Master Passion
By Moldoveanu & Nohria
Anxiety: The Primeval Broth
The most familiar engagement of a person with her anxieties is the phenomenon of deciding. Decisions bring us face to fact with anxiety. Decisions are terrifying because within them the possible is too visible in the actual for us to ignore it. We suffer from the freedom to choose. Anxiety is precisely the sensation of the possibility of such a freedom. The language of principles, causes, and reasons provides the perfect mask of this freedom. Anxiety -- (Kierkegaard, 1963) is the experience of the possibility of freedom. Freedom is an extravagant possibility. Culture defends us from the realization of our own freedom. Anxiety can emerge from the discontinuities that come from reflecting on the mundane acts associated with practical experience.
Identity as Narcotic
CIA understands these ideas well: "A person's sense of identity depends upon continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the questioner to cut through these links and throw the subject back upon his own unaided internal resources. Detention should be planned to enhance the subject's feelings of being cut off from anything known and reassuring." The breach of man's trust in his world is the key to getting him to 'regress' or to lose, progressively, his capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations.
The manner and timing of the subject's arrest should be planned to achieve surprise and the maximum amount of mental discomfort. He should be arrested when he least expects it and when his mental and physical endurance are at their lowest -- ideally, in the early hours of the morning. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress and have great difficulty adjusting to the situation.
The CIA's experts have the trick of placing a person in front of the mirror of consciousness, all alone, they recognize in most of their subjects "Solitary confinement acts on most persons as a powerful stress." CIA advises the "persistent manipulation of time, retarding and advancing clocks, serving meals at odd times, disrupting sleep schedules, disorientation regarding day and night, un-patterned questioning sessions, nonsensical questioning, ignoring half-hearted attempts to cooperate and rewarding non-cooperation" as noncoercive ways to induce regression to an undeveloped, rudimentary set of behaviors.
Loss of trust in life and the world can also bring us to the brink of freedom. We can become free of our own past and of human culture - the suppliers of names, models, myths, and metaphors, the great tranquilizers and the great therapies. We can free ourselves from them because they no longer supply a home -- a safe haven.
Ambition as Desire and the Will to Power
Karl Marx: Philosophers have thus far only interpreted history. The point, however, is to change it.
Ambition is the desire for ever greater causal powers (powers to cause). The ambitious person is an unfolding spiral of self-assertions. He wishes to be recognized. What bewitches the body into action is often the feeling that "this achievement will finally bring contentment."
Ambition is self-fueling but also self-denying. Our expectation of fulfillment was illusory and that unfulfilled desire takes hold of us again -- this time for a different object.
Max Weber (1930) point out the link between the passion of the Puritanical Calvinist and the capital drive for worldly accomplishments. For Calvin, the individual is not free to choose his destiny but can only discover it. He cannot influence what has been ordained for him but merely seek evidence for or against the fact of his ultimate salvation. Because the social activity of the Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei, success in worldly endeavors is a sing that singles out the elect, who are not saved because their works but rather are successful in their works because they are the elect.
Acts of possession are addictive. Consumption consumes. George Bernard Shaw: "There are two great tragedies in life: the first is not to get your heart's desire; the second is to get it".
In the world of power, there are no games in which everyone wins.
The quenching of thirs is not a typical image of satisfying a desire or of satiating a want. We rather think of thirst as a need, even though we can do without satisfying the need when it presents itself. Responding too quickly or too anxiously to take care of our need might make the experience of desiring a liquid more intense: the greater care we take of ourselves, the more care our selves require.
Frustration in fact is a form of desire. When frustrated, we experience desire as resentment. Frustration and the promise of fulfillment are equally the fuels of desire.
The fear of regret. The thought of what one could have done, of what one could have been is the seed of a rumination that we desperately want to escape sometimes.
Envy and Jealousy
"What we are asking is that the rich pay their fair share of taxes" (Bill Clinton)
"Everyone's getting rich but me"
"Someone will win the lottery -- just not you"
Ambition is mobilized by answers to the question "What could I have or be?"
Envy makes its subject vibrate to the question "What could I have had or been?"
To envy, we must think it plausible that we could have had what the envied has but that we cannot get it. We see its possession by another as a sign of our impotence and as afailur of our causal powers -- the objects of our ambitious desires.
Envy is the passion we long to hid and that we are skilled at hiding from.
