Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture

by Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, Nitin Nohria

An exploration of the powerful role of anxiety, ambition, and envy in shaping both our individual lives and society as a whole. At the heart of the human experience lies anxiety caused by the realization that the world is unknown, forever eluding our control. And out of this anxiety arises the master passions of ambition and envy, which we repress to mask their power over our lives. Discussion of the role of the emotions in our lives is not new, but Mihnea Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria go much further, showing how these passions shape not only our individual lives but our social and organizational culture as well. The master passions are not pretty, and so we cover them with the more socially acceptable faces of reason and morality. Moldoveanu and Nohria guide the reader in revealing the real impetus behind such actions as firing a friend, leaving a lover, or even pillaging your own people. Below the rational explanation, they show, often lies a willingness to hurt or even destroy others to fuel our own ambitions or quench the fires of envy. The authors offer intriguing thought experiments and examples from their own lives as they expose the power of the master passions. Deftly weaving ideas from psychology (Sigmund Freud), sociology (Max Weber), literature (William Shakespeare, Albert Camus), and philosophy (David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche) with the personal, they build a strong argument that society would be much healthier if we faced the deception and self-deception that pervade our lives.

269 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2002

Reviews

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and inspirational.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The modern commitment to instrumental and technical rationality is a collective attempt at self-therapy." (xv)

"The familiar is part of my self -- of the narrative that I have spun around my experiences. Thus, the self is an instrument by which the I seeks to master its anxiety. Stories soothe. Narratives calm the unquiet mind." (54)

"Ambition is the desire for greater causal powers." (57)

"Moral conflict is a conflict wetween two self-images we would like to hold up simultaneously but cannot because action forces us to choose between them." (155)

"There is a heavy price to pay for opting out of 'language,' and that is and abandonment of one's liguistic connection with others." (173)

"We need, then, a counterweight to desiring, to Eros, in the realm of the mind, and that counterweight is letting -- letting come, letting be, and letting go. Letting is a form of being, jsut as desiring is, but it is a form of being that does not presuppose or require the idea and feel of the I that wants, acts, and sweats. It does not exclude the idea of the I, to be sure, and it certainly does not repress the idea of the I." (218)