Last week, Brownstone Journal published an excerpt from Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment, titled: Our Last Innocent Moment: Angry Forever?
In this piece Ponesse treats, in a refreshingly well-rounded and down-to-earth way, the complex subject of anger. Few people have ever, in my experience, offered up such thoughtful and realistic reflections on this topic; most people tend to either unrepentantly self-justify their wrath — which they proceed to gleefully release carte blanche — or else, they tend to look at anger (or at least, its public expression) as a kind of disruptive annoyance, as fearsome and cruel, or as a moral failure.
But Ponesse takes this all-too-natural artifact of human emotion in her metaphorical hands and twirls it around to tenderly survey all sides of it; in doing so, she imbues it with a rare sense of dignity and nuance.
As someone who has, over the past few years, experienced intense anger as the world I live in seems to fall apart around me — along with most of the available opportunities for building what I consider to be a humane, fulfilling life — I wanted to respond to this piece and to add to (what I consider to be) a much-needed public conversation.
Anger: What is its role? Where does it come from? How do we interpret it? How do we wield and transform it? These are all questions that have deep and complex answers — and that, in the end, may be key to understanding what it is we want, what it is we’ve lost, and how to engage with those around us as we attempt to restore these things to our world.
In her essay, Ponesse makes many observations that resonate precisely with my own experience. In my years spent moving through various activist circles as well as observing and studying “rebel,” “fringe,” and “countercultural” communities, I have witnessed many of them — either firsthand, or through historical accounts — rotted from within by anger, hedonism, and corruption.
I have seen how acidic and damaging a force of raw, unchecked anger can be. Yet, at the same time, I have witnessed many callous or dismissive responses to incredibly justified displays of anger — usually coming from people who live relatively insulated and comfortable lives themselves.
As someone who regularly feels that sense of incredibly justified anger myself, I can say that there are few things that stoke the fires of that anger more reliably than the callousness of the comfortable. And, free-spirited rebel-at-heart that I am, I have always violently rejected the common notion that, in a supposedly “civilized” society, anger — and for that matter, aggressive behavior more generally — should be relegated to the realm of fiction, or to the memory of a once-barbaric past.
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Though these strong and volatile forces — that is, anger and aggression — can be raw and rough and dangerous, they are ultimately a vital part of a healthy socioemotional ecosystem. But how do we allow them to exist in our society, and learn to explore them in a constructive and illuminating way, without provoking senseless destruction or letting them consume everything in their path?
This is a delicate question and one that deserves to be handled reverently, and Ponesse navigates it with grace. She recognizes the legitimate forces that often give rise to anger, as well as its destructive potential. Anger can be quite poisonous. Like acid, it eats away at everything around it — including, as she mentions, its own human hosts. Furthermore, it is not always accurate in selecting its targets. Innocents — or the people we love — can easily get caught in the crossfire. But it can also motivate positive, and even overtly constructive action. It can change the world; it can create or annihilate.
In short, anger is neither inherently good nor bad; it is simply a natural human emotion — an incredibly energizing and powerful one. It deserves to be respected, but we should not fear it — rather, we should develop socially beneficial methods for exploring it, so that we can foster emotional literacy and wisdom surrounding its engagement.
This is what I would like to try to experiment with a bit here. Excavating beneath the foundation that Ponesse has charted out, I would like to move toward an archaeology of anger.
The Foundations of Anger: Ego and the Personal
Ponesse rightly points out that anger has a personal aspect, and that it is rooted in the ego. I would argue that all anger is personal, and that all anger is rooted in the ego — simply because, as I would argue, all our emotional experiences are.
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that all anger (or all emotions more generally) is necessarily (negatively) selfish — when I use the term ego, I use it in the standard psychological sense: to signify the individual conscious will; volition; agency; or the experience of self-identity. This self-identity is, I would maintain, the starting point for all subjective experience — even that which can be genuinely classified as selfless or transcendent.
Whether they are directed inward, toward the self, or outward, toward self-transcendent purposes — emotions, in general, are fundamentally individual and personal. They act as feedback mechanisms to help orient the individual within a contextual environment. They give us powerful, and often urgent signals, about our current relationship to the immediate world outside ourselves — specifically in the context of our goals, intentions, and adaptive self-maintenance. They move us to react to stimuli and events in that environment (or, sometimes, to refrain from acting) in a coordinated way, helping to orient our attention and steer information processing in a way that (at least, ideally) will help us survive while staying in alignment with those goals.
