Sentence:  Perhaps it was his misfortune , or good fortune , whichever way one looked at it , to belong to the former group , and he was struggling unconsciously to build up pressure in a world which demanded none , which <WSD>was</WSD> positively antagonistic to it . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)