There's no emotion we ought to think harder about than anger
aeon.coAs an anger repressor, I believed anger was a problem that should be set aside at all costs. Now that I'm a lot more in contact with anger, it's clear that that was counterproductive.
Anger has a legitimate biological purpose - that is to set boundaries. Look at any animal [1], if you push their boundaries they will bite, scratch or bark at you. But they will also very quickly let it go once the boundary has been set.
We humans tend to be taught to let our boundaries be pushed, weakened or outright crossed in order to do what others think is right. We are taught to repress our very biological instinct because we are bad, because we believe our primal instincts are just violent. But the body knows that our boundaries are being violated, millions of years of evolution aren't irrelevant. To me, this explains why we hold onto anger so much today and see outbursts of it online.
What we think of as primal instincts to harm people is actually our own repression of our primal instincts. Lord of the Flies is a propaganda film - perhaps even the secularization of original sin. Research has shown time and again that humans left alone in a group tend to work together, not kill each other [2].
When I see people deeply angry at society, at politicians, or at me, I see somebody who has had their boundaries crossed, again and again, and has been taught that they are not allowed to set them. This energy has to go somewhere.
Personally, the more I've allowed my own anger and set personal boundaries, the less angry I am at the world. The less my anger seems to manifest in harmful outbursts. Anger comes, and if expressed, it passes very quickly in a way that may be assertive but that doesn't harm others.
I did a talk on anger in the workplace at SREcon22 to an audience of people who work in tech [1]. Anger is well-studied, particularly by Dr. Brad Bushman, who has made it his life's work.
It's important to draw a distinction between repression and expression here. Feeling anger does not need to equate to expressing anger, though we often do. Expressing anger is almost always harmful—I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example where it isn't harmful—both to the individual feeling anger and to whomever they may express it to.
Dr. Bushman found, over multiple studies, that expressing anger led to a heightened state of arousal and set the conditions for its reoccurrence in the future.
The middle way is to feel the anger mindfully. One can even discuss it. The distinction is in becoming the feeling (I am it) versus recognizing the feeling as a guest who soon will leave.
I agree for the most part, feeling the anger is a very important step to understanding where it comes from inside and the analogy of it being a guest is a great one. But (and this could just be the limitations of language so we may be saying the same thing) I disagree that expressing anger is always harmful.
I think the conventional idea about anger is that the only way to express it is to shout, yell or worse, physically assault somebody. To me that's just an unhealthy form of expression, that seems to come about due to fear or repression.
Imagine a friend punches you jokingly in the arm every time you see them and you find it uncomfortable. It's unhealthy to scream at them, sure, but IMO it's also unhealthy to just sit there and feel the anger mindfully while continuing to let them do it. The middle way is to tell them assertively to stop it. It doesn't have to be unkind - just like we wouldn't consider a cat unkind when it nips at you for invading its personal space for patting it too much. The cat is using the only expression it has to warn you about its boundaries, but most cats don't go off the rails and start tearing you apart because it was slighted.
Personally I never had a healthy example of anger growing up -- only dysfunctional examples -- so I believed that the conventional expression was the only way to express it. The conventional expression felt scary, so I avoided it at all costs. It took me years to realise that I was so afraid of the emotion and expression of anger that I was even using meditation and mindfulness to continue to repress it.
The more I began to express anger in these healthier ways, the less that heightened state of arousal comes up to the point where it's very rare that anger sticks around for more than a few moments now, and is far less intense in the body.
> When I see people deeply angry at society, at politicians, or at me, I see somebody who has had their boundaries crossed, again and again, and has been taught that they are not allowed to set them.
Aggressive angry people were frequently enabled whole their lives. They were not taught to control or suppress anger they were taught everyone else is at fault.
That is frequent real world situation.
Likewise, people who feel wronged and treated unfairly because they are subject to the same rules as others are a thing. Their boundary of "only I matter, you dont" was crossed, but is not legitimate at all.
The typical dynamic is that bully is enabled, because it is easier. And typically victim is pushed to more submission, because it is easier. And bully grows angrier and more aggressive.
And it is the same in politics.
The problem is society doesn’t allow normal people to enforce boundaries or consequences against those “aggressive angry people” in any meaningful way.
