Disgust

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 Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Led by Little Bawang, the students imposed the same fate on more teachers, the dunce caps becoming unbearably tall and the boards heavier. Imitating their revolutionary brothers and sisters in Beijing, the students initiated “struggle meetings” in which they forced certain teachers into the jet-plane position—a student standing on either side, pushing teachers to their knees, pulling their hair back with a jerk, then holding their arms out and back, like the wings of a jet plane. It was a most painful position, but it seemed to work, as after an hour or two of this, with students jeering at them, many teachers began to confess. The students were right in their suspicions—the school had been teeming with revisionists, right under their noses! Soon the students’ attention turned to the vice principal, Lin Sheng, who they discovered was the son of a notorious landlord. He was the third-highest official at school, which made this bit of news all the more salacious. Jianhua had been sent to his office once for misbehavior, and Sheng had been quite lenient with him, which he had appreciated at the time. The students locked Lin Sheng in a room, where he was to stay between the struggle meetings, but one morning Jianhua, serving as the guard on duty, opened the room to discover the vice principal had hung himself. Once again Jianhua struggled to repress his discomfort, but he had to admit the suicide made it seem as if Lin Sheng was indeed guilty of something. One day, in the midst of all this, Jianhua ran into Fangpu, who was bursting with excitement. Since his forced public apology over his poster attacking Ding, he had been laying low. He had spent his time devouring the writings of Mao and Marx and plotting his next move. Word had come from Beijing that the work teams were to be withdrawn from all schools. Students were to form their own committee, choose a school official to be its head, and run the school itself through the committee. Fangpu planned on becoming the student leader of the committee. And he was going to wage open revolution against Secretary Ding. Jianhua could only admire his bravery and persistence. Through Little Bawang, who had forced more and more confessions from teachers, Fangpu learned that Secretary Ding had had affairs with at least two female teachers, revealing his audacious hypocrisy. He was the one continually ranting against Western decadence and was always admonishing the male and female students at Yizhen to keep their distance from each other. Bawang and Fangpu ransacked his office and found that he had been hoarding food coupons and possessed a fancy radio and bottles of nice wine, all hidden away. Now posters attacking Ding filled the walls. Even Jianhua felt indignant at his behavior. Soon Ding Yi was paraded through school and then through the town of Yizhen, on his head the most enormous dunce cap, decorated with drawings of monsters, and a

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As she returned to writing her stories with a new sense of commitment, Flannery felt another change from within: an increasing awareness of and disgust with the course of life and culture in America in the 1950s. She sensed that people were becoming more and more superficial, obsessed with material things and plagued by boredom, like children. They had become unmoored, soulless, disconnected from the past and from religion, flailing around without any higher sense of purpose. And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. She expressed some of this in a story inspired by her own illness, called “The Enduring Chill.” The main character is a young man returning home to Georgia, deathly ill. As he gets off the train, his mother, there to meet him, “had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up.” As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one another and felt rather superior to any kind of outsider. If they could only see what she had seen—how our time is so short, how everyone must suffer and die—it would alter their way of life; it would make them grow up; it would melt all their coldness. What her readers needed was their own “bullet in the side” to shake them out of their complacency. She would accomplish this by portraying in as raw a manner as possible the selfishness and brutality lurking below the surface in her characters, who seemed so outwardly pleasant and banal. The one problem Flannery had to confront with her new life was the crushing loneliness of it all. She required the company of people to soothe her, and she depended on the cast of characters she met to supply her endless material for her work. As her fame grew with the publication of Wise Blood and her collections of stories, she could count on the occasional visit to the farm from other writers and fans of her work, and she lived for such moments, putting every ounce of her energy into observing her visitors and plumbing their depths. To fill the gaps between these social encounters, she began a lengthy correspondence with a growing number of friends and fans, writing back to almost anyone who wrote to her. Many of them were quite troubled. There was the young man in the Midwest who felt suicidal and on the verge of madness. There was the brilliant young woman from Georgia, Betty Hester, who felt ashamed for being a lesbian and confided in Flannery, the two of them now regularly

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The few months away had given him some perspective, and now when he looked at the East-Is-Red Middle School, it appeared in a very different light: everywhere he saw signs of unbelievable destruction—classrooms completely torn up with no desks or chairs, the walls full of peeling posters and crumbling plaster; the science labs devoid of all equipment; piles of rubble around the campus; unmarked graves; the music hall blown up by a bomb; and hardly a reputable teacher or official left to resume their education. All of this destruction in a few short years, and for what? What did Heping and Yulan and Zongwei and so many others die for? What had they been fighting over? What had they learned? He could no longer figure it out, and the waste of their young lives filled him with disgust and despair. Soon Jianhua and his brother joined the army, to escape the school and bury their memories. Over the following years, as he drove an