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

  A contemporary writer, probably a priest of Treves, gives a frightful picture of the immediate results of this reform, with which he sympathized in principle. Slaves betrayed masters and masters betrayed slaves, friends informed against friends, faith and truth were violated, the offices of religion were neglected, society was almost dissolved. The peccant priests were exposed to the scorn and contempt of the laity, reduced to extreme poverty, or even mutilated by the populace, tortured and driven into exile. Their wives, who had been legally married with ring and religious rites, were insulted as harlots, and their children branded as bastards. Many of these unfortunate women died from hunger or grief, or committed suicide in despair, and were buried in unconsecrated earth. Peasants burned the tithes on the field lest they should fall into the hands of disobedient priests, trampled the host under foot, and baptized their own children.58 In England, St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, d. 988, had anticipated the reforms of Hildebrand, but only with temporary success. William the Conqueror made no effort to enforce sacerdotal celibacy, except that the charge of concubinage was freely used as a pretext for removing Anglo-Saxon prelates to make room for Norman rivals. Lanfranc of Canterbury was a Hildebrandian, but could not prevent a reformatory council at Winchester in 1076 from allowing married priests to retain their wives, and it contented itself with the prohibition of future marriages. This prohibition was repeated at a council held in London, 1102, when Anselm occupied the see of Canterbury. Married priests were required to dismiss their wives, and their children were forbidden to inherit their fathers’ churches. A profession of chastity was to be exacted at ordination to the subdiaconate and the higher orders. But no punishment was prescribed for the violation of these canons. Anselm maintained them vigorously before and after his exile. A new council, called by King Henry at London, 1108, a year before Anselm’s death, passed severe laws against sacerdotal marriage under penalties of deposition, expulsion from the Church, loss of property, and infamy. The temporal power was pledged to enforce this legislation. But Eadmer, the biographer of Anselm, sorrowfully intimates that the result was an increase of shocking crimes of priests with their relatives, and that few preserved that purity with which Anselm had labored to adorn his clergy.

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

  Yet by projecting all the cruelty of his time onto Indra, Zoroaster demonized violence and made him a figure of absolute evil. 109 Zoroaster made few converts in his lifetime: no community could survive in the steppes without the fighters whom he had rejected. The early history of Zoroastrianism remains obscure, but we do know that when the Avestan Aryans migrated to Iran, they took their faith with them. Suitably adapted to the needs of the aristocracy, Zoroastrianism would become the ideology of the Persian ruling class, and Zoroastrian ideals would infiltrate the religion of Jews and Christians living under Persian rule. But that lay in the distant future. In the meantime, the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans began to bring the cult of Indra to the Indian subcontinent. a In Avestan, the Sanskrit devas became daevas. 2 India: The Noble Path For the Aryans who migrated to the Indian subcontinent, springtime was the season of yoga. After a winter of “settled peace” (ksema) in the encampment, it was time to summon Indra to lead them on the warpath into battle once again, and the priests performed a ceremony that reenacted the god’s miraculous birth. 1 They also chanted a hymn celebrating his cosmic victory over the chaos dragon Vritra, who had imprisoned the life-giving waters in the primal mountain so that the world was no longer habitable. During this heroic battle, Indra had been strengthened by hymns sung by the Maruts, the storm gods. 2 Now priests chanted these same hymns to fortify the Aryan warriors, who like Indra before his battles drank a draught of soma. At one now with Indra, exalted by the intoxicating liquor, they harnessed their horses to their war chariots in the formalized yug (“yoking”) ritual and set off to raid the villages of their neighbors, firm now in their conviction that they too were setting the world to rights. The Aryans regarded themselves as “noble,” and yoga marked the start of the raiding season, when they really lived up to their name. As for the pastoralists of the Near East, Indian Aryan ritual and mythology glorified organized theft and violence. For the Indo-Aryans too, cattle rustling needed no justification; like any aristocrats, they regarded forcible seizure as the only noble way to obtain goods, so raiding was per se a sacred activity. In their battles they experienced an ecstasy that gave meaning and intensity to their lives, performing thus a “religious” as well as an economic and political function.

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

  24 was thrown into consternation by the fear of a slave insurrection (Tacit. Ann. IV. 27). Athenaeus, as quoted by Gibbon (I. 51) boldly asserts that he knew very many (pavmpolloi) Romans who possessed, not for use, but ostentation, ten and even twenty thousand slaves. In a single palace at Rome, that of Pedanius Secundus, then prefect of the city, four hundred slaves were maintained, and were all executed for not preventing their master’s murder (Tacit. Ann. XIV. 42, 43). The legal condition of the slaves is thus described by Taylor on Civil Law, as quoted in Cooper’s Justinian, p. 411: "Slaves were held pro nullis, pro mortuis, pro quadrupedibus; nay, were in a much worse state than any cattle whatsoever. They had no head in the state, no name, no title, or register; they were not capable of being injured; nor could they take by purchase or descent; they had no heirs, and therefore could make no will; they were not entitled to the rights and considerations of matrimony, and therefore had no relief in case of adultery; nor were they proper objects of cognation or affinity, but of quasi-cognation only; they could be sold, transferred, or pawned, as goods or personal estate, for goods they were, and as such they were esteemed; they might be tortured for evidence, punished at the discretion of their lord, and even put to death by his authority; together with many other civil incapacities which I have no room to enumerate." Gibbon (I. 48) thinks that "against such internal enemies, whose desperate insurrections had more then once reduced the republic to the brink of destruction, the most severe regulations and the most cruel treatment seemed almost justifiable by the great law of self- preservation." The individual treatment of slaves depended on the character of the master. As a rule it was harsh and cruel. The bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre stupefied the finer sensibilities even in women. Juvenal describes a Roman mistress who ordered her female slaves to be unmercifully lashed in her presence till the whippers were worn out; Ovid warns the ladies not to scratch the face or stick needles into the naked arms of the servants who adorned them; and before Hadrian a mistress could condemn a slave to the death of crucifixion without assigning a reason. See the references in Friedländer, I. 466. It is but just to remark that the philosophers of the first and second century, Seneca, Pliny, and Plutarch, entertained much milder views on this subject than the older writers, and commend a humane treatment of the slaves; also that the Antonines improved their condition to some extent, and took the oft abused jurisdiction of life and death over the slaves out of private hands and vested it in the magistrates. But at that time Christian principles and sentiments already freely circulated throughout the empire, and exerted a silent influence even over the educated heathen.

