Guilt

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 40 of 99 · 20 per page

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

  Once this kid was beat to shit, Abel dragged him over to the car and held him up in front of me. “Say you’re sorry.” The kid was whimpering, trembling. He looked me in the eye, and I had never seen fear in someone’s eyes like I saw in his. He’d been beaten by a stranger in a way I don’t think he’d ever been beaten before. He said he was sorry, but it was like his apology wasn’t for what he’d done to me. It was like he was sorry for every bad thing he’d ever done in his life, because he didn’t know there could be a punishment like this. Looking in that boy’s eyes, I realized how much he and I had in common. He was a kid. I was a kid. He was crying. I was crying. He was a colored boy in South Africa, taught how to hate and how to hate himself. Who had bullied him that he needed to bully me? He’d made me feel fear, and to get my revenge I’d unleashed my own hell on his world. But I knew I’d done a terrible thing. Once the kid apologized, Abel shoved him away and kicked him. “Go.” The kid ran off, and we drove back to the house in silence. At home Abel and my mom got in a huge fight. She was always on him about his temper. “You can’t go around hitting other people’s children! You’re not the law! This anger, this is no way to live!” A couple of hours later this kid’s dad drove over to our house to confront Abel. Abel went out to the gate, and I watched from inside the house. By that point Abel was truly drunk. This kid’s dad had no idea what he was walking into. He was some mild-mannered, middle-aged guy. I don’t remember much about him, because I was watching Abel the whole time. I never took my eyes off him. I knew that’s where the danger was. Abel didn’t have a gun yet; he bought that later. But Abel didn’t need a gun to put the fear of God in you. I watched as he got right in this guy’s face. I couldn’t hear what the other man was saying, but I heard Abel. “Don’t fuck with me. I will kill you.” The guy turned quickly and got back in his car and drove away. He thought he was coming to defend the honor of his family. He left happy to escape with his life.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Considering then these things, we ought to shew mercy to our debtors. For they are to us if we are wise the cause of our greatest pardon; and though we perform only a few things, we shall find many. For we owe many and great debts to the Lord, of which if the least part should be exacted from us, we should soon perish. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) But what is the debt except sin? If thou hadst not received, thou wouldest not owe money to another. And therefore sin is imputed to you. For thou hadst money with which thou wert born rich, and made after the likeness and image of God, but thou hast lost what thou then hadst. As when thou puttest on pride thou losest the gold of humility, thou hast receipted the devil’s debt which was not necessary; the enemy held the bond, but the Lord crucified it, and cancelled it with His blood. But the Lord is able, who has taken away our sins and forgiven our debts, to guard us against the snares of the devil, who is wont to produce sin in us. Hence it follows, And lead us not into temptation, such as we are not able to bear, but like the wrestler we wish only such temptation as the condition of man can sustain. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (ubi sup.) For it is imposible not to be tempted by the devil, but we make this prayer that we may not be abandoned to our temptations. Now that which happens by Divine permission, God is sometimes in Scripture said to do. And in this way by hindering not the increase of temptation which is above our strength, he leads us into temptation. MAXIMUS. (in Orat. Dom.) Or, the Lord commands us to pray, Lead us not into temptation, let us not have experience of lustful and self-induced temptations. But James teaches those who contend only for the truth, not to be unnerved by involuntary and troublesome temptations, saying, My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations. (James 1:2.) BASIL. (in reg. brev. ad inter. 221.) It does not however become us to seek by our prayers bodily afflictions. For Christ has universally commanded men every where to pray that they enter not into temptation. But when one has already entered, it is fitting to ask from the Lord the power of enduring, that we may have fulfilled in us those words, He that endureth to the end shall be saved. (Mat. 10:22.) AUGUSTINE. (in Enchirid. c. 116.) But what Matthew has placed at the end, But deliver us from evil, Luke has not mentioned, that we might understand it belongs to the former, which was spoken of temptation. He therefore says, But deliver us, not, “And deliverus,” clearly proving this to be but one petition,” Do not this, but this.” But let every one know that he is therein delivered from evil, when he is not brought into temptation.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  us. We could stir up conflict. Perhaps our parents induced in us as well some shame for our aggressive outbursts. In any event, we may come to view the aggressive part of the self as dangerous. But since this energy cannot disappear, it turns inward, and we create what the great English psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn called the internal saboteur . The saboteur operates like a persecutor from within, continually judging and attacking us. If we are about to attempt something, it reminds us of the potential for failure. It tries to tamp down any exuberance, because that could open us to criticism from others. It makes us uncomfortable with strong sensations of pleasure or the expression of deep emotion. It impels us to tamp down our ambitions, the better to fit into the group and not stand out. It wants us to retreat inward, where we can protect ourselves, even if that leads to depression. And it makes us forge a fake self to present to the world, one that is humble and self-effacing. In the end, the internal saboteur works to lower our energy and constrain what we do, making our world more manageable and predictable but also quite dead. It is the same goal as the aggressor—gaining control over uncertainty—but through the opposite means. The internal saboteur can also have a dampening effect on our mental powers. It discourages us from being bold and adventurous in our thinking. We limit our ideas and settle for the conventional opinions of the group, because that is safer. Creative people display great aggressiveness in their thinking, as they try out many options and search for possible solutions. By trying to rid ourselves