Shame

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

  That action of lying conflicts with your belief about yourself as a truthful person. That creates dissonance. So do you suddenly start thinking of yourself as someone who lies? No. You rationalize away the untruth that you told your boss. “It didn’t hurt anybody. I don’t do this on the regular. This was an exception to the rule.” Whether it is your own actions or new and disconfirming information, when it comes to a battle between the facts and changing your beliefs, the facts too often lose out. Like the other forces we’ve explored, cognitive dissonance adds debris to the katamari, making it harder to quit. Every time you rationalize away new information in order to cling to a belief, that belief becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of your identity. The act of rejecting the facts becomes circular. Now the next time you discover conflicting information or your actions don’t align with your beliefs, you’re going to be even more motivated to stick to those beliefs. This explains why some of the Seekers could have rejected such clear signals that Marian Keech did not have a direct line to superintelligent beings from another planet. Forced to square the failure of the aliens to show or the flood to arrive with their decision to cut off their families and friends and get rid of their worldly goods, they rationalized away the absence of the doom. Their devotion may have staved off the end of the world. This was all a test and the Seekers passed it. There was no spaceship because the aliens were already on Earth, about to reveal themselves. That’s how they resolved the conflict, just as we all do. The Mirror and the WindowWhen it comes to identity, we all want to maintain a positive self-narrative. We want to think well of ourselves. We want to believe that we’re consistent and rational, that we don’t make mistakes, that the things we believe about the world are true. When we look in the mirror, we want to see someone we can think well of. We also want others looking in on us to view us the same way. We worry that if others see inconsistency between our present and past decisions or actions, they will judge us as being wrong, irrational, capricious, and prone to mistakes. The desire to maintain a positive self-image contributes to the problem with quitting. When you quit, you’re closing a mental account, and we know that we don’t like to close those accounts in the losses. If you abandon a belief, that is the moment you admit you were mistaken. If you set out on a course of action and change your mind, that’s when you go from “failing” to “having failed.” And if you have failed, doesn’t that mean you made a mistake to start in the first place? Of course, the answer is no. But that’s not how it feels to us.

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

  To underscore this point, Milkman and Beshears looked at how analysts reacted to updated earnings information, depending on whether their estimates were out of consensus or in the mainstream. If extreme positions become more integral to who we are, we ought to see less escalation of commitment from those with consensus positions. That’s exactly what they found. Analysts who made consensus forecasts that later turned out to be far off actual earnings seemed perfectly willing to update those forecasts. It was only the analysts who had made extreme predictions who were so stubborn. This was one of the problems Andrew Wilkinson had in cutting his losses on Flow. He took an out-of-consensus, very public position about the superiority of bootstrapping to venture backing. That led to him turning down the flood of venture capital offers coming in. He later admitted the importance he attached to that position and those statements. “I glorified that, and that was my identity. I really valued that.” As his venture-backed competitors started to outpace him, it likely influenced his continued commitment, long after the world showed him that his investments did not have a positive expected value. The lesson in all this is that we need to be careful about tying our identity to any single thing that we believe. And we need to be particularly cautious when a belief is outside the mainstream and public because it is so much harder to let go of those beliefs, facts be damned. Mistaken IdentityThe tragedy of all this is that the way we imagine other people view us is often wrong. That means that some of the irrational decisions we make about quitting are based on a mistaken fear of how we’re going to look to other people. Those imaginings, frankly, are often unkind and ungenerous to those around us because we assume that if we quit, even if it’s obviously the right thing to do, other people are going to think that we failed. That we’re capricious or weak. In these scenarios, we don’t believe there’s going to be any empathy or understanding of why we might have made the choice that we did. But that harsh view of others is usually unjustified. It turns out that when we do quit, other people often don’t think that way at all. Those worries we’ve projected onto others are just head trash we’re carrying around. That’s what happened with Sarah Olstyn Martinez. “I was worried my fellow ER doctors would think I was a wimp, a sellout who couldn’t hack it. I was worried about how my supervisors were going to view me.” She dreaded giving her boss notice, because she assumed he would be angry or upset. When Olstyn Martinez finally did give her notice, her boss was actually very understanding. By the end of the talk, he apologized for failing her, for not making the job less stressful so that she could have persevered.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  It is common to find exilic Cubans occupying top administrative posts in City Hall, The Miami Herald , and the city's corporate boardrooms. Cubans wield tremendous power in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres of Miami. Because exilic Cubans surmounted the social structures of oppression, I am the racist or the oppressor when in Miami and the victim of racism or oppression when I leave. Remember that racism is more than just personal prejudices or biases; it is the product of social structures designed to privilege one group over another. Even though my prejudices and biases remain the same, when in Miami I am the one who benefits from the social structures, hence the racist. Yet when I leave Miami and drive on the New Jersey Turnpike, I am the victim of racism. What changed? Not my biases or prejudices; rather, my social location. Although personal biases or prejudices are not virtues to be emulated, they do not fully constitute racism: social structures do. This is why, when people of color point out Euroamerica's racism, they are referring to something that goes beyond mere bias or prejudice. White privilege makes all whites racist not because of their possible beliefs of superiority but because they benefit from the present social structures; in the same way, I must confess my racism when in Miami because those structures are designed to benefit me. This does not make all whites evil, wicked people; it simply reveals who benefits in society because of race. It must be remembered that this was not always the case. After all, blond-haired and blue-eyed white Gauls were sold as slaves in the marketplaces of Rome during imperial times, and white Europeans served as slaves to Moorish and Ottoman overlords. Racism depends on which group controls power and uses that power, at the expense of others, to provide privilege for one group. In this country, at this time in world history, the face of racism happens to be white. In the same way, I must confess that I am a sexist, even though I consider myself a feminist. Because of my gender, I must realize and confess my complicity with sexist social structures, a complicity motivated by personal advantage.4 When competing with a woman for a job, I hold the advantage of being hired, and at a higher salary, solely because I am male. It does not matter that my personal beliefs are that men and women are and should be treated as equals; the social structures exist to provide me with privilege due to my gender. All things being equal, I prevail over women in the marketplace, in the church community, and in society at large because I am male. I need not hold racist or sexist beliefs; my complicity with social structures protects the privilege that comes with whiteness and maleness. Racism, as well as sexism, becomes normalized within a society through its customs, language, traditions, myths, regulations, and laws.

