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

  On page 531, in describing the 'reasonable type' of decision, it was said that it usually came when the right conception of the case was found. Where, however, the right conception is an anti-impulsive one, the whole intellectual ingenuity of the man usually goes to work to crowd it out of sight, and to find names for the moment may sound sanctified, and sloth or passion may reign unchecked. How many excuses does the drunkard find when each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test; moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it; or others are drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse; or it is but to enable him to sleep, or just to get through this job of work; or it isn't drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; or it is a means of stimulating him to make a more powerful resolution in favor of abstinence than any he has hitherto made; or it is just this once, and once doesn't count, etc., etc., ad libitum —it is, in fact, anything you like except being a drunkard. That is the conception that will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all the other possible ways of conceiving, from all the other possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.[510]

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

  We now see at one view when it is that effort complicates volition. It does so whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind; it does so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome. The âme bien née, the child of the sunshine, at whose birth the fairies made their gifts, does not need much of it in his life. The hero and the neurotic subject, on the other hand, do. Now our spontaneous way of conceiving the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an active force adding its strength to that of the motives which ultimately prevail. When outer forces impinge upon a body, we say that the resultant motion is in the line of least resistance, or of greatest traction. But it is a curious fact that our spontaneous language never speaks of volition with effort in this way. Of course if we proceed a priori and define the line of least resistance as the line that is followed, the physical law must also hold good in the mental sphere. But we feel, in all hard cases of volition, as if the line taken, when the rarer and more ideal motives prevail, were the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of coarser motivation were the more pervious and easy one, even at the moment when we refuse to follow it. He who under the surgeon's knife represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself to social obloquy for duty's sake, feels as if he were following the line of greatest temporary resistance. He speaks of conquering and overcoming his impulses and temptations.

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

  But the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward, never talk of their conduct in that way or say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety, conquer their courage, and so forth. If in general we class all springs of action as propensities on the one hand and ideals on the other, the sensualist never says of his behavior that it results from a victory over his ideals, but the moralist always speaks of his as a victory over his propensities. The sensualist uses terms of inactivity, says he forgets his ideals, is deaf to duty, and so forth; which terms seem to imply that the ideal motives per se can be annulled without energy or effort, and that the strongest mere traction lies in the line of the propensities. The ideal impulse appears, in comparison with this, a still small voice which must be artificially reinforced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, making things seem as if, while the force of propensity were essentially fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of various amount. But what determines the amount of the effort when, by its aid, and ideal motive becomes victorious over a great sensual resistance? The very greatness of the resistance itself. If the sensual propensity is small, the effort is small. The latter is made great by the presence of a great antagonist to overcome. And if a brief definition of ideal or moral action were required, none could be given which would better fit the appearances than this: It is action in the line of the greatest resistance. The facts may be most briefly symbolized thus, P standing for the propensity, I for the ideal impulse, and E for the effort: I per se < P. I + E > P. In other words, if E adds itself to I, P immediately offers the least resistance, and motion occurs in spite of it. But the E does not seem to form an integral part of the I. It appears adventitious and indeterminate in advance. We can make more or less as we please, and if we make enough we can convert the greatest mental resistance into the least. Such, at least, is the impression which the facts spontaneously produce upon us. But we will not discuss the truth of this impression at present; let us rather continue our descriptive detail. PLEASURE AND PAIN AS SPRINGS OF ACTION.