of any kind of aggressive impulse, we actually thwart our own creative energies. Understand: The problem has never been that we humans are assertive and aggressive. That would be to make a problem of our own nature. The positive and negative aspects of this energy are but two sides of the same coin. To try to tamp down the negative, to give ourselves over to the internal saboteur, only dulls the positive. The real problem is that we do not know how to harness this energy in an adult, productive, and prosocial manner. This energy needs to be embraced as totally human and potentially positive. What we must do is tame and train it for our own purposes. Instead of being chronically aggressive, passive-aggressive, or repressed, we can make this energy focused and rational. Like all forms of energy, when it is concentrated and sustained, it has so much more force behind it. By following such a path, we can recover some of that pure spirit we had as children, feeling bolder, more integrated, and more authentic. The following are four potentially positive elements of this energy that we can discipline and use, improving what evolution has bestowed on us. Ambition: To say you’re ambitious in the world today is often to

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  When Martin Jr. misbehaved in any way, his father whipped him, telling the boy this was the only way to turn him into a real man. The whippings continued until he was fifteen. Once his father caught Martin Jr. at a church social dancing with a girl, and his scolding of the boy in front of his friends was so vehement, Martin Jr. strove to never repeat the experience by causing his father’s displeasure. But none of this discipline came with the slightest hint of hostility. Martin Sr.’s affection for his son was too real and palpable for the boy to feel anything but guilt for disappointing him. And such feelings of guilt were all the more stressful for Martin Jr. because of the high hopes the father placed on his son. As a boy, Martin Jr. displayed an unusual way with words; he could talk his friends into almost anything, and his eloquence was quite precocious. He was certainly bright. A plan formed in Martin Sr.’s mind that his elder son would follow in his father’s footsteps— attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, becoming ordained as a minister, serving as copastor at Ebenezer, and then eventually inheriting the father’s position, just as Martin Sr. had inherited it from his father-in-law. Sometimes the father shared this plan, but more than anything else the boy could feel the weight of his father’s expectations in the prideful way he looked at him and treated him. And it made him anxious. He deeply admired his father—he was a man of very high principle. But Martin Jr. could not avoid sensing the growing differences between them in taste and temperament. The son was more easygoing. He loved attending parties, wearing nice clothes, dating girls, and dancing. As he got older, he developed a pronounced serious and introspective side and was drawn to books and learning. It was almost as if there were two people inside of him —one social, the other solitary and reflective. His father, on the other hand, was not complicated at all. When it came to religion, Martin Jr. had his doubts. His father’s faith was strong but simple. He was a fundamentalist who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. His sermons were aimed at the emotions of his parishioners, and they responded in kind. Martin Jr., on the other hand, had a cool temperament. He was rational and practical. His father seemed more concerned with helping people in the afterlife, whereas the son was more interested in life on earth and how it could be improved and enjoyed. The thought of becoming a minister intensified these inner conflicts. At times he could imagine himself following his father’s career path. As someone deeply sensitive to any form of suffering or injustice, serving as a minister could be the perfect way to channel his desire to help people.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  will. Soon he began to question her love for him. He continually withdrew from her during his bouts of depression. When she became pregnant, he suddenly developed some mysterious ailment that prevented him from being with her. Without warning he could become quite cold. Feeling unloved and neglected, she began an affair with the famous composer Richard Wagner, who was a friend and colleague of von Bülow’s. Cosima had the feeling that von Bülow had unconsciously encouraged their affair. When she eventually left von Bülow to live with Wagner, von Bülow bombarded her with letters, blaming himself for what had happened; he was unworthy of her love. He would then go on about the bad turn in his career, his various illnesses, his suicidal tendencies. Although he criticized himself, she could not help but feel guilty and depressed for somehow being responsible. Recounting all of his woes seemed like his subtle way of wounding her. She compared each letter to “a sword twisted in my heart.” And they kept coming, year after year, until he remarried and repeated the same pattern with his new wife. These types often have a secret need to wound others, encouraging behavior such as betrayal or criticism that will feed their depression. They will also sabotage themselves if they experience any kind of success, feeling deep down that they don’t deserve it. They will develop blocks in their work, or take criticism to mean they should not continue with their career. Depressive types can often attract people to them, because of their sensitive nature; they stimulate the desire to want to help them. But like von Bülow, they will start to criticize and wound the ones who wish to help, then withdraw again. This push and pull causes confusion, but once under their spell it is hard to disengage from them without feeling guilty. They have a gift for making other people feel depressed in their presence. This gives them more fuel to feed off. Most of us have depressive tendencies and moments. The best way to handle them is to be aware of their necessity—they are our body’s and mind’s way of compelling us to slow down, to lower our energies and withdraw. Depressive cycles can serve positive purposes. The solution is to realize their usefulness and temporary quality. The depression you feel today will not be with you in a week, and you can ride it out. If possible, find ways to elevate your energy level, which will physically help lift you out of the mood. The best way to handle recurrent depression is to channel your energies into work, especially the arts. You are used to withdrawing and being alone; use such time to tap into your unconscious. Externalize your unusual sensitivity and your dark feelings into the work itself. Never try to lift up depressive people by preaching to them about the wonderfulness of life. Instead, it is best to go along with their