army truck delivering stone and cement, he and his comrades watched the slow disassembling of the Cultural Revolution, all of its former leaders falling into disgrace. After the death of Mao in 1976, the Communist Party itself finally condemned the Cultural Revolution as a national catastrophe. • • • Interpretation: The above story and characters come from the book Born Red (1987) by Gao Yuan. (After the Cultural Revolution, the author changed his name from Gao Jianhua to Gao Yuan.) It is his nonfiction account of the events he participated in at his school during the Cultural Revolution. In essence, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to try to alter human nature itself. According to Mao, through millennia of capitalism in various forms, humans had become individualistic and conservative, bound to their social class. Mao wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. As he explained it, “A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” To get his blank canvas, Mao would have to shake things up on a mass scale by uprooting old habits and ways of thinking and by eradicating people’s mindless respect for those in authority. Once he accomplished this, Mao could start to paint something bold and new on the clean sheet.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  everything else. The former members of the Red Rebels had to wear white armbands that described their various crimes. They were made to kowtow before the Mao statue several times a day while classmates kicked them from behind. The former Red Rebels had become like the reviled teachers, cowed and obedient. Jianhua was forced to do the most menial labor, and having had enough of this, in early summer of 1968 he returned to his hometown. His father sent him and his brother to a farm deep in the mountains where they could be safe and work as laborers. In September, determined to finish his studies, Jianhua returned to school. The few months away had given him some perspective, and now when he looked at the East-Is-Red Middle School, it appeared in a very different light: everywhere he saw signs of unbelievable destruction—classrooms completely torn up with no desks or chairs, the walls full of peeling posters and crumbling plaster; the science labs devoid of all equipment; piles of rubble around the campus; unmarked graves; the music hall blown up by a bomb; and hardly a reputable teacher or official left to resume their education. All of this destruction in a few short years, and for what? What did Heping and Yulan and Zongwei and so many others die for? What had they been fighting over? What had they learned? He could no longer figure it out, and the waste of their young lives filled him with disgust and despair. Soon Jianhua and his brother joined the army, to escape the school and bury their memories. Over the following years, as he drove an army truck delivering stone and cement, he and his comrades watched the slow disassembling of the Cultural Revolution, all of its former leaders falling into disgrace. After the death of Mao in 1976, the Communist Party itself finally condemned the Cultural Revolution as a national catastrophe. • • • Interpretation: The above story and characters come from the book Born Red (1987) by Gao Yuan. (After the Cultural Revolution, the author changed his name from Gao Jianhua to Gao Yuan.) It is his nonfiction account of the events he participated in at his school during the Cultural Revolution. In essence, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to try to alter human nature itself. According to Mao, through millennia of capitalism in various forms, humans had become individualistic and conservative, bound to their social class. Mao wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. As he explained it, “A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” To get his blank canvas, Mao would have to shake things up on a mass scale by uprooting old habits and ways of thinking and by eradicating people’s mindless respect for those in authority. Once he accomplished this, Mao could start to paint something bold and new on the clean sheet. The result would be a

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  of the cops knelt down beside her. He never took his eyes off me as he reached forward and took one of her hormone-swollen breasts in his hand. “Honk, honk,” he laughed as he squeezed it. I stopped dead in my tracks, chilled and filled with hatred. I couldn’t think of a way to intervene except to stand there and witness. The cop standing nearest me walked over. He brought his face up close to mine. “What’s your fucking problem?” he asked me. He’d eaten garlic recently. I didn’t move or speak. He jabbed me in the rib with the end of his nightstick. “How’d you like me to run you in?” he asked. The thought of getting busted alone in New York City terrified me. “Answer me, huh? Yes or no?” I paused. He grabbed his nightstick with both hands and held it horizontally across my chest. “Yes or no, asshole?” I exhaled. “No.” “You mean Ng, sir,’ he taunted me. I pressed my lips together. He stared into my eyes. “Get the fuck out of here,” he ordered. I ran down 46" Street until I couldn’t hear their laughter any more. My breath came in short gasps. An icy wind blew off the river. A young child was standing near the driver’s side of a car, talking to the man behind the steering wheel. If she hadn’t been wearing high heels, she wouldn’t 252 = Leslie Feinberg have been tall enough to meet the driver’s eyes. She wore a thin, short jacket and seamed stockings. She must have been freezing. I saw her walk around to the passenger side of the car and get in. I couldn’t run or walk any further. I leaned my forehead against the cold brick face of a building. The physical pain began in my chest and worked its way up to my throat. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound would come. The next morning I was waiting in front of the 42°¢ Street temporary labor office when it opened. A man in a plaid sports coat read over my application. “What kind of discharge?” he asked me. “Huh?” “The service. What kind of discharge you got?” I shrugged. I hadn’t filled out that section of the application. “I wasn’t in the service.” He leaned back in his chair. “Why not?” I leaned forward. “Mister, you got a job for me ot note” He slammed his pen down. “You got a drivet’s license?” I shook my head. “Get one,” he said. “No,” I told him. “I don’t want to drive in this city. Too crazy.