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.

Page 71 of 90 · 20 per page

• From Going Clear (2013)

  One of the guests referred to the waiter as a faggot. It is difficult to imagine such open bigotry in Hollywood, a liberal stronghold, but especially in the home of John Travolta, who has dodged rumors of his sexual orientation since he first became a star. Despite the onslaught of publicity and sexual harassment suits that have been lodged against the star over the years, many Scientologists, including Haggis, believed that Travolta was not gay. Haggis had been impressed by his apparently loving relationship with his wife and children; but it is also common to assume that homosexuality is handled at the OT III level, where the body thetans that cause such problems can be audited away. The other diners may have been so convinced of Travolta’s sexual orientation that they felt free to display their prejudice. In any case, Travolta reprimanded his guest, saying that such remarks were not tolerated in their home. Haggis was flooded with admiration for the firm but graceful way that the star had handled the situation. After the other guests had departed, Haggis and Travolta had a conversation in his small study. They talked about the bigotry they had observed in the church. Haggis confided that Katy had been made to feel unwanted at the Celebrity Centre. Travolta said that Hubbard’s writings had been misinterpreted, and he later provided some references that Katy could use to defend herself. When Hubbard wrote Dianetics, in 1950, he reflected the prevailing social prejudices, including the psychiatric community, which considered homosexuality a mental illness. (It was not removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1973.) “The sexual pervert”—by which Hubbard meant the homosexual—“is actually quite ill physically,” he writes. The following year, he published the Tone Scale in Science of Survival. Near the bottom, at 1.1 on the scale, is the Covertly Hostile personality. People in this state engage in casual sex, sadism—and homosexual activity. Hubbard describes this as “the most dangerous and wicked level.... Here is the person who smiles when he inserts a knife blade between your vertebrae.” “This is the level of the pervert, the hypocrite, the turncoat. This is the level of the subversive.... A 1.1 is the most dangerously insane person in society and is likely to cause the most damage.... Such people should be taken from the society as rapidly as possible and uniformly institutionalized.” Another way of dealing with them, he writes, is “to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.” He went on: “The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.” Hubbard occasionally moderated his stance, although he never entirely repudiated or discarded his prejudice.

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

  This boy-pope fully equaled and even surpassed John XII. in precocious wickedness. He combined the childishness of Caligala and the viciousness of Heliogabalus.297 He grew worse as he advanced in years. He ruled like a captain of banditti, committed murders and adulteries in open day-light, robbed pilgrims on the graves of martyrs, and turned Rome into a den of thieves. These crimes went unpunished; for who could judge a pope? And his brother, Gregory, was Patrician of the city. At one time, it is reported, he had the crazy notion of marrying his cousin and enthroning a woman in the chair of St. Peter; but the father of the intended bride refused unless he abdicated the papacy.298 Desiderius, who himself afterwards became pope (Victor III.), shrinks from describing the detestable life of this Benedict, who, he says, followed in the footsteps of Simon Magus rather than of Simon Peter, and proceeded in a career of rapine, murder, and every species of felony, until even the people of Rome became weary of his iniquities, and expelled him from the city. Sylvester III. was elected antipope (Jan., 1044), but Benedict soon resumed the papacy with all his vices (April 10, 1044), then sold it for one or two thousand pounds silver299 to an archpresbyter John Gratian of the same house (May, 1045), after he had emptied the treasury of every article of value, and, rueing the bargain, he claimed the dignity again (Nov., 1047), till he was finally expelled from Rome (July, 1048). Gregory VI. John Gratian assumed the name Gregory, VI. He was revered as a saint for his chastity which, on account of its extreme rarity in Rome, was called an angelic virtue. He bought the papacy with the sincere desire to reform it, and made the monk Hildebrand, the future reformer, his chaplain. He acted on the principle that the end sanctifies the means. Thus there were for a while three rival popes. Benedict IX. (before his final expulsion) held the Lateran, Gregory VI. Maria Maggiore, Sylvester III. St. Peter’s and the Vatican.300 Their feuds reflected the general condition of Italy. The streets of Rome swarmed with hired assassins, the whole country with robbers, the virtue of pilgrims was openly assailed, even churches and the tombs of the apostles were desecrated by bloodshed. Again the German emperor had to interfere for the restoration of order. § 66. Henry III and the Synod of Sutri. Deposition of three rival Popes. A.D. 1046. Bonizo (or Bonitho, bishop of Sutri, afterwards of Piacenza, and friend of Gregory VII., d. 1089): Liber ad amicum, s. de persecutione Ecclesiae (in Oefelii Scriptores rerum Boicarum II., 794, and better in Jaffe’s Monumenta Gregoriana, 1865). Contains in lib. V. a history, of the popes from Benedict IX. to Gregory VII., with many errors. Rodulfus Glaber (or Glaber Radulfus, monk of Cluny, about 1046): Historia sui temporis (in Migne, Tom. 142).