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

  JEROME. As much as to say; It is of My will, and of the Father’s will, that I should die for the salvation of men; you considering only your own will would not that the grain of wheat should fall into the ground, that it may bring forth much fruit; therefore as you speak what is opposed to My will, you ought to be called My adversary. For Satan is interpreted ‘adverse’ or ‘contrary.’ ORIGEN. Yet the words in which Peter and those in which Satan are rebuked, are not, as is commonly thought, the same; to Peter it is said, Get thee behind me, Satan; that is, follow me, thou that art contrary to my will; to the Devil it is said, Go thy way, Satan, understanding not ‘behind me,’ but ‘into everlasting fire.’ He said therefore to Peter, Get thee behind me, as to one who through ignorance was ceasing to walk after Christ. And He called him Satan, as one, who through ignorance had somewhat contrary to God. But he is blessed to whom Christ turns, even though He turn in order to rebuke him. But why said He to Peter, Thou art an offence unto me, (Ps. 119:165.) when in the Psalm it is said, Great peace have they that love thy law, and there is no offence to them? It must be answered, that not only is Jesus not offended, but neither is any man who is perfect in the love of God; and yet he who does or speaks any thing of the nature of an offence, may be an offence even to one who is incapable of being offended. Or he may hold every disciple that sinneth as an offence, as Paul speaks, Who is offended, and I burn not?. (2 Cor. 11:29.) 16:24–2524. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 25. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I got my father’s razor and made up my mind to kill Freda, and now I know she is happy.” The jury chose madwoman, and Alice spent the rest of her life in the Western State Insane Asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee. Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she had forfeited some essential femininity. The conversation about domestic abuse in lesbian relationships had been active within the queer community since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989, when Annette Green shot and killed her abusive female partner in West Palm Beach after a Halloween party, that the question of whether such a thing was possible was brought before a jury and became one for the courts . Green was one of the first queer people to use “battered woman syndrome” to justify her crime. The idea of the battered woman 35 was brand-new—it had been coined in the ’70s—but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing: physical violence and a white, straight woman (Green is Latina), respectively. The baffled judge eventually allowed Green’s defense, but only after insisting on renaming it “battered person syndrome,” despite the fact that both the abuser and the abused were women. Regardless, it was not successful; Green was convicted of second-degree murder. (A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that “if this had been a heterosexual relationship,” she would have been acquitted.) All of this contrasts sharply with the way narratives of abused straight (and, usually, white) women play out. When the Framingham Eight—a group of women in prison for killing their abusive partners—came into the public eye in 1992, people were similarly uncertain about what to do with Debra Reid, a black woman and the only lesbian among them. When a panel was convened to hear the women’s stories to consider commuting their sentences, Debra’s lawyers did their best to leverage the committee’s inherent assumptions and prejudices by painting her as “the woman” in the relationship: she cooked, she cleaned, she cared for the children. The attorneys believed, rightly, that Debra needed to fit the traditional domestic abuse narrative that people understood: the abused needed to be a “feminine” figure—meek, straight, white—and the abuser a masculine one. 36 That Debra was black didn’t help her case; it worked against the stereotype. (In another early lesbian abuse case, in which a woman gave her girlfriend a pair of shiny black eyes, the prosecutor acknowledged that while she was grateful for and surprised by the abuser’s conviction, she believed that the fact that the defendant was butch and black almost certainly played into the jury’s willingness to convict her.) The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another. And when that happens, the results are frustratingly predictable.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.” What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts. The morning closed in around us. I put down the book. The heads of the green beans went on snapping. They thunked in the steel sink like fingers. “You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body. I don’t know. What I do know is that back at Goodwill you handed me the white dress, your eyes glazed and wide. “Can you read this,” you said, “and tell me if it’s fireproof?” I searched the hem, studied the print on the tag, and, not yet able to read myself, said, “Yeah.” Said it anyway. “Yeah,” I lied, holding the dress up to your chin. “It’s fireproof.” Days later, a neighborhood boy, riding by on his bike, would see me wearing that very dress—I had put it on thinking I would look more like you—in the front yard while you were at work. At recess the next day, the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster. Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof. “That’s so good to know, baby.” You stared off, stone-faced, over my shoulder, the dress held to your chest. “That’s so good.” You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  intolerable. We want to feel significant in some way, to protest against our natural smallness, to expand our sense of self. What we experienced at the age of three or four unconsciously haunts us our entire lives. We alternate between moments of sensing our smallness and trying to deny it. This makes us prone to finding ways to imagine our superiority. Some children do not go through that second phase in early childhood in which they must confront their relative smallness, and these children are more vulnerable to deeper forms of grandiosity later in life. They are the pampered, spoiled ones. The mother and the father continue to make such children feel like they are the center of the universe, shielding them from the pain of confronting the reality. Their every wish becomes a command. If ever attempts are made to instill the slightest amount of discipline, the parents are met with a tantrum. Furthermore, such children come to disdain any form of authority. Compared with themselves and what they can get, the father figure seems rather weak. This early pampering marks them for life. They need to be adored. They become masters at manipulating others to pamper them and shower them with attention. They naturally feel greater than anyone above them. If they have any talent, they might rise quite far, as their sense of being born with a crown on their head becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike others, they never really alternate between feelings of smallness and greatness; they know only the latter. Certainly Eisner came from such a background, as he had a mother who met his every need, completed his homework for him, and sheltered him from his cold and sometimes cruel father. In the past, we humans were able to channel our grandiose needs into religion. In ancient times, our sense of smallness was not just something bred into us by the many years we spent dependent on our parents; it also came from our weakness in relation to the hostile powers in nature. Gods and spirits represented these elemental powers of nature that dwarfed our own. By worshipping them we could gain their protection. Connected to something much larger than ourselves, we felt enlarged. After all, the gods or God cared about the fate of our tribe or city; they cared about our individual soul, a sign of our own significance. We did not merely die and disappear. Many centuries later, in a similar manner, we channeled this energy into worshipping leaders who represented a great cause and promoted a future utopia, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution, or Mao Zedong and communism. Today, in the Western world, religions and great causes have lost their binding power; we find it hard to believe in them and to satisfy our grandiose energy through identification with a greater power. The need to feel larger and significant, however, does not simply disappear; it is stronger than ever. And absent any other channels,

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

  “I’m going to be a firefighter,” or “I’m going to be a doctor,” or “I’m going to be a basketball player.” When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are. Cognitive DissonanceFestinger posited that cognitive dissonance explained the Seekers’ behavior after the aliens failed to show. He theorized that we experience dissonance when new information conflicts with our prior beliefs. When that happens, it makes us uncomfortable, and we want to make that discomfort go away. So we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior beliefs. Elliot Aronson, one of Festinger’s early students and himself a pioneer in social psychology, explained that in resolving such conflicts, “we frequently get ourselves into a tangled muddle of self-justification, denial, and distortion.” We have the intuition that when the world tells us our beliefs need updating, when new information conflicts with a belief we have, we will resolve that conflict by changing our belief. But all too often, like the cult members, we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior belief and stick to it. That way, we don’t have to admit that we made a mistake or that something we believed wasn’t true. “I didn’t abandon my family and give away all my worldly goods for no good reason.” Here’s a simple example. You put a political sign in your yard for a particular candidate because you support them. Their policies align with your values. You volunteer at their campaign office. You canvass for them. You put campaign bumper stickers on your car. Then, information comes out that the candidate was involved in a horrible scandal. The scandal is sufficiently bad that if you had heard this at the beginning of the election cycle, before you had made your choice, you would not have supported them in the first place. But you’ve already publicly asserted your support of the candidate. Your neighbors know you support them. So does anybody who has visited your house or driven by and seen the sign on your front lawn. What do you do now? Dissonance theory predicts that you won’t yank all those signs out of your yard or peel the sticker off your car. Instead, you’ll continue your support, even escalating your commitment, by rationalizing away the new information. The other party is trying to smear your candidate. The establishment is trying to bring them down. One of the things that you love about them is that they thumb their nose at the establishment. It’s not just new information that can create a conflict with your past beliefs. Sometimes your own actions can cause dissonance. Imagine that you believe yourself to be a truthful person and one day you’re late to work because you’re hung over and you slept through your alarm. When your boss asks you why you didn’t get in on time, you say that traffic was really bad.