This is an important point. Because while human emotions are certainly highly influenced by language, symbolic thought, and culture, they are by no means purely — or even necessarily primarily — a product of these things. Other animals who lack symbolic thought also experience a wide variety of emotional states. The neurobiological pathways that support basic emotional processing evolved before language, before higher-order cognition, and even before the theory of mind.
The basic infrastructure of emotion, then, evolved within an asymbolic world of immediacy, to provide relational feedback about an organism’s immediate experience of reality. And — despite the fact that we have overlaid, upon this base reality, a vast, multilayered, and labyrinthine architecture of symbolic space (which now heavily permeates our daily lives) — our emotions remain anchored in their evolutionary foundations: the realm of direct and immediate experience, and its webs of relationships.
We often forget this: but we are still, after all, animals. And I don’t mean this in a reductive sense. Homo sapiens are not merely animals or just animals. We have what you might call “the spirit of God;” “transcendent consciousness;” “advanced theory of mind;” or “the creative spirit” — something that, it seems, no other animal possesses.
But we are still members of the animal kingdom — as opposed to gods, demigods, angels, or other spirit beings. And, like all members of the animal kingdom, we exist in a fundamentally relational material world. We move in finite material space, we possess a will — and with it a complex of goals, values, and intentions — and we attempt to act that will out in that physical space. In order to do that, we need to gain some kind of understanding of the world in which we live, the consequences and the likely outcomes of our actions, and we need to understand how we relate to objects and to other beings in our environment: potential allies, predators and enemies, friends, and companions, and so on.
Our emotions help us to do this. Almost everything we feel, probably, at heart, fulfills one of the following functions:
- identify and respond to potential problems and threats;
- find, and establish bonds with, allies;
- establish security or achieve or maintain harmony in our social and environmental landscapes;
- act our will out in the world, seek comfort and pleasure, or exert our creative impulses;
- explore, experiment, play, and learn about the world.
Anger, in particular, is a fight-or-flight emotion. It typically occurs in response to a real or perceived threat or obstruction — either to our literal survival or to the exercise of our volition or the gratification of our desires.
But our emotions, and these underlying purposes, often get displaced from their real-world triggers and targets into the abstract space we have invented. It becomes difficult, at times, to locate and to read the underlying immediacy — that is, the true relationships between our goals, our feelings, and the events and stimuli that produced them.
In a heavily symbolic world, our emotions often become triggered by abstract or distant events that have little direct impact on our daily lives; these events stand in as symbols for some personal or ego-driven cause or motivation. Conversely, immediate and ordinary events, which normally might be relatively meaningless, take on symbolic significance when read through the lens of culture, ubiquitous narrative frameworks, or recurrent patterns in our lives.
The Symbolic Abstraction of Anger: Disentangling Cultural Feedback Loops
Let’s look at three scenarios, by way of illustration: let’s assume, for all of them, that you’re a black American man living in a coastal city, in the period between late May and early June of 2020.
1. You’ve just learned, from reading online news sources, about the death of George Floyd.
You have had little social interaction over the past few months because of the ongoing pandemic restrictions. At heart, you are itching to see people. You might be experiencing an underlying sense of anger or distress because of social isolation, loss of work, or other side effects of the restrictions; or because of the loss of stimulating experiences and social events that normally bring joy to your life and relieve stress.
On top of this, you have background knowledge of historical patterns — the history of slavery in the United States; the Ku Klux Klan and segregation — that tell you that black Americans like you have been persecuted, or discriminated against, in the recent past. You may have anecdotal evidence from friends, family, or acquaintances that suggests this discrimination is ongoing (perhaps they seem to always get searched by the police for drugs, for example, or perhaps security guards tend to follow them around in department stores). Perhaps at some point, someone has even hurled a racial epithet at you to cheaply “win” an argument.
You might be primed, in this situation — as it seems many people were — to interpret George Floyd’s death as one more example in a long line of racist atrocities running through America’s history. Though he is a stranger, you may be genuinely and empathetically saddened by the tragedy of murder. You might be personally angry — partially because of direct, immediate losses you’ve experienced in your life that make the world in general seem more unstable and threatening; and partially because this particular event seems to exacerbate the relevance of that threat to you specifically. If it could happen to him, it could happen to any black American, you might think. It could happen to me.