• From Going Clear (2013)

  De Vocht recalls that forty-five minutes later, Shelly Miscavige called him and asked him, “What are we going to do? He’s losing it.” She told him that Dave had gone “Type 3”—psychotic—because of all the Suppressive Persons at the base. 3 While De Vocht was working on Building 50, he was forced to attend a séance with five hundred other Sea Org members on Gold Base. People were called out by name and asked, “What crimes have you committed against David Miscavige?” One after another, people approached the microphone and confessed to ways in which they were suppressing the dissemination of Scientology or thinking taboo thoughts. De Vocht was disgusted by the orgy of self-abasement. One night, he simply took over the meeting and brought some semblance of order to it. That night, Shelly Miscavige asked him to be the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, which essentially put him in charge of the entire base. “It’s out of control,” she pleaded, saying that her husband counted on him and had no one else to turn to. In 2004, De Vocht finished reconstructing the 45,000-square-foot Building 50, which wound up costing $70 million. “You’re the biggest spender in the history of Scientology,” Miscavige told him. “You should be shot.” EVEN THOUGH MEMBERSHIP in the church has been declining for years, according to polls and census figures, money continues to pour into Scientology coffers in fantastic sums. Donors are accorded higher status depending on the size of their gifts to the International Association of Scientologists—Patron Maximus for a $25 million pledge, for instance. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, became a Patron Laureate for her $10 million gift to the association in 2007. The IAS now holds more than $1 billion, mostly in offshore accounts, according to former executives of the church. Scientology coursework alone can be very pricey—as much as $400,000 to reach the level of OT VIII. That doesn’t count the books and materials or the latest-model E-Meter, which is priced at $4,650. Then there is the auditing, which ranges in price from $5,000 to $8,000 for a twelve-hour “intensive,” depending on the location and the level of the auditor. Services sold in Clearwater alone amount to $100 million a year. Despite the frequent cost overruns on construction, Scientology undertook a worldwide building campaign, kicked off by Miscavige’s decision to use the occasion of 9/11 to issue a call for a massive expansion of the church. “Bluntly, we are the only people of Earth who can reverse the decline,” he announced. “The way to do better is to get big.” In some cases, the building projects have become significant moneymakers for the church.

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

  How much more grand and dazzling must this cosmopolitan spectacle have been when the priests (whose number Josephus estimates at 20,000) with the broidered tunic, the fine linen girdle, the showy turban, the high priests with the ephod of blue and purple and scarlet, the breastplate and the mitre, the Levites with their pointed caps, the Pharisees with their broad phylacteries and fringes, the Essenes in white dresses and with prophetic mien, Roman soldiers with proud bearing, Herodian courtiers in oriental pomposity, contrasted with beggars and cripples in rags, when pilgrims innumerable, Jews and proselytes from all parts of the empire, "Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans, and Arabians,"196 all wearing their national costume and speaking a Babel of tongues, surged through the streets, and pressed up to Mount Moriah where "the glorious temple rear’d her pile, far off appearing like a mount of alabaster, topp’d with golden spires" and where on the fourteenth day of the first month columns of sacrificial smoke arose from tens of thousands of paschal lambs, in historical commemoration of the great deliverance from the land of bondage, and in typical prefiguration of the still greater redemption from the slavery of sin and death.197 To the outside observer the Jews at that time were the most religious people on earth, and in some sense this is true. Never was a nation so ruled by the written law of God; never did a nation so carefully and scrupulously study its sacred books, and pay greater reverence to its priests and teachers. The leaders of the nation looked with horror and contempt upon the unclean, uncircumcised Gentiles, and confirmed the people in their spiritual pride and conceit. No wonder that the Romans charged the Jews with the odium generis humani. Yet, after all, this intense religiosity was but a shadow of true religion. It was a praying corpse rather than a living body. Alas! the Christian Church in some ages and sections presents a similar sad spectacle of the deceptive form of godliness without its power. The rabbinical learning and piety bore the same relation to the living oracles of God as sophistic scholasticism to Scriptural theology, and Jesuitical casuistry to Christian ethics. The Rabbis spent all their energies in "fencing" the law so as to make it inaccessible. They analyzed it to death.