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

  'This odd state of mind," says Darwin,[405] " is chiefly recognized by the face reddening, by the eyes being averted or cast down, and by awkward, nervous movements of the body....Shyness seems to depend on sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of others, more especially with respect to external appearance. Strangers neither know nor care anything about our conduct or character, but they may, and often do, criticise our appearance....The consciousness of anything peculiar, or even new, in the dress, or any slight blemish on the person, and more especially on the face—points which are likely to attract the attention of strangers—makes the shy intolerably shy.[406] On the other hand, in those cases in which conduct, and not personal appearance, is concerned, we are much more apt to be shy in the presence of acquaintances whose judgment we in some degree value than in that of strangers....Some persons, however, are so sensitive that the mere act of speaking to almost any one is sufficient to rouse their self-consciousness, and a slight blush is the result. Disapprobation...causes shyness and blushing much more readily than does approbation....Persons who are exceedingly shy are rarely shy in the presence of those with whom they are quite familiar, and of whose good opinion and sympathy they are quite assured; for instance, a girl in presence of her mother....Shyness... is closely related to fear; yet it is distinct from fear in the ordinary sense. A shy man dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them; he may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet hare no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers. Almost every one is extremely nervous when first addressing a public assembly, and most men remain so through their lives."

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

  an interest in a set of objects external to my thought. These thoughts in other men's minds are out of my mind and 'ejective' to me. They come and go, and grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure in the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, just as in the former case, the pure principle seems out of the game as an object of regard, and present only as the general form or condition under which the regard and the thinking go on in me at all. But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me, whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other outward change. But the pride and shame which I feel are not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as if something else had changed too, when I perceived my image in your mind to have changed for the worse, something in me to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt inside of me, big and strong and lusty, but now weak, contracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change I feel the shame about? Is not the condition of this thing inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my self-regard? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare numerical principle of distinction from other men, and no empirical part of me at all? No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection of objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind 'belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and demand a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of disdain? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it; it is as being an I who has always been treated with respect, who belongs to a certain family and 'set,' who has certain powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is what your disdain negates and contradicts; this is 'the thing inside of me' whose changed treatment I feel the shame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in consequence of your conduct, is collapsed; and this certainly is an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of shame is often more concrete even than this,—it is simply my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and without any reflection at all on my part works those muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together make up the 'expression' of shame. In this instinctive, reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire vehicle of

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

  inward nature, the spotlessness from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count as spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled. But this broad external review of the facts of the life of the Self will be incomplete without some account of the RIVALRY AND CONFLICT OF THE DIFFERENT SELVES. With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant , and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 189 ff.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own. I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not. Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to

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

  advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work ."[152] A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain . It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects , that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last quoted remarks: "The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-making." No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act , one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of

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

  Modesty, Shame. Whether there be an instinctive impulse to hide certain parts of the body and certain acts' is perhaps even more open to doubt than whether there be an instinct of cleanliness. Anthropologists have denied it, and in the utter shamelessness of infancy and of many savage tribes have seemed to find a good basis for their views. It must, however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and that, as far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself works directly against it at times of excitement, and with reference to certain people; and that habits of immodesty contracted with those people may forever afterwards inhibit it any impulse to be modest towards them. This would account for a great deal of actual immodesty, even if an original modest impulse were there. On the other hand, the modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a singularly ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the presences that call it forth, and as regards the acts to which it leads. Ethnology shows it to have very little backbone of its own, and to follow easily fashion and example. Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of some sort of tribute to shame, however perverted—as where female modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty in appearing before strangers unpainted—and to believe it to have no impulsive root whatever. Now, what may the impulsive root be? I believe that, for one thing, it is shyness, the feeling of dread that unfamiliar persons, as explained above, may inspire us withal. Such persons are the original stimuli to our modesty.[409] But the actions of modesty are quite different from the actions of shyness. They consist of the restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the covering of certain parts; and why do such particular actions necessarily ensue? That there may be in the human animal, as such, a 'blind' and immediate automatic impulse to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring presences is a possibility difficult of actual disproof. But it seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of modesty are suggested to us in a roundabout way; and that, even more than those of cleanliness, they arise from the application in the second instance to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates. It is not easy to believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbor's eyes. Human nature is sufficiently homogeneous for us to be sure that everywhere reserve must inspire some respect, and that persons who suffer every liberty are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like such people, then, would be one of the first resolutions suggested by social self-consciousness to a. child of nature just emerging from the unreflective state. And the resolution would probably acquire effective pungency for the first time when the social self-consciousness was sharpened into a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom it was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion would of course go on to build its positive precepts upon this germ; and, through a variety of examples and experiences, the ritual of modesty would grow, until it reached the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by name.

