Anger

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Anger

Postby Elvis » Fri Jun 16, 2017 9:59 pm

From the woman credited with the concept of "mansplaining":

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/facing-the-furies/

From the May 2017 issue
Facing the Furies

By Rebecca Solnit

A 2001 study by Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner found that feeling angry makes people as optimistic about the outcome of a situation as feeling happy. In other words, anger may make people miserable, but it also makes them more confident and obliterates other, more introspective miseries: pain, fear, guilt, uncertainty, vulnerability. We’d rather be mad than sad.

In our political conversations, anger is constantly invoked yet rarely examined. What exactly is it? At its most basic, it is a physiological reaction to threat, one we share with other mammals. Anger manifests as a collection of somatic responses — accelerated heart rate, increased blood pressure, heightened body temperature — that are associated with alertness, focus, readiness to act. But the similarity to animals ends there. Where a dog may growl, bristle, or bite you if you poke it with a stick, it will have no such reaction if you insult its god or its sports team or talk about someone you know who poked another dog.

For our species, with its imaginative and narrative capacities, challenges to one’s status, beliefs, and advantages also count as threats. Human anger is a response to insecurity both literal and imagined, to any sense that our physical or social or emotional welfare is at risk. Attacks of fury can bring on strokes and heart attacks and blood clots. We routinely die of rage.



Anger is hostile to understanding. At its most implacable or extreme, it prevents comprehension of a situation, of the people you oppose, of your own role and responsibilities. It’s not for nothing that we call rages “blind.”



Governments regularly manufacture or exaggerate threats to suggest that violence is necessary and restraint would constitute weakness: during World War II, the United States condemned citizens of Japanese heritage; during the postwar period, it targeted leftists. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it scrambled to find new adversaries, and has now settled on Muslims, immigrants, and transgender people. The provocation of anger is essential to government by manipulation, and the angriest people are often the most credulous, willing to snatch up without scrutiny whatever feeds their fire.

On social media, audiences give perfunctory attention to facts so that they can move on to the pleasure of righteous wrath about the latest person who has said or done something wrong.



Righteous rage is often seen as a virtue.

Rage is not quite the same thing as outrage.



Anger is frequently mistaken for a dowsing rod indicating something deep, when it is better understood as a dial that can be spun with a flick of the finger.



The terms used by primatologists are unsettlingly helpful in understanding the social role of anger: “threat display,” “dominance behavior.” Expressions of rage are a means of exercising control over others and asserting status, a status defined in part by the right to dominate



In her essay “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde reflects that women of color “have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so they do not tear us apart.” In an obituary for Nelson Mandela, the writer Stephen Smith makes a similar point. In prison, he writes, Mandela came to see that “hatred and enmity were mimetic, a trap laid by the ‘evil’ other: fall into it and you and your adversary become hard to tell apart.” Mandela, who was as entitled to anger as anyone, nevertheless gave it up. But he did not give up his endeavor to change the world around him. The difference is significant.



The Buddhist writer Thanissara Mary Weinberg put it thus:

Anger is traditionally thought to be close to wisdom. When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.


We will all feel anger at one time or another, but it doesn’t need to become animosity or be renewed and retained. Buddhism offers an elegant model of anger management. Harness the emotion, feel it without inflicting it.

Some cultures consider anger a luxury in which one should not indulge. The Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon, a 1986 study suggests, regard anger as dangerous, undesirable, and closely tied to violence. Jean Briggs, an anthropologist, lived with Inuit people in Canada in the early 1960s, and reported that they highly valued emotional control: “The maintenance of equanimity under trying circumstances,” she observed, “is the essential sign of maturity, of adulthood.” Volatile adults were seen as disruptive, disturbing. Anger was something you were supposed to outgrow.

We in America have not outgrown it; we don’t even think we should.



Yet in my observation, those dedicated to practical change over the long term are often the least involved in the dramas of rage, which wear on both the self and others. After hearing, say, hundreds of detailed accounts of rape, you may remain deeply motivated to engage in political action but find it difficult to get emotionally worked up about the newest offense. The most committed organizers I know are frequently indignant, but they’re not often incensed. Their first obligation is to changing how things are — to action, not self-expression.

Much political rhetoric suggests that without anger there is no powerful engagement, that anger is a sort of gasoline that runs the engine of social change. But sometimes gasoline just makes things explode.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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