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

  Not unfrequently we find unbelief and superstition united in the same persons, according to the maxim that all extremes touch each other. Man must believe something, and worship either God or the devil.81 Magicians and necromancers abounded, and were liberally patronized. The ancient simplicity and contentment were exchanged for boundless avarice and prodigality. Morality and chastity, so beautifully symbolized in the household ministry of the virgin Vesta, yielded to vice and debauchery. Amusement came to be sought in barbarous fights of beasts and gladiators, which not rarely consumed twenty thousand human lives in a single month. The lower classes had lost all nobler feeling, cared for nothing but "panem et circenses," and made the proud imperial city on the Tiber a slave of slaves. The huge empire of Tiberius and of Nero was but a giant body without a soul, going, with steps slow but sure, to final dissolution. Some of the emperors were fiendish tyrants and monsters of iniquity; and yet they were enthroned among the gods by a vote of the Senate, and altars and temples were erected for their worship. This characteristic custom began with Caesar, who even during his lifetime was honored as "Divus Julius" for his brilliant victories, although they cost more than a million of lives slain and another million made captives and slaves.82 The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of

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

  In one part of the building women and their procurors disputed and in another part the clergy held forth in their disputations.1961 The Fourth Lateran arraigned bishops for spending the nights in revelry and wantonness. The archbishopric of Rouen was occupied for 113 years by three prelates of scandalous fame. Two of them were bastards of the ducal house and all rivalled or excelled the barons round about in turbulence and license. A notorious case in high places was that of the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema. He held a council which forbade priests and the lower clergy to have wives or concubines; but, sent to the bishop of Durham to remonstrate with him over the debauchery which ruled in his palace, the cardinal himself yielded to a woman whom the bishop provided. The bishop regarded it as a jest when he pointed out the cardinal in the act of fornication. Marriage and concubinage continued to be practised by the clergy in spite of the Hildebrandian legislation. Innocent III. agreed with Hildebrand that a priest with a family is divided in his affections and cannot give to God and the Church his full allegiance in time and thought.1962 Writers, like Salimbene and Caesar of Heisterbach, were severe on married priests. According to the Fourth Lateran, bishops not only violated the canons of the Church themselves by committing the "crime of the flesh," as Gregory VII. called it, but winked at their violation by priests for a money-compensation. A common saying among priests was, si non caste, caute; that is, "if not chaste, at least cautious." In this way Paul’s words were misinterpreted when he said, "If they cannot contain, let them marry." Bonaventura, who knew the facts, declared "that very many of the clergy are notoriously unchaste, keeping concubines in their houses and elsewhere or notoriously sinning here and there with many persons."1963 Conditions must have been bad indeed, if they equalled the priestly customs of the fourteenth century and the example set by the popes in the latter half of the fifteenth. Who will forget the example and mistresses of the first and only Scotch cardinal, Archbishop Beaton, who condemned Patrick Hamilton and Wishart to death! Were not the Swiss Reformers Bullinger and Leo Jud sons of priests, and was not Zwingli, in spite of his offence against the law of continence, in good standing so long as he remained in the papal communion! The violation of the ecclesiastical law of celibacy was, however, by no means in all cases a violation of the moral law. Without the ceremony of marriage, many a priest lived honorably with the woman he had chosen, and cared for and protected his family. The Roman pontiff’s ordinance, setting aside an appointment of the Almighty, was one of the most offensive pieces of papal legislation and did unspeakable injury to the Church. § 127. The Councils.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Later Mozi, one of the Axial philosophers, recalled the lavish funerals of the Shang kings, the “sons of Heaven,” clearly revolted by the prodigal, vulgar extravagance and the ritual murder of hapless servants and retainers: On the death of a prince, the store houses and treasures are emptied. Gold, jade and pearls are placed on the body. Rolls of silk and chariots with their horses are buried in the grave. But an abundance of hangings are also needed for a funerary chamber, as well as tripod vases, drums, tables, pots, ice-containers, war axes, swords, plumed standards, ivories and animal skins. No one is satisfied unless all these riches accompany the deceased. As for the men who are sacrificed in order to follow him, if he should be a Son of Heaven, they will be counted in hundreds or tens. If he is a great officer or a baron, they will be counted in tens or units.80 There was cruelty and violence in Shang religion, and in the end, it seemed to the Chinese that even Di, who had little sense of moral responsibility, had run out of patience with his ruling dynasty. In 1045, King Wen of the Zhou, a people who ruled a principality in the Wei Valley, invaded the Shang domain while the king was away from the capital. Tragically, King Wen was killed in battle, but his son King Wu continued to advance into Shang territory, and defeated the Shang army at the battle of Mu-Ye, north of the Yellow River. The Shang king was beheaded, and the Zhou occupied Yin. King Wu then divided the spoils. He decided that he would remain in the old Zhou capital in the Wei Valley, so he put his son Cheng in charge of Yin, and entrusted the administration of the other Shang cities to Wu-Keng, the son of the last Shang king. King Wu then returned to the Wei Valley, where he died shortly afterward. [image file=image_rsrc5JN.jpg] After his death, the Shang prince seized the opportunity to rebel against Zhou rule. But King Wen’s brother Dan, usually known as the duke of Zhou, quashed the revolt, and the Shang lost control of the central plain. Prince Cheng became the new king, but because he was still a minor, the duke of Zhou acted as regent and devised a quasi-feudal system. The princes and allies of the Zhou were each given a city, as a personal fief, and the Zhou built a new capital to maintain a presence in the eastern territories of their domain. It was named Chengzhou in honor of the new king.