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

  two hundred years ago If you had been raised in a village two hundred years ago, somewhere in Eastern Europe, say, or even on the coast of Massachusetts, and your father was a drunk, or a little off, or both, then everyone in the village, those you grew up with and those who knew you only from a distance, they would all know that the town drunk or the village idiot was your father. It couldn’t be hidden or denied. Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with, It’s his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk, and they couldn’t help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped. They would look into your eyes to see if they were his eyes, they would notice if you were to stumble slightly as you stepped into a shop, they would remember that your father too had started with promise, like you. They would know he was a burden, they could read the struggle in your face, they would watch as you passed and nod, knowing that around the next corner your father had fallen and pissed himself. And they would watch you watch him, note the days you simply kept walking, as if you didn’t see, note the days you knelt beside him, tried to get him to rise, to prop him up. If they were friends and they came by your house they couldn’t help but notice whether you had an extra room, or whether your own situation seemed precarious, marginal. And they might not say anything but they would take it in and wonder, either way it meant something. If this was two hundred years ago you left the village maybe once a month, to bring whatever it was you grew or fabricated—onions or oil, wine or cloth—to a distant market to sell, only to return in a day or two to the village, and you might get the sense, perhaps rightly, that there was nowhere else on earth for you to be, that to leave the village would be akin to banishment, to enter into a lifetime of wandering, to become open to speculation that you’d abandoned your father to his fate, turned your back, left him to die. Taken and not given back. For if you are not responsible for your own father, who is? Who is going to pick him up off the ground if not you?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Look at their actions, the lack of accomplishments, the great projects they never start on, always with a good excuse. If you notice traces of this attitude in yourself, a good strategy is to take on a project of even the smallest scale, taking it all the way to completion and embracing the prospect of failure. If you fail, you will have already cushioned the blow because you anticipated it, and inevitably it will not hurt as much as you had imagined. Your self- esteem will rise because you finally tried something and finished it. Once you diminish this fear, progress will be easy. You will want to try again. And if you succeed, all the better. Either way, you win. When you find others with this attitude, be very wary of forming partnerships with them. They are masters at slipping away at the wrong moment, at getting you to do all of the hard work and take the blame if it fails. At all costs avoid the temptation to help or rescue them from their negativity. They are too good at the avoidance game. The Depressive Attitude. As children, these types did not feel loved or respected by their parents. For helpless children, it is too much to imagine that their parents could be wrong or flawed in their parenting. Even if unloved, they still are dependent on them. And so their defense is to often internalize the negative judgment and imagine that they are indeed unworthy of being loved, that there is something actually wrong with them. In this way they can maintain the illusion that their parents are strong and competent. All of this occurs quite unconsciously, but the feeling of being worthless will haunt such people their entire lives. Deep down they will feel ashamed of who they are and not really know why they feel this way. As adults they will anticipate abandonment, loss, and sadness in their experiences and see signs of potentially depressing things in the world around them. They are secretly drawn to what is gloomy in the world, to the seamy side of life. If they can manufacture some of the depression they feel in this way, it at least is under their control. They are consoled by the thought that the world is a dreary place. A strategy they will employ throughout their lives is to temporarily withdraw from life and from people. This will feed their depression and also make it something they can manage to some extent, as opposed to traumatic experiences imposed upon them. An excellent example of this type was the talented German composer and conductor Hans von Bülow (1830–1894). In 1855 von Bülow met and fell in love with Cosima Liszt (1837–1930), the charismatic daughter of the composer Franz Liszt.