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper. “Know how to drive a forklift?” I nodded. “Sewing machine factory,” he said. “Skid work.” He was a man of few words. “What's it pay?” He smiled. “$80 a week. We take $40 out this week and next.” I leaned forward in anger. “What for?” “For finding you the job. You want it or not?”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY õ King Afonso had seen the moral perils of European greed early on, even though he was caught up in the slave trade himself. Capturing members of rival tribes and selling them to European slavers was a key means by which he held onto power and kept his rivals in check. õ Therefore, it’s all the more remarkable that he pleaded with the authorities in Rome to see how slavery undermined the moral authority of Christianity in Africa. This is what he said: “Merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives … and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated.” õ But the slave trade only continued to grow. For most average people in West Africa during the 17th and 18th centuries, Christianity was seeming less and less like the faith of righteous Africans and more like the evil ideology of white men who shackled them and shipped them thousands of miles to a life of hard labor and violent death. õ An anti-slavery activist named Lourenco da Silva de Mendouca was disturbed by this brutality. He was born in Brazil to an African family, and went to Rome in person in 1684 to beg the pope to intercede. His report on the suffering and death that slavers inflicted on Africans made a big impression on the pope and his advisors. But Rome was no match for the powerful mix of greed and racism that drove the expansion of the slave trade into a thriving global industry. õ In many cases, ministers and missionaries gave a message that told enslaved people to accept their lot in life and serve their masters in good faith, while the masters received praise for rescuing supposed barbarians and saving their souls. Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform 195

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  74 The History of Christianity II õ Puritans also obeyed the church covenant, in which regenerate Christians meet and satisfy each other of their faith, then create a church. In Puritan New England, each church was an autonomous unit. Another term for this way of organizing a church is congregationalism, meaning that each congregation is autonomous, not subject to the authority of any higher body. DISSENTERS õ Another faction, the Baptists, emerged from Protestant communities that refused to conform to the rules of the Church of England. More specifically, the denomination goes back to the English separatist John Smyth, who met some Mennonites in Holland and admired the Anabaptist practice of baptizing adult believers after a confession of faith. õ The first Baptist church in America was founded in Rhode Island by Roger Williams in 1638. Williams became a Baptist because he got fed up with the Puritans, but he was a Baptist only for a few months before he decided that no church on earth really practiced true Christianity. õ Prior to founding his church, Williams had lived for a time in Massachusetts, where his sermons against the church leadership caused all kinds of headaches for the Puritan town fathers. His most problematic claim had to do with Christian law. õ Puritan society worked on the principle that even if you were not a converted member of the church, you could still be held accountable to Puritan law and forced to attend church. The Puritans believed

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ Bergoglio was deeply suspicious of proposals for top-down political reform that promised to help the poor. He thought too many of these plans were motivated by manmade ideologies and an arrogant confidence in leaders’ ability to change human nature. But Bergoglio was even more worried about the murderous practices of the Argentinian government. õ Between 1976 and 1983, during what came to be known as the Dirty War, over 8,000 of citizens were “disappeared”—the government’s euphemism for dissidents who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by state officials. Some scholars put the number even higher. õ Bergoglio couldn’t be a bystander even if he wanted to because the government was targeting radical priests in his own order. He had a choice, and he chose, in secret, to help the radicals. He hid a steady stream of activists in the rooms of the Jesuit college in Buenos Aires. õ Priests who worked with Bergoglio later told stories of him going to meet with high-ranking officers to try to intervene for activists who had been arrested; once, after a meeting like this, he was so disgusted by the inhumanity of the officer that afterward he raced out and vomited. All the while, he was praying that the regime wouldn’t find out what he was doing. õ In the decades since the Dirty War, many human rights activists and liberal journalists have criticized Bergoglio for being complicit in the regime’s crimes. They even accused him of denouncing two of his own priests to the authorities, although in the view of many experts the evidence against him does not hold up. 270 The History of Christianity II õ The junta finally gave up power in 1983, and democratic elections brought some semblance of peace to Argentina. Bergoglio’s profile continued to rise. He was appointed a bishop in 1992, and Pope John Paul II named him a cardinal in 2001. But outside Catholic circles he was still relatively unknown until 2013, when Pope Benedict XVI abdicated and the papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor. He took the name Pope Francis, and adopted a stance of both accommodation and protest toward the modern secular world. SUGGESTED READING Gonzalez and Gonzalez, Christianity in Latin America: A History. Ivereigh, The Great Reformer. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What moral dilemmas faced priests like Jorge Bergoglio during Argentina’s Dirty War? ä Why don’t American political labels neatly apply to the leader of the global Catholic Church? Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America 271 272

