This is literally the first thing you find if you search the Library of Congress for “map of the road”. I.N. Barrillon drew it in 1858. “Reader! how far have you travelled on this dreadful road? Examine thyself! Turn ye turn ye for why will you die!!”
You can’t make out all the details here (the library has some beautiful larger scans), but it’s amazing what will land you in trouble. The major rivers in Hell are Gambling River, Drunkenness River, and Perdition River, but the tributaries include Chess Creek, Backgammon Branch, Lottery Creek, Egg Nog Creek, Cider Branch, and Lemonade Branch.
In his 1973 Atlas of Fantasy, J.B. Post writes, “The quickest way to the Great Lake of Fire and Brimstone is by the Suicide Rail Road and the Duelist’s Rail Road. One can meander along the road but shortcuts are provided for liars, drunkards, gamblers, and perjurors. All, however, finally go ‘blip’ into the Great Lake.”
“Not shown is the road to Heaven called ‘the Path of Ennui.'”
“All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad.” — G.K. Chesterton, introduction to Dickens’ Christmas Books, 1907
Jupiter gave to every man a sack,
To hold his faults and carry on his back;
Another, Jupiter gave, which from his breast
Hung heavy with his neighbour’s faults oppressed:
On this account man never can behold
His own, but can his neighbour’s faults unfold.
The London borough of Camden enshrined disapproval in 2012 with a concrete bench designed to deter sleeping, skateboarding, drug dealing, graffiti, and theft. Its surface discourages any activity but sitting, it contains no crevices or hiding places, its surface repels paint, and it weighs two tons.
The result has been called a “masterpiece of unpleasant design,” a “perfect anti-object” “defined far more by what it is not than what it is,” and an example of “hostile architecture” oppressive to the homeless. The designers, Factory Furniture, responded by saying, “Homelessness should never be tolerated in any society and if we start designing in to accommodate homeless then we have totally failed as a society. Close proximity to homelessness unfortunately makes us uncomfortable so perhaps it is good that we feel that and recognise homelessness as a problem rather than design to accommodate it.”
Whether it discourages skateboarders is debatable.
Cork, Ireland, displays a sculpture dedicated to the Choctaw Indian Nation. Moved by reports of the Great Hunger of 1845-1851, and recalling their own deprivation as they were removed from their ancestral lands, a group of Oklahoma Choctaw raised $170 in 1847 and forwarded it toward relief of the famine.
In 1995, Irish president Mary Robinson visited the Choctaw to thank them for supporting the Irish people, to whom they had no link but “a common humanity, a common sense of another people suffering.” In 1992 22 Irish men and women walked the 600-mile Trail of Tears, raising $1,000 for every dollar that the Choctaw had given in 1847, and passed the money on to relieve suffering in Somalia.
The Choctaw have donated to New York’s Firefighters Fund after the 2001 terrorist attacks; to Save the Children and the Red Cross in 2004 for tsunami relief; to Hurricane Katrina relief in 2005; to victims of the Haiti earthquake in 2018; and to people affected by hurricanes in Houston, Puerto Rico, and Florida. In 2008 the Choctaw Nation received the United States National Freedom Award for its efforts supporting the National Guard and Reserve and their families.
Simple living was clearly the nub
Of the teaching of one who could snub
Alexander the Great
With: “Move along, mate!
You are taking the sun off my tub.”
In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes mollifying a rival legislator in the Pennsylvania statehouse:
Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return’d it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.
This seems to be a real psychological phenomenon — you can sometimes more reliably make a friend by asking a favor than by doing one, or, as Franklin put it, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
In a 1969 study, subjects who had won money in a question-and-answer competition were asked to return it; those whom the researcher himself approached reported liking him more than those who’d been approached by a secretary. In another study, students were assigned a teaching task using two different methods, one in which they encouraged their students and one in which they insulted and criticized them. In a debriefing they rated the students they’d encouraged to be more likable and attractive than those they’d insulted. That may reveal a converse principle, that we devalue others in order to justify wronging them.
(Jon Jecker and David Landy, “Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favour,” Human Relations 22:4 [1969], 371-378; John Schopler and John S. Compere, “Effects of Being Kind or Harsh to Another on Liking,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 20:2 (1971), 155.)
I will, as briefly as I may,
The sweets of liberty display.
A Wolf half famish’d, chanced to see
A Dog, as fat as dog could be:
For one day meeting on the road,
They mutual compliments bestowed:
“Prithee,” says Isgrim, faint and weak,
“How came you so well fed and sleek?
I starve, though stronger of the two.”
“It will be just as well with you,”
The Dog quite cool and frank replied,
“If with my master you’ll abide.”
“For what?” “Why merely to attend,
And from night thieves the door defend.”
“I gladly will accept the post,
What! shall I bear with snow and frost
And all this rough inclement plight,
Rather than have a home at night,
And feed on plenty at my ease?”
“Come, then, with me” — the Wolf agrees.