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

  the other side) downwards into the anterior (direct) and lateral (crossed) columns of the spinal cord. (4) Anatomical proof of the continuity of the rolandic regions with these motor columns of the cord is also clearly given. Flechsig's 'Pyramidenbahn' forms an uninterrupted strand (distinctly traceable in human embryos, before its fibres have acquired their white 'medullary sheath') passing upwards from the pyramids of the medulla, and traversing the internal capsule and corona radiata to the convolutions in question (Fig. 10). None of the inferior gray matter of the brain seems to have any connection with this important fibrous strand. It passes directly from the cortex to the motor arrangements in the cord, depending for its proper nutrition (as the facts of degeneration show) on the influence of the cortical cells, just as motor nerves depend for their nutrition on that of the cells of the spinal cord. Electrical stimulation of this motor strand in any accessible part of its course has been shown in dogs to produce movements analogous to those which excitement of the cortical surface calls forth. [image file=Image00009.jpg] One of the most instructive proofs of motor localization in the cortex is that furnished by the disease now called aphemia, or motor Aphasia . Motor aphasia is neither loss of voice nor paralysis of the tongue or lips. The patient's voice is as strong as ever, and all the innervations of his hypoglossal and facial nerves, except those necessary for speaking, may go on perfectly well. He can laugh and cry, and even sing; but he either is unable to utter any words at all; or a few meaningless stock phrases form his only speech; or else he speaks incoherently and confusedly, mispronouncing, misplacing, and misusing his words in various degrees. Sometimes his speech is a mere broth of unintelligible syllables. In cases of pure motor aphasia the patient recognizes his mistakes and suffers acutely from them. Now whenever a patient dies in such a condition as this, and an examination of his brain is permitted, it is found that the lowest frontal gyrus (see Fig. 11) is the seat of injury. Broca first noticed this fact in 1861, and since then the gyrus has gone by the name of Broca's convolution. The injury in right-handed people is found on the left hemisphere, and in left-handed people on the right hemisphere. Most people, in fact, are left-brained, that is, all their delicate and specialized movements are handed over to the charge of the left hemisphere. The ordinary right-handedness for such movements is only a consequence of that fact, a consequence which shows outwardly on account of that extensive decussation of the fibres whereby most of those from the left hemisphere pass to the right half of the body only. But the left-brainedness might exist in equal measure and not show outwardly. This would happen wherever organs on both sides of the body could be governed by the left hemisphere; and just such a case seems offered by the

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

  clothes—is more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply.[256] Next, our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part of our life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of affection; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who, in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats it with contempt. All these different things are the objects of instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical interests of life. We all have a blind impulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes, and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may live in and 'improve.' An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labor. There are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long construction of their hands or brains—say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript—were suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards his gold, and although it is true that a part of our depression at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we must now go without certain goods that we expected the possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time removed farther than ever away from the happy sons of earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full-blown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to anti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emotion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread. (b ) A man's Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish

• From Story of O (1954)