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

  According to one estimate, between 1519 and 1595 the population of Central Mexico fell from 16.9 million to 1 million and between 1572 and 1620 the Inca population had been halved. 10 Cortés and Pizarro were the heroes of the conquistadores (“conquerors”), men of low social status who went to the New World to become Spanish grandees. Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation. When they arrived in a new region, they would read out a formal statement in Spanish, informing the uncomprehending inhabitants that the pope had given their land to Spain so they must now submit to the Church and the Catholic monarchs: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and do you all the mischief and damage that we can.” 11 The Spanish did not need to import African slaves; they simply enslaved the local people to grow cash crops, work in the mines, and provide domestic labor. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain established the first global empire, stretching from the Americas to the Philippines and dominating large portions of Europe. 12 The Spanish colonialists felt no compunction about their treatment of the indigenous peoples—they regarded the “savage” as scarcely human and had been horrified to discover that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. 13 But at home the Dominicans adhered more faithfully to Christian principles and spoke up for the conquered peoples. The Church had no jurisdiction over these American “kings,” argued Durandus of San Poinciana in 1506; they should not be attacked unless they were actually harming Europeans. The popes should send missionaries to these new lands, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan argued, but not “for the purpose of seizing their lands or reducing them to temporal subjection.” 14 Francisco de Vitoria maintained that the conquistadores had no right to “eject the enemy from their dominions and despoil them of their property.” 15 The Renaissance humanists, however, were far more sympathetic to the colonial project. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a fictional account of an ideal society, the Utopians went to war only “to drive invading armies from the territories of their friends, or to liberate oppressed people in the name of humanity from tyranny and servitude.” All very admirable, but there were limits to this benevolent policy: if the population became too great for their island to support, Utopians felt entitled to send settlers to plant a colony on the mainland, “wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied or uncultivated land.” They would farm this neglected soil, which “previously had seemed too barren and paltry even to support the natives,” and make it yield an abundance.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  These are the limits set by a morality which belongs more to the realms of superstition than to a clear understanding of what would be right and what would be wrong. Firstly, these limits or markers only send signals in one direction; I have never had any scruples in someone else’s bathroom about using her perfumed soap to chase away the fetid residue of the night. Then, I may have cheated on someone in a way which, if and when it was revealed, might have hurt him much more than to find out that I had cavorted in his sheets with someone else. I appropriate to other people the same adherence to environment that I have myself, which makes every intimate thing – or any thing that has served an intimate purpose – a sort of extension of the body, a sensitive prosthesis. If, while someone is away, you touch something that they are close to, they themselves are involved by contiguity. During an orgy, my tongue could easily lick round a pussy which had just been stuffed by a man who had first got off on me, but the thought of drying myself on a towel that some woman who came clandestinely to my home may have used to wipe between her thighs, or the thought that Jacques might use the same one as some guest of mine whose visit he knew nothing about, horrifies me as much as an epidemic of leprosy. What is more, as a precursor to this fear itself, a hierarchy is established in my mind, granting greater importance to a respect for physical integrity (everything attached to it and that I attach to it…) than for moral serenity; because I consider that it is more irremediable to damage the first than the second. Although I have managed to relativise this theory, I tend to think that we ‘cope’ better with an invisible wound than an external wound. I am a formalist.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Mozi was, for example, highly critical of the Zhou dynasty and had little time for Confucius’s hero the duke of Zhou. He had very little interest in the Zhou ritual, music, and literature, which was so inspiring to Confucius. The poorer folk had never taken part in these elaborate court ceremonies, and the li seemed a complete waste of time and money to the Mohists. Mozi was deeply religious and believed that it was important to sacrifice to Heaven and the nature spirits, but he was disgusted by the extravagance of the elaborate ceremonial rites in the ancestral temples. He was especially incensed by the expensive funerals and the long, three-year mourning period. This was all very well for the idle rich, but what would happen if everybody observed these rites? It would ruin the workingman, bring down the economy, and weaken the state.56 Mozi took a strictly pragmatic view of ritual. Rulers spent an inappropriate amount of money on these ceremonies, when the ordinary people did not have the wherewithal for food and clothes. The li did not elevate the soul; the ritualists had simply retreated from the problems of their time, taking refuge in the discussion of arcane ceremonies and abandoning all hope of redeeming the world. The situation had already changed dramatically in the short time that had elapsed since Confucius’s death. In the fourth and third centuries, as we shall see, Confucians would agonize about the plight of the poor and work indefatigably for the reform of society. But in Mozi’s day, some of the ritualists might have been so shocked by the rapid changes in the great plain that they withdrew from public life in the way that Mo described. Mozi, however, was extremely distressed by the predicament of the peasants, who were dragged off to fight in wars, conscripted into the corvée, and impoverished by heavy taxation. It was essential to supply their basic need for shelter, clothing, and security. Mozi was not a revolutionary. He did not want to topple the ruling class, but he was convinced that Chinese values needed radical revision. Mozi believed that the sage kings had been content with the bare necessities of life. There must be a return to the ideals of Yao, Shun, and Yu, who had not lived lives of sophistication, luxury, and showy display at the expense of ordinary folk. They had built their houses just high enough to keep out the damp; their walls were just thick enough to keep out sleet and rain, and their inner partitions just high enough to segregate the sexes.57 Mozi’s favorite was Yu, who, despite his lofty status and great wealth, had spent his life developing a technology to control water distribution and prevent flooding, working practically for the good of the people.