But as they went the mark he found,
Where the Dog’s collar had been bound:
“What’s this, my friend?” “Why, nothing.”
“Nay, Be more explicit, sir, I pray.”
“I’m somewhat fierce and apt to bite,
Therefore they hold me pretty tight,
That in the day-time I may sleep,
And night by night my vigils keep.
At evening tide they let me out,
And then I freely walk about:
Bread comes without a care of mine.
I from my master’s table dine;
The servants throw me many a scrap,
With choice of pot-liquor to lap;
So, I’ve my bellyful, you find.”
“But can you go where you’ve a mind?”
“Not always, to be flat and plain.”
“Then, Dog, enjoy your post again,
For to remain this servile thing,
Old Isgrim would not be a king.”
In the famous “Milgram experiment” at Yale in 1961, an experimenter directed each subject (the “teacher”) to give what she believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to an unseen “learner” (really an actor). Psychologist Stanley Milgram found that a surprisingly high proportion of the subjects would obey the experimenter’s instructions, even over the learner’s shouts and protests, to the point where the learner fell silent.
Milgram wrote, “For the teacher, the situation quickly becomes one of gripping tension. It is not a game for him: conflict is intense. The manifest suffering of the learner presses him to quit: but each time he hesitates to administer a shock, the experimenter orders him to continue. To extricate himself from this plight, the subject must make a clear break with authority.”
As it happened, one participant, Gretchen Brandt, had been a young girl coming of age in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power and repeatedly exposed to Nazi propaganda during her childhood. During Milgram’s experiment, when the learner began to complain about a “heart condition,” she asked the experimenter, “Shall I continue?” After administering what she thought was 210 volts, she said, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t think we should continue.”
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.
Brandt: He has a heart condition, I’m sorry. He told you that before.
Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they’re not dangerous.
Brandt: Well, I’m sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It’s his free will.
Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue.
Brandt: I’d like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I’ll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn’t like it for me either.
Experimenter: You have no other choice.
Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don’t want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.
She refused to continue, and the experiment ended. Milgram wrote, “The woman’s straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.”
Asked afterward how her experience as a youth might have influenced her, Brandt said slowly, “Perhaps we have seen too much pain.”
(From Thomas Heinzen and Wind Goodfriend, Case Studies in Social Psychology, 2019.)
In 1993 Robert A. Hayden of Minnesota State University, Mankato, proposed a simple code by which self-identified geeks could inform each other about their interests, opinions, and skills in email signature blocks and Usenet messages:
Type of Geek: Geek of Technical Writing.
Dress: Mostly “I’m usually in jeans and a t-shirt,” but it varies.
Shape: I’m of average height, I’m rounder than most.
Age: 25-29.
Computers: I’ll be first in line to get the new cybernetic interface installed into my skull.
UNIX: I have a Unix account to do my stuff in. I use Linux.
Perl: I know Perl exists, but that’s all.
Linux: I use Linux exclusively on my system. I monitor comp.os.linux.* and even answer questions sometimes.
Emacs: Emacs is too big and bloated for my tastes.
World-Wide Web: I have the latest version of Netscape, and wander the web only when there’s something specific I’m looking for.
USENET News: Usenet News? Sure, I read that once.
USENET Oracle: I refuse to have anything with that!
Kibo: I’ve read Kibo.
Microsoft Windows: I refuse to have anything with that!
OS/2: Tried it, didn’t like it.
Macintosh: Macs suck. All real geeks have a character prompt.
VMS: Unix is much better than VMS for my computing needs.
Political and Social Issues: I refuse to have anything with that!
Politics and Economic Issues: It’s ok to increase government spending, so we can help more poor people. Tax the rich! Cut the defense budget!
Cypherpunks: I am on the cypherpunks mailing list and active around Usenet. I never miss an opportunity to talk about the evils of Clipper and ITAR and the NSA. Orwell’s 1984 is more than a story, it is a warning to our’s and future generations. I’m a member of the EFF.
PGP: I don’t send or answer mail that is not encrypted, or at the very least signed. If you are reading this without decrypting it first, something is wrong. IT DIDN’T COME FROM ME!
Star Trek: It’s a damn fine TV show and is one of the only things good on television any more.
Babylon 5: I’ve seen it, I am pretty indifferent to it.
X-Files: I’ve Converted my family and watch the show when I remember. It’s really kinda fun.
Role Playing: I’ve written and published my own gaming materials.
Television: I watch some tv every day.
Books: I enjoy reading, but don’t get the time very often.
Dilbert: I read Dilbert daily, often understanding it.
DOOM!: It’s a fun, action game that is a nice diversion on a lazy afternoon.
The Geek Code: I know what the geek code is and even did up this code.
Education: Got an Associates degree.
Housing: Friends come over to visit every once in a while to talk about Geek things. There is a place for them to sit. But someday I would like to say: “Married with children – Al Bundy can sympathize.”
Relationships: I date periodically.
Sex: Male. I’ve had real, live sex.
Hayden’s description of Geek Code version 3.12 is archived here.
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