George Floyd’s death, in this scenario, is an abstract event that happened in a distant place. You didn’t know him; the man who killed him lives in another state; his death has no bearing on the unique circumstances or probabilities that exist in your environment. Perhaps you have a nice job, live in a nice neighborhood, lead an insulated life, and make lots of money. Perhaps you would never frequent the kinds of places he frequented, or find yourself in the kind of situation he was in.
But his death takes on a symbolic significance that fuels your underlying sense of insecurity and frustration. That symbolic significance may, or may not, tell you anything practically applicable about real-world probabilities and events. But maybe, you are so stirred to anger that you decide to go to a Black Lives Matter protest — despite the fact that this protest does little to address the most pressing current threats to your own life.
2. You go to a coffee shop to order a coffee, and the (white) woman at the counter is short with you. She takes a long time to make your drink and, when you ask for a napkin, she seems to ignore you. When the (white) man who is next in line steps up to the counter, the barista’s eyes light up and she makes chatty conversation.
There are a lot of possible explanations for this series of events. Maybe the barista has a subtle, and perhaps subconscious, racist bias. But maybe she is just having a bad day. Maybe the next customer is an old friend of hers, and she is happy and surprised to see him. Or maybe she just decided she hates you in particular, for reasons completely unrelated to race.
But because of the salience of the current public conversation surrounding racism and George Floyd’s death, you might be primed to interpret her behavior as evidence of her underlying racism. Your anger is real, and triggered by real events — that is, bad customer service that appears partial — but the interaction is not necessarily very meaningful beyond that. It has taken on a symbolic significance that may (or may not) be unwarranted, because of the narrative lens through which it is read.
You may believe you are angry about racism, when in fact, what triggered your anger in that particular moment was the feeling of being slighted. If you wanted to exact vengeance for this perceived slight, treating it as an example of racism would place you in a self-righteous position, where you could be a justified victim and potentially garner sympathy and aid. You could also gain attention by participating in an already-salient public conversation, putting yourself closer to the center of the drama and thereby making yourself look more important. There is, therefore — consciously or otherwise — a possible incentive to read the interaction this way.
3. You hear about the controversy surrounding author J.K. Rowling’s supposedly “transphobic” tweets.
In this scenario, let’s say you are not a Harry Potter fan. You are a black man, and Rowling is a white woman; she lives in a completely different country far away. But perhaps, you read about this incident and it makes you angry on Rowling’s behalf. Perhaps you are a staunch supporter of free speech, and you dislike what you perceive to be the growing censorious dogma surrounding “trans ideology.” Perhaps you identify as Christian, and you don’t think being “trans” is morally right.
In this case, your anger isn’t necessarily rooted in a perceived direct personal threat; rather, it is rooted in your sense of values, and your schema of ideals regarding the kind of world you want to live in. You are angry, perhaps, because you don’t want to live in a world where people are punished for standing up for what you believe to be moral goodness; or because you don’t want to live in a world where being “trans” is considered to be normal.
You want people around you to uphold the moral standards you believe in, because it would be a more hospitable place for you to live; but also because — from a transcendent perspective — you believe this would make the world more beautiful, and would create more overall happiness. You may also feel, from a genuinely selfless place, a universal sort of human empathy for Rowling.
There is nothing you can really do about this controversy, and — again — it may or may not tell you anything practically applicable about your direct, personal, environment. But it becomes a symbol of something unsettling that you detect within the larger world: distant and potentially hostile forces are at work that are exerting influence counter to your personal values, changing the world little by little into something you don’t want it to be.
The Search for Anger’s Roots
Hopefully the above examples — somewhat superficially sketched though they may be — have helped at least provide a sampling of the ways in which complex webs of symbolic abstraction often interplay with the foundational immediacy of emotional experience. By fostering a growing consciousness of these dynamics, we may be able to approach a greater understanding of what it is we — and others around us — really want from the world, each other, ourselves, and life itself. We can then proceed to try to figure out the most effective, and socially constructive, ways to go about achieving these goals or putting our ideals and values into practice.
“Whatever its source,” Ponesse writes, “I’m not sure most of us are even aware of how angry we are or what we are angry about, beyond an amorphous weightiness lurking in the background of our daily movements.”