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

  fat, butter or margarine. We can’t eat fried potatoes for breakfast (which we’ve been doing to save on bread), so we’re having hot cereal instead, and because Mrs. van D. thinks we’re starving, we bought some half-and-half. Lunch today consists of mashed potatoes and pickled kale. This explains the precautionary measure with the handkerchief. You wouldn’t believe how much kale can stink when it’s a few years old! The kitchen smells like a mixture of spoiled plums, rotten eggs and brine. Ugh, just the thought of having to eat that muck makes me want to throw up! Besides that, our potatoes have contracted such strange diseases that one out of every two buckets of pommes de terre winds up in the garbage. We entertain ourselves by trying to figure out which disease they’ve got, and we’ve reached the conclusion that they suffer from cancer, smallpox and measles. Honestly, being in hiding during the fourth year of the war is no picnic. If only the whole stinking mess were over! To tell you the truth, the food wouldn’t matter so much to me if life here were more pleasant in other ways. But that’s just it: this tedious existence is starting to make us all disagreeable. Here are the opinions of the five grown-ups on the present situation (children aren’t allowed to have opinions, and for once I’m sticking to the rules): Mrs. van Daan: “I’d stopped wanting to be queen of the kitchen long ago. But sitting around doing nothing was boring, so I went back to cooking. Still, I can’t help complaining: it’s impossible to cook without oil, and all those disgusting smells make me sick to my stomach. Besides, what do I get in return for my efforts? Ingratitude and rude remarks. I’m always the black sheep; I get blamed for everything. What’s more, it’s my opinion that the war is making very little progress. The Germans will win in the end. I’m terrified that we’re going to starve, and when I’m in a bad mood, I snap at everyone who comes near.” Mr. van Daan: “I just smoke and smoke and smoke. Then the food, the political situation and Kerli’s moods don’t seem so bad. Kerli’s a sweetheart. If I don’t have anything to smoke, I get sick, then I need to eat meat, life becomes unbearable, nothing’s good enough, and there’s bound to be a flaming row. My Kerli’s an idiot.” Mrs. Frank: “Food’s not very important, but I’d love a slice of rye bread right

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  If one of the meanings of the word ‘space’ is emptiness, if when it is used without any qualification it principally evokes a clear sky or a desert, a confined space is seen almost as automatically as a filled space. When I feel the need to return my aspirations to vast horizons, I happily transport myself to a dustbin site, usually the one at the foot of the building in which I grew up. Back to the wall, I am shafted between the corrugated surfaces of the bins by a man who by necessity puts down his bucket of garbage. I have never enacted this fantasy but I assiduously maintained a relationship with a man who lived in such a shambles and so much filth that a platonic dustbin must have had a place somewhere in his unconscious. This same man was an aesthete, a clear and precise theoretician with a rather precious turn of phrase. His apartment consisted of two minute rooms whose walls were completely covered in shelves laden with books and records, distributed at random, and some had given way under their weight. Three quarters of one of the rooms was taken up with the bed where I had only ever seen the top sheet and the blanket scuffed up in a heap, and which you could only get into after pushing aside books, papers and newspapers. In the second room it was not only the desk which looked as if it had suffered the revenge of a burglar furious not to have found what he was looking for, but also the floor; it was covered with a maze of crumbling piles of books and catalogues, heaps of opened envelopes and crumpled paper, fanned out sheaves of paper which one might think still of some use. This along with the dust would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for the glasses with the dried brown mark of long-forgotten drinks used as paperweights, if they hadn’t left their slimy circular imprint on other pieces of paper, if a greyish T-shirt or a stiffened face towel hadn’t been jumbled into the bed sheets, if – when you wanted to locate a bar of soap in the sink – you didn’t have to search through archaeological layers of cups and saucers encrusted with crumbs, like the mud still attached to recently exhumed relics … all of that made you heave. I spent many nights in this hovel. The occupier seemed not to notice. The fact that he never accomplished that elementary act of comfort – brushing his teeth – I found strange. When he laughed, his upper lip raised the curtain on a yellow plaster dotted with black patches. As I was sure that all mothers taught their children this hygienic routine, I wondered exactly what level of amnesia he had achieved on the subject of his childhood. He liked to be finger-fucked up his arse.