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  felt used by them, or they’ve been insensitive or ignored your pleas to stop behavior that is unpleasant. Even before you express your annoyance, they seem to have picked up your mood, and you can detect some sulking on their part. And when you do confront them, they grow silent, wearing a hurt or disappointed look. It is not the silence of someone with remorse. They may respond with a “Fine. Whatever. If that’s how you feel.” Any apologies on their part are said in a way (through tone of voice or facial expressions) that subtly conveys some disbelief that they have done anything wrong. If they are really clever, in response they might conjure up something you’ve said or done in the past, which you’ve forgotten but which still rankles them, as if you are not so innocent. It doesn’t sound like something you’ve said or done, but you can’t be sure. Perhaps they will say something in their defense that pushes your buttons, and as you get angry, they can now accuse you of being hostile, aggressive, and unfair. Whatever their type of response, you are left with the feeling that perhaps you were wrong all along. Maybe you overreacted or were paranoid. You might even slightly doubt your sanity—you know you felt upset, but maybe you can’t trust your own feelings. Now you are the one to feel guilty, as if you were to blame for the tension. Better to reassess yourself and not repeat this unpleasant experience, you tell yourself. As an adjunct to this strategy, passive aggressors are often quite nice and polite to other people, only playing their games on you, since you are the one they want to control. If you try to confide in people your confusion and anger, you get no sympathy, and the blame shifting has double the effect. This strategy is a way of covering up all kinds of unpleasant behavior, of deflecting any kind of criticism, and of making people skittish about ever calling them on what they are doing. In this way they can gain power over your emotions and manipulate them as they see fit, doing whatever they want with impunity. They are exploiting the fact that many of us, since early childhood, are prone to feeling guilty at the slightest impetus. This strategy is used most obviously in personal relationships, but you will find it in more diffused form in the work world. People will use their hypersensitivity to any criticism, and the ensuing drama they stir up, to dissuade people from ever trying to confront them. To counter this strategy, you need to be able to see through the blame shifting and remain unaffected by it. Your goal is not to make them angry, so don’t get caught in the trap of exchanging recriminations. They are better at this drama game than you are, and they thrive by their power to rankle you. Be calm and even fair,

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Fangpu had broken this taboo. Had he gone too far? A few days after the appearance of Fangpu’s poster, some strangers arrived on campus from Beijing. They were part of “work teams” sent to schools around China to help supervise and maintain some discipline over the bourgeoning Cultural Revolution. The work team at YMS ordered Fangpu to publicly apologize to Secretary Ding. At the same time, however, they lifted the ban on posters that criticized teachers. As in schools around China, they also suspended all classes and exams at YMS. Students were to devote themselves to making revolution, under their watchful eye. Suddenly feeling free of the yoke of the past and all the habits of obedience drummed into them, the students at YMS began to brazenly attack those teachers who had demonstrated less than revolutionary zeal or had been unkind to students. Jianhua felt compelled to join the campaign, but this was difficult —he happened to like almost all of his teachers. He did not want to seem, however, like a revisionist. Besides, he respected the wisdom and authority of Mao. He decided to make a poster attacking Teacher Wen, who had criticized him once for not being sufficiently interested in politics, which had bothered him at the time. He made his criticism of her as gentle as possible. Others took this up and went further with their attacks on Teacher Wen, and Jianhua felt bad. To satisfy the students’ growing anger, some teachers began to confess to some minor revolutionary sins, but this made the students feel they were hiding even more. They had to apply more pressure to get them to reveal the truth, and a student nicknamed “Little Bawang” ( bawang meaning “overseer,” referring to his love of giving orders) had an idea on how to do this. He had read Mao’s description of how during the revolution in the 1940s peasants had captured the most notorious landlords and paraded them through their villages with enormous dunce caps on their heads and heavy wooden boards—with inscriptions describing their crimes—hung around their necks. To avoid such public humiliation, certainly the teachers would come clean and confess. The students agreed to try this, and their first target for such treatment was to be Teacher Li, Jianhua’s favorite. Teacher Li was accused of faking his switch to communism. Stories began to come out of his telling other teachers about his visits to brothels in Shanghai. Clearly he had a secret life, and Jianhua now felt disappointed in Li. China before the communist revolution had been a cruel place, and if Li was working to bring that back, he could only hate him. Unwilling to confess to any crimes, Li was the first to be paraded through school with the dunce cap and board around his neck. Along the way some students poured a bucket of poster paste over his head. Jianhua followed the parade from a distance, trying to repress his uneasiness at the humiliation of his teacher.