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  A smiley is a goat’s head. They’re boiled and covered with chili pepper. We call them smileys because when you’re done eating all the meat off it, the goat looks like it’s smiling at you from the plate. The cheeks and the tongue are quite delicious, but the eyes are disgusting. They pop in your mouth. You put the eyeball into your mouth and you bite it, and it’s just a ball of pus that pops. It has no crunch. It has no chew. It has no flavor that is appetizing in any way. After lunch we’d head back to the garage, relax, sleep off the meal, and make more CDs. In the afternoons we’d see a lot of moms. Moms loved us. They were some of our best customers. Since moms run the household, they’re the ones looking to buy that box of soap that fell off the back of the truck, and they were more likely to buy it from us than from some crackhead. Dealing with crackheads is unpleasant. We were upstanding, well-spoken East Bank boys. We could even charge a premium because we added that layer of respectability to the transaction. Moms are also often the most in need of short-term loans, to pay for this or that for the family. Again, they’d rather deal with us than with some gangster loan shark. Moms knew we weren’t going to break anyone’s legs if they couldn’t pay. We didn’t believe in that. Also we weren’t capable of it—let’s not forget that part. But that’s where Bongani’s brilliance came in. He always knew what a person could provide pending their failure to pay. We made some of the craziest trades. Moms in the hood are protective of their daughters, especially if their daughters are pretty. In Alex there were girls who got locked up. They went to school, came straight home, and went straight into the house. They weren’t allowed to leave. Boys weren’t allowed to talk to them, weren’t even allowed to hang around the house—none of that. Some guy was always going on about some locked-away girl: “She’s so beautiful. I’ll do anything to get with her.” But he couldn’t. Nobody could. Then that mom would need a loan. Once we lent her the money, until she paid us back she couldn’t chase us away from her house. We’d go by and hang out, chat, make small talk. The daughter would be right there, but the mom couldn’t say, “Don’t talk to those boys!” The loan gave us access to establish a relationship with the mom. We’d get invited to stay for dinner.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  326The History of Christianity II õAnglican leaders, whose denomination had a large presence in Africa, did not approve of any of this. They thought that miracles were more or less impossible in modern times, and that loud, emotional worship was a sign of paganism. Aladura leaders rejected that entirely. The Aladura saw their revival as a prayer movement that brought Christians into touch with the full gospel of Christ. Their movement continued to grow throughout the 20 th century, and today it can claim about 40 million adherents. REVIVAL IN THE BELGIAN CONGO õBy the first decades of the 20 th century, European missionaries had been preaching their message in Western Africa for at least three generations, with some success. But a growing number of Africans were tired of being bossed around by these missionaries. õSome white church officials stood up to racist policies, but in most cases the colonial churches helped enforce white supremacy. They devoted their best staff and resources to church schools for white children, barred black clergy from leadership, and sometimes required black priests to use the back door when entering a building for white church staff. õThe Aladura leaders were just one example of the many African movements breaking away from missionary churches between 1890 and 1920. They often called their new communities Ethiopian, a reference to Psalm 68: “Let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God.” Today the term for these churches is AIC, for African Independent Churches or African Initiated Churches. õAnother movement began in the central African country now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be a colony of Belgium. There, a man named Simon Kimbangu dreamt that God told him to “take care of my sheep.” People were dying of the f lu all around him, and European medicine and doctors did not seem to be making any difference.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As she wrote to a friend with the news of her illness, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” There were other blessings to count as well: Knowing early on about her disease, she would have time to get used to the idea of dying young, and it would lessen the blow; she would relish every minute, every experience, and make the most of her limited encounters with outsiders. She could not expect much from life, so everything she got would mean something. No need to complain or feel self-pity—everyone had to die at some point. She would find it easier now to not take so seriously the petty concerns that seemed to roil others so much. She could even look at herself and laugh at her own pretensions as a writer, and mock how ridiculous she looked with her bald head, stumbling around with a cane. As she returned to writing her stories with a new sense of commitment, Flannery felt another change from within: an increasing awareness of and disgust with the course of life and culture in America in the 1950s. She sensed that people were becoming more and more superficial, obsessed with material things and plagued by boredom, like children. They had become unmoored, soulless, disconnected from the past and from religion, flailing around without any higher sense of purpose. And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. She expressed some of this in a story inspired by her own illness, called “The Enduring Chill.” The main character is a young man returning home to Georgia, deathly ill. As he gets off the train, his mother, there to meet him, “had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up.” As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one another and felt rather superior to any kind of outsider. If they could only see what she had seen—how our time is so short, how everyone must suffer and die—it would alter their way of life; it would make them grow up; it would melt all their coldness. What her readers needed was their own “bullet in the side” to shake them out of their complacency. She would accomplish this by portraying in as raw a manner as possible the selfishness and brutality lurking below the surface in her characters, who seemed so outwardly pleasant and banal.