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

  The principal imperative of Islamic spirituality is tawhid (“making one”): Muslims truly understand the unity of God only if they integrate all their activities and thoughts. But this document atomizes the mission, dividing it into segments—the “last night,” the journey to the airport, boarding the planes, etc.—so that the unbearable whole is never considered. The terrorists were told to look forward to paradise and back to the time of the Prophet—in fact, to contemplate anything but the atrocity they were committing in the present. 63 Living from one moment to another, their minds were to be diverted from the appalling finale. The prayers themselves are jarring. Like all Muslim discourse, the document begins with the bismallah —“In the Name of God, the most Merciful and most Compassionate”—but it initiates an action devoid of either mercy or compassion. It then segues to a remark that most Muslims, I suspect, would find idolatrous: “In the name of God, of myself, and my family.” 64 The hijacker is told to cut off any feelings of pity for his fellow passengers or fear for his own life and exert an immense effort to put himself into this abnormal mind-set. He must “resist” these impulses, “tame,” “ purify,” and “convince” his soul, “incite” it, and “make it understand.” 6 5 The imitation of Muhammad is central to Islamic piety; by imitating his external behavior, Muslims hope to acquire his interior attitude of total surrender to God. But Ata’s document determinedly steers the terrorists away from their inner world by an almost perverse emphasis on the external. As a result, the devotions seem primitive and superstitious. While packing, they were to whisper Quranic verses into their hands and rub this holiness onto their luggage, box cutters, knives, ID, and passports. Their clothes must fit snugly, like the garments of the Prophet and his companions. When they begin to fight the passengers and crew, as a sign of resolution, each one must “clench his teeth just as the pious forefathers did prior to entering into battle” and “strike in the manner of champions who are not desirous of returning to this world, and shout Allahu akbar! For this shout causes fear in the hearts of the unbelievers.” They must not “become gloomy” but recite Quranic verses while they are fighting, “just as the pious ancestors would compose poetry in the midst of battles to calm their brothers and to cause tranquillity and joy to enter their souls.” 66 To imagine that a possibility of serenity and joy would be possible in such circumstances indicates a truly psychotic inability to relate their faith with the reality of what they were about to do. We find here the kind of magical thinking that we noted in Faraj’s The Neglected Duty. As they went through the security gates of the airport, the hijackers were instructed to recite a verse that was almost “a creedal statement” for radicals.

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

  treated no better than so many beasts of burden; on the Flavian amphitheatre alone toiled twelve thousand Jewish prisoners of war; and it was built to gratify the cruel taste of the people for the slaughter of wild animals and human beings made in the image of God. The influx of wealth from conquered nations diffused the most extravagant luxury, which collected for a single meal peacocks from Samos, pike from Pessinus, oysters from Tarentum, dates from Egypt, nuts from Spain, in short the rarest dishes from all parts of the world, and resorted to emetics to stimulate appetite and to lighten the stomach. "They eat," says Seneca, "and then they vomit; they vomit, and then they eat." Apicius, who lived under Tiberius, dissolved pearls in the wine he drank, squandered an enormous fortune on the pleasures of the table, and then committed suicide.566 He found imperial imitators in Vitellius and Heliogabalus (or Elaogabal). A special class of servants, the cosmetes, had charge of the dress, the smoothing of the wrinkles, the setting of the false teeth, the painting of the eye-brows, of wealthy patricians. Hand in hand with this luxury came the vices of natural and even unnatural sensuality, which decency forbids to name. Hopeless poverty stood in crying contrast with immense wealth; exhausted provinces, with revelling cities. Enormous taxes burdened the people, and misery was terribly increased by war, pestilence, and famine. The higher or ruling families were enervated, and were not strengthened or replenished by the lower. The free citizens lost physical and moral vigor, and sank to an inert mass. The third class was the huge body of slaves, who performed all kinds of mechanical labor, even the tilling of the soil, and in times of danger were ready to join the enemies of the empire. A proper middle class of industrious citizens, the only firm basis of a healthy community, cannot coëxist with slavery, which degrades free labor. The army, composed largely of the rudest citizens and of barbarians, was the strength of the nation, and gradually stamped the government with the character of military despotism. The virtues of patriotism, and of good faith in public intercourse, were extinct. The basest avarice, suspicion and envy, usuriousness and bribery, insolence and servility, everywhere prevailed. The work of demoralizing the people was systematically organized and sanctioned from the highest places downwards. There were, it is true, some worthy emperors of old Roman energy and justice, among whom Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius stand foremost; all honor to their memory. But the best they could do was to check the process of internal putrefaction, and to conceal the sores for a little while; they could not heal them. Most of the emperors were coarse military despots, and some of them monsters of wickedness.