  "Oh, please, for pity's sake, not yet!" said O, for Sir Stephen was getting to his feet, René was following suit, he leaned down and took her by the shoulders. "So give us your answer," he said. "Do you consent?" Finally she said that she did. Gently he helped her up and, having sat down on the big sofa, made her kneel down alongside him facing the sofa, on which reclined her outstretched arms, her bust, and her head. Her eyes were closed, and an image she had seen several years before flashed across her mind: a strange print portraying a woman kneeling, as she was, before an armchair. The floor was of tile, and in one corner a dog and child were playing. The woman's skirts were raised, and standing close beside her was a man brandishing a handful of switches, ready to whip her. They were all dressed in sixteenth-century clothes, and the print bore a title which she found disgusting: Family Punishment. With one hand, René took her wrists in a viselike grip, and with the other lifted her skirts so high that she could feel the muslin lining brush her cheek. He caressed her flanks and drew Sir Stephen's attention to the two dimples that graced them, and the softness of the furrow between her thighs. Then with that same hand he pressed her waist, to accentuate further her buttocks, and ordered her to pen her knees wider. She obeyed without saying a word. The honors René was bestowing upon her body, and Sir Stephen's replies, and the coarseness of the terms the men were using so overwhelmed her with a shame as violent as it was unexpected that the desire she had felt to be had by Sir Stephen vanished and she began to wish for the whip as a deliverance, for the pain and screams as a justification. But Sir Stephen's hands pried open her again, caressed her until she moaned. She was vanquished, undone, and humiliated that she had moaned. "I leave you to Sir Stephen," René then said. "Remain the way you are, he'll dismiss you when he sees fit." How often had she remained like this at Roissy, on her knees, offered to one and all? But then she had always had her hands bound together by the bracelets, a happy prisoner upon whom everything was imposed and from whom nothing was asked. Her it was through her own free will that she remained half naked, whereas a single gesture, the same that would have sufficed to bring her back to her feet, would also have sufficed to cover her. Her promise bound her as much as had the leather bracelets and chains. Was it only the promise? And however humiliated she was, or rather because she had been humiliated, was it not somehow pleasant to be esteemed only for her humiliation, for the meekness with which she surrendered, for the obedient way in which she opened?

• From Story of O (1954)

  her tiny shoulders and slender torso, rendered them fragile. She could not keep them from trembling, she would have had to stop breathing. To hope that this fragility would disarm Sir Stephen was futile, and she was fully aware that it was quite the contrary: her proffered gentleness cried for wounds as much as caresses, fingernails as much as lips. She had a momentary illusion: Sir Stephen's right hand, which was holding his cigarette, grazed their tips with the end of his middle finger and, obediently, they stiffened further. That this, for Sir Stephen, was a game, or the guise of a game, nothing more, or a check, the way one checks to ascertain whether a machine is functioning properly, O had no doubt. Without moving from the arm of his chair, Sir Stephen then told her to take off her skirt. O's moist hands made the hooks slippery, and it took her two tries before she succeeded in undoing the black faille petticoat under her skirt. When she was completely naked, her high-heeled patent-leather sandals and her black nylon stockings rolled down flat above her knees, accentuating the delicate lines of her legs and the whiteness of thighs, Sir Stephen, who had also gotten to his feet, seized her loins with one hand and pushed her toward the sofa. He had her kneel down, her back against the sofa, and to make her press more tightly against it with her shoulders than with her waist, he made her spread her thighs slightly. Her hands were lying on her ankles, thus forcing her belly ajar, and above her still proffered breasts, her throat arched back. She did not dare look Sir Stephen in the face, but she saw his hands undoing his belt. When he had straddled O, who was still kneeling, and had seized her by the nape of her neck, he drove into her mouth. It was not the caress of her lips the length of him he was looking for, but the back of her throat. For a long time he probed, and O felt the suffocating gag of flesh swell and harden, its slow repeated hammering finally bringing her to tears. In order to invade her better, Sir Stephen ended by kneeling on the sofa, one knee on each side of her face, and there were moments when his buttocks rested on O's breast, and in her heart she felt her womb, useless and scorned, burning her. Although he delighted and reveled in her for a long time, Sir Stephen did not bring his pleasure to a climax, but withdrew from her in silence and rose again to his feet, without closing his dressing gown.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O was happy that René had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash, and the outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled her to pleasure when they took her, and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins. There had been embraces she had found foul, hands that had been an intolerable insult on her breasts, mouths which had sucked on her lips and tongues like so many soft, vile leeches, and tongues and sexes, viscous beasts which, caressing themselves at her closed mouth, at the double furrow before and behind, which she had squeezed tight with all her might, had stiffened her with disgust and kept her stiffened so long that it was all the whip could do to unbend her, but she had finally yielded to the blows and opened, with disgust and abominable servility. And what if, in spite of that, Sir Stephen was right? What if she actually enjoyed her debasement? In that case, the baser she was, the more merciful was René to consent to make O the instrument of his pleasure. As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the Protestants often inscribe in their houses: IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD No, O told herself now, that isn't true. What is fearful is to be cast out at the hands of the living God. Every time René postponed, or was late to, a rendezvous with her, as he had done today - for six o'clock had come and gone, as had six-thirty - O was prey to a dual feeling of madness and despair, but for nothing. Madness was nothing, despair for nothing, nothing was true. René would arrive, he would be there, nothing was changed, he loved her but had been held up by a staff meeting or some extra work, he had not had time to let her know; in a flash, O emerged from her airless chamber, and yet each of these attacks of terror would leave behind, somewhere deep inside her, a dull premonition, a warning of woe: for there were also times when René neglected to let her know when the reason for the delay was a game of golf or a hand of bridge,