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You gesture to the sign, the explanation. She doesn’t look. She gets so close to you it’s like she’s going to kiss your ear, except she’s berating you under her breath, a steady stream of rage and profanity that would be indistinguishable from sweet nothings to a nearby stranger. You can’t look at her. You can’t look away from Ross, who is also Untitled, who is also dead, who will also always be alive, immortal. You suck and suck and suck on the candy, which you’re realizing has no identifiable flavor beyond its sugar, and she’s still telling you you’re the worst, you’re worse than the worst, she can’t believe she brought you here. (This exhibit? This museum? This city? Her bed? You’ll never know.) The candy goes from pebble to ice chip, and then it’s gone—one more step toward Ross’s disintegration. One more step toward resurrection. Dream House as Second ChancesOne day you are both napping off a hangover in the Dream House when she turns to you, wide awake—more wide awake than you thought she was. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to apply to Iowa again?” she asks. “So I can move back, be with you.” It is hard to identify the sensation in your chest, the simultaneous leap of excitement yanked back by a leash of panic. You smile, quickly, but she has seen something in your face, and hers collapses with displeasure. “What, you don’t think I’m good enough? Or you don’t want me there?” “No, I just—you spent all of this time and money getting to Bloomington, and you love it here. And you love your friends—why would you leave? This is such a great program. I think we’re making the long-distance thing work, don’t you?” She pushes herself up off the bed and walks away. She doesn’t talk to you for the rest of the day. Not until you muster up all your sweetness and agree to help her. “I can’t wait for you to be there with me,” you tell her. You don’t question her logic again. But you know. You know that, somewhere deep down, it isn’t about you at all. You help her edit her stories for her application. One of them is about a man who is so possessive and jealous he wrecks all of his relationships. It’s pretty good. Dream House as Chekhov’s GunYou’d been staying at the Dream House for weeks over Christmas break, carless, careless. You shouldn’t have been so stupid; the warnings were already there, but the prospect of endless days of fucking for hours in a lavender bed and eating decadently and being with her was too tantalizing. You have always been a hedonist, and she is there to indulge with you, with an animal hunger that matches your own.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  OF THE MATTER OF THIS SACRAMENT (EIGHT ARTICLES)We have now to consider the matter of this sacrament: and first of all as to its species; secondly, the change of the bread and wine into the body of Christ; thirdly, the manner in which Christ’s body exists in this sacrament; fourthly, the accidents of bread and wine which continue in this sacrament. Under the first heading there are eight points for inquiry: (1) Whether bread and wine are the matter of this sacrament? (2) Whether a determinate quantity of the same is required for the matter of this sacrament? (3) Whether the matter of this sacrament is wheaten bread? (4) Whether it is unleavened or fermented bread? (5) Whether the matter of this sacrament is wine from the grape? (6) Whether water should be mixed with it? (7) Whether water is of necessity for this sacrament? (8) Of the quantity of the water added. Whether the matter of this sacrament is bread and wine?Objection 1: It seems that the matter of this sacrament is not bread and wine. Because this sacrament ought to represent Christ’s Passion more fully than did the sacraments of the Old Law. But the flesh of animals, which was the matter of the sacraments under the Old Law, shows forth Christ’s Passion more fully than bread and wine. Therefore the matter of this sacrament ought rather to be the flesh of animals than bread and wine. Objection 2: Further, this sacrament is to be celebrated in every place. But in many lands bread is not to be found, and in many places wine is not to be found. Therefore bread and wine are not a suitable matter for this sacrament. Objection 3: Further, this sacrament is for both hale and weak. But to some weak persons wine is hurtful. Therefore it seems that wine ought not to be the matter of this sacrament. On the contrary, Pope Alexander I says (Ep. ad omnes orth. i): “In oblations of the sacraments only bread and wine mixed with water are to be offered.” I answer that, Some have fallen into various errors about the matter of this sacrament. Some, known as the Artotyrytae, as Augustine says (De Haeres. xxviii), “offer bread and cheese in this sacrament, contending that oblations were celebrated by men in the first ages, from fruits of the earth and sheep.” Others, called Cataphrygae and Pepuziani, “are reputed to have made their Eucharistic bread with infants’ blood drawn from tiny punctures over the entire body, and mixed with flour.” Others, styled Aquarii, under guise of sobriety, offer nothing but water in this sacrament.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  1094 00:53:52,295 --> 00:53:55,932 I felt like I knew what I didn't to be. 1095 00:53:56,032 --> 00:53:58,235 [Robin] Jness, though, oddly, 1096 00:53:58,335 --> 00:54:00,637 was really not about women's success. 1097 00:54:00,737 --> 00:54:03,773 It was about more how to be subservient, 1098 00:54:03,873 --> 00:54:08,378 and it conveyed a lot of very negative messages. 1099 00:54:08,478 --> 00:54:12,582 It was extremely misogynistic, at the end of the day. 1100 00:54:12,682 --> 00:54:15,752 Often you'll have a person who, um, was... 1101 00:54:15,852 --> 00:54:18,455 we'll call it "abused" by a-a father. 1102 00:54:18,555 --> 00:54:20,657 There's one instance I know in particular. 1103 00:54:20,757 --> 00:54:24,461 And the girl really loved it, enjoyed it. 1104 00:54:24,561 --> 00:54:27,297 There wasn't a single part of it she didn't like 1105 00:54:27,397 --> 00:54:31,901 until she recognized by society that it was abuse. 1106 00:54:32,002 --> 00:54:34,938 [Dr. Lauch] Keith says during one of the Jness sessions 1107 00:54:35,038 --> 00:54:39,309 rape isn't rape unless you decide that you're a victim. 1108 00:54:39,409 --> 00:54:41,344 So she became frigid in later life. 1109 00:54:41,444 --> 00:54:44,814 She didn't enjoy sex, didn't want sex, didn't-- 1110 00:54:44,914 --> 00:54:48,285 didn't like anything to do with men in particular. 