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

  being, as it pretends, a liberation of light from darkness, is really a turning of light into darkness. 2. The morality of the Manichaeans was severely ascetic, based on the fundamental error of the intrinsic evil of matter and the body; the extreme opposite of the Pelagian view of the essential moral purity of human nature.927 The great moral aim is, to become entirely unworldly in the Buddhistic sense; to renounce and destroy corporeity; to set the good soul free from the fetters of matter. This is accomplished by the most rigid and gloomy abstinence from all those elements which have their source in the sphere of darkness. It was, however, only required of the elect, not of catechumens. A distinction was made between a higher and lower morality similar to that in the catholic church. The perfection of the elect consisted in a threefold seal or preservative (signaculum).928 (a) The signaculum oris, that is, purity in words and in diet, abstinence from all animal food and strong drink, even in the holy supper, and restriction to vegetable diet, which was furnished to the perfect by the "bearers," particularly olives, as their oil is the food of light. (b) The signaculum manuum: renunciation of earthly property, and of material and industrial pursuits, even agriculture; with a sacred reverence for the divine light-life diffused through all nature. (c) The signaculum sinus, or celibacy, and abstinence from any gratification of sensual desire. Marriage, or rather procreation, is a contamination with corporeity, which is essentially evil. This unnatural holiness of the elect at the same time atoned for the unavoidable daily sins of the catechumens who paid them the greatest reverence. It was accompanied, however, as in the Gnostics, with an excessive pride of knowledge, and if we are to believe the catholic opponents, its fair show not rarely concealed refined forms of vice. 3. Organization. Manichaeism differed from all the Gnostic schools in having a fixed, and that a strictly hierarchical, organization. This accounts in large measure for its tenacity and endurance. At the head of the sect stood twelve apostles, or magistri, among whom Mani and his successors, like Peter and the pope, held the chief place. Under them were seventy-two bishops, answering to the seventy-two (strictly seventy) disciples of Jesus; and under these came presbyters, deacons and itinerant evangelists.929 In the congregation there were two distinct classes, designed to correspond to the catechumens and the faithful in the catholic church: the "hearers;"930 and the "perfect," the esoteric, the priestly caste,931 which represents the last stage in the process of liberation of the spirit and its separation from the world, the transition from the kingdom of matter into the kingdom of light, or in Buddhistic terms, from the world of Sansara into Nirwana. 4. The worship of the Manichaeans was, on the whole, very simple. They had no sacrifices, but four daily prayers, preceded by ablations, and accompanied by prostrations, the worshipper turned towards the sun or moon as the seat of light. They observed Sunday, in honor of the sun, which was with them the same with the redeemer; but, contrary to the custom of the catholic Christians, they made it a day of fasting. They had weekly, monthly, and yearly fasts. They rejected the church festivals, but instead celebrated in March with great pomp the day of the martyrdom of their divinely appointed teacher, Mani.932 The sacraments were mysteries of the elect, of which even Augustin could learn very little. Hence it has been disputed whether they used baptism or not, and whether they baptized by water, or oil. Probably they practised water baptism and anointing, and regarded the latter as a higher spiritual baptism, or distinguished both as baptism and confirmation in the catholic church.933 They also celebrated a kind of holy supper, sometimes even under disguise in catholic churches, but without wine (because Christ had no blood), and regarding it perhaps, according to their pantheistic symbolism, as the commemoration of the light-soul crucified in all nature. Their sign of recognition was the extension of the right hand as symbol of common deliverance from the kingdom of darkness by the redeeming hand of the spirit of the sun. CHAPTER XII.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  POSITIVE AVERSIONSMany clients enter therapy already in an erotic crisis, though they don’t fully realize it. At first they simply want to resolve a sexual dysfunction or rekindle waning desire. Only later do they discover a more serious problem: negative core beliefs are wrecking their eroticism. In these cases unpleasant symptoms aren’t just necessary, they’re ultimately beneficial. They force a person to stop, take notice, and initiate a change. Brenda: Self-esteem and the death of desire “My husband, Ernie, sent me here because I’m a mess sexually,” Brenda announced with a mixture of pain and embarrassment she tried unsuccessfully to hide. “He sent you?” I asked, echoing the implication that she had been towed into the shop for repairs. She explained that she was rarely orgasmic with Ernie but insisted she didn’t mind. Until recently, sex had been tolerable, sometimes pretty good. But now Ernie was displeased because Brenda had lost all interest. She couldn’t even acquiesce passively as she had so often done before. “I don’t know why I’m so screwed up,” she said, sighing, “but the thought of sex almost makes me sick. “Pretty crazy, huh?” she asked, watching closely to see how quickly I would agree with her self-criticism. Her eyes moistened when I insisted that there must be very good reasons for her to feel so disgusted with sex. When I asked if Ernie had considered coming in with her, she replied incredulously, “Are you kidding? Ernie would never go to therapy!” Although their marriage was clearly in serious trouble, intuition told me that Brenda had come for more important reasons. Her voice mostly communicated sadness and resignation, but occasionally she would slip in little clues that she was on the threshold of a radical new experiment: to find out what she felt and wanted. Wearily, she accepted my invitation to explore her sexuality for her own purposes rather than Ernie’s, to see if we could uncover the messages her inhibitions were trying to convey. Born into a large, prominent New England family, Brenda had been terrorized by a loud and pompous father who relied on intimidation and violent flare-ups to get his way and keep everyone around him in a state of fear. Like her mother, Brenda adopted a submissive “low profile” in hopes of avoiding her father’s wrath. She excelled in school and always had close girlfriends, but males seemed too frighteningly crass and aggressive. Yet in one of those predictable ironies of erotic life, her gentle ways attracted men with an urge to dominate. Although reluctant to admit it, she finally acknowledged that these attractions were quite often mutual. One day she confided in a hushed, confessional tone that in her favorite fantasy an almost savage stranger sweeps her off her feet, carries her to bed, and ravages her, catering to her every need—a common fantasy among women, and quite a few men too.