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  And moreover I have always found in Nature, flouri s hing and renewed, something sh a meful and distressing . ◄s Just as the Rousseauian outlook wa s associated with liberalism and democ racy, so Baudelaire, though b asically apolitical, had reactionary sympathies, in spite of some tem p orary wobbles which saw him for instance involved in the first phases of 1848. But this did n 't mean that he had any sympath y for bourgeois commercial civ i lization. On the contrary, he considered the age on e o f d ecadence. The reason for the wobbles to the left lay precisely in this hosti li ty to th e s t a tu s quo . 436 • SUBTLER LANGUAGES What Baudelaire held u p in opposition to his world was an ideal of aristocracy, one of the spirit and sensibility. Dandyism was one of the forms it took. The dandy is continuous wit h the aristocrat; something of the style ha s often sprung up in aristocratic castes. What defines the aristocrat is what moves him and w ha t fails to move him. The warrior is concerned not at all for life, but very much for his honour; so the warrior-aristocrat will espouse a nd play out this pattern of concern by rituals of punctil i ousness, even carrying to absurd length the sacrifice of safety or wealth, as when one hazards one's life in a duel for a triviality. Indeed, it is just the absurdi ty which make s the point. Something of this heroism is reflected in the dandy. It is t he very absurdi ty of giving such a priority t o o n e's appearance and dress which distinguishes him. The unshakeable attachment through all obstacles to what seems trivial is the mar k of his exceptional nature. He may be deathly ill, but he will still maintain his style . In this case, "ii souffrira comme le Lacedemonien sous la morsure du r enard". Keeping to this inflexible demand will "fortify the will and discipline the soul". Baudelaire likens him to a stoic. 46 In his rejection of nature, Bau delaire is anti-Romantic, and in his aristocratism, he stands against the most famous poets of the Romantic era. But he is one with them in his hatred of commercial/instrumental civilization, and ce rt ainly follows the m in seeking the antidote in art. It is an art closely linke d to religion; or perhaps which itself takes the place o f religion.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  16 But he thinks to take these further, to defend more integrally the equal value and goodness of desire, by affirming its physical nature. In radicalizing their rejectiqn of deviations (2.) and (3), the utilitarians thu s relaxed o r at least altered their view of (1). Sensuality was given a new value. The promotion of ordinary life, alre a d y tra nsposed by Deists into an affirmation of the p ursuit of happiness, now begins to turn into an exaltation of the sensual. This turn has profoundly marked modern culture. Where John Smith could speak of "the Epicurean herd of Brutish men, who have drowned al l their own sober Reason in the deepest Lethe of Sensuality" , 1 7 an d be generally understood and a pp roved by his generation, we are ready to take a qu ite different view. Sensual fulfilmen t has itself become marked as sig nificant. This seems to be one of the irreversible changes brought about by the ra dical Enlightenment. D iderot, in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, presents a di alo gu e between a Tahitian host, Orou, and his guest, a European pries t , to wh o m he offers the sexual favours of his wife and dau g hters. The priest at first dec li nes , and this is the occasion of an extended discussion of the faults and m e ri ts o f the two utterly different sexual mores. Diderot p uts into the mouth of O ro u a devastating attack on the anti-sens ua l morality o f Western Christianity and an eloquent p lea for t he naturalness of sexual fulfilmen t. Nature herself se e m s t o cry out against our repressive moral ity, which is blind to the sign ific a nc e that she has conferred on sensual life.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  62 In these texts, the killing of the animal was frequently described as “cruel,” an evil that had to be expiated. The victim should sometimes be spared, and given as a gift to the officiating priest. Already, at this very early date, the ritualists were moving toward the ideal of ahimsa (“harmlessness”) that would become the indispensable virtue of the Indian Axial Age. 63 The reformed ritual also banned any hint of aggression toward human beings. There were to be no more competitions, chariot races, mock battles, or raids. These were all systematically expunged from the rites and replaced by anodyne chants and symbolic gestures. To ensure that there could be no possibility of conflict, the patron or sacrificer, who commissioned the rite, would henceforth be the only warrior or vaishya present. The old noisy, crowded sacrificial arena was now empty, except for the single, lone sacrificer and his wife. No hostile enemies could interrupt the rite; there were no challengers, and the patron could invite no guests. Their place had been taken by the four priests and their assistants, who guided the patron through the ceremonies, taking care that every action and mantra conformed exactly to the regulations. All the fire, fury, and fun of sacrifice had been eradicated. The only danger that could occur in these innocuous rituals was a mistake in the procedure, which could easily be rectified by a special rite to “heal” the sacrifice. We know what the ritualists removed, because the old agonistic practices left clear traces in the reformed rites. There are incongruous references to warfare in the most unlikely contexts. The Brahmana texts explained that the pressing of the soma plant reenacted Indra’s slaughter of Vritra; they compared a stately antiphonal chant to Indra’s deadly thunderbolt, which the priests were hurling back and forth “with strong voices.” 