1111 00:54:48,385 --> 00:54:50,720 It's their fault if you think you're a victim. 1112 00:54:50,820 --> 00:54:53,290 Why don't you just lay back and enjoy it? 1113 00:54:53,390 --> 00:54:54,557 And if it were in a different culture, 1114 00:54:54,658 --> 00:54:56,259 if it were in Rome or Greece, 1115 00:54:56,359 --> 00:54:57,694 it would've been totally okay 1116 00:54:57,794 --> 00:54:58,995 and the person wouldn't have been frigid, 1117 00:54:59,095 --> 00:55:03,266 and would have had a perfectly fine adult life. 1118 00:55:03,366 --> 00:55:05,568 [Rick] In a sense, it gives him permission 1119 00:55:05,669 --> 00:55:09,472 to do anything, because there are no victims. 1120 00:55:09,572 --> 00:55:13,243 So do you feel that you're being victimized by me? 1121 00:55:13,343 --> 00:55:17,247 That's an example of your negative mindset 1122 00:55:17,347 --> 00:55:20,317 of you being a suppressive person. 1123 00:55:20,417 --> 00:55:22,519 And so he could abuse people. 1124 00:55:22,619 --> 00:55:24,421 He could exploit people. 1125 00:55:24,521 --> 00:55:27,023 But they could not be his victims. 1126 00:55:27,123 --> 00:55:31,594 Working for Jness is grounding and satisfying and humbling. 1127 00:55:31,695 --> 00:55:35,632 And it's...wonderful, wonderful. 1128 00:55:35,732 --> 00:55:37,000 We're all working together, 1129 00:55:37,100 --> 00:55:38,535 and no one is ever punished, 1130 00:55:38,635 --> 00:55:40,870 and no one is ever, um, 1131 00:55:40,970 --> 00:55:43,573 told that they're wrong or they're bad. 1132 00:55:43,673 --> 00:55:46,276 The most important thing in working on Jness 1133 00:55:46,376 --> 00:55:48,645 is relationships in Jness. 1134 00:55:53,049 --> 00:55:56,753 [Narrator] In 2015, Raniere creates an offshoot of Jness 1135 00:55:56,853 --> 00:56:00,724 called DOS, an acronym for the Latin phrase 1136 00:56:00,824 --> 00:56:03,593 Dominus Obsequious Sororium. 1137 00:56:03,693 --> 00:56:06,696 Dominus Obsequious Sororium, DOS,

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  1322 01:05:08,771 --> 01:05:13,376 But Keith Raniere was branding them like cattle. 1323 01:05:16,579 --> 01:05:18,681 This was at Keith Raniere's direct order. 1324 01:05:18,781 --> 01:05:20,283 Keith Raniere is on tape 1325 01:05:20,383 --> 01:05:23,319 telling Allison Mack how he wants this done. 1326 01:06:04,927 --> 01:06:05,962 [woman screaming] 1327 01:06:06,062 --> 01:06:08,431 [Robert] There's no anesthesia. 1328 01:06:08,531 --> 01:06:12,034 And there's a slow burning in the skin . 1329 01:06:12,134 --> 01:06:15,371 Excruciating pain. 1330 01:06:15,471 --> 01:06:19,041 Lauren Salzman described it as, like, hearing women squealing. 1331 01:06:19,141 --> 01:06:20,409 [woman screaming] 1332 01:06:20,509 --> 01:06:23,212 [Robert] There's burnt flesh in the air. 1333 01:06:46,769 --> 01:06:48,371 [woman screaming] 1334 01:06:48,471 --> 01:06:51,807 [Armando] If they quit, then not only would they lose everything, 1335 01:06:51,907 --> 01:06:54,076 they would have no support system. 1336 01:06:54,176 --> 01:06:56,278 They're very deep into this group. 1337 01:06:56,379 --> 01:06:58,414 There's a ton of stuff they have on you. 1338 01:06:58,514 --> 01:07:01,450 They have your money. They have your images. 1339 01:07:01,550 --> 01:07:06,389 If you don't agree with it, all of that's gonna get out. 1340 01:07:18,868 --> 01:07:20,603 [Paige] They're almost always on the hips, 1341 01:07:20,703 --> 01:07:24,673 usually very close to the pubic area, 1342 01:07:24,774 --> 01:07:26,876 right on the hip bone. 1343 01:07:26,976 --> 01:07:29,011 Painful place to get tattoos. 1344 01:07:29,111 --> 01:07:31,213 Super painful place to be branded. 1345 01:07:32,848 --> 01:07:34,250 [Robert] The women were told it was, like, 1346 01:07:34,350 --> 01:07:36,585 the symbols of nature and wind. 1347 01:07:36,685 --> 01:07:40,356 But they are branding the initials "KR." 1348 01:07:40,456 --> 01:07:44,126 He is marking these women with his initials. 1349 01:07:45,094 --> 01:07:47,163 So you can see, in a situation like that, 1350 01:07:47,263 --> 01:07:49,465 it's gonna be even harder to leave. 1351 01:07:50,499 --> 01:07:52,468 [Dr. Joseph] The branding is another example 1352 01:07:52,568 --> 01:07:56,105 of a psychopath wanting more control. 1353 01:07:56,205 --> 01:07:59,809 It's not enough to have followers worship you. 1354 01:07:59,909 --> 01:08:02,478 It's not enough to get them to sleep with you. 1355 01:08:02,578 --> 01:08:04,080 It's not enough to get their money, 1356 01:08:04,180 --> 01:08:06,449 to get them to do the things that you want. 1357 01:08:06,549 --> 01:08:09,318 Now you have to take their flesh. 1358 01:08:10,619 --> 01:08:14,723 [Rick] That ordeal was, in a sense, 1359 01:08:14,824 --> 01:08:17,193 the culmination of 1360 01:08:17,293 --> 01:08:21,163 this long process of seduction, 1361 01:08:21,263 --> 01:08:24,266 this long process of indoctrination 1362 01:08:24,366 --> 01:08:26,469 that went on and on and on, 1363 01:08:26,569 --> 01:08:29,105 and it ground out their ability 1364 01:08:29,205 --> 01:08:32,141 to critically and independently think. 1365 01:08:32,241 --> 01:08:35,177 Keith Raniere, he just kept going and going, 1366 01:08:35,277 --> 01:08:36,612 pushing and pushing. 1367 01:08:36,712 --> 01:08:40,182 He weaponized his women, his followers, 1368 01:08:40,282 --> 01:08:42,485 very much like Charlie Manson.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Yet, to refer to God solely in the masculine limits and confines the mystery that is God to a humanmade image. God is both male and female, and thus God is neither male nor female. If God created male and female in God's own image, then both the man and the woman are equal within God's eyes because both are patterned after God. Women cease to be a copy of a man, an appendix to a story centered on the man's need for companionship. The fall of humanity, due to Adam and Eve's action, changed this mutually equal relationship. One of the consequences of sin was its manifestation in the form of sexism, where the woman ceased to be a person in the image of God and became instead a possession to be owned by the man. The transformation of women into objects for possession is reflected throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. The tenth commandment demonstrates how a woman, like a house, slave, ox, or donkey, is a possession of the male. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male slave, or his slave girl, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything which belongs to your neighbor. (Ex. 20:17) Women as possessions were a means by which a man's honor within society could be lost. The taking of another man's woman brought shame to the household and family name of the man whose possession was taken. Consequently, adultery only applied to the married or betrothed woman who engaged in sexual relationships with anyone other than her husband. If a woman was caught in the act of adultery, she could face a death sentence. John 8:3–11 tells the story of a woman, “caught in the very act of committing adultery,” who was brought to Jesus. It is interesting to note that the man with whom she was adulterous was not called to task. Why wasn't he also brought before Jesus? Because it was her sin, not his. In the Hebrew Scriptures, a man was guilty only if he had sexual relationships with another man's wife, that is, another man's possession. With this one exception, a married man was free to engage in sexual relationships with nonmarried women. When King David was punished for his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, it was not because he engaged in a sexual relationship outside marriage. David's sin was against Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, because David took his possession, his wife Bathsheba. This is made clear in the prophet's condemnation of David in which he compares the king to the rich man with an abundant flock who steals the only lamb of a poor man. Bathsheba, like the lamb, was the object taken from the “true” victim, Uriah (2 Sam. 12:1–4). As possessions, women could also be given as ransom for men. This happened more than once, as in the city of Sodom, where Abraham's nephew Lot lived.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  In 1983, it was still not completed and a spokesman for the plant’s owner clearly admitted the sunk cost problem, pointing out that if the decision were a fresh one, they would not continue: “If we had known that we were talking about a $3 billion plant and all the other travail that has gone along the way—the licensing, the political problems—I think we might have chosen not to.” And yet, continue they did! It wasn’t for another six years and spending $2.5 billion more that the still unfinished plant was discontinued. It’s easy to look at these fiascos, roll your eyes, and think, “Typical government waste.” But the sunk cost effect makes us all, in ways big and small, build a track from nowhere to nowhere, refusing to quit because we don’t want to lose what we’ve already spent. It could be someone staying in their money pit of a house. Our track to nowhere could be refusing to quit our college major even though it’s making us unhappy, because we already took so many classes and put so much time into it. Or we don’t leave a career we spent years training for, because that would mean our training was for nothing. Or we keep watching a bad movie because of the time we’ve already spent watching it. Because we put time or effort or money into anything we have started, the sunk cost fallacy affects all of our decisions about whether to stop. KatamariThere was a popular video game that came out in 2004 named Katamari Damacy . It was a silly game, strangely addictive, with a grandiose but simple plot. You control the actions of a tiny prince, whose father, the King of All Cosmos, gives him a katamari (Japanese for “clump”), a sticky ball you roll around different locations, picking up trash and debris off the floor, the ball growing bigger and bigger as it accumulates more stuff. Why are you on this mission? The king had gotten drunk and accidentally destroyed a bunch of stars and constellations. You have to grow the ball until it’s big enough to become a star to replace the ones the king destroyed. It’s a goofy plot, but no goofier than whatever is supposed to be motivating you to eat dots and fruit in Pac-Man or fit together block formations in Tetris . The katamari can’t roll over anything bigger than itself. If it does, the impact knocks some things off, making your ball even smaller. At the beginning, your katamari is only big enough to pick up things like ants, thumbtacks, and buttons. Running into a mouse can be a catastrophe. But as you successfully pick up debris, the ball gets bigger. Then you’re terrorizing the mouse. You’re rolling over batteries, plates of food, radios, shoes, pets. Cows, bears, sumo wrestlers, cars, monsters, buildings, islands, mountains.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The postural patterns, both self-reported and observed by experimenters, were remarkably consistent across multiple subjects. The pattern of disgust, for example, involved the internal sensations of nausea—as if in preparation to vomit along with the observed behavior of turning away. The pattern as a whole was labeled “revulsion” and could vary in intensity from the milder form of dislike to an almost violent urge to turn away and vomit. This latter response could be recognized as an effort to eject something toxic, or as a means of preventing being fed something that one doesn’t like. This type of reaction is seen when children are abused or forced to do something against their will—something that they cannot “stomach.” This could be anything from forced bottle feeding to forced fellatio or, often, something they cannot stomach metaphorically. ‡ Bull analyzed the fear response and found it consisted of a similar compulsion to avoid or escape and was associated with a generalized tensing up or freezing of the whole body. It was also noted that subjects frequently reported the desire to get away, which was opposed by an inability to move. This opposition led to paralysis of the entire body (though somewhat less in the head and neck). However, the turning away in fear was different from that of disgust. Associated with fear was the additional component of turning toward potential resources of security and safety. Bull discovered that the emotion of anger involves a fundamental split. There was, on the one hand, a primary compulsion to attack, as observed in a tensing of the back, arms and fists (as if preparing to hit). However, there was also a strong secondary component of tensing the jaw, forearm and hand. This was self-reported by the subjects, and observed by the experimenters, as a way of controlling and inhibiting the primary impulse to strike. In