Yes, narcissism combined with aggression is a dangerous combo.
In my experience though almost every one of these aggressive angry people is quietly ashamed of their anger. They may not even be aware of it themselves, but that shame is what keeps it held together. They can never approach their anger because it feels so deeply to them as if their identity is that aggressive angry person, and so attacking their anger only makes their very identity feel threatened (even if it's not an identity they want). Attacking people is actually a way of protecting themselves.
I've had this experience multiple times in my life with bullies. Somehow trying to understand them even in the face of their anger allows them to relax and let down the offensive (although that of course does not mean letting them cross my boundaries).
People who've learned that form of interacting with other people have almost certainly had difficult lives. That doesn't mean to excuse them and allow them to run riot over everyone else, but the thing is attacking them is counterproductive and only puts up their defenses.
The bully-victim dynamic happens because one person is used to crossing boundaries (even if it feels bad) and the other person is used to allowing their boundaries be crossed (even if it feels bad). The bully explicitly seeks out those who have (through no fault of their own) been taught to allow their boundaries to be crossed. In both cases the mistaken belief is the same - that crossing boundaries is normal.
If you're interested in this more I highly recommend the 2017 documentary The Work:
My pet model of anger is as a manifestation/symptom of (or mask for) fear[0].
Having encountered people who reinforced their arbitrary boundaries in various ways (including physical violence) strategically and obviously without anger, as well as people who are constantly letting off anger without apparent success in own boundary reinforcement, I find the fear model a better fit for anger than the boundary-setting model.
That said, the models could coexist, make sense for different situations and individuals, and provide their own ways of resolution.
1. The boundary-setting model provides letting off anger as a way to reinforce boundaries and avoid the situation from reoccurring. It can be a productive way of dealing with the situation, and I admit one I haven’t thought about as much prior to today.
2. The fear model provides “overcoming fear” as a way of evolving to prevent the discomfort from reoccurring. From the boundary-setting angle, this could mean adjusting boundaries. (Note that this is different from repressing anger.)
Either model may be more useful in specific contexts: you may want to learn to choose the second option with a loved one, a friend, or perhaps a colleague, but to reinforce boundaries with a random person in a situation where others may use the precedent to take advantage of you[1].
Then, there’s a whole host of situations where there is fear/boundary violation not concerning any person in particular (e.g., living in a crowded city, in a society with unfamiliar norms, neurological changes due to physical factors difficult or impossible to control, etc.) where I wouldn’t say the fear model/overcoming fear is always the best fit, but I would say the boundary model/letting off anger could mostly lead to poor and destructive outcomes for yourself and others around you, especially over long term.
[0] Where “fear” ought to be interpreted at least as widely and generically as “boundaries” and could range from “fear of personal harm” to “fear for social status” to “fear of unknown” and so on.
[1] I will note that in such a situation giving into anger may be a bad choice if you are not in a position to use it well intuitively; depending on an individual and the situation, cold response can be more useful. Once you are weighing this all, you are necessarily not being angry, so the ability to snap back into the state on demand can be a valuable skill.
The article strongly equates anger with a desire for revenge. That's a bit confusing to me - for me, anger is just an emotion that's not particularly linked to any plan. Heck, I can even be angry at myself, in which case revenge doesn't even make sense. I think anger is most closely associated for me with "painful reflection on something that happened to me that felt unjust".
As an aside, while being easily angered is not good, I also think it's equally bad ritually suppress anger, because (a) that takes a toll over time that you eventually won't be able to suppress and (b) if you don't provide "feedback" to whatever it is that's angering you, it will probably happen again.
The claim in the article di that anger is associated with a desire for payback, of which revenge is one manifestation. This is subtle, but I think that in an article like this subtle differences matter. The author also claims that this is backed by psychology studies, though some sources for this claim would have been welcome.
The author does go on to focus on revenge only, and I'm with you on being skeptical that this implies that anger is an emotion that should be repressed. It seems to me that the authors equates a bit too quickly payback with a negative or a frivolous desire. The focus on Mandela's South Africa, of all things, is pretty curious since there definitely was a change in status for the white community after he took power.
When you're angry with yourself (or perhaps when you are angry at a situation in which you are by your own fault) the payback would be to not let that situation happen again. Or maybe the payback is to change yourself to address the character flaw that your anger is targeted at.