Stanley Migram's experiments show a fear of "standing out" borne of the fear of becoming the object of envious feelings or envious retaliation. He found a high rate of conformity -- higher in the case of Norwegians than of the French. People did not have to state their opinions publicly, simply write them down on a secret ballot which would not be revealed to the others who made up the coercive majority. A Norwegian explained "I tried to put myself in a public situation, even though I was sitting at the booth in private".
Envy in action: resentment and the drive to destroy
Resentment drives the envious to action, for envy alone is not causally potent.
Immanuel Kant noted: "The impulse for envy is ... inherent in the nature of man, and only its manifestation makes of it an abominable vice, a passion not only distressing and tormenting to the subject, but intent on the destruction of the happiness of others, and one that is opposed to man's duty towards himself and towards other people".
Envy would not be identified with malice. Envy needs to be aroused to malice and spite for it to become causally potent; it needs a proximal stimulus.
Envy is a mater passion: for the envious sees his actions determined by the actions of people themselves moved by envy and does not fail to find the envy motive in everyone's actions.
Envy is always between neighbors. The envious man thinks that if a neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.
Envy reaches its greatest levels in quasi-egalitarian societies, where people can "just see" themselves enjoying the same possession and status enjoyed by their neighbors but not by themselves (I could have it, but I won't). Thus, physical proximity and proximity in relative standing both encourage envy among men and women.
Jealousy: the guardian of the extended self
If envy engender resentment toward the one who has what you could have had, jealousy engenders resentment toward the one who might take away or diminish what you now have. The jealousy self asks "What could I lose -- and how could I lose it?" The belief is that everyone could be coveting what is now yours, and they are about to try to get it.
Envy, jealousy and the logic of initiation rises
The resentment that comes from envy and jealousy can fuel the severe initiation rituals facing young tribesmen, new members of university-level fraternities and dormitories, intern.
Envy's Master Narratives: The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1963) wrote The Communist Manifesto as if the intuitively understood the sway of envy on their reader's minds. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
It takes some doing to show that the causal powers of other people are something that you could have had. You really could have what you currently do not: the ever present possibility of changing your condition through revolutionary action. It is the mission of the envious to destroy whaever makes the envied enviable. When you feel envious to the point of resentment, do you not wish for the diminishment of the envied? Marx and Engels say "It really is all right to live out your envious desires".
Marx's passions move our souls -- though we take his reasons to sway our minds. It take passion to see the world communist revolution as the inevitable outcome of world history because we have to ignore the many societies -- tribal societies, among others -- that do not conform to his analysis.
Jealousy's Master Narrative: The Case of Mein Kampf
Hitler's writing, on the other hand, stokes one's jealousy, or the resentment of another who could (but does not) have what is currently yours. He is concerned with the genetic purity of the German nation -- and he makes the German cultural heritage the object of jealous desire and therefore the reason for jealous resentment.
Hitler gives an example: "The fight for daily bread makes all those succumb who are weak, sickly and less determined, while the males' fight for the female gives the right of propagation, or the possibility of it, only to the most healthy. The fight is always a means for the promotion of the species' health and force of resistance, and thus a cause for its development towards a higher level."
Hitler needs to create a palpable object for jealousy -- one that inspires someone who feel "superior" with the requisite jealous resentment that drives him to take action against one of the "inferiors."/ What shall this object be? The object of jealousy.
There was a need for a threatening subject to complete.
"The Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan. Hardly in any people of the world is the instinct of self-preservation more strongly developed. The Jewish, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture."
Hitler explains both why he does not have what the Aryans have -- culture, which now becomes the object of jealousy -- and why he could want it by "interracial mixing".
If we follow the history of the envious society to its logical end, we will end in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's underground, wherein there is no privacy for the individual: all acts are public acts, for now envy has become attached to the right to privacy itself. Consciousness of self has now become consciousness of the other who watches the self. Each watches the other and therefore watches the other watch her, watches him watching her watching him, and so forth. Action grinds to a halt, and people live out their lives through the eyes of others; they are -- even to themselves -- the images that they see in others' eyes, images that they guard jealously every waking hour.
If the geographic expanse of the society is too large for people to lose their physical privacy, TV fills the gap and makes psychological privacy impossible to achieve. Now the private has become publc by means of the public becoming private. No longer are sexual relations open to the fantasy or the imagination of the individual. Desire is desire for the prowess of the TV hero and heroinl it is envious desire. The prototypically successful man and woman have entered the bedroom of the envious and are watching him from his TV screen.