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Of course, even such wise coaching won’t be enough to help perfectionists, or most employees, get over their fear of failure if the culture of a team is one that’s harsh about making mistakes. So, it’s important to openly address with teams that they should readily alert you or their boss about problems, and then you work to solve them together. Method 3: Treat Failures as Learning OpportunitiesDuring the 2020 pandemic, we were able to listen in on a call with the leadership team of one of our clients—a restaurant chain—the Monday morning after Mother’s Day. It was a time when every restaurant needed every dollar to keep the lights on, but the online ordering system had gone down for several hours over the weekend, costing untold thousands of dollars in revenue and upsetting a lot of guests whose orders were never received. The chief information officer could have been on the hot seat as the call started with leaders around the country whose stores had been affected. Instead, the chief executive leading the session told the group that blame had no place in their culture. “I know we had a tough day yesterday, but we don’t point fingers,” he said. “No one wanted this to happen, and I appreciate Amir [the CIO] and our IT team responding on a tough day to get us back up and running. Let’s have a productive discussion about how we go forward to learn and get better.” What followed was an hour spent brainstorming about potential investments in time, talent, and technology that could help them learn from the setback. By the time Father’s Day arrived, the CIO’s team had redundant systems in place and a series of backups if anything happened. This was one of the most constructive examples we’ve witnessed of a leader assuming positive intent and getting a team working together with the understanding that when failure happens, we can get better as a result. We have witnessed meetings, in other organizations, that degraded into blame sessions. We’ve also met with loads of employees who’ve recounted the damaging effects of being publicly censured for a mistake. Being told off for any employee is like a figurative punch to the brain and can trigger feelings of shame and despondency. When Alan Mulally assumed the CEO mantle at Ford Motor Company in 2006, he inherited a culture in which an unhealthy fear of failure had infected the leadership ranks. Executive meetings had become places of combat in which employees tried to identify flaws in each other’s plans instead of recommending solutions. Mulally told us he instituted a new philosophy, “based on the fact that we are going to have problems, and we’re going to need everybody’s help to solve them.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  They’re not being perfectionists in these times, they’re being responsible. Perfectionism isn’t about a rational quest to get things right when they have to be, it’s a corrosive impulse to appear perfect, and often to push others to perfection as well (while being averse to any criticism themselves). And, in a horrible irony, perfectionism can seriously undermine people’s performance and has become a warning sign for many employers. Consider the case of one of the greatest performers of all time, opera star Maria Callas. In the 1940s and ’50s, Callas became one of classical music’s bestselling vocalists, and today is still considered by many to be the greatest soprano of all time. She forever changed expectations of singers with an acting talent that had never been seen on the opera stage. And yet Callas’s career is an example of how striving for perfection can eat away at excellence. Pushed by an overbearing mother—who had her singing on the street for money as early as age five—as the Washington Post reported, she developed a “perfectionism that grew ever more fierce as her voice decayed.” Callas pushed herself to be flawless at the expense of her health and relationships at work and outside. On one occasion, before a rehearsal at La Scala, she was asked to wait until the eminent pianist Wilhelm Backhaus finished rehearsing a concerto in the space Callas was scheduled for. Callas refused adamantly, saying she didn’t care who it was: “I’m supposed to start my rehearsal at three o’clock. Tell him it’s over.” While rehearsing Medea , she rushed to a nearby café during a break from a rehearsal, where she was asked, “What are you holding?” She was still grasping the prop dagger, her mind unable to take a break from her role. While a one-in-a-lifetime talent, Callas’s expectations of perfection weighed so heavily that she eventually had a hard time performing. In recapping her career, she said, “I never lost my voice, but . . . I lost my courage.” Her singing days were over by age forty, where in contrast, Joan Sutherland, considered to be history’s second-best soprano after Callas, was able to sing into her midsixties. While aiming for excellence can lead to breakthroughs, perfectionism can lead to breakdowns. The Endless Report Card Perfectionists aren’t merely ambitious, diligent strivers. As Dr. Brian Swider of the University of Florida, who’s researched the differences between strivers and perfectionists, says, “Yes, perfectionists strive to produce flawless work, and have higher levels of motivation and conscientiousness than nonperfectionists. However, they are also more likely to set inflexible and excessively high standards, to evaluate their behavior overly critically, to hold an all-or-nothing mindset about their performance (‘my work is either faultless or a total failure’), and to believe their self-worth is contingent on performing perfectly. Studies have also found that perfectionists have higher levels of stress, burnout, and anxiety.”