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Powerless and dispossessed of their ancestral lands, Amerindians lost their identity as many began to see themselves in the way those from the dominant culture saw them. This process, which is not limited to the Amerindian experience, leads the marginalized group to internalize the illusion of inferiority constructed by the dominant culture while idealizing the white culture and its religious manifestations (including how it reads the Bible). This process of internalization usually leads toward self-hatred and the self-imposition of oppressive structures. While some Amerindians reject the message of liberation found in the Gospels, due mostly to how the symbol of the white Jesus continues to be linked to the death of their culture and ancestors, others are rediscovering the ways of their ancestors, learning to worship Jesus through their own cultural symbols. For example, a present-day medicine man sees his work and that of Jesus to be similar in their attitude toward evil. When evil is given importance, it increases. Jesus teaches that when confronted, evil should be left to God, who can always be trusted and will never lose. Healing ceases to be simply physical. It also becomes a spiritual and psychological process that leads toward harmony. Both Jesus and the medicine man teach that the most important thing to learn from evil is that the beauty of life rests in living in harmony with God through brother Jesus who shows God's goodness.13 AN ASIAN AMERICAN CHRIST The Christ originally introduced to the Asian community was a Christ understood through a culture defined by a Western ethos. The avarice of the West to colonize the “exotic” lands of the East created a Christ and a biblical understanding steeped in the imperialist and colonialist mind-set. A biblical rendering that assumes and demonstrates a European superiority creates a Christ who is complicit with the colonialist venture, a Christ responsible for justifying political structures that cause misery and death. For Christ to be Asian or Asian American, he, along with the Bible, must first be “decolonialized.” A colonialized Bible tends to romanticize the plight of the poor, even to the point of making the condition of the oppressed the model for the victims of racism, classism, and sexism. In Mark 12:41–44 (repeated in Luke 21:1–4) we are told the story of a poor widow who gives all that she has to the Temple. Sitting opposite the [Temple's] treasury, Jesus watched how the crowd cast copper coins into the treasury. Many rich people cast in much, but one poor widow came and cast two lepta, which is a quadrans. Having called his disciples close to him, Jesus said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow cast more than all those casting into the treasury.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  severance package. The board members could no longer ignore the falling stock price. The firing of Katzenberg and Ovitz made Eisner the most hated man in Hollywood, and as his fortunes fell, all of his enemies came out of the woodwork to hasten his destruction. His fall from power was fast and spectacular. Understand: The story of Michael Eisner is much closer to you than you think. His fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale. The reason is simple: we humans possess a weakness that is latent in us all and will push us into the delusional process without our ever being aware of the dynamic. The weakness stems from our natural tendency to overestimate our skills. We normally have a self-opinion that is somewhat elevated in relation to reality. We have a deep need to feel ourselves superior to others in something—intelligence, beauty, charm, popularity, or saintliness. This can be a positive. A degree of confidence impels us to take on challenges, to push past our supposed limits, and to learn in the process. But once we experience success on any level—increased attention from an individual or group, a promotion, funding for a project—that confidence will tend to rise too quickly, and there will be an ever-growing discrepancy between our self-opinion and reality. Any success that we have in life inevitably depends on some good luck, timing, the contributions of others, the teachers who helped us along the way, the whims of the public in need of something new. Our tendency is to forget all of this and imagine that any success stems from our superior self. We begin to assume we can handle new challenges well before we are ready. After all, people have confirmed our greatness with their attention, and we want to keep it coming. We imagine we have the golden touch and that we can now magically transfer our skills to some other medium or field. Without realizing it, we become more attuned to our ego and our fantasies than to the people we work for and our audience. We grow distant from those who are helping us, seeing them as tools to be used. And with any failures that occur we tend to blame others. Success has an irresistible pull to it that tends to cloud our minds. Your task is the following: After any kind of success, analyze the components. See the element of luck that is inevitably there, as well as the role that other people, including mentors, played in your good fortune. This will neutralize the tendency to inflate your powers. Remind yourself that with success comes complacency, as attention becomes more important than the work and old strategies are repeated. With success you must raise your vigilance. Wipe the slate clean with each new project, starting from zero. Try to pay less attention to the applause as it grows louder. See the limits to what