This is certainly true. And it creates an incredibly dangerous situation. For anger that is not consciously mastered is easily weaponized by manipulative individuals or factions. Yet, even if it does not ultimately become weaponized by those with less-than-benevolent intentions, we can still find ourselves directing it, of our own accord, against inappropriate targets.
Psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Erich Fromm, in his book Escape From Freedom, recounts watching this happen right before his eyes during the period of Nazi ascendancy. In the aftermath of World War I and the German Revolution, the German middle class was decimated by economic decline, depression, and inflation. Many people lost their life savings, and the peasant class was mired in debt.
At the same time, the old cultural fabric, along with all its institutions and authorities — the monarchy, the church, the family — was crumbling. Life became more difficult for many people; households were squeezed and struggling to survive. Meanwhile, their sense of social stability and institutional security had fallen out from under their feet. In a changing world, the advice of older generations ceased to accurately guide the younger; the younger generations therefore had to forge their own way alone in the world and ceased to feel that their elders had anything of value to offer them.
Fromm describes a situation much like the one that we currently see around us, which he says led to a sense of “increasing social frustration” and “intense bitterness:”
The older generation of the middle class grew more bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driving for action. Its economic position was aggravated by the fact that the basis for an independent economic existence, such as their parents had had, was lost; the professional market was saturated, and the chances of making a living as a physician or lawyer were slight…The vast majority of the population was seized with [a] feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness…In the postwar period it was the middle class, particularly the lower middle class, that was threatened by monopolistic capitalism. Its anxiety and thereby its hatred were aroused; it moved into a state of panic and was filled with a craving for submission to as well as for domination over those who were powerless. These feelings were used by an entirely different class for a regime which was to work for their own interests. Hitler proved to be such an efficient tool because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating, petty bourgeois, with whom the lower middle class could identify themselves emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers. Originally he posed as the Messiah of the old middle class, promised the destruction of department stores, the breaking of the domination of banking capital, and so on. The record is clear enough. These promises were never fulfilled. However, that did not matter. Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism. What mattered was that hundreds of thousands of petty bourgeois, who in the normal course of development had little chance to gain money or power, as members of the Nazi bureaucracy now got a large slice of the wealth and prestige they forced the upper classes to share with them. Others who were not members of the Nazi machine were given the jobs taken away from Jews and political enemies; and as for the rest, though they did not get more bread, they got ‘circuses.’ The emotional satisfaction afforded by these sadistic spectacles and by an ideology which gave them a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind was able to compensate them — for a time at least — for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally.
It is this last sentence that really makes clear, for us, the personal foundations of the anger that ultimately fueled the fires of Nazism and encouraged its rise. Jews, and other “political enemies,” ultimately became the scapegoats for this anger. A narcissistic pride in “the nation of Germany” and the idea of racial superiority gave a sense of righteous, moral justification to the unconscionable brutality that ensued. That brutality did not solve the underlying problem — because it did not address the causes of that problem; nor did it do anything to genuinely restore what had originally been lost.
“Payback is especially attractive when one suffers…because retribution feels like a satisfying way of returning in kind the deeply personal ways we were wounded,” Ponesse writes.
The first line of response to anger is often to look for something to blame, so we can exact punishment. There is a powerfully primal logic to this reaction: by blaming and punishing, we assert ourselves as formidable opponents, neutralize potential threats, and take back power. Blame and punishment also serve a social function: they create a theatrics of justice that signal to our allies who is “right” and who is “wrong.” Though that theatrics is ultimately founded on a sort of “might is right” logic, which does not necessarily belie true justice, it is tempting to believe that someone who was cast in the role of the “villain,” in reality, deserved their fate.
In a more socially direct and heavily-localized world, blame and retribution might have often served as real, practical, adaptive responses to threats and obstructions. After all, if a predator or enemy attacks you physically, and you defend yourself by reacting with aggression, then you are genuinely neutralizing a real and present threat to your well-being.
In a small and close-knit social group, likewise, individuals have direct and highly personal relationships with one another, and their negotiations and confrontations are confined to an incredibly localized sphere of influence. Blame and retribution might be effective last-resort tools for resolving confrontations between specific individuals: if negotiations fail, you know exactly who wronged you, and you can remind them, with the aid of pain, that you are not someone to habitually disrespect.