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Growing up in a staunchly middle-class black neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) had a pleasant and carefree childhood. His father, Martin Sr., was the pastor of the large and thriving Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, so the Kings were relatively well off. His parents were loving and devoted to their children. Home life was stable and comfortable and included Grandmother King, who doted on young Martin Jr. He had a wide circle of friends. The few encounters he had with racism outside the neighborhood marred this idyllic childhood but left him relatively unscathed. Martin Jr., however, was exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of those around him. And as he got older, he sensed something from his father that began to trigger some inner tension and discomfort. His father was a strict disciplinarian who set solid boundaries of behavior for the three King children. When Martin Jr. misbehaved in any way, his father whipped him, telling the boy this was the only way to turn him into a real man. The whippings continued until he was fifteen. Once his father caught Martin Jr. at a church social dancing with a girl, and his scolding of the boy in front of his friends was so vehement, Martin Jr. strove to never repeat the experience by causing his father’s displeasure. But none of this discipline came with the slightest hint of hostility. Martin Sr.’s affection for his son was too real and palpable for the boy to feel anything but guilt for disappointing him. And such feelings of guilt were all the more stressful for Martin Jr. because of the high hopes the father placed on his son. As a boy, Martin Jr. displayed an unusual way with words; he could talk his friends into almost anything, and his eloquence was quite precocious. He was certainly bright. A plan formed in Martin Sr.’s mind that his elder son would follow in his father’s footsteps— attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, becoming ordained as a minister, serving as copastor at Ebenezer, and then eventually inheriting the father’s position, just as Martin Sr. had inherited it from his father-in-law. Sometimes the father shared this plan, but more than anything else the boy could feel the weight of his father’s expectations in the prideful way he looked at him and treated him. And it made him anxious. He deeply admired his father—he was a man of very high principle. But Martin Jr. could not avoid sensing the growing differences between them in taste and temperament. The son was more easygoing. He loved attending parties, wearing nice clothes, dating girls, and dancing. As he got older, he developed a pronounced serious and introspective side and was drawn to books and learning. It was almost as if there were two people inside of him —one social, the other solitary and reflective. His father, on the other hand, was not complicated at all. When it came to religion, Martin Jr. had his doubts. His father’s

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We try to cheer up a depressed person by making her realize that her life is not that bad and that the sun is shining, only to find out we have made her even more depressed. She now feels guilty about her feelings, worthless, and more alone in her unhappiness. A wife tries to get her partner to open up more to her. With the hope of establishing more intimacy, she asks him what he is thinking, what happened during the course of the day, and so on. He interprets this as intrusiveness and closes up further, which makes the wife more suspicious and more prying, which closes him up even further. The source of this age-old syndrome is relatively simple: alarmed by something in the present, we grab for a solution without thinking deeply about the context, the roots of the problem, the possible unintended consequences that might ensue. Because we mostly react instead of think, our actions are based on insufficient information—Caesar was not planning to start a monarchy; the poor people of Delhi despised their colonial rulers and would not take kindly to suddenly losing money; Americans would be willing to go to war if attacked. When we operate with such a skewed perspective, it results in all kinds of perverse effects. In all of these cases a simple move partway up the mountain would have made clear the possible negative consequences so obvious to us in hindsight: for example, offering a reward for dead cobras would naturally cause impoverished residents to breed them. Invariably in these cases people’s thinking is remarkably simple and lazy: kill Caesar and the Republic returns, action A leads to result B. A variation on this, one that is quite common in the modern world, is to believe that if people have good intentions, good things should be the result. If a politician is honest and means well, he or she will bring about the desired results. In fact, good intentions often lead to what are known as cobra effects , because people with the noblest intentions are often blinded by feelings of self-righteousness and do not consider the complex and often malevolent motivations of others. Nonconsequential thinking is a veritable plague in the world today that is only growing worse with the speed and ease of access to information, which gives people the illusion that they are informed and have thought deeply about things. Look at self-destructive wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the attempts to shut down the American government for short-term political gain, the increasing number of financial bubbles from tech stocks to real estate. Related to this is a gradual disconnect from history itself, as people tend to view present events as if they were isolated in time. Understand: Any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  And so, in these first years of business, we can see the motivating factor that would drive all his subsequent actions—the overwhelming need for control. The more complicated and difficult this task, the more relentless the energy he would summon to achieve such a goal. And out of this need came a second one, almost as important—to justify his aggressive actions to the world and to himself. Rockefeller was a deeply religious man. He could not live with the thought that what drove his actions was a desire to control people and acquire the vast sums of money necessary for such a purpose. That would have been to see himself in too ugly and soulless a light. To repress such a thought, he constructed what we shall call the aggressor’s narrative . He had to convince himself that his quest for power served some higher purpose. There was a belief at the time among Protestants that to make a lot of money was a sign of grace from God. With wealth, the religious individual could give back to the community and help support the local parish. But Rockefeller took this further. He believed that establishing order in the oil business was a divine mission, like ordering the cosmos. He was on a crusade to bring cheap prices and predictability to American households. Turning Standard Oil into a monopoly blended seamlessly with his deep religious convictions. Sincerely believing in this crusade, it did not bother his conscience to ruthlessly manipulate and ruin his rivals, to bribe legislators, to run roughshod over laws, to form fake rival enterprises to Standard Oil, to spark and use the violence of a strike (with Pennsylvania Railroad) that would help him in the long