Anxiety: The Primeval Broth
The most familiar engagement of a person with her anxieties is the phenomenon of deciding. Decisions bring us face to fact with anxiety. Decisions are terrifying because within them the possible is too visible in the actual for us to ignore it. We suffer from the freedom to choose. Anxiety is precisely the sensation of the possibility of such a freedom. The language of principles, causes, and reasons provides the perfect mask of this freedom. Anxiety -- (Kierkegaard, 1963) is the experience of the possibility of freedom. Freedom is an extravagant possibility. Culture defends us from the realization of our own freedom. Anxiety can emerge from the discontinuities that come from reflecting on the mundane acts associated with practical experience.
Identity as Narcotic
CIA understands these ideas well: "A person's sense of identity depends upon continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the questioner to cut through these links and throw the subject back upon his own unaided internal resources. Detention should be planned to enhance the subject's feelings of being cut off from anything known and reassuring." The breach of man's trust in his world is the key to getting him to 'regress' or to lose, progressively, his capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations.
The manner and timing of the subject's arrest should be planned to achieve surprise and the maximum amount of mental discomfort. He should be arrested when he least expects it and when his mental and physical endurance are at their lowest -- ideally, in the early hours of the morning. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress and have great difficulty adjusting to the situation.
The CIA's experts have the trick of placing a person in front of the mirror of consciousness, all alone, they recognize in most of their subjects "Solitary confinement acts on most persons as a powerful stress." CIA advises the "persistent manipulation of time, retarding and advancing clocks, serving meals at odd times, disrupting sleep schedules, disorientation regarding day and night, un-patterned questioning sessions, nonsensical questioning, ignoring half-hearted attempts to cooperate and rewarding non-cooperation" as noncoercive ways to induce regression to an undeveloped, rudimentary set of behaviors.
Loss of trust in life and the world can also bring us to the brink of freedom. We can become free of our own past and of human culture - the suppliers of names, models, myths, and metaphors, the great tranquilizers and the great therapies. We can free ourselves from them because they no longer supply a home -- a safe haven.
Ambition as Desire and the Will to Power
Karl Marx: Philosophers have thus far only interpreted history. The point, however, is to change it.
Ambition is the desire for ever greater causal powers (powers to cause). The ambitious person is an unfolding spiral of self-assertions. He wishes to be recognized. What bewitches the body into action is often the feeling that "this achievement will finally bring contentment."
Ambition is self-fueling but also self-denying. Our expectation of fulfillment was illusory and that unfulfilled desire takes hold of us again -- this time for a different object.
Max Weber (1930) point out the link between the passion of the Puritanical Calvinist and the capital drive for worldly accomplishments. For Calvin, the individual is not free to choose his destiny but can only discover it. He cannot influence what has been ordained for him but merely seek evidence for or against the fact of his ultimate salvation. Because the social activity of the Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei, success in worldly endeavors is a sing that singles out the elect, who are not saved because their works but rather are successful in their works because they are the elect.
Acts of possession are addictive. Consumption consumes. George Bernard Shaw: "There are two great tragedies in life: the first is not to get your heart's desire; the second is to get it".
In the world of power, there are no games in which everyone wins.
The quenching of thirs is not a typical image of satisfying a desire or of satiating a want. We rather think of thirst as a need, even though we can do without satisfying the need when it presents itself. Responding too quickly or too anxiously to take care of our need might make the experience of desiring a liquid more intense: the greater care we take of ourselves, the more care our selves require.
Frustration in fact is a form of desire. When frustrated, we experience desire as resentment. Frustration and the promise of fulfillment are equally the fuels of desire.
The fear of regret. The thought of what one could have done, of what one could have been is the seed of a rumination that we desperately want to escape sometimes.
Envy and Jealousy
"What we are asking is that the rich pay their fair share of taxes" (Bill Clinton)
"Everyone's getting rich but me"
"Someone will win the lottery -- just not you"
Ambition is mobilized by answers to the question "What could I have or be?"
Envy makes its subject vibrate to the question "What could I have had or been?"
To envy, we must think it plausible that we could have had what the envied has but that we cannot get it. We see its possession by another as a sign of our impotence and as afailur of our causal powers -- the objects of our ambitious desires.
Envy is the passion we long to hid and that we are skilled at hiding from.
