The Age of Rage
The Age of Rage
How our anger is being hijacked and what we can do about it
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring emotions.
This Week at a Glance:
This week we investigate one of the most powerful emotions—anger. Anger is known to come on suddenly and is often hard to relinquish. This week, we explore the emotion and different tactics on conquering it.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 What is hijacking our anger today;
🍬 How we can create distance from anger;
🍫 How we can conquer our anger once and for all.
“Anger cannot win. It cannot even think clearly.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Anger is an all-consuming emotion. Once it is unleashed, there is no stopping it until it dies down. Like a burning fire, it will continue to rage until it destroys everything in its path or runs out of oxygen.
And like it or not, this emotion of ours is being hijacked every single day.
Our emotional states are heavily influenced by the stories we both tell and are told. What we take in helps to form what we believe and this forms our thoughts which lead to our emotions.
These emotions are constantly being pushed and pulled in every direction as we live in a new era of yellow journalism.
Yellow journalism first began in the late 1890s as the New York World owned by Joseph Pulitzer and The New York Journal owned by William Randolph Hearst competed for attention (and money) of every day people looking for the news. The problem was, it wasn’t news the newspapers were selling, rather it was sensationalism with headlines such as:
“Mobs Make Morbid Show of Death”
“Crisis is at Hand”
“Peace Treaty is Ratified. Awful Slaughter.”
The headlines were meant to shock, entice, and enrage the citizens. It was the beginning of mass media manipulation where our emotions would be used for another’s means. Anger makes you not only vulnerable to the uncontrollable nature of the emotion itself, it makes you susceptible to others who use the emotion as a driving force for their own gain.
One of the main issues when dealing with anger, as the philosopher Todd Mays has pointed out, is the fact that we don’t see the person we’re mad at, rather we see them as an “anonymous” person.
“When we shout at people there is a blurring of the features of the object of our anger. They don't appear to us in the way of someone with another life but instead as someone more anonymous. In that sense rather being engaged with the object of our anger we are instead engaged with ourselves, and specifically with the anger itself.”
While anger can be all-engaging, there are ways to handle it. Here are five ways to take back control of our emotion.
From Anger to Forgiveness
When we allow anger to run our lives, we relinquish control of our own actions and we hand it over to our emotional state.
The problem is our emotional state holds no reason, it does not think, it only reacts. It is the response agent to everything that happens.
“Holding onto anger and resentment is like scuba diving with an anchor,” writes the author James Clear. “As long as you're clinging to it, you're bound to the seabed, limited in movement, unable to appreciate the coral reefs and the colorful fish that dart in and out of view.”
Clear recommends turning that anger into forgiveness. Forgiveness, Clear says, is “letting go of the anchor.”
When we’re given the ability to, when the opportunity arises to unburden ourselves from the sinking, it frees us from the blinders of anger and allows us to appreciate everything else around us.
There can be Distance Between our Anger and our Response
The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus recounted over 2,000 years ago stories of people stubbing their toes on rocks, yelling at the rock for doing so, and then picking it up and hurling it in disgust.
Our reactions have changed very little since then.
When something unexpected happens, or when we feel “slighted” as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains (noting from Seneca), we become angry. We feel there is some form of injustice.
But if one were to take a step back and observe the above situation, they would see how ridiculous it is.
There is a key reason for this: SPACE.
When we allow our emotions to direct us, we hand over control to what Plato called the horses. By allowing the horses to direct the charioteer (who is supposed to be controlling them), there is no telling what one will do (hence the yelling and throwing of the inanimate rock).
But, as the psychologist and WWII Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl outlined so long ago, when we provide ourselves space between the stimulus and how we respond, we provide ourselves room to change how we would react.
That space, that vital aspect in the equation may seem small, it may even seem non-existent for some, but if we are to remind ourselves in our moments of emotional outburst that there is a space, regardless of its size, it provides us time to pause and think.
And in this pause is where we hold our reasoning ability to remind ourselves of the situations, of how we want to react.
Thomas Jefferson similarly had a useful exercise for building that space between stimulus and response. He wrote:
“When angry, count to ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.”
The space may be small, but with practice it will grow. And the more it grows, the more we can stop, think, and then choose how we want to react.
Emotions are Guideposts, Not Instructions
The emotion of anger arises from a historical perspective—it is based upon the experiences we’ve previously had.
Our emotions work, according to psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, by projecting what the mind thinks we should be feeling in any given situation. It bases this feeling from events that way heavily within our history such as the culture we’re raised in or the experiences we’ve had.
But it is important to remember that these emotions are not always correct. Just because we have previously held the emotion in a scenario does not mean it is right nor does it mean we have to continue.
The science writer Leonard Mlodinow reminds us of this when he writes:
“To say that emotion states are generalizable means that a whole variety of stimuli may lead to the same response and, conversely, that we may at different times exhibit a variety of responses to the same stimulus.”
Decide what emotional response you want to have for a given situation and begin practicing that when the situation arises. It may seem hard or even impossible at first, but emotions, like so much else in life, are moldable.
Determine What is Actually Angering
Very often, the judgments we hold of an event are the driving forces behind our emotional states.
We don’t encounter events in the world as blank slates, we come at them with our full life history. We have a life of judgments, successes and failures, and personal experiences that completely dictate how we will act in a given situation based upon the value we previously provided it.
As Epictetus said, it is not things that disturb us but our interpretation of things that do.
By understanding the judgements we make about the encounters we have, we’re better equipped to handle the situations we face.
In book six of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of his ability to control his anger through the judgments he holds power over:
“You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves.”
We hold the power to shape our decisions and it starts with how we judge the situation we’re encountering.
Breakdown the Event Before You
Emotions such as anger have a habit of sweeping us up in a hurry and preventing us from thinking. Seneca likened the emotion of anger to the experience of a building collapsing—once it gets started, there is no stopping it and it will destroy anything in its path.
But when we look at the event that is angering us and we break it down, when we are able to objectively review it, the emotional rage that tends to sweep us up dissipates and we are able to look upon it with clarity.
"Forcing yourself to describe things in concrete terms is a way of undoing your own idiosyncratic accumulation of abstractions," the psychologist Steven Pinker once said.
Marcus Aurelius similarly reinforced to himself to break things down into first principles so as to better look upon them objectively:
“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood… Perceptions like that - latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time - all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust - to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.”
Ultimately, anger is an emotion that will arise within all of us. While it is a naturally occurring emotion, we do not have to give it the power it so often takes. By working to understand ourselves, by taking time to understand why the emotion arose, by breaking down what is angering us, we not only come to better know ourselves, we take back control of our emotional state and we stop anger in its tracks.
3-Bullet Summary:
Anger today is being hijacked by mass media to invoke the emotion within us in order to sell attention similarly to yellow journalism in the late 1890s;
When we become angry, we no longer see someone as a person, rather, they become anonymous to us and we blur their features;
Anger is controllable. While not easy, when we learn to create space between the stimulus and our response, when we investigate the source of our anger, when we can exchange anger for forgiveness, we can conquer the emotion.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.