But the modern world is governed by, and permeated with, highly impersonal networks of forces. We feel pain, we struggle, and we know that someone or something is responsible; the people around us fail to complete their side of the social bargain, they stand as obstacles in our path, and they seem not to care at all what happens to us. The call center operator based in some foreign country, who barely speaks your language, says, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that.” He is not really sorry — he is getting paid to tell you that — and you are angry because he should help you — but you are still courteous to him because you know that reacting aggressively won’t actually fix your situation.
We are all increasingly dependent on vast, sprawling complexes of systems. The systems have power, but increasingly, no one person — even from the ranks of the world’s richest and most powerful — bears ultimate responsibility for how they operate. And yet, there are people making decisions, changing and influencing the world, and sometimes wielding immense and completely unfair mandates over the minute details of our daily lives.
We know this; we know it is unjust; we know we are dependent on this unjust set of structures; and yet, we know, too, that we cannot really see the culprits. Their acts of injustice seem random, and frequently, actually are; the rhythms of our lives become increasingly driven by absurdity. This knowledge makes us feel all the more powerless, and at the same time, all the more desperate to release our anger on someone — on anyone who happens to make themselves available to us.
When two rats are placed in a cage together and electrically shocked, they tend to behave aggressively toward one another — a phenomenon sometimes known as “shock-induced aggression.” In humans, a similar phenomenon occurs, called “displaced aggression.” According to the authors of the linked meta-analysis: “In the experimental literature on displaced aggression…a paradigm feature that is common to virtually all studies is that the initial provocateur is never made available as a potential target for aggressive retaliation.”
That is, displaced aggression occurs because we don’t have access to the people who actually made us miserable; or, perhaps, because we do not even know who and where they are. Like the caged rats, we are shocked by unseen, distant, sprawling, or abstract forces. Sensing a threat, we scan our environment and try to identify its source; but we either cannot clearly localize the perpetrator(s), or we cannot approach them. Instead, we attack what we can access, what we can see.
We give them group names and labels: Jews; Muslims; Christians; Homosexuals; Heretics; Lepers; Witches; Communists; Capitalists; Liberals; The Far-Left; Conservatives; The Far-Right; Conspiracy Theorists; Covid Deniers; White People; Rich People; The Patriarchy; TERFs; Fascists; Antifa; The Russians; The Americans; The Chinese; Illegal Immigrants; The Bourgeoisie.
Many of the members of such groups, perhaps, are people whom we envy; or people we perceive as opportunistically gaining benefits at our expense. Or perhaps we see some of their members rallying to cheer on the destruction of the world we love, laughing at our misery, or eagerly laying bricks in the wall of our demise. They are callous to us and they desecrate our hallows. Perhaps they govern us, though they are foreigners and have no knowledge of our culture and history. Either way, we see them as general threats to our well-being and survival, or as obstacles to the goals we have or to the construction of the world we want to see.
But any declared war on these targets will be vague, ultimately unwinnable, and will likely catch many innocents in its crosshairs. We no longer live in jungles, or on African savannahs, or, for that matter (for the most part), even in small, isolated towns. In these immediate, primarily physical environments, anger would probably have, indeed, reliably directed our attention toward the source of an obstacle or threat. The rise of the feeling of anger within us would have been correlated with the real and concrete presence of its trigger — priming us to rectify the problem at its source.
Dealing with such a threat, in such an environment — either through negotiation or direct aggression — would have had a decent chance of helping to resolve some actual conflict. But today, the targets of our anger may or may not really have any influence on our day-to-day existence.
Even if they do, waging a war against them will probably do little to actually solve our most pressing issues and concerns. But more than likely, many of them are, like us, other “shocked rats” (so to speak).
They are angry, like us, because they have also lost something; because they are also struggling to survive in a world that, all too often, feels hostile to humans (because its very foundations and structures are impersonal and inhumane).
They are angry, like us, because they also feel powerlessly dependent on these structures. Because they constantly feel threatened and thwarted by the complex and often arbitrary processes that rule over their lives.
They are angry, like us, because survival is getting harder; the world seems full of threats and obstacles to their success; and because, whether they consciously realize it or not, their “lives [are being] impoverished, economically, and culturally.”
