their own. When a workman becomes a partner, he “hustles” in a new spirit. Even the small bonus distributed in profit-sharing experiments has been found to increase the carefulness and willingness of the men to such an extent that the bonus did not diminish the profits of the employers.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I see Mr. Ferrars myself, ma’am, this morning in Exeter, and his lady too, Miss Steele as was. They was stopping in a chaise at the door of the New London Inn, as I went there with a message from Sally at the Park to her brother, who is one of the post-boys. I happened to look up as I went by the chaise, and so I see directly it was the youngest Miss Steele; so I took off my hat, and she knew me and called to me, and inquired after you, ma’am, and the young ladies, especially Miss Marianne, and bid me I should give her compliments and Mr. Ferrars’s, their best compliments and service, and how sorry they was they had not time to come on and see you, but they was in a great hurry to go forwards, for they was going further down for a little while, but howsever, when they come back, they’d make sure to come and see you.” “But did she tell you she was married, Thomas?” “Yes, ma’am. She smiled, and said how she had changed her name since she was in these parts. She was always a very affable and free-spoken young lady, and very civil behaved. So, I made free to wish her joy.” “Was Mr. Ferrars in the carriage with her?” “Yes, ma’am, I just see him leaning back in it, but he did not look up;—he never was a gentleman much for talking.” Elinor’s heart could easily account for his not putting himself forward; and Mrs. Dashwood probably found the same explanation. “Was there no one else in the carriage?” “No, ma’am, only they two.” “Do you know where they came from?” “They come straight from town, as Miss Lucy—Mrs. Ferrars told me.” “And are they going farther westward?” “Yes, ma’am—but not to bide long. They will soon be back again, and then they’d be sure and call here.” Mrs. Dashwood now looked at her daughter; but Elinor knew better than to expect them. She recognised the whole of Lucy in the message, and was very confident that Edward would never come near them. She observed in a low voice, to her mother, that they were probably going down to Mr. Pratt’s, near Plymouth. Thomas’s intelligence seemed over. Elinor looked as if she wished to hear more. “Did you see them off, before you came away?” “No, ma’am—the horses were just coming out, but I could not bide any longer; I was afraid of being late.” “Did Mrs. Ferrars look well?” “Yes, ma’am, she said how she was very well; and to my mind she was always a very handsome young lady—and she seemed vastly contented.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Wages, too, have risen in some trades. Very earnest efforts have been made by experts to prove that the rise in wages has kept pace with the rise in prices, but with dubious results. Dun’s Review some time ago compared the prices of 350 staple commodities in July 1, 1897, and December 1, 1901, and found that $1013 in 1901 would buy no more than $724 in 1897. Hence if wages had remained apparently stationary, they had actually declined. The purchasing power of the wages determines the health and comfort of the workingman and his family. It does not decide on the justice of his wage. That is determined by comparing the total product of his work with the share paid to him. The effectiveness of labor has increased immensely since the advent of the machine. The wealth of the industrial nations consequently has grown in a degree unparalleled in history. The laborer has doubtless profited by this in common with all others. He enjoys luxuries that were beyond the reach of the richest in former times. But the justice of our system will be proved only if we can show that the wealth, comfort, and security of the average workingman in 1906 is as much greater than that of the average working-man in 1760 as the wealth of civilized humanity is now greater than it was in 1760. No one will be bold enough to assert it. The bulk of the increase in wealth has gone to a limited class who in various ways have been strong enough to take it. Wages have advanced on foot; profits have taken the Limited Express. For instance, the report of the Interstate Commerce Commission of June, 1902, stated that from 1896–1902 the average wages and salaries of the railway employees of our country, 1,200,000 men, had increased from $550 to $580, or five per cent. During the same period the net earnings of the owners had increased from $377,000,000 to $610,000,000, or sixty-two per cent. Thorold Rogers, in his great work “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” says: “It may well be the case, and there is every reason to fear it is the case, that there is collected a population in our great towns which equals in amount the whole of those who lived in England and Wales six centuries ago; but whose condition is more destitute, whose homes are more squalid, whose means are more uncertain, whose prospects are more hopeless, than those of the peasant serfs of the Middle Ages or the meanest drudges of the mediæval cities.” If the celebrated saying of John Stuart Mill is true, that “it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” it means that the achievements of the human mind have been thwarted by human injustice. Our blessings have failed to bless us because they were not based on justice and solidarity.