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We can call it willpower, assertiveness, or even aggression, but it is mixed with our intelligence and cleverness. It was revealed to us in its purest state in childhood. This energy made us bold and adventurous, not only physically but mentally, wanting to explore ideas and soak up knowledge. It made us actively search for friends with whom we could explore together. It also made us rather relentless when it came to solving problems or getting what we wanted. (Children can often be bold in what they ask for.) It made us open to the world and to new experiences. And if we felt frustrated and helpless for long enough periods of time, this same energy could make us unusually combative. As we get older and we encounter mounting frustrations, resistance from others, and feelings of impatience for power, some among us may become chronically aggressive. But another phenomenon is even more common: we become uncomfortable with and even frightened of that assertive energy within, and our own potential for aggressive behavior. Being assertive and adventurous could lead to some failed action, making us feel exposed and vulnerable. If we express this energy too much, people may not like 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.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Paul had met Lan in 1967 while stationed in Cam Ranh Bay with the US Navy. They met at a bar in Saigon, dated, fell in love, and, a year later, married right there in the city’s central courthouse. All through my childhood their wedding photo hung on the living room wall. In it, a thin, boyish Virginian farmboy with doe-brown eyes, not yet twenty-three, beams above his new wife, five years his senior—a farmgirl, as it happens, from Go Cong, and a mother to twelve-year-old Mai from her arranged marriage. As I played with my dolls and toy soldiers, that photo hovered over me, an icon from an epicenter that would lead to my own life. In the couple’s hopeful smiles, it’s hard to imagine the photo was snapped during one of the most brutal years of the war. At the time it was taken, with Lan’s hand on Paul’s chest, her pearl wedding ring a bead of light, you were already a year old—waiting in a stroller a few feet behind the cameraman as the bulb flashed. Lan told me one day, while I was plucking her white hairs, that when she first arrived in Saigon, after running away from her doomed first marriage, after failing to find a job, she ended up as a sex worker for American GIs on R&R. She said, with barbed pride, as if she was defending herself before a jury, “I did what any mother would do, I made a way to eat. Who can judge me, huh? Who?” Her chin jutted, her head lifted high at some invisible person across the room. It was only when I heard her slip that I realized she was, in fact, speaking to someone: her mother. “I never wanted to, Ma. I wanted to go home with you—” She lunged forward. The tweezers dropped from my grip, pinged on the hardwood. “I never asked to be a whore,” she sobbed. “A girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest,” she repeated the proverb her mother told her. “A girl who leaves . . .” She rocked from side to side, eyes shut, face lifted toward the ceiling, like she was seventeen again.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  It’s also written in the Psalms that “the highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humankind.”12 So there is this realm, heaven, where things are as God wants them, under the rule and reign of God. But the earth is different. God has allowed for the temporary existence of other kingdoms. Other realms of authority. The earth “he has given to humankind.” Which means we can do whatever we want. We can live however we want. We can choose to live under the rule and reign of God, or we can choose to rebel against God and live some other way. Now if there’s a realm where things are as God wants them to be, then there must be a realm where things are not as God wants them to be. Where things aren’t according to God’s will. Where people aren’t treated as fully human. It’s called hell. Think about the expression “for the hell of it.” When someone says “for the hell of it,” what they mean is that whatever is being discussed was done or said for no apparent reason. It was, in essence, pointless. Random. And God is for purpose and beauty and meaning. When we say something was a “living hell,” we mean that it was void of any love or peace or beauty or meaning. It was absent of the will and desire of God. We hear about war zones being like hell, working conditions being hellish, a divorce being emotional hell, a famine feeling like hell on earth.13 Concentration camps are hells on earth. And that’s Jesus’s point with the “gouge out your eye” teaching. His point isn’t that you should mutilate your body if you find yourself lusting after someone. His point is that something serious—sometimes hellish—happens when people are treated as objects, and we should resist it at all costs.14 Right Now When Jesus talks about heaven and hell, they are first and foremost present realities that have serious implications for the future. Either can be invited to earth, right now, through our actions. It’s possible for heaven to invade earth. And it’s possible for hell to invade earth. A friend of mine talks honestly about how he spent years exploiting women for sex. He knew exactly what to say, how to act. He was a master at finding a woman who had a troubled relationship with her father and manipulating the situation for his pleasure. The first time he was telling me his story, he made a profound point that is true for all of us. He said that exploiting women for sex didn’t just rob them of their humanity, it robbed him of his as well. As the years went on, he found that he didn’t like what was happening to him. He was becoming less human in the process. He said he was becoming a monster.