We’re not all suffering, of course; and even those of us who are do not all suffer equally. In fact, some of us seem to be quite well-adapted to the current circumstances (and are often very smug about it).
But the fact that the brutalities and inhumanities of our environment do take a toll, not just on ourselves, but on many of our perceived opponents and enemies, should signal to us that we have the potential to be allies. Instead of viciously attacking one another in unbridled rage, we can undergo a shared exploration of the deeper-level mutual causes for our anger; foster a sense of compassion for the ways these phenomena affect all of us; and, instead of getting lost in the maze-like back alleys of the blame game, we can set to work nourishing each other and the world we want to see.
“Sometimes the realities of our world stretch our humanity too far,” concludes Ponesse. “The prevalence of pent-up frustration today might be a testament to the gap we perceive between where we are and where we might have been. If so, we need to see that for what it is. We need to take up the gauntlet, and prune our anger into something that has a chance of repairing our moral injury so we are better equipped for the future.”
The idea of restoration, or “repair,” is key. For if anger’s purpose, as a psychic sensory mechanism, is to alert our ego to the presence of threats and obstructions to our agency, then the next question is: threats and obstructions to what?
We have already established that, in a highly immediate and localized world, blame, punishment, and aggression might be genuinely effective tools for neutralizing concrete threats and obstructions. And, in the immediate realm, in many contexts, they remain effective: few people would condemn, for instance, the use of even lethal violence to defend one’s family or children from armed intruders or to protect oneself from sexual assault.
But as our social environment becomes more abstractified, and social responsibility, in turn, becomes more diffused, retribution begins to have diminishing returns. It loses its utility, at the same time as it becomes inherently more ignorant and dangerous. Group-oriented retribution, in particular, risks harming innocents and potential allies, ascribing agency to the wrong targets, and missing altogether the sources of one’s habitual grievances.
I would argue that, today, we are seeing a corresponding shift in the way we think about the ethics of blame and retribution, which reflects the diminishing day-to-day usefulness of these previously-adaptive tools.
For much of human history, retributive justice did stand a chance of functionally removing threats in direct, and small-scale, conflicts. Retribution would have had an adaptive utility, not so much in its ability to rectify the past, but with regard to establishing social boundaries and securing the future. But in the modern world, it seldom can hope to accomplish this. And the costs of failure are far too high.
Ponesse rightly points out that retribution does not bring back what is lost. In a world where it also no longer seems likely to secure the future, we must innovate new adaptations for solving the underlying problems that it once addressed. And that means focusing less energy on condemning the people who are responsible for our suffering, and more on nourishing, protecting, and restoring our culture, our livelihoods, and our world.
The Gulf Between the Real and the Ideal, and the Transformation of Anger
Throughout her essay, Ponesse refers to philosopher Agnes Callard’s notion of “pure anger,” defined as “a response to the perceived gap between ‘the way the world is and the way it ought to be.’”
For many of us, our sense of anger doesn’t stem so much from immediate, acute threats to our physical body or day-to-day survival (although, in the face of a seemingly rapidly diminishing respect for bodily autonomy, and for the integrity of food and water, this may be changing). Rather, it could be said to arise from a confluence of daily routines, encounters, systems, structures, impositions, interactions, and events — the totality of which reminds us of this gap.
For many of us, there is an enormous gulf between “the way the world [currently] is” and “the way it ought to be.” “The way it ought to be” is, presumably, a world in which we would feel at home — a place that would feel comfortable and psychospiritually nourishing to us, where we could live the rhythms of our lives spontaneously alongside people we care about, and who share our values. Very few of us have something that really, fully resembles that, I would venture to say.
On some level, we crave to bridge that gulf. And every little detail that reminds us of how far we are from doing so feels like a deeply personal insult. But as Ponesse points out, this “pure anger,” with its often globally reaching spirit of fantasy, “can create a false promise of agency in a world that offers increasingly less control over every facet of life.”
Distant, or abstract, events stand in as symbols of the feeling of powerlessness we have before the vast universe of systems that affect us. But anger (as opposed to fear) is an emotion of empowerment. It prepares us, not to seek escape, but to confront (and, ideally, to emerge victorious). Our anger, in the face of these vast and impersonal systems, may delude us into (unconsciously) thinking we can simply will the world to be the way we want it to be; as if, by asserting our desires with enough emotional energy, the world around us will eventually capitulate.