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

  It’s Benioff’s way of saying, “I just spent three hundred thousand dollars to have a band play one song. You know why? Because I can.” The same goes for his philanthropy. Benioff says he’s challenging other tech billionaires to give away as much money as he does. The thing is, a lot of rich tech people do give away a lot of money; they just don’t go around bragging about it. Benioff’s challenge is a form of self-aggrandizement, his way of saying that while others might give away money, Mine is bigger. He wields his philanthropy like a four-foot cock, slapping us all in the face with it. Benioff talks about the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, which used to be called UCSF Children’s Hospital until Benioff donated $100 million and got them to rename the place after him. Next he shows a movie about Haiti and earthquake victims, and talks about all the money Salesforce.com has sent there to help rebuild the country. When the movie ends, he introduces the prime minister of Haiti, Laurent Lamothe, along with supermodel-turned-philanthropist Petra Nemcova, and actor-slash-asshole Sean Penn. The crowd goes nuts. I’m feeling like I might be sick. The idea is for Benioff to “interview” these people, but the “interview” consists of Lamothe saying how grateful he and his impoverished countrymen are to Benioff, and then Benioff talking over him. It’s painful. Here is the prime minister of a sovereign nation, flown into a tech conference by a billionaire, in those shoes, just so that the prime minister can kiss the billionaire’s ring in public. Everyone eats this up. They love Benioff! They stand and cheer. Benioff walks down off the stage into the aisles like a televangelist, bathing in the adoration, saying awesome and phenomenal, again and again. What, exactly, is awesome? This whole thing! All of us! Just for being here, just for caring, we’re all awesome! It’s phenomenal! I glance over at Cranium. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, which is that we could purchase nuclear-powered orange tracksuits that shoot lasers from both sleeves and we would still be no match for this guy. Why would customers buy software from pikers like us when they can buy software from Benioff? I’m appalled by Benioff’s performance, and I find him completely repellent, but even I want to buy his software. Cranium looks pissed off. Finally the presentation shifts to product announcements. Huey Lewis returns to the stage and plays “Back in Time,” and then there’s a huge fake thunder explosion, dry ice machines blanket the stage in fog, and the co-founder of Salesforce.com, Parker Harris, drives onstage in a white Tesla and leaps out dressed as Emmett “Doc” Brown from the movie Back to the Future, in a white lab coat and a crazy snow-white wig.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  77 Ineffective and undependable, Di met the usual fate of the Sky God and began to fade away. The Shang never developed a routine liturgy to ask for his help, and by the twelfth century they had stopped addressing him directly at all, and appealed only to the ancestors and nature spirits. 78 Shang society was a strange mixture of refinement, sophistication, and barbarity. The Shang appreciated the beauty of their environment. Their art was sophisticated and inventive, and their bronze ritual vessels showed close observation of the wild animals and their cattle, oxen, and horses. They created wonderfully inventive urns in the shape of sheep, rhinoceroses, or owls. But they were not squeamish about slaughtering the beasts they observed so tenderly, sometimes slaying as many as a hundred victims in a single sacrifice. During the royal hunt, the Shang killed wild beasts with reckless abandon, and consumed hecatombs of domestic animals at a bin banquet or a funeral. The kings and nobles had acquired great wealth, which they measured in livestock, metal, crops, and game. Their environment teemed with wildlife, and the peasants provided an endless flow of grain and rice, so their resources seemed inexhaustible. There was no thought of saving for the morrow. 79 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.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Experts have noted a strong association between CrossFit and rhabdomyolysis, a rare medical condition that results from working your muscles so hard that they break down and release toxic proteins into the bloodstream, which can cause kidney damage or failure. CrossFit coaches are so familiar with the condition that they’ve given it a nickname: Uncle Rhabdo. In some boxes, you’ll find depictions of Uncle Rhabdo as a sickly clown hooked up to a dialysis machine, his kidneys spilling onto the floor. (“Pukie,” a different ghoulish clown, is a more prominent mascot.) Online, I found a handful of T-shirts for sale featuring the slogan “Go Until You Rhabdo.” * Because the majority of Dispenza’s followers get to know him through his carefully crafted internet persona, most never dig to find out he’s connected to a controversial New Age circle called Ramtha. The group was founded in the late ’80s by a self-proclaimed ESP master (and proud Trump supporter) named J. Z. Knight, who has been quoted spewing all kinds of QAnon-esque rhetoric and generally bigoted nonsense (like that all gay men used to be Catholic priests). But Ramtha devotees—which have included a handful of A-list celebrities—hear what they want to hear and ignore the rest. * Since 2018, QAnon supporters have committed murders, made bombs, destroyed churches, derailed freight trains, livestreamed themselves monologuing about Q while engaged in a high-speed police car chase, and organized deadly pro-Trump mobs (among other nightmarish crimes).