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  In the section titled "Unjust Reversals," Kahneman discusses the incoherence prevalent in judicial decision-making, particularly in the context of punitive damages assessed by mock juries in Texas. He details an experiment where jurors evaluated cases in isolation versus in comparative pairs, revealing that those who made joint evaluations awarded higher damages to a child with burns compared to a bank's financial loss, highlighting the emotional weight of individual cases. Kahneman argues that single evaluations can lead to irrational judgments influenced by anchoring effects, which deviate from a more objective and just approach that should ideally involve broader contextual comparisons. He cites Cass Sunstein's analysis of administrative penalties across U.S. agencies, illustrating how penalties can seem rational within isolated contexts yet appear arbitrary when considered against each other, further emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive evaluative frame in legal contexts. The section "Emotional Framing" delves into how language and presentation profoundly affect decision-making, illustrating this through various psychological experiments. Kahneman highlights significant framing effects by presenting choices in terms of gains versus losses, demonstrating that individuals are more likely to accept a gamble framed as a possible gain than as a loss. The section includes findings from the University College London, where neural activity was monitored while subjects faced differently framed choices, revealing that emotional responses often precede rational deliberation. Kahneman emphasizes that framing can elicit starkly different choices, even among trained professionals like physicians, who often succumb to these emotional cues despite their expertise. This underscores the pervasive influence of framing in decisions that should ideally be made based on objective criteria. In "Empty Intuitions," Kahneman explores the troubling implications of inconsistent decision-making and moral intuitions influenced by framing effects. He presents the "Asian disease problem," illustrating how framing choices in terms of lives saved versus lives lost leads to vastly different preferences. This showcases the irrationality rooted in emotional reactions to the wording of scenarios rather than their substantive content. Kahneman reflects on how even experts, such as public health professionals, fall prey to these biases, often rendering them unable to reconcile conflicting choices once they recognize their inconsistency. He emphasizes that moral intuitions are not stable and can shift dramatically based on framing, revealing a deep-seated irrationality in decision-making that complicates ethical considerations in critical contexts. "Good Frames" addresses the importance of framing in shaping perceptions and choices, arguing that some frames facilitate better decision-making than others. Kahneman introduces scenarios that starkly contrast emotional responses elicited by different presentations of the same decision problem, demonstrating that how a question is framed can influence a person's willingness to proceed with an action, such as purchasing theater tickets. He articulates that while some frames can induce irrationality, effectively designed frames can lead to more rational decision-making outcomes by reducing emotional reactivity. This section emphasizes the responsibility of decision-makers to be mindful of framing effects, advocating for the development of better framing strategies that promote fairness and clarity in decision-making processes.