run. Belief in this narrative made him all the more energetic and aggressive, and for those who faced him, it could be confusing—perhaps there was some good in what he was doing; perhaps he was not a demon after all. Finally, to realize his dream of control, Rockefeller transformed himself into a superior reader of men and their psychology. And the most important quality for him to gauge in the various rivals he faced was their relative willpower and resiliency. He could sense this in people’s body language and in the patterns of their actions. Most people, he determined, are rather weak. They are mostly led by their emotions, which change by the day. They want things to be rather easy in life and tend to take the path of least resistance. They don’t have a stomach for protracted battles. They want money for the pleasures and comforts it can bring, for their yachts and mansions. They want to look powerful, to satisfy their ego. Make them afraid or confused or frustrated, or offer them an easy way out, and they would surrender to his stronger will. If they got angry, all the better. Anger burns itself out quickly, and Rockefeller always played for the long term.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  use for their purposes. They can draw us in with their unusual energy, but if we become enmeshed, it can be a nightmare to disengage. They are masters at turning the tables and making others feel guilty. Narcissistic leaders are the most dangerous of all, and we must resist their pull and see through the façade of their apparent creativity. Knowing how to handle the deep narcissists in our lives is an important art for all of us. Second, we must be honest about our own nature and not deny it. We are all narcissists. In a conversation we are all champing at the bit to talk, to tell our story, to give our opinion. We like people who share our ideas—they reflect back to us our good taste. If we happen to be assertive, we see assertiveness as a positive quality because it is ours, whereas others, more timid, will rate it as obnoxious and value introspective qualities. We are all prone to flattery because of our self-love. Moralizers who try to separate themselves and denounce the narcissists in the world today are often the biggest narcissists of them all—they love the sound of their voice as they point fingers and preach. We are all on the spectrum of self-absorption . Creating a self that we can love is a healthy development, and there should be no stigma attached to it. Without self-esteem from within, we would fall into deep narcissism. But to move beyond functional narcissism, which should be our goal, we must first be honest with ourselves. Trying to deny our self-absorbed nature, trying to pretend we are somehow more altruistic than others, makes it impossible for us to transform ourselves. Third and most important, we must begin to make the transformation into the healthy narcissist . Healthy narcissists have a stronger, even more resilient sense of self. They tend to hover closer to the top of the scale. They recover more quickly from any wounds or insults. They do not need as much validation from others. They realize at some point in life that they have limits and flaws. They can laugh at these flaws and not take slights so personally. In many ways, by embracing the full picture of themselves, their self-love is more real and complete. From this stronger inner position, they can turn their attention outward more often and more easily. This attention goes in one of two directions, and sometimes both. First, they are able to direct their focus and their love into their work, becoming great artists, creators, and inventors. Because their outward focus on the work is more intense, they tend to be successful in their ventures, which gives them the necessary attention and validation. They can have moments of doubt and insecurity, and artists can be notoriously brittle, but work stands as a continual release from too much self-absorption. The other direction healthy narcissists take is toward people, developing empathic powers. Imagine empathy as the realm lying at

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  running late, he finally appeared on the balcony outside his motel room when a rifle shot rang out and a single bullet pierced his neck. He died within an hour. • • • Interpretation: Martin Luther King Jr. was a complex man with several sides to his character. There was the pleasure-loving King, who loved nice clothes, food, dances, women, and mischievous behavior. There was the practical King, always wanting to solve people’s problems and think things through thoroughly. There was the sensitive, introspective King, a side that increasingly inclined him toward spiritual pursuits. These sides were often in conflict from within, as he succumbed to passing moods. This was what often caused him to agonize over decisions. Associates would often be troubled by how deeply he considered his options and how often he doubted himself, imagining that he was not worthy of the role that he had been called upon to play. His relationship to his father reflected this complexity. On the one hand, he truly loved and respected him, enough to consider becoming a minister and emulating his style of leadership. On the other hand, he became aware from a very early age of the dangers that would ensue if he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his father’s dominating presence. His younger brother, A.D. King, lacked such awareness, a fact that caused him much pain in his life. A.D. became a minister, but he never could assert his independence. His career was erratic as he moved from one church to another. He developed an alcohol problem and later in life revealed a definite self-destructive streak that troubled his older brother. A.D. lived in their father’s shadow. Something from deep within Martin Jr. impelled him to create some distance and autonomy. This meant not mindlessly rebelling against his father, which in the end would simply have revealed how defined he had been by him in reverse. It meant understanding the differences between them and using these differences as levers to create space. It meant taking the best from his father—his discipline, his high sense of principle, his caring nature. And it meant going his own way when something from deep within urged him to do so. He taught himself to listen to such intuitions, which led to his decision to begin his public career in Montgomery and to accept the MIA leadership position. In such moments, it was as if he could foresee his destiny and drop his habit of overthinking things. Then, a few weeks after becoming the MIA leader, as he began to feel the increasing tension that went with the position, the many sides of his character suddenly took over and led to an inner crisis. There was the self-doubting King, the fearful King, the practical King frustrated by the endless obstacles and infighting, the King who yearned for a simpler and more pleasant life. This inner conflict paralyzed him. And as all of that reached a peak the night he