I love this distinction, thank you for capturing it. In this framing, what forms of payback besides revenge, if any, exist when one is angry with other people?
Proving them wrong. Or undoing the negative situation they created.
This can in fact be quite a powerful driver. When I was younger a hurtful comment by a teacher led me to start getting good marks in their subject. This was definitely fueled by the anger I felt at the dismissive remarks, as teenager me had no other motivation.
Another payback could be to increase your status to their level (not decrease theirs) so you can do things differently and make things right. What Mandela did basically.
Maybe making them feel remorseful or regret their initial action, but to me this is a byproduct and ends up not mattering that much. In the situation I described I didn't really care what the teacher felt or what effect there was on them (likely none at all). Though there was some satisfaction in proving to myself they were an idiot.
Replying to myself as I can't edit anymore, but I think payback can also be about cutting off the person from your life, or otherwise making them irrelevant to you. I don't believe this would qualify as revenge, and I think that this is a rather common type of anger payback. It is also rather healthy and effective when the person has a toxic behavior.
The article states that Aristotle and many modern philosophers agree that a desire for payback is a fundamental part of anger.
I questioned it too, thinking through a bunch of different scenarios.
The biggest counter example that popped into my head was being angry at my kids for doing typical kid stuff.
I'm not trying to get "payback" or revenge, right?
When I paused and reflected on it, I'm not so sure. Why do I raise my voice? I want them to feel bad, theoretically so that they learn to not do whatever it was they did. Is me wanting them to feel bad wanting payback? I guess you could argue that it is.
Whenever I get angry, it's very action-oriented. I stew on what I'm going to do in response to whatever made me angry. After I calm down, I can recognize how irrational most of those thoughts are.
My brain doesn't function well when I'm angry. The thing that I've learned, and it's been a hard lesson at times, is to not react. Those feelings of revenge and payback etc... make everything worse.
Especially when I really look back on whatever situation made me angry. Once I'm calm, I'm able to see what part of the situation was my fault. A lot of times, it's an embarrassingly large part, and the fact that I was a jerk in some way is hard to admit.
It's a lot easier to just externalize it all, get mad at someone else, and contemplate ways to "get even".
Thanks for pointing that out. As I reflect on it, I think anger is maybe just really confusing to me. I'm pretty hardwired to believe that if something went wrong, either it's my fault or there's some explanation for the other person's behavior. Anger causes some dissonance. I might burn a lot of cycles having a mental argument over the possible justification for what happened, and then of course I calm down eventually. I suppose that when I've been quite confident in injustice of a situation before I've calmed down, I've moved to thinking of revenge.
My thoughts of "revenge" aren't things that I would do to a person, for example, I don't think about slashing tires or calling their boss or anything like that.
It's much more internal, like "let's see how they like it when I'm gone". "They'll never find another guy like me". "This company will never survive without me". Stuff like that. When I get very angry, I shut down. My move is to leave.
I've acted on this many times when I was younger to my regret. I've learned to never make big decisions when I'm tired or angry, because a lot of the time they are vengeance driven, rather than what's best for me.
Yours is a good point — and something that took me a long time to understand about some people I care about. Personally, my anger is usually "directed," though more in the sense of furiously/forcefully wanting to correct some perceived wrong, rather than revenge. The notion of "directionless anger" was kinda alien to my mind.
But some people definitely have an "angry at the world" or "angry in general" feeling. And if you swoop in with a "let's fix the problem that's causing this" attitude, it may completely miss the mark for them. Ask me how I know (:
For some people, a good outlet for anger is venting, and doing something is not helpful. And for others, it's the opposite. People are complicated. We use simplistic words like "anger" which mean different things to different people in different contexts, and misunderstandings ensue.
Very interesting. I definitely feel like my anger is directed - I'm usually angry about something specific, and it would feel good if someone genuinely tried to help fix the problem - but I just don't think about revenge too much. I think it takes most of my energy to try to understand what happened and why, and I don't generally stay angry that long about specific events.
> my anger is usually "directed," though more in the sense of furiously/forcefully wanting to correct some perceived wrong, rather than revenge.