64 A serene hymn, once chanted during a chariot race, was still called “The Chariot of the Devas.” The Brahmanas frequently mentioned the “enemy,” whose absence had left an awkward gap. One of the three sacred fires in the arena still belonged to “the enemy”; mantras referred to a fight that never happened—“Indra and Agni have scattered my rivals!” 65 Any reference to warfare was rigorously excluded from the Agnicayana, which had originally sacralized the easterly migration of the warrior bands and the conquest of new territory. First the sacrificer was simply told to pick up the firepot, take three steps to the east, and set it down again.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  [image file=image_rsrc5JS.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc5JT.jpg] The Greeks were haunted by images of violence and disaster. The Olympians were not merely cruel to human beings; they could also persecute and maim one another. Hera, wife of Zeus, for example, was so disgusted by her crippled son, Hephaestus, when he was born that she flung him down to the earth. A savage, angry deity, she relentlessly hounded the children born of her husband’s illicit amours. She plotted with the Titans to kill Dionysus, son of Zeus by the mortal woman Semele, and eventually made him insane. For years Dionysus ran frenziedly through the countries of the east, before he finally found healing. Hera also tried to kill Heracles, another son of Zeus, by putting snakes into his cradle, and drove him mad too, so that he killed his wife and children. The family was the foundation of society. In other cultures, as we shall see, it was regarded as a sacred institution, where people learned the values of respect and reverence for others. In Greece it was a lethal battleground, and Hera, goddess of marriage, showed that the most basic relationships could inspire murderous, cruel emotions. Her cult was pervaded by guilt, terror, and profound anxiety. The first Greek temple to be built after the dark age was Hera’s temple on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. Her cult there showed that she was an uncanny, unreliable goddess who could disappear at a moment’s notice and take all the good things of life with her. On the eve of her festival each year, her effigy—a shapeless plank—mysteriously vanished from the shrine. Its loss was discovered at daybreak, and all the people of Samos turned out to search for her. When they found the cult image, they purified it, and tied it up with willow twigs to prevent her escaping again—but she always did. Hera was the mother of life, the origin of all that existed. Her disappearance threatened the whole natural order.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  This all took place as she was entering puberty. It surprised her that she couldn’t remember any sexual feelings at all during her adolescence. Clearly, she had unconsciously suppressed her sexuality to avoid complicating her confusing emotional bond with her father even further. Once she started dating, she typically formed platonic friendships with men. In three amazing feats of intuitive attraction she had selected boyfriends with whom she could be close but who, because of their own insecurities, were reluctant to have sex with her. Thus she had spared herself the daunting task of examining her incest fear, the one difficult aspect of an otherwise wonderful relationship with her father. By keeping the spotlight on her boyfriends’ sexuality rather than on her own, she had kept her own lust in check. During our next session Ryan revealed that he often felt like his mother’s “little husband.” That day Ryan had been talking with his mom on the phone when she confided in him, as she often did, how lonely and unhappy she was with his father, who didn’t seem to care that much about her. As usual, Ryan was trying to comfort her when she whispered, “Oh, Ryan, you’re the only one who understands.” Although the exchange was all too familiar, a wave of revulsion suddenly engulfed his body, along with an overwhelming urge to hang up. Ryan added, “Sometimes she’s so damn needy it gives me the creeps.” Almost everyone is aware of how damaging sexual contact with an adult can be for a child. Not so widely recognized, however, is that certain kinds of overclose emotional involvements between parent and child, even when no overt sex is involved, can make it very difficult for the child to integrate love and lust as an adult. When Ryan and Janet made love, the combination of their intimate connection with sexual arousal apparently triggered old incest fears in both of them. When Ryan engaged in phone sex with sluttish fantasy women, not only was he acting out his identity as a depraved sex fiend, he was also directing his erotic attention toward someone as unlike his mother as possible. By separating love from lust he was honoring his father’s warnings while also steering clear of any interactions that might feel even vaguely Love and lust are inseparable parts of a larger whole for some, while for others they are irretrievably disconnected. Most of us, however, express our eroticism somewhere in the gray areas where love and lust both relate and conflict. Only by realizing that the two experiences are separate can we avoid painful self-delusions; to lust is not necessarily to love. By also recognizing that love and lust can and do interact, we open the door to the deepest mysteries of eros.