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  someone who is unusually attentive and concerned for your welfare. They want to help you with your work or some other tasks. They want to listen to your stories of hardship and adversity. How refreshing and unusual to have such attention. You find yourself becoming ever so dependent on what they give you. But every now and then you detect some coldness on their part, and you rack your brain to figure out what you might have said or done to trigger this. In fact, you can’t really be sure if they’re upset with you, but you find yourself trying to please them nonetheless, and slowly, without really noticing it, the dynamic is reversed, and the displays of sympathy and concern seem to shift from them to you. Sometimes a similar dynamic is played out between parents and their children. A mother, for instance, can shower her daughter with affection and love, keeping the girl bound to her. If the daughter tries to exercise independence at some point, the mother responds as if this were an aggressive and unloving act on the daughter’s part. To avoid feeling guilty, the daughter stops asserting herself and works harder to earn more of the affection she has become dependent on. The relationship has reversed itself. Later, the mother exercises control over other aspects of her daughter’s life, including money, career, and intimate partners. This can also occur within couples. A variation of this strategy comes from people who love to make promises (of assistance, money, a job), but don’t quite deliver on them. Somehow they forget what they had promised, or only give you part of it, always with a reasonable excuse. If you complain, they may accuse you of being greedy or insensitive. You have to chase after them to make up for your rudeness or to beg to get some of what they had promised. In any event, this strategy is all about gaining power over another. The person who is made to feel dependent is returned to the position of the needy and vulnerable child, wanting more. It is hard to imagine that someone who is or was so attentive could be using this as a ploy, which makes it doubly hard to see through. You must be wary of those who are too solicitous too early on in a relationship. It is unnatural, as we are normally a bit suspicious of people in the beginning of any relationship. They may be trying to make you dependent in some way, and so you must keep some distance before you can truly gauge their motives. If they start to turn cold and you are confused as to what you did, you can be nearly certain they are using this strategy. If they react with anger or dismay when you try to establish some distance or independence, you can clearly see the power game as it emerges. Getting out of any such relationships should be a priority.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  That’s the sort of thing he would talk about. It was very interesting to him. I don’t enjoy not liking people, but sometimes these things feel as though you are not in control of them. I never chose not to like the guy. It felt more like the dislike of him chose me. Regardless, I had to spend a good amount of time with him as we were working on a temporary project together. He began to get under my skin. I wanted him to change. I wanted him to read a book, memorize a poem, or explore morality, at least as an intellectual concept. I didn’t know how to communicate to him that he needed to change, so I displayed it on my face. I rolled my eyes. I gave him dirty looks. I would mouth the word loser when he wasn’t looking. I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. In short, I withheld love. After Greg Spencer’s lecture, I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish, and what’s more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive, he didn’t like me, he thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding it to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be. I was making a mess of everything. And I was disobeying God. I became convicted about these things, so much so that I had some trouble getting sleep. It was clear that I was to love everybody, be delighted at everybody’s existence, and I had fallen miles short of God’s aim. The power of Christian spirituality has always rested in repentance, so that’s what I did. I repented. I told God I was sorry. I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson. Here is something very simple about relationships that Spencer helped me discover: Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them. If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  authority but had tried to resist its power, including that morning in her bedchamber when she had stood before him so regal and self- possessed, suddenly overwhelmed him. He confessed his crimes to the chaplain. In his mind, he mixed the image of his imminent judgment before God with the majesty of the queen, and he felt the full weight of his betrayal. He could see her face before him, and it frightened him. He told the chaplain, “I must confess to you that I am the greatest, the vilest, and most unthankful traitor that ever has been in the land.” The queen was right to execute him, he said. He requested a private execution so as not to inflame the public. In his last words, he asked God to preserve the queen. He went to his death with a submissiveness and quiet dignity that no one had seen or suspected in him before. • • • Interpretation: When Elizabeth Tudor became queen, she understood her supremely fragile position. Unlike her father or almost any other English monarch, she had zero credibility as a ruler, and no respect or authority to draw upon. The country was in a weakened state. She was too young, with no political experience or prior proximity to power to learn from. Yes, by merely occupying the throne she could expect some obedience, but such loyalty was thin and could change with the slightest mistake or crisis. And within months or years she would be forced to marry, and as she knew, being married could lead to all sorts of problems if she did not quickly produce a male heir. What made this even more troubling was that Elizabeth was ambitious and highly intelligent; she felt more than capable of ruling England. She had a vision of how she could solve its many problems and transform it into a European power. Marriage would not only be bad for her but for the country as well. Most likely she would have to marry a foreign prince, whose allegiance would be to his country of origin. He would use England as a pawn in the Continent’s power games and drain its resources even further. But given all the odds against her, how could she hope to rule England on her own? She decided the only way forward was to turn her weak position into an advantage, forging her own type of credibility and authority, one that in the end would give her powers far greater than any previous king. Her plan was based on the following logic: Kings and queens of her time ruled with a tremendous sense of entitlement due to their bloodline and semidivine status. They expected complete obedience and loyalty. They did not have to do anything to earn this; it came with the position. But this sense of entitlement had its consequences. Their subjects would pay homage, but the emotional connection to such rulers was in most cases not very deep. The English people