Stanley Migram's experiments show a fear of "standing out" borne of the fear of becoming the object of envious feelings or envious retaliation. He found a high rate of conformity -- higher in the case of Norwegians than of the French. People did not have to state their opinions publicly, simply write them down on a secret ballot which would not be revealed to the others who made up the coercive majority. A Norwegian explained "I tried to put myself in a public situation, even though I was sitting at the booth in private".
Envy in action: resentment and the drive to destroy
Resentment drives the envious to action, for envy alone is not causally potent.
Immanuel Kant noted: "The impulse for envy is ... inherent in the nature of man, and only its manifestation makes of it an abominable vice, a passion not only distressing and tormenting to the subject, but intent on the destruction of the happiness of others, and one that is opposed to man's duty towards himself and towards other people".
Envy would not be identified with malice. Envy needs to be aroused to malice and spite for it to become causally potent; it needs a proximal stimulus.
Envy is a mater passion: for the envious sees his actions determined by the actions of people themselves moved by envy and does not fail to find the envy motive in everyone's actions.
Envy is always between neighbors. The envious man thinks that if a neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.
Envy reaches its greatest levels in quasi-egalitarian societies, where people can "just see" themselves enjoying the same possession and status enjoyed by their neighbors but not by themselves (I could have it, but I won't). Thus, physical proximity and proximity in relative standing both encourage envy among men and women.
Jealousy: the guardian of the extended self
If envy engender resentment toward the one who has what you could have had, jealousy engenders resentment toward the one who might take away or diminish what you now have. The jealousy self asks "What could I lose -- and how could I lose it?" The belief is that everyone could be coveting what is now yours, and they are about to try to get it.
Envy, jealousy and the logic of initiation rises
The resentment that comes from envy and jealousy can fuel the severe initiation rituals facing young tribesmen, new members of university-level fraternities and dormitories, intern.
Envy's Master Narratives: The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1963) wrote The Communist Manifesto as if the intuitively understood the sway of envy on their reader's minds. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
It takes some doing to show that the causal powers of other people are something that you could have had. You really could have what you currently do not: the ever present possibility of changing your condition through revolutionary action. It is the mission of the envious to destroy whaever makes the envied enviable. When you feel envious to the point of resentment, do you not wish for the diminishment of the envied? Marx and Engels say "It really is all right to live out your envious desires".
Marx's passions move our souls -- though we take his reasons to sway our minds. It take passion to see the world communist revolution as the inevitable outcome of world history because we have to ignore the many societies -- tribal societies, among others -- that do not conform to his analysis.
Jealousy's Master Narrative: The Case of Mein Kampf
Hitler's writing, on the other hand, stokes one's jealousy, or the resentment of another who could (but does not) have what is currently yours. He is concerned with the genetic purity of the German nation -- and he makes the German cultural heritage the object of jealous desire and therefore the reason for jealous resentment.
Hitler gives an example: "The fight for daily bread makes all those succumb who are weak, sickly and less determined, while the males' fight for the female gives the right of propagation, or the possibility of it, only to the most healthy. The fight is always a means for the promotion of the species' health and force of resistance, and thus a cause for its development towards a higher level."
Hitler needs to create a palpable object for jealousy -- one that inspires someone who feel "superior" with the requisite jealous resentment that drives him to take action against one of the "inferiors."/ What shall this object be? The object of jealousy.
There was a need for a threatening subject to complete.
"The Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan. Hardly in any people of the world is the instinct of self-preservation more strongly developed. The Jewish, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture."
Hitler explains both why he does not have what the Aryans have -- culture, which now becomes the object of jealousy -- and why he could want it by "interracial mixing".
If we follow the history of the envious society to its logical end, we will end in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's underground, wherein there is no privacy for the individual: all acts are public acts, for now envy has become attached to the right to privacy itself. Consciousness of self has now become consciousness of the other who watches the self. Each watches the other and therefore watches the other watch her, watches him watching her watching him, and so forth. Action grinds to a halt, and people live out their lives through the eyes of others; they are -- even to themselves -- the images that they see in others' eyes, images that they guard jealously every waking hour.
If the geographic expanse of the society is too large for people to lose their physical privacy, TV fills the gap and makes psychological privacy impossible to achieve. Now the private has become publc by means of the public becoming private. No longer are sexual relations open to the fantasy or the imagination of the individual. Desire is desire for the prowess of the TV hero and heroinl it is envious desire. The prototypically successful man and woman have entered the bedroom of the envious and are watching him from his TV screen.
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