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Would I ever have thought of writing this book which opens with a chapter called ‘Numbers’, if I had not once experienced being a minute satellite which suddenly left the orbit where it had been held by a whole network of connections but which now no longer govern it? The lift off happened in two stages. Firstly, there were times when I found satisfaction less frequently, and I coped with this frustration less tolerantly than I have just described. My excitement could rise to very high levels. The signs that I took as precursors of an overwhelming pleasure were that my lips would turn cold and I would get goose pimples (I will come back to these sensations in more detail later). If, as had more frequently become the case, the process ground to a halt, I would feel as if an insurmountable obstacle towered in front of me instead of the vast release I had hoped for. Each time, in the very moment when my partner was moving away and I was closing my legs, I searched, with the same stubborn resolve as when I am trying to describe something in an article, for a definition of the feelings inside me which I could not put into words. What name should I give to this singular emotion? That was the question I put to myself. It was in fact, I’m sure, a loathing of whoever was next to me at the time, but one which was obviously independent of my feelings for him the rest of the time. But at that moment this loathing filled me as closely and as fully as a liquid metal occupies a mould. I struggled obstinately to describe it to myself, and I remember sometimes comparing it to another form of sculpture: Tony Smith’s hermetic dice. Luckily, in the same way that the oppression that came over me after a failed rendezvous never lasted beyond the trip back in the taxi or the metro, this lacerating hatred put up no resistance to my reflex to slip off to the bathroom. And I think that it was in that position, as I ran a towel between my legs, that I first thought I ought to tell all about it.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  ‘Tough day for business. Besides the stench, no one can swim because of the dark tide, an influx of toxic seaweed. Like the riptides, no signs announce the danger, no newspaper articles, no lifeguards. But there is Kiara, a dark silhouette, unmistakable to me, cleaving the dark water, a kelpie drawing the unaware to their own doom. Lemmings, the early tourists will dive in if they see another swimmer, assuming their safety. She seals her way back to her promontory. She thinks I’ll pace her on the beach, like the iguana paralleling her on the sand, its flailing gait leaving thrashed tracks. But I sit tight. She climbs out of the water up on to the rocks at her crown of land. Even at dusk I see that she’s lost her nun’s habit and is naked, her lithe body haloed in the crepuscular light. She emits her own corona. She disappears behind the apertured wall. I heave myself out of my webbed cradle and turn the other way and walk South towards the City of the Dead. I leave my camera in the rope net. I’m used to working at night, but the darkness here is complete; no refracting neon brightens the sky like a hippie god. La luna, gorged on light, hoists its full belly over the top of the towering Strangler Figs and washes the jungle in a pale glow. The arms of the enveloping Stranglers shroud the slivered ghosts of the host trees. I touch the smooth bark of a host sapling no higher than myself but with much better posture. A gust rattles its bleached leaves, sending a shudder down its shimmering, golden trunk. Quite a lovely tree, really. Just behind it, a Strangler Fig reaches with murderous arms to hug its trembling limbs. Long roots have just begun to unfurl themselves from the canopy to coil around its outflung branches, grafting themselves around the slender trunk and knotting themselves . together in a callused embrace. I break off a branch of the palomino sapling with a vicious snap. Dark sap flows from the wound. I taste it, bitter, and feel a mercury shock in my veins, a paprika tingle on my lips, a rancid-meat 98 ¥. D. Munro nausea in my belly. The over-arching canopy stirs, setting off a dry whispering of leaves. A bird caterwauls.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Part 2: Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human i. “top annoying cliché”: James D. Richardson, “The Phrase ‘Drank the Kool-Aid’ Is Completely Offensive. We Should Stop Saying It Immediately,” Washington Post, November 18, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/18/the-phrase-drank-the-koolaid-is- completely-offensive-we-should-stop-saying-it-immediately/. “so odious”: Lesley Kennedy, “Inside Jonestown: How Jim Jones Trapped Followers and Forced ‘Suicides’,” History.com, A&E Television Networks, November 13, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide. “It makes me shudder”: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Drinking the Kool-Aid: A Survivor Remembers Jim Jones,” The Atlantic, November 18, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/drinking- the-kool-aid-a-survivor-remembers-jim-jones/248723/. “revolutionary suicide”: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Q042 Transcript,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, June 16, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/? page_id=29081. the “Rainbow Family”: Lauren Effron and Monica Delarosa, “40 Years After Jonestown Massacre, Ex- Members Describe Jim Jones as a ‘Real Monster,’” ABC News, September 26, 2018, https://abc news.go.com/US/40-years-jonestown-massacre-members-describe-jim-jones/story?id=57933856. hybristophilia: Eliza Thompson, “3 Experts Explain Why Some People Are Attracted to Serial Killers,” Cosmopolitan, February 14, 2018, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a17804534/sexual- attraction-to-serial-killers/. “sexual appeal”: Melissa Dittmann, “Lessons from Jonestown,” Monitor on Psychology 34, no. 10 (November 2003): 36, https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov03/jonestown. “He appealed to anyone”: David M. Matthews, “Jim Jones’ Followers Enthralled by His Skills as a Speaker,” CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/11/13/jonestown.jim.jones/. his “little Angela Davis”: Sikivu Hutchinson, “No More White Saviors: Jonestown and Peoples Temple in the Black Feminist Imagination,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, October 5, 2014 (updated May 30, 2020), https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=61499. “the fading promise of the Black Power movement”: Sikivu Hutchinson, “Why Did So Many Black Women Die? Jonestown at 35,” Religion Dispatches, December 12, 2013, https://religion dispatches.org/why-did- so-many-black-women-die-jonestown-at-35/. “I was just enthralled”: Effron and Delarosa, “40 Years After Jonestown Massacre, Ex-Members Describe Jim Jones as a ‘Real Monster.’” Known for quotes: Fielding M. McGehee III, “Q932 Summary,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, June 16, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=28323. Laura Johnston Kohl: Joseph L. Flatley, “Laura Johnston Kohl and the Politics of Peoples Temple,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, October 25, 2017, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=70639. White Nights: “What Are White Nights? How Many of Them Were There?,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, June 15, 2013 (updated October 6, 2013), https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=35371. Christine Miller: Michael Bellefountaine, “Christine Miller: A Voice of Independence,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, July 25, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=32381. the Death Tape: Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple authors, “The Death Tape”, The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, July 25, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29084. ii.