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I couldn’t wait till we left the reception. Annie rode with her arms around my neck and her face Stone Butch Blues 211 against my back. By the time we got to her home both her shoes were gone and the exhaust pipe had burned a hole in the hem of her dress. “Pay it no mind,” Annie said. She was drunk. When we got to the porch she threw her arms around me. “You comin’ in, darlin’?” “Naw,” I said. “I gotta get ready for work in the morning,” She looked down at her stocking feet and back up to my face. “I ain’t gonna see you again, am I?” she asked. I looked down at my shoes. “I don’t think so.” She nodded. “Why not?” It hurt my heart the way she asked it. “Tm afraid I’d fall in love with you,’ I said. It was partly true, but it sure didn’t tell the whole story. It’s one thing for the magician to reveal the art of illusion. It’s another thing to tell a straight woman that the man she slept with is a woman. That’s not what Annie agreed to get into. Sooner or later it was going to blow up. And after this afternoon, I had even more reason to fear the explosion. “What’s wrong with falling in love? What’s the matter with you guys, anyway?” she slurred. “Tve been hurt, Annie. I need time.” “Shit, I thought you were different. You ain’t any 212 = Leslie Feinberg different from any other guy who stands to pee.” “Well,” I shrugged, “maybe just a little different.” “You tell that woman who hurt you ’'m gonna come after her and rip her to shreds. She spoiled it for the rest of us.” Annie’s smile faded. “Ain’t no use us standing out here talkin’, is itP You best be goin’.” I nodded. We looked at each other for a long moment. I took the keys from her hand and unlocked the front door. I kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Hey, thanks for what you said to Wilma back there.” “T meant every word of it.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “Thanks for everything, darlin’.” I smiled and turned to go. She stood on the porch and watched me kick-start my bike. “Hey,” she yelled over the roar of the engine. “What?” I cupped my hand near my ear to hear. “The wabbit.” “What?” “Kathy’s wabbit.” I nodded and strained to hear what she was repeating. “Kathy’s wabbit isn’t a girl, it’s a boy!” I FELT LIGHT-HEADED AND DIZZY. My stomach clenched. I was about to heave my guts up. The worst part of it was I knew I couldn’t leave the injection-mold machine I was working on. If I switched it off, the plastic would harden throughout the machine. The machines ran continuously—the repetitive sounds were the music we worked to in the molding department.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  snapshot To hell in a handbasket —this is how my grandmother described my future with a knowing wink. After I’d already totaled two cars, my mother sat me down and asked what I planned to do with my life. Seventeen, clearly on the wrong path, I thought for a moment and answered, Crime . As tears well up in my mother’s eyes I tried to explain— White-collar, victimless . She walked out of the room. A year later, the morning after the motorcycle accident, my mother is strangling me in the ICU, muttering, You little shit , the heart monitor wildly peaking, a nurse coming in to drag her off. After I’ve spent the night in surgery, after I drove off the road, after I ditched the bike to avoid hitting a stone wall. After I waved the first two cars on, insisting I was all right, pumped up with adrenaline, not wanting to believe Mary’s wrist was broken. After finally accepting a lift and checking her into the hospital, after calling my mother to say everything was fine, a small accident, No, no need to come down. After I forgot to hang up the phone, after I knocked all the magazines off the waiting room table, suddenly overcome, I just needed to lie down for a second. After I rose up, minutes later, some part of me knowing something was wrong, by then I was seeing triple. After I staggered down the hall to the admissions desk, I think I need to be looked at, I managed, my eyes already gone yellow. I sang the theme song from Winnie-the-Pooh to Mary, waiting to get her wrist set, as we lay side by side on our gurneys, a curtain between us, both still tipsy from the schnapps, begging the nurses for more painkillers, laughing, as the blood from my broken spleen, unnoticed, drowned me from within. When I woke up that morning after going under the knife I can remember my brother halfheartedly pulling my mother off me as the nurse rushed in. Or perhaps he was egging her on. A few months before the motorcycle accident I had been with Mary at my house. An April night, my mother bartending, not due home until one or two. If my mother was away on a Saturday night Mary was in my bed. That night, after we came up for air, we were drinking whiskey in the kitchen, and Mary opened a notepad to write something down. In the pad she found a letter my mother had written, a suicide note, undated, but referring to the time after Travis had left the house, the summer of the Red Sox, maybe three years before. I read it, and told Mary, told myself, that it must have been from that time, a hard time for us all, but she had gotten through it, and everything now was better. I made this story up on the spot, I had to tell myself something. We killed the bottle of whiskey, and I tore the note out of the notebook and took it into the yard and burned it, four pages in all, and never mentioned a word of it to my mother. But from then on I kept a closer eye on her, and within four months ( Seek, seek for him, / Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life / That wants the means to end it ) I drove my motorcycle into a wall.