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

  Unlike grittiness, there just aren’t that many positive words for quittiness, as evidenced by the absence of quittiness itself from the dictionary. One of the biggest clues to the way that the language favors grit over quitting is that one of the synonyms for grittiness is heroism . Others include bravery , courage , and fearlessness. When we think of perseverance, particularly in the face of danger, we picture the hero, who gets to the edge of death, faces down the abyss, and perseveres when other people would give up. Meanwhile, people who quit are cowards. In a world where perseverance is almost universally seen as the road to honor and success, grit is the star. Quitting, meanwhile, is either the villain (an obstacle to overcome) or, more often, a bit player (credited only as “Henchman #3” or “Cowardly Soldier”). Wrapped in EuphemismIn February 2019, Lindsey Vonn, one of the world’s most famous athletes, announced on Instagram that she was retiring from ski racing: “My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of. My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.” After detailing her most recent series of injuries, surgery, and rehabilitation (much of which she had not previously disclosed), she added the following message: “I always say, ‘Never give up!’ So to all the kids out there, to my fans who have sent me messages of encouragement to keep going . . . I need to tell you that I’m not giving up! I’m just starting a new chapter.” In the first part of Vonn’s statement, she very clearly, in all caps, says she is stopping competitive skiing. (Translation: She’s quitting.) But then, in the second part of the statement, she gives a full-throated denial of the very quitting that she just announced, instead wrapping it in the euphemism “starting a new chapter.” If anybody has earned the right to proudly quit without their mettle or stick-to-itiveness questioned, it’s Lindsey Vonn. Stories of her comebacks from serious crashes are almost as impressive as her unrivaled record of success. After being airlifted to a hospital from a horrible crash at the 2006 Olympics, she tried to sneak out before being cleared by doctors and competed two days later. In 2013, after suffering a torn ACL and MCL and another fracture, having surgery, and working through a grueling rehabilitation, she reinjured both reconstructed ligaments and went through the same process again . She missed the Sochi Olympics and most of 2014 yet returned to win another twenty-three World Cup races between late 2014 and early 2018. If Lindsey Vonn finds it so hard to just say that she’s quitting, imagine what it’s like for us mere mortals to do so. The idea of quitting is such a bitter pill to swallow that we have to take it with a spoonful of sugar.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  they seem to relish the drama in their stories. No one else suffers as they do. If you are careful, you can detect a vaguely bored expression when they listen to other people’s problems; they are not so engaged. Because they play up their supposed helplessness, you will naturally feel sympathetic, and once they elicit this, they will ask for favors, extra care, and attention. That is the control they are after. They are hypersensitive to any signs of doubt on your face, and they don’t want to hear advice or how they might be slightly to blame. They may explode and classify you as one of the victimizers. What might make this hard to see through is that often they do suffer through unusual adversity and personal pain, but they are masters at attracting the pain. They choose partners who will disappoint them; they have a bad attitude at work and attract criticism; they are negligent with details, and so things around them fall apart. It is not malicious fate that is to blame but something from within them that wants and feeds off the drama. People who are genuine victims cannot help but feel some shame and embarrassment at their fate, part of an age-old human superstition that a person’s bad luck is a sign of something wrong with the individual. These true victims do not enjoy telling their stories. They do so reluctantly. Passive aggressors, on the other hand, are dying to share what has happened to them and bask in your attention. As part of this, passive aggressors may display various symptoms and ailments—anxiety attacks, depression, headaches—that make their suffering seem quite real. Since childhood, we have all been capable of willing such symptoms to get attention and sympathy. We can make ourselves sick with worry; we can think our way into depression. What you are looking for is the pattern: this seems to recur in passive aggressors when they need something (such as a favor), when they feel you pulling away, when they feel particularly insecure. In any case, they tend to soak up your time and mental space, infecting you with their negative energy and needs, and it is very hard to disengage. These types will often prey upon those who are prone to feel guilty—the sensitive, caregiving types. To deal with the manipulation involved here you need some distance, and this is not easy. The only way to do this is to feel some anger and resentment at the time and energy you are wasting in trying to help them, and how little they give back to you. The relationship inevitably tilts in their favor when it comes to attention. That is their power. 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