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

  Taken in conjunction with the two former principles—that the same object may excite ambiguous impulses, or suggest an impulse different from that which it excites, by suggesting a remote object—they explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which the conduct flows. 1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this: When objects of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react on any other specimen. The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a, particular mate, of a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet will return to the same sticking-place in its rook, and the lobster to its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its dung in the same corner; the bird makes its nest on the same bough. But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to other opportunities and occasions—an insensibility which can only be described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the habit of old ones already formed. The possession of homes and wives of our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing, especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no instinctive propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it existed miscellaneously, or as an instinct pure and simple, only before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.

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

  setting the canons at defiance and indulging in enormities hateful to God and man. At last, the Gregorian enforcement of sacerdotal celibacy triumphed in the whole Roman Church, but at the fearful sacrifice of sacerdotal chastity. The hierarchical aim was attained, but not the angelic purity of the priesthood. The private morals of the priest were sacrificed to hierarchical ambition. Concubinage and licentiousness took the place of holy matrimony. The acts of councils abound in complaints of clerical immorality and the vices of unchastity and drunkenness. "The records of the Middle Ages are full of the evidences that indiscriminate license of the worst kind prevailed throughout every rank of the hierarchy."61 The corruption again reached the papacy, especially in the fifteenth century. John XXIII. and Alexander VI. rivaled in wickedness and lewdness the worst popes of the tenth and eleventh centuries. § 14. The War over Investiture. The other great reform-scheme of Gregory aimed at the complete emancipation of the Church from the bondage of the secular power. His conception of the freedom of the Church meant the slavery of the State. The State exercised control over the Church by selling ecclesiastical dignities, or the practice of simony, and by the investiture of bishops and abbots; that is, by the bestowal of the staff and ring.62 These were the insignia of ecclesiastical authority; the staff or crosier was the symbol of the spiritual rule of the bishop, the ring the symbol of his mystical marriage with the Church. The feudal system of the Middle Ages, as it developed itself among the new races of Europe from the time of Charlemagne, rested on land tenure and the mutual obligations of lord and vassal, whereby the lord, from the king down to the lowest landed proprietor, was bound to protect his vassal, and the vassal was bound to serve his lord. The Church in many countries owned nearly or fully one-half of the landed estate, with the right of customs, tolls, coinage of money, etc., and was in justice bound to bear part of the burden attached to land tenure. The secular lords regarded themselves as the patrons of the Church, and claimed the right of appointing and investing its officers, and of bestowing upon them, not only their temporalia, but also the insignia of their spiritual power. This was extremely offensive to churchmen. The bishop, invested by the lord, became his vassal, and had to swear an oath of obedience, which implied the duty of serving at court and furnishing troops for the defense of the country. Sometimes a bishop had hardly left the altar when his liege-lord commanded him to gird on the sword. After the death of the bishop, the king or prince used the income of the see till the election of a successor, and often unduly postponed the election for his pecuniary benefit, to the injury of the Church and the poor.

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

  Engineering came first, and sales came later. That’s how I thought things worked. But HubSpot did the opposite. HubSpot’s first hires included a head of sales and a head of marketing. Halligan and Dharmesh filled these positions even though they had no product to sell and didn’t even know what product they were going to make. HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product. Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as “the tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.” That’s what HubSpot is doing. Its technology isn’t very impressive, but look at that revenue growth! That’s why venture capitalists have sunk so much money into HubSpot, and why they believe HubSpot will have a successful IPO. That’s also why HubSpot hires so many young people. That’s what investors want to see: a bunch of young people, having a blast, talking about changing the world. It sells. Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive. How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year. You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work. On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly, Millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are, and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard, and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make the company a team , with a team color and a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt.