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Openly expressed jealousy, for the Mosuo, is considered aggressive in its implied intrusion upon the sacred autonomy of another person, and is thus met with ridicule and shame. Sadly, hostility toward this free expression of female sexual autonomy is not limited to narrow-minded anthropologists and thirteenth-century Italian explorers. Although the Mosuo have no history of trying to export their system or convincing anyone else of the superiority of their approach to love and sex, they have long suffered outside pressure to abandon their traditional beliefs, which outsiders seem to find threatening. Once the Chinese established full control of the area in 1956, government officials began making annual visits to lecture the people on the dangers of sexual freedom and convince them to switch to “normal” marriage. In a bit of dubious publicity reminiscent of Reefer Madness, Chinese government officials showed up one year with a portable generator and a film showing “actors dressed as Mosuo … who were in the last stages of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces.” The audience response was not what the Chinese officials expected: their makeshift cinema was burned to the ground. But the officials didn’t give up. Yang Erche Namu recalls “meetings night after night where they harangued and criticized and interrogated…. [The Chinese officials] ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses, they dragged couples out of their beds and exposed people naked to their own relatives’ eyes.” When even these heavy-handed tactics failed to convince the Mosuo to abandon their system, government officials insisted on bringing (if not demonstrating) “decency” to the Mosuo. They cut off essential deliveries of seed grain and children’s clothing. Finally, literally starved into submission, many Mosuo agreed to participate in government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where each was given “a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy, and a paper certificate.” 11 But the arm-twisting had little lasting effect. Travel writer Cynthia Barnes visited Lugu Lake in 2006 and found the Mosuo system still intact, though under pressure from Chinese tourists who, like Marco Polo 750 years earlier, mistake the sexual autonomy of Mosuo women for licentiousness. “Although their lack of coyness draws the world’s attention to the Mosuo,” Barnes writes, “sex is not the center of their universe.” She continues: I think of my parents’ bitter divorce, of childhood friends uprooted and destroyed because Mommy or Daddy decided to sleep with someone else. Lugu Lake, I think, is not so much a kingdom of women as a kingdom of family—albeit one blessedly free of politicians and preachers extolling “family values.” There’s no such thing as a “broken home,” no sociologists wringing their hands over “single mothers,” no economic devastation or shame and stigma when parents part.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Though it can seem to take almost forever, the waves always win in the end, reducing immobile rock to shifting sand. The twentieth century saw the headlands beginning to crumble under surges of anti-slavery movements, women’s rights, racial equality, and, more recently, the steadily growing acceptance of the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people. Author Andrew Sullivan described his experience growing up both gay and Catholic as “difficult to the point of agony. I saw in my own life and those of countless others,” Sullivan recalled, “that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing … people into molds they do not fit helps no one,” Sullivan wrote. “It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.” 11 Sullivan’s comments were provoked by the twisted collapse of the publicly homophobic but privately homosexual televangelist Ted Haggard, but he could have been speaking for anyone who doesn’t fit the socially sanctioned mold of his or her day. And who does fit this mold? Yes, self-hating gay televangelists and politicians need to come out of the closet, but so does everyone else. It won’t be easy. It’s never easy to stand up to shame-fueled anger. Historian Robert S. McElvaine previews some of the shrill denunciation awaiting those who may dare to wander from the monogamous fold, declaring, “Free love is likely to degenerate into ‘free hate.’ Since loving everybody is a biological impossibility, the attempt to do so [becomes] ‘otherization,’ and the hatred that goes with it.” 12 Like McElvaine, many relationship counselors seem both terrified by and ignorant of nonstandard marital relationships of any kind. Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, quotes a family therapist she knows (and respects) stating unequivocally, “Open marriage doesn’t work. Thinking you can do it is totally naïve. We tried it in the seventies and it was a disaster.” 13 Maybe, but such therapists might want to delve a little deeper before reflexively dismissing alternatives to conventional marriage. Asked to imagine the first swingers in modern American history, most people probably picture hairy hippies in headbands lolling about on waterbeds in free-love communes under posters of Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane on the hi-fi. But be cool, Daddy-O, ‘cause the truth is gonna blow your mind. It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s studies of commons management in small-scale communities led her to conclude that, “all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.” 