addition, these experiments explored the bodily aspects of sadness and depression. Depression was characterized, in the subject’s consciousness, as a chronically interrupted drive. It was as though there was something they wanted but were unable to attain. These states of depression were frequently associated with a sense of “tired heaviness,” dizziness, headache and an inability to think clearly. The researchers observed a weakened impulse to cry (as though it were stifled), along with a collapsed posture, conveying defeat and apparent lethargy. We all recognize that there is a fundamental difference between negative and positive emotions. When Bull studied the patterns of elation, triumph and joy, she observed that these positive affects (in contrast to the negative ones of depression, anger and disgust) did not have an inhibitory component; they were experienced as pure action. Subjects feeling joy reported an expanded sensation in their chests, which they experienced as buoyant, and which was associated with free deep breathing. The observation of postural changes included a lifting of the head and an extension of the spine. These closely meshed behaviors and sensations facilitated the freer breathing.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  121 In fact as studies have shown, those individuals who experience the greatest health and positive self-regard, throughout the world and in all socioeconomic levels, are those with strong group affiliations . Feelings and emotions have evolved, at least in part, to amplify the hedonic sensations of approach and avoidance. When, for example, we taste something that is mildly bitter, sensations of “distaste” are registered upon our consciousness. However, when something tastes extremely bitter (and therefore, likely to be toxic), we are more apt to have the compelling emotion of disgust, with the associated sensation of nausea. With this emotional red flag (disgust), we are very likely to avoid such substances (or those that taste, smell or look like them) in the future. In addition, other members of the group who see our reaction will be less likely to ingest the same substance. Because we may not get the chance to avoid a poison (such as a rancid carcass) more than once, these emotional signaling reactions are meant to be compelling to us and others, making a long-lasting survival imprint. This is why if you get violently ill after eating steak béarnaise at your favorite restaurant, you are likely to avoid this particular dish and even that restaurant for years—if not going to the extreme of becoming a vegetarian. By being able to feel things out , we are afforded the precision and overall adaptability that have put us at the top of the heap. There is a significant downside to this solution of imparting to feelings such a kingly executive function. If the emotional feeling systems were to fail and become disordered, as they do in stress and trauma, this disarray would reflect throughout the myriad of the physiological, behavioral and perceptual subsystems. This leaves us susceptible to fundamental misperceptions. A disturbing example of this flaw is when we detect danger where it does not exist—and, on the flip side, when we fail to detect it when it’s actually in our face. Another poignant example of our “feeling system” gone awry is the presence of every sort of stress, autoimmune illness and “psychosomatic” disease, which have been the bane of modern medicine. It has been estimated, for example, that between 75 to 90% or more of all visits to the doctor’s office are stress related. Fortunately, the evolution of conscious emotional feeling states provides, in itself, a remarkable solution if we can learn to register and respond to the inner promptings of our bodies. Our instinctual feeling-programs are the foundation for what allows us to plan and move ahead with purpose and direction. It is the fabric of what connects us to one another. When this critical map becomes disordered and maladaptive with trauma or protracted stress, as a consequence, we simply become lost. Losing our Way in the World: Serendipity Gained Ivan Pavlov was born in a small village in central Russia.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the Wrong Lesson When MGM made the Academy Award–winning version of Gaslight in 1944, they didn’t just remake it. They bought the rights to the 1940 film, “burned the negative and set out to destroy all existing prints.” They didn’t succeed, of course—the first film survived. You can still see it. But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all. Dream House as Déjà Vu She says she loves you. She says she sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. She says you are the only one for her, in all the world. She says she trusts you. She says she wants to keep you safe. She says she wants to grow old with you. She says she thinks you’re beautiful. She says she thinks you’re sexy. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something weirdly ambiguous, and there is a kick of anxiety between your lungs. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like the most scrutinized person in the world. Dream House as Apartment in Philadelphia Many years later, I wrote part of this book in my apartment in West Philadelphia, the one I share with my wife. Before we moved here, we’d been living in a terrible, dark building nearby. There were mice and cockroaches. We had to lay traps. One morning, I walked out of my bedroom to make coffee and found a mouse sprawled on one of the glue traps, looking like an adventurer half-melted by acid in a forbidden temple. It squealed a horrible squeal. I googled “What to do about a mouse in a glue trap” and found an article with advice. In my pajamas I walked outside with the mouse and the trap in a plastic bag, and I stomped on it as hard as I could before tossing it in the dumpster. As for the cockroaches, they made me feel like I was on the verge of madness and transcendence, like G.H. and her passion. At first, I was fastidious, looking for a paper towel to cleanly smash them as they darted around the counter. Then one day they moved into the digital clock in our microwave, and I could see them silhouetted there. The nymphs shed their skins against the glow, left part of themselves behind. After that, I developed the sort of detached practicality I had imagined was reserved for professional assassins in movies. Then, I killed them with my bare hands.