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

  Consider the enormous annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion, as he clutches the handle of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous customer to meet. See the ignoble crew that escorts every great pugilist—parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day today, is to arrange some set-to of which they may share the rapture without enduring the pains! The first blows at a prize-fight are apt to make a refined spectator sick; but his blood is soon up in favor of one party, and it will then seem as if the other fellow could not be banged and pounded and mangled enough—the refined spectator would like to reinforce the blows himself. Over the sinister orgies of blood of certain depraved and insane persons let a curtain be drawn, as well as over the ferocity with which otherwise fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the sacking of a town, for instance), the excitement of victory long delayed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the contagion of a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all combine to swell the blind drunkenness of the killing-instinct, and carry it to its extreme. No! those who try to account for this from above downwards, as if it resulted from the consequences of the victory being rapidly inferred, and from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the imagination, have missed the root of the matter. Our ferocity is blind, and can only be explained from below. Could we trace it back through our line of descent, we should see it taking more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, and at the same time becoming more and more the pure and direct emotion that it is. [393] In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pullout grasshoppers' legs and butterflies' wings, and disembowel every frog they catch, have no thought at all about the matter.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Through self-analysis Nadine has stumbled upon one of the most widespread shadow themes—and one of special interest to Dr. Stoller—dehumanization. He has described how the hostile imagination often robs its objects of their personhood. In a sense, Nadine’s coarse men are fetish objects whom she can manipulate by having them manipulate her. In the process her pain is magically transformed into excitement. But is she healed by her turn-on or simply repeating the same old story and paying a higher price for the privilege than she realizes? How can anyone who wants to be treated so badly possibly feel good about herself? These and other questions will occupy us in Part II, “Troublesome Turn-ons.” One thing I know: many people are healed—at least temporarily—by such fantasies. They wouldn’t be nearly so widespread if they didn’t have much to offer. THE PUZZLE OF SADOMASOCHISMTwo centuries ago, the infamous Marquis de Sade laid out his dark vision of sex and human nature in a deliberately odious collection of novels, plays, and essays that remain the quintessential literature of the sexual shadow. In his provocative book Dark Eros, Thomas Moore describes Sade’s unsavory aesthetic: Sade seems to have fixed his vision on this underworld with the tenacity and intensity you might find in mystical literature. He approaches humankind’s love of evil with the devotion and faithfulness of a saint, and so with good reason he has been called “The Divine Marquis.”12 Sade’s hatred of convention and sentimentality is not just personal misanthropy. It is a positive recognition of the dangers of pleasantness taken to the extreme and made into a rule. Sade’s leather straps reflect as in a mirror the ways in which the conventional world can handcuff a life.13 In the Sadian aesthetic, as is so often the case in the shadow world, the usual order of things is reversed. He revels in everything considered disgusting, perverse, or depraved: cruelty is a virtue, degradation is a sacred act, feces are objects of enthusiasm, and pain is pleasure. Sade is best known for a form of kinky sex that bears his name—sadism, which is one side of a unitary phenomenon known as sadomasochism (S-M in popular parlance). Sadomasochists create a unique kind of erotic intensity by inflicting and/or receiving physical or emotional pain. The pain may range from very mild to extreme but it always symbolizes eroticized power, a combination with which we have become familiar. Most S-M impulses are expressed in fantasy, but many are also acted out in role playing—often with paraphernalia such as whips or any of a variety of devices for bondage, restraint, and punishment.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Nature cannot but counsel that which is criminal . .. [In] all the actions an d desires of the purely natural man, y o u will find nothing that is not ghastly." 3 If Romanticism, like Deism, grew out of an Erasmian Christianity, here is an authentic statement of the most extreme Augustinian pessimism, no lo n ger Visions of the Post-Romantic Age · 435 eve n Christian in its one - sideness: clo s er in fact to Manichaeism. Thus Baudelaire was fascinated by sexual desire, but at the same time experienced it as something base, dragging us downward , a s ource of melancholy and regret: 11 y a dans toute homme, a t o ute heure, deux postulations simultanees, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan. L ' inv ocation a Dieu, ou spiritualite, est un desir de monter en grade; celle de Satan, ou animalite, est une joie de descendre. C'est a cette demiere q ue doivent etre rapportees les amours pour les femm es et les conversations intimes avec les animaux, chi ens, chats, etc. There are in all men, at all times, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan. The invocation to God, or spirituali ty , is a desire to raise oneself higher; th at towards Satan , or animality, is the joy of descent. To the latte r belong the love of women, and intimate conversations with animals, dogs, cats, etc. 44 Baudelaire had no time for the Romantic reverence for extra-human nature, either: Je sui s incapable de m' attendrir sur