Sometimes, the gulf between “the way the world is” and “the way it ought to be” is too vast, and we are too small. But it is possible to direct the anger that we feel toward things that we actually have power over. And there is nothing quite like the gap between the real and the ideal when we are seeking to illuminate these possibilities. A conscious mastery of anger directs us back toward the source of our control and helps us truly begin to empower ourselves again.
I’d like to briefly share some of the techniques I’ve developed for doing this, over a period of many years of expressing and reflecting on my own anger.
A Personal Archaeology
In this article I’ve attempted to excavate a largely universally-human archaeology of anger: its evolutionary functions and roots, and the forms it takes in modern society; but here I would like to share the questions I have asked myself as part of my own, personal, attempts at excavation. And I would like to invite my readers to ask some of these questions of themselves, and perhaps of others in their lives, to begin a shared conversation. I find it especially helpful, on self-reflection, to write such questions and answers in a journal; writing is, after all, one of the best ways to clarify one’s thoughts.
What have I lost?
What do I love and treasure?
What am I afraid of?
What are the daily threats (and perceived threats) to my continued survival and my sense of humanity?
Which of these threats are, at the moment, abstract, and which are concrete and present?
What kind of world do I want to see?
How is it different from the one I live in?
How can I immediately make a difference, and where does the center of my power lie?
What is sacred in life, and to me personally?
How do I keep those things alive?
What are my goals in life, and what obstacles do I currently perceive to their fulfillment?
Are there alternative, or creative ways that I can achieve some of those goals?
Where are the boundaries of my knowledge, and how should that affect my operating protocol?
Am I acting selfishly, or could I be wrong in any way in my approach?
Do I want things that I’m not actually entitled to?
Do I want to achieve my goals by taking from, or imposing myself on, other people?
Do I listen to, and consider, what others — even my perceived enemies — desire and need?
Do I dismiss those needs, when they don’t seem to be compatible with mine, or do I take them seriously?
Questions such as these can help us start to focus on the actual problems we face, and more importantly, reorient our attention on the ways in which we can potentially have an immediate impact on our local world, in concrete and tangible ways.
Asking them to ourselves, as well as with other people, can help us take ourselves out of the unwinnable realm of abstract, displaced battles and back into the realm of the personal — where everything ultimately originates. Starting from the personally relevant and significant, we can begin to approach our issues from a place of shared sentiment and humanity — motivated by compassion and mutual respect.
Threat De-Escalation
I have found it helpful to create a mental “priority scale” when I am evaluating perceived threats or things that trigger my own anger.
I try to ask myself: “How does this particular situation or event threaten me? How large is the threat, in reality? How close, or distant, is it? How likely is it to impact me, in practice? Is this threat merely symbolic, or is it, in fact, very concrete? If it is symbolic, then what concrete thing is it symbolic of, and how can I address that problem directly?”
Doing this has allowed me to de-escalate my sense of threat in conversations and interactions with others — and, consequently, to have more open and sincere discussions (even with my perceived enemies).
Anger sends us into fight-or-flight mode: it sets our focus on ourselves, and our own self-protection. But if we want to have genuinely open, and productive, conversations with others and foster real alliances, it is important to genuinely want to understand what other people want and need. We need to be able to summon the moral courage required to come face-to-face with things that trigger our disgust reflexes, that we find abhorrent, or that we believe to be stupid or impossible. We need to be able to face, even, the anger of others.
Their anger is, most likely, like our own: they feel powerless and confused. They want to take power back over their world. They have lost — or perhaps, never had in the first place — things that are fundamental human necessities, or things that were sacred and beloved to them. They may be worried and anxious about how they are going to survive in an increasingly impersonal and rapidly changing world. They — like us — probably feel dismissed, and want to be heard and taken seriously.
But if everyone is constantly in threat mode, thinking about their own self-protection, who is going to start the process of mutual restoration first?
It is not only our physical or economic survival and our cultural environment that need restoration. We also need to restore our own spirits — and help those around us to become empowered enough to do the same.
Creating Sacred Spaces
Creating a “sacred space” is a small way in which we can begin to nourish and restore our own souls. If our anger is exacerbated by a constant feeling that we are not at home, or that the world is not “the way it ought to be,” then perhaps we can attenuate this feeling somewhat by recreating microcosms of the world we want to see.