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

  I was psyched when Cranium asked me to go to Dreamforce, if only for the chance to spend a few days in San Francisco. I haven’t been back here since I left my job at ReadWrite. I have a list of people I want to see, restaurants I want to visit. But San Francisco is a shitshow. One hundred forty thousand people have descended on a one-square-mile area of downtown. Dreamforce takes place over four days, with concerts and comedians and inspirational speakers. It’s basically Woodstock for people who work in sales and marketing. Or, as Benioff has declared, “the largest and most transformational event in the history of enterprise technology.” Entire blocks have been shut down to traffic. All of downtown is gridlocked. Restaurants and hotels are booked solid. I’m staying at the Courtyard Marriott, which was my home away from home during my stint as editor of ReadWrite. Last year I spent so many months living in this hotel that when I walk into the lobby the woman at the front desk recognizes me and remembers my name. Last year I paid $129 a night. This week, because of Dreamforce, I’m paying close to $700 a night. As for getting around town, forget about finding a taxi. They’re all booked. Oh, and the forecast calls for rain. It’s a nightmare. None of this is as awful as Benioff himself. He stands six-feet-five-inches tall and weighs three hundred pounds, with gleaming white teeth and curly black hair that glistens with hair gel. He is a former salesperson who now sells software that lets other salespeople sell more stuff. It’s called customer relationship management, or CRM, software. Benioff is also one of the wealthiest people in the world, a member of the Forbes billionaire list. Here in the main auditorium of the Moscone Center, thousands of people who sell things over the Internet are standing up and cheering for him as if he’s some kind of superhero. The whole thing makes me depressed, in part because Benioff is a buffoon, a bullshit artist, and such an out-of-control egomaniac that it is painful to listen to him talk. He lives in Hawaii and signs his emails “Aloha.” He’s a Buddhist and hangs out with Zen monks from Japan, and he gave his golden retriever the title “chief love officer” at his company. He is the Ron Burgundy of tech. He and this conference are the essence of everything that has gone wrong in the industry. “Have you transformed the way you innovate?” was Benioff’s big line at the 2012 Dreamforce show. Note that you can switch the two buzzwords in the sentence and it still sounds good and still means nothing. Meaningfullessness is not a word, but should be. There’s an art to this kind of horseshit, and Benioff is its Michelangelo. More depressing is that Benioff represents a threat to HubSpot, and while he may be ridiculous, he’s not someone you want to have as an enemy.

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

  And we’re just one of dozens of companies selling tools to automate the work of sending junk around the Internet. Now I’m a part of this. I’m working for the people who fill your email inbox with junk mail, the online equivalent of those pesky telemarketers who call you at dinnertime to sell you new windows or a set of solar panels for your roof. I rationalize this by telling myself that while the work might be ignoble, it’s not necessarily evil. We’re not Hitler. We’re just annoying people. Sure, arguably we are making the world a little bit worse—but only a little bit. That’s what I tell myself. Online marketers have invented euphemisms to make the work they do sound less awful. For example, we’re told that our email campaigns do not involve badgering people, or pestering them—rather, we’re “nurturing” them. “Lead nurturing” is a big thing in the world of online marketing. If someone doesn’t open our first email, we’ll nurture them again, and we’ll keep on nurturing them until they finally cave in and buy something. HubSpot doesn’t just sell this software—it also teaches people how to use it and in general how to be more effective at selling stuff online. At the annual customer conference, Inbound, thousands of online marketers flock to Boston to learn new tricks. One involves using a misleading subject line in an email— something like, fwd: your holiday plans—to dupe people into opening the message. “Boosting your open rate,” they call it. At the conference HubSpot also shows off new features and products, like one that puts a tracking cookie on the computer of everyone who visits your website and keeps track of every page they visit. The software can even send you an alert when someone comes back to your website for a second visit—so you can call that person immediately and say, “Hey, I see you’re on our website! Is there something I can help you with?” That’s the business we’re in: Buy our software, sell more stuff, make more money. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not exactly how HubSpot bills itself or describes what it does. The motto of the Inbound conference is this: “Come together. Get inspired. Be remarkable.” In training we’re taught that the billions of emails that we blast into the world do not constitute email spam. Instead, those emails are what we call “lovable marketing content.” That is really what our trainers call it. That is the exact term they use. The convoluted logic behind this is that “spam” means unsolicited email, and we only send email to people who have handed over their contact information by filling out a form and giving us their permission to be contacted. Our emails might be unwanted, but they’re not, strictly speaking, unsolicited, and therefore they are not spam.