6 Despite how it’s been spun by economists and others arguing against local resource management, the real tragedy of the commons doesn’t pose a threat to resources controlled by small groups of interdependent individuals. Forget the commons. We need to confront the tragedies of the open seas, skies, rivers, and forests. Fisheries around the world are collapsing because no one has the authority, power, and motivation to stop international fleets from strip-mining waters everybody (and thus, nobody) owns. Toxins from Chinese smokestacks burning illegally mined Russian coal lodge in Korean lungs, while American cars burning Venezuelan petroleum melt glaciers in Greenland. What allows these chain-linked tragedies is the absence of local, personal shame. The false certainty that comes from applying Malthusian economics, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the tragedy of the commons to pre-agricultural societies requires that we ignore the fine-grain contours of life in small-scale communities where nobody “could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment,” in Rousseau’s words. These tragedies become inevitable only when the group size exceeds our species’ capacity for keeping track of one another, a point that’s come to be known as Dunbar’s number. In primate communities, size definitely matters. Noticing the importance of grooming behavior in social primates, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar plotted overall group size against the neocortical development of the brain. Using this correlation, he predicted that humans start losing track of who’s doing what to whom when group size hits about 150 individuals. In Dunbar’s words, “The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” 7 Other anthropologists had arrived at the same number by observing that when group sizes grew much beyond that, they tend to split into two smaller groups. Writing several years before Dunbar’s paper was published in 1992, Marvin Harris noted, “With 50 people per band or 150 per village, everybody knew everybody else intimately, so that the bonding of reciprocal exchange could hold people together. People gave with the expectation of taking and took with the expectation of giving.” 8 Recent authors, including Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling The Tipping Point, have popularized the idea of 150 being a limit to organically functioning groups. Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, human beings aren’t very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity. When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift, and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract. The same argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  American ingenuity would mass-produce orgasms for women who were denied them in their “properly chaste,” sexually deprived lives: the first vibrators were invented by these enterprising physicians. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical tinkerers designed all sorts of devices to provoke the necessary nervous paroxysms in their patients. Some were diesel powered; others ran on steam, like little locomotives that could. Some were huge contraptions hanging from the rafters on chains and pulleys, like engine blocks at an auto shop. Others sported pistons thrusting dildos through holes in tables or involved high-pressure water directed at the patient’s genitalia like a fire brigade called in to douse the consuming flames of female passion. And all the while, the good doctors never publicly admitted that what they were doing was more sex than medicine. But perhaps even more dumbfounding than their silence on being paid to provoke nervous paroxysms like so many Chippendale’s studs is the fact that these same medical authorities managed to maintain the conviction that female sexuality was a weak and reluctant thing. The medical monopoly on providing socially acceptable extramarital orgasms to women was assured by a strict prohibition against women or girls masturbating themselves to orgasm. In 1850, the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal declared masturbation public enemy number one, waring: “Neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils, have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilized society.” Children and adults were warned that masturbation was not only sinful, but very dangerous—sure to result in severe health consequences, including blindness, infertility, and insanity. Besides, these authorities intoned, “normal” women had little sexual desire anyway. In his Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886, German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing declared what everyone already thought they knew: “If [a woman] is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a family impossible.” 2 To have suggested that women enjoyed, indeed needed regular orgasmic release, would have been shocking to men and humiliating to most women. Perhaps it still is. While the anti-masturbation frenzy has roots deep in Judeo-Christian history, it found unfortunate medical support in Simon André Tissot’s A Treatise on the Disease Produced by Onanism, published in 1758.