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

  Reply to Objection 2: Both men and angels belong to the fellowship of His mystical body; men by faith, and angels by manifest vision. But the sacraments are proportioned to faith, through which the truth is seen “through a glass” and “in a dark manner.” And therefore, properly speaking, it does not belong to angels, but to men, to eat this sacrament spiritually. Reply to Objection 3: Christ dwells in men through faith, according to their present state, but He is in the blessed angels by manifest vision. Consequently the comparison does not hold, as stated above (ad 2). Whether the just man alone may eat Christ sacramentally?Objection 1: It seems that none but the just man may eat Christ sacramentally. For Augustine says in his book De Remedio Penitentiae (cf. Tract. in Joan. xxv, n. 12; xxvi, n. 1): “Why make ready tooth and belly? Believe, and thou hast eaten . . . For to believe in Him, this it is, to eat the living bread.” But the sinner does not believe in Him; because he has not living faith, to which it belongs to believe “in God,” as stated above in the [4638]SS, Q[2], A[2]; [4639]SS, Q[4], A[5]. Therefore the sinner cannot eat this sacrament, which is the living bread. Objection 2: Further, this sacrament is specially called “the sacrament of charity,” as stated above ([4640]Q[78], A[3], ad 6). But as unbelievers lack faith, so all sinners lack charity. Now unbelievers do not seem to be capable of eating this sacrament, since in the sacramental form it is called the “Mystery of Faith.” Therefore, for like reason, the sinner cannot eat Christ’s body sacramentally. Objection 3: Further, the sinner is more abominable before God than the irrational creature: for it is said of the sinner (Ps. 48:21): “Man when he was in honor did not understand; he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them.” But an irrational animal, such as a mouse or a dog, cannot receive this sacrament, just as it cannot receive the sacrament of Baptism. Therefore it seems that for the like reason neither may sinners eat this sacrament. On the contrary, Augustine (Tract. xxvi in Joan.), commenting on the words, “that if any man eat of it he may not die,” says: “Many receive from the altar, and by receiving die: whence the Apostle saith, ‘eateth and drinketh judgment to himself.’” But only sinners die by receiving. Therefore sinners eat the body of Christ sacramentally, and not the just only. I answer that, In the past, some have erred upon this point, saying that Christ’s body is not received sacramentally by sinners; but that directly the body is touched by the lips of sinners, it ceases to be under the sacramental species.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  For I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was an alien and you turned me out, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.” And when both the virtuous and condemned ask when they did these things to Jesus, Christ will respond, “Truly I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of these, the least of my people, you did it to me.” Jesus does not divide sheep from goats by their denominational affiliation, by the church they attended, or by their confession of faith. The litmus test is what they did or did not do to the least, to the poorest. Jesus asks if the individual participated in liberative acts that led others toward an abundant life or if he or she instead participated in enslaving acts that led others to death. He specifically asks if we fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the alien, clothed the naked, visited the sick or the prisoner behind bars. The radicalness of salvation, as we already saw with the account of the rich young ruler and Zacchaeus, is that Jesus judges all people on how they interacted with the disenfranchised in society. The epistle of James best summarizes what awaits those who, like the rich young ruler, rely on their wealth and religiosity, ignoring the plight of the marginalized: You who are rich, start howling and crying aloud over the hardships that are coming to you. Your wealth is rotted, and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and this same corrosion will be your sentence, eating your flesh as fire. You heaped treasures in the last days. Laborers who reaped your fields had their wages withheld by you, behold their cries! The cries of those laborers have entered into the ears of the Lord of hosts. On earth you lived luxuriously and lived riotously. In the time of slaughter you ate to your heart's content. You condemned, you murdered the just, who offered you no resistance. (5:1–6) Our first reaction in reading the above text might be a sigh of relief. We may say that we are not rich but middle-class, and so this passage does not apply to us, it applies to those in a higher tax bracket: the Donald Trumps of the world. I will insist, however, that it does apply to the vast majority of those living in the so-called first world, including people on the margins. Specifically, many people residing in the United States live in a luxury unknown to the rest of the world and unfathomed by the aristocracy of any previous age. This is made obvious when we consider that the average yearly income is about $330 in Kenya, $300 in India, or $160 in Bangladesh.

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

  Secondly, it may happen without fault on his part, as, for instance, when he has sorrowed over his sin, but is not sufficiently contrite: and in such a case he does not sin in receiving the body of Christ, because a man cannot know for certain whether he is truly contrite. It suffices, however, if he find in himself the marks of contrition, for instance, if he “grieve over past sins,” and “propose to avoid them in the future” [*Cf. Rule of Augustine]. But if he be ignorant that what he did was a sinful act, through ignorance of the fact, which excuses, for instance, if a man approach a woman whom he believed to be his wife whereas she was not, he is not to be called a sinner on that account; in the same way if he has utterly forgotten his sin, general contrition suffices for blotting it out, as will be said hereafter ([4646]XP, Q[2], A[3], ad 2); hence he is no longer to be called a sinner. Whether to approach this sacrament with consciousness of sin is the gravest of all sins?Objection 1: It seems that to approach this sacrament with consciousness of sin is the gravest of all sins; because the Apostle says (1 Cor. 11:27): “Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord”: upon which the gloss observes: “He shall be punished as though he slew Christ.” But the sin of them who slew Christ seems to have been most grave. Therefore this sin, whereby a man approaches Christ’s table with consciousness of sin, appears to be the gravest. Objection 2: Further, Jerome says in an Epistle (xlix): “What hast thou to do with women, thou that speakest familiarly with God at the altar?” [*The remaining part of the quotation is not from St. Jerome]. Say, priest, say, cleric, how dost thou kiss the Son of God with the same lips wherewith thou hast kissed the daughter of a harlot? “Judas, thou betrayest the Son of Man with a kiss!” And thus it appears that the fornicator approaching Christ’s table sins as Judas did, whose sin was most grave. But there are many other sins which are graver than fornication, especially the sin of unbelief. Therefore the sin of every sinner approaching Christ’s table is the gravest of all. Objection 3: Further, spiritual uncleanness is more abominable to God than corporeal. But if anyone was to cast Christ’s body into mud or a cess-pool, his sin would be reputed a most grave one. Therefore, he sins more deeply by receiving it with sin, which is spiritual uncleanness, upon his soul.