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Whatever the world thought was wrong with me, I finally began to agree they were right. Guilt burned like vomit in my throat. The only time it receded was when I went back to The Land Where They Don’t Mind. That’s how I remembered the desert. A Dineh woman came to me one night in a dream. She used to come to me almost every night, but not since I had been in the psychiatric ward several years earlier. She held me on her lap and told me to find my ancestors and be proud of who I was. She told me to remember the ring. When I woke up it was still dark outside. I curled up on the foot of my bed and listened to the rainstorm outside my window. Lightning bolts lit up the night sky. I waited until my parents got dressed before I snuck into their bedroom and took the tring. During the day at school I hid in a bathroom stall and looked at it, wondering about its power. Stone Butch Blues 19 When would it protect me? I figured it was like the Captain Midnight Decoder Ring—you had to figure out how it worked. That night at dinner my mother laughed at me. “You were talking Martian in your sleep again last night when we went to bed.” I slammed my fork down. “It’s not Martian.” “Young lady,” my father shouted, “you can go to your room.” As I walked through the high school corridor a group of girls squealed as I passed, “Is it animal, mineral, or vegetable?” I didn’t fit any of their categories. I had a new secret, something so terrible I knew I could never tell anyone. I discovered it about myself during the Saturday matinee at the Colvin Theater. One afternoon I stayed in the bathroom at the theater for a long time. I wasn’t ready to go home yet. When I came out, the adult movie was showing. I snuck in and watched. I melted as Sophia Loren moved her body against her leading man. Her hand cupped the back of his neck as they kissed, her long red nails trailed against his skin. I shivered with pleasure. Every Saturday after that I hid in the bathroom 20 = Leslie Feinberg so I could sneak out and watch the adult movies. A new hunger gnawed at me. It frightened me, but I knew better than to confide in a single soul. One day my high school English teacher, Mrs. Noble, gave us a homework assignment: bring in eight lines of our favorite poem and read them in front of the class. Some of the kids moaned and groaned that they didn’t have a favorite poem and it sounded “bor-ing.” But I panicked. If I read a poem I loved, it would leave me vulnerable and exposed. And yet, to read eight lines I didn’t care about felt like self- betrayal.

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

  We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. As much as we needed the money, I never sold the camera. I felt too guilty, like it would be bad karma, which I know sounds stupid and it didn’t get the family their camera back, but I just couldn’t do it. That camera made me confront the fact that there were people on the other end of this thing I was doing, and what I was doing was wrong. — One night our crew got invited to dance in Soweto against another crew. Hitler was going to compete with their best dancer, Hector, who was one of the best dancers in South Africa at the time. This invitation was a huge deal. We were going over there repping our hood. Alex and Soweto have always had a huge rivalry. Soweto was seen as the snobbish township and Alexandra was seen as the gritty and dirty township. Hector was from Diepkloof, which was the nice, well-off part of Soweto. Diepkloof was where the first million-rand houses were built after democracy. “Hey, we’re not a township anymore. We’re building nice things now.” That was the attitude. That’s who we were up against. Hitler practiced a whole week. We took a minibus over to Diepkloof the night of the dance, me and Bongani, Mzi and Bheki and G, and Hitler. Hector won the competition. Then G was caught kissing one of their girls, and it turned into a fight and everything broke down. On our way back to Alex, around one in the morning, as we were pulling out of Diepkloof to get on the freeway, some cops pulled our minibus over. They made everyone get out and they searched it. We were standing outside, lined up alongside the car, when one of the cops came back. “We’ve found a gun,” he said. “Whose gun is it?” We all shrugged. “We don’t know,” we said. “Nope, somebody knows.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Creating some inner distance will allow you to see through them better and eventually quit the unhealthy relationship. Do not feel bad about this. You will be surprised at how quickly they find another target. The Dependency Strategy: You are suddenly befriended by someone who is unusually attentive and concerned for your welfare. They want to help you with your work or some other tasks. They want to listen to your stories of hardship and adversity. How refreshing and unusual to have such attention. You find yourself becoming ever so dependent on what they give you. But every now and then you detect some coldness on their part, and you rack your brain to figure out what you might have said or done to trigger this. In fact, you can’t really be sure if they’re upset with you, but you find yourself trying to please them nonetheless, and slowly, without really noticing it, the dynamic is reversed, and the displays of sympathy and concern seem to shift from them to you. Sometimes a similar dynamic is played out between parents and their children. A mother, for instance, can shower her daughter with affection and love, keeping the girl bound to her. If the daughter tries to exercise independence at some point, the mother responds as if this were an aggressive and unloving act on the daughter’s part. To avoid feeling guilty, the daughter stops asserting herself and works harder to earn more of the affection she has become dependent on. The relationship has reversed itself. Later, the mother exercises control over other aspects of her daughter’s life, including money, career, and intimate partners. This can also occur within couples. A variation of this strategy comes from people who love to make promises (of assistance, money, a job), but don’t quite deliver on them. Somehow they forget what they had promised, or only give you part of it, always with a reasonable excuse. If you complain, they may accuse you of being greedy or insensitive. You have to chase after them to make up for your rudeness or to beg to get some of what they had promised. In any event, this strategy is all about gaining power over another. The person who is made to feel dependent is returned to the position of the needy and vulnerable child, wanting more. It is hard to imagine that someone who is or was so attentive could be using this as a ploy, which makes it doubly hard to see through.