les vegetaux ... mon ame est rebelle a cette singuliere religion nouvelle, qui aura toujours, cc me semble, pour tout etre spirituel je ne sais quoi de shocking. J e ne croirai ja mais que l'ame des Dieux habite dans l e s plantes, et quand meme qu'elle y habiterait, je m'en soucierais mediocreme n t, et considererais la mienne co mme d'un bien plus haut pr ix que celle des legumes sanctifies. j ' a i meme toujours pense qu'il y ava it da ns La Nature, florissante et rajeunie, quelque chose d ' im p ud e nt et d'affligeant. I am incapable of sympathizing with vegetation ... my soul rebels against this singular new religion, that will alwa y s have, it seems to me, for any spiritual being, something shocking. I wilJ never believe that the soul of the Gods inhabits plants, and even if it did, it would concern me but little, and I would consider my own soul as of much higher value than that of such sanctified vegetables.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This issue is in logic quite distinct from that between Erasmian and h y per-Augustinian Christian ity. Erasmus himself was a Platonist. And the Calvinist divines I quoted earlier who saw the ordinary fulfilm e nts of life as p otentially spiritual followed the Aristotelian road. But both t h e naturalist Enlightenment and Romanticism grew out of the extreme Erasmian wing of Christianity, while at the sam e time the y went further than ev er before in integrating physical fulfilme n t into the moral life. This constellation creates in a sense a fusion betwee n th e two issues . H e nc efor th those of a 'Platonisf bent tend also to adopt a dark vision o f mankind's f allen natu re. Transposed into the religion of art, this gives us Baudelaire's notion of art as an anti-nature, coupled with a live ly sense of human evil. This obviously fi t s well with his aristocrati c , anti-levelling stance. This is a position which r ecurs in the following century. W e will see it for instance in T. E. Hulme, one of the influential thinkers of early Modernism. Hulme in rejecting Romanti cism precisel y defined it a s the view that man was by natur e good, the view introduced by Rousseau. 58 Hulme's A u gustinianism by contrast dictates an art in which "there is nothing vital", which arises from "disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes", and seeks "a perfection and rigidity which vital things can never have". It seeks it in life-alien, "geometric" forms. 59 M. H. Abrams has noted the widespread existence in modern lit e rature o f a constellation which c ombines dogmatic th e ological orthodoxy ( or what is mea n t to be such), political and social c onservatism, and an anti-Romantic poet; it may be called 'classical' but in fact justifies a v ant- gard e art. 6 0 This is the legacy of Baudelaire. The rejection of nature gives a certain sense to the slogan 'l'art pour l'art', w hich was not Baudelaire' s invention and which he d idn't really espouse, b u t one s e nse of which does carture his outlook. In a way, whoever follows a religion of art takes the second of th e two v i e ws which Schiller offered and s ees art as offering a higher human realization than morality , that i s , make s art an end in itself. But in S c hiller' s formulation, beauty in completing human Visions of the Post-Romantic Ag e • 44z lif e helps realize all the other recognizably moral goals. It brings not only wholeness to each person but unity to so cie ty. 6 1 It is equally true to say that a rt is for humans, or for life.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  People in the entourage of the late Jo seph Stalin used to try to anticipate his desires. A correct move in this game might have been a wa y to stay alive. It was thus not the dictator's having comm a nded something which made it imperative, but rather the pros p ect of a visit to the Lubyanka i f o ne didn't do it. Be that as it m ay, this amalgam of voluntaris m and hedonism enables Locke to see the Law of Nature both as divine command and as the dictate o f reason. The reason in question is instrumental. Once we see that we ar e creatures of an omnipotent lawgiver, the rational thing to do is to obey. No other pain or pleasure c ould compensa t e for those which he will administer. 7 In fact, Locke thinks not only that obeying God is the (instrumentally) r ational thin g to do but even that (theoretical) reason ca n d iscern the content of God's will . Although we in fact learn of God's law through revelation, we could in principle reach similar conclusions by reason alone. Locke believes that reason shows us clearly that our world was created by God. And he believes that the basic purposes of God in the creation can be read off this c r eation. 8 His c reatures strive instinctively to preserve themselves , and therefore we can concl u de that preservation is God ' s intent. But although thi s is in principl e possible through reason, in fact h uman s only learn God ' s law through its whole extent by revelation. Humans' shortcomings, their sloth, passions, fears, s uperstitions, their s u sceptibility to being imposed on by unsc rupulous elites, all ensure that they fail to realize their capaci ty in principle to work it all out, and God's proclamations come to the res cue . 9 This amalgam was p rofoundly repugnant to many people then as now. It offended religious sensibilities that the following of God's law and the achieving of the highes t pay-off of pleasure should be m otivationally align ed. It offended moral sensibilities that virtue should be seen as somethin g mercena ry. The philosophers, indeed, showed th e beauty of virtue: they set her off and drew men's eyes and approbatio n to her; but leaving her unendowe d , very few were willing to espouse her ... But now there being put into t he scales, on her side, "an exceeding and immortal weight o f glory", intere st is come about to her; and virtue now is visibly th e most enrichin g Rationalized Ch ristianity • 2 3 7 pu rcha s e, and by much the best bargain . . . It has another relish and efficacy to pe rsuade men, that if they live well here, the y s hall be happy hereafter.