We, obviously, cannot snap our fingers and instantly remodel the entire universe to our liking (and that, at any rate, would be authoritarian). Nor can we, even by participating in political activity and public discourse, in the best of cases, usually gain much ground on putting our ideal realities into practice. To some extent, we will always be stuck in a world that is not to our liking — or that, at least, contains persistent threats to our utopias.
But, in my experience, taking back power on a small scale goes a long way. Create a sacred space — no matter how tiny — in your own home, and keep it clean and beautiful. Adorn it with objects that have meaning to you; sit there and savor tea, wine, or coffee; and when you are there, be present in the world that you envision.
Or, set aside a sacred time — one day a week, one morning, one evening — which you can dedicate to restoring your own spirit. During that time, do whatever you do for its own sake, out of pure exploratory enjoyment;, study spiritual texts; meditate; or simply put on some music, close your eyes, and let your imagination run free.
Within that space or time, immerse yourself in the world “as it ought to be.” Remember what you lost. Remember your dreams. Create. Reconnect with life’s beauty. If necessary, cry and grieve. Allow yourself to take away this sense of nourishment, or rootedness, to strengthen you as you confront challenges out in the world at large. Remember that there is, at the very least, one refuge where you can find peace, and where the world is still a sacred place.
Living as Nourishment
It is vital for us to find ways to nourish our own spirits as we navigate the terrain of our own anger. Anger is a hunger for justice; it drives us to demand things from other people. Whether in retribution or otherwise, we want to replace what we have lost; we want reparations; we want the scales and balances of our lives to be rectified. Perhaps these are things we really need. But the sad reality is, most of the people around us also need these things, too. And if we are all constantly psychospiritually undernourished, who will there be left to give of themselves to tend the spirit of the world?
Though we have vastly different visions of utopia; though we crave vastly different things; and though these things, on the surface — and perhaps, genuinely, on a deeper level — often seem to actively conflict with one another; these surface reflections are often simply fractured mirrors of the same, underlying hungers. The world we live in brutalizes us; and if it does not brutalize us, then, all too often, it makes us comfortable, greedy, and unwilling to sacrifice even a crumb of our own security for others.
We have two duties to each other, then.
The first is to consciously and reflectively master our own anger, so that we have a concrete and functional understanding of exactly what it is we see as beautiful and sacred in the world; and so that we can respectfully and sincerely, from the bottom of our hearts, recount to others our losses and ask them to help us respect what we are trying to protect.
The second: to summon the moral courage to go past the point where we are comfortable; to enter into discussions we don’t want to have; to face the darknesses of others with compassion, and to consider the darknesses within ourselves; to open our minds to things we previously thought were impossible, or that terrify us; and to let go, sometimes, of our own security, in order to listen to others and to allow them space to live life autonomously and maintain a sense of their humanity.
At a certain point, when we have experienced chronic anger for too long, we reach a crossroads. And it is there that we choose one of two paths.
When you’ve lost almost everything; when you’ve witnessed uncountable tragedies; when everyone around you continually fails to fulfill their most basic commitments to you; when the very foundations on which society is built seem to be crumbling beneath you; when nothing seems to be sacred; when no one treats anything with reverence; when the sanctity of life itself is constantly defiled before your eyes; when everything that makes the world delightful is discarded as if it meant nothing; and when you feel powerless to stop any of it…
The last violation, the last loss, is the first path: to double down on your own visions of self-protection, justified or otherwise; to become a servant to the anger that ultimately destroys you.
And the second path is the final act of rebellion: the determined and passionate refusal to become another vehicle for the senseless carnage that devours the world.
When you are so hollowed out by grief and stress, so battered by the onslaught of viciousness, so speechless at the horrors and injustices around you; then, in that moment, what you crave more than anything else is no longer justice — not even the restoration of what was lost — but the raw and timeless radiance of love and of the beautiful. And, as it seems that all the forces in the world are gathered to destroy all traces of this light, you will want to — as your last hope of resistance — transform yourself into the very source of it.
Even if you cannot have it yourself.
You will want, more than anything else, to nourish the world from the ashes of your own pain; to take your experiences, to take the destruction, and to let them inform, and give life to, your most reverent and compassionate tenderness.
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