This is the exact definition of revenge. While revenge carries connotations that we tend to separate ourselves from today -- sounds too barbaric? -- it's fundamentally about justice, and as such is justified and even noble given the right context and expression.
I suppose I lightly disagree with that. Revenge, to me, holds a significant connotation of "spite." I.e. making someone feel bad/hurt because they made you feel bad/hurt. It's about the hurt, as much as (or more than) correcting the situation.
But words are sloppy, I totally get what you're saying too (:
Interesting, yeah that makes sense to me too.
> can even be angry at myself, in which case revenge doesn't even make sense
I have seen lots of people, myself included, where self revenge would make the most plausible explanation for behavior. I no longer see people as homogeneous or discrete.
Anger serves a useful tool, but it can also be an extremely powerful way to manipulate and be manipulated.
Fascinating, can you describe some of these cases? I suppose self-harm could fit this description, but let's say I'm angry at myself for making a bad decision that hurt someone else, what would revenge on myself look like? It would be hard to make things up to the victim by sabotaging myself.
Bad self talk where one tears oneself down is a common one.
There is also regressive punishment, in the case where someone else has been wronged, not writing the wrong and letting it linger is also a form of self harm.
I now have the philosophy that if I were to see someone else treating someone the way one treats themselves, and they take note of it, then the internal behavior is not appropriate.
Denying oneself something nice/good (but unrelated). Or doing something that provokes a punishing response from someone/something else. Like picking a fight, or "failing" to pay bills, gambling.
Neither will help a victim of course, but self-sabotage never help (almost by definition).
Anger is also learned. I grew up in a household in which rage was accepted and permitted. It took me quite a lot of time and interaction outside of my family to realize that I had learned patterned reactions of anger that were entirely unjustified and that this anger was altogether harmful, unproductive, and pointless.
If you are responsible for taking care of others, keep in mind that the way you act will stick with them. What you do today may be encoded and burned into them such that it determines their behavior tomorrow.
When I worked in psychiatry, I was taught that emotion isn't learned, but behavior is.
I don't know if I buy that. I think that many of our emotions are driven by our expectations, and expectations are definitely learned.
Hand a wealthy person an imperfect fruit, and they'll react with anger.
Hand the same fruit to a hungry person, and you'll get gratitude.
I agree. Also, emotional regulation is a thing—feeling an initial flash of anger is one thing, but allowing yourself to be consumed by it is another. I think I have pretty good emotional control of my anger, I rarely lose my temper at people and I'm generally pretty good at channeling it productively.
But the reaction doesn't go away, and it is also linked to other things like taking care of your physical health, diet, sleep, etc. taking accountability for your reactions to things ultimately involves cleaning up a lot of the rest of your life, too. Plus people can find it hard to believe that healthier people are less angry, but I firmly believe this is true based on my own observations of myself—so in this sense, emotions kind of are a choice, with enough practice and desire to achieve this and luck.
It is indeed very difficult to separate emotion and behavior, both concepts are encapsulated by the same continual shifting attention. That maintaining control over this shifting of attention is the focus of so many philosophies (eastern and western) shouldn't be ignored.
It might be that emotion and behavior are so tightly coupled that they are effectively both learned and it doesn't make complete sense to distinguish them.
For example, when I used to struggle more with these feelings, I'd get into tirades which were behavioral reactions that, rather than simmering things down, would just further amplify my anger. Similarly, I think forcing yourself to smile and other subtle behaviors actually can have an emotional effect.
Me too.
>> I grew up in a household in which rage was accepted and permitted.
Accepted, permitted and encouraged: "Show your anger! Let them know! Bring it out! Don't accept that from that person! Get angry!" Righteous indignation was exactly the right way to feel when you have "been wronged".
It's amongst the greatest disservices my parents could have done to me (there were more, plenty more).
I eventually managed to undo much of the damage to my personality by asking a simple question whenever I start to feel anger:
"Does this matter?"
If it really matters, get angry - get REALLY angry if you need to. I found that almost nothing matters and I basically never get angry.
Getting angry destroys relationships and friendships pretty much instantly - and the angry person is typically unaware of this.
I saw a woman in a carpark get super angry because someone else took her parking spot that she was waiting to back into. She got out of her car and yelled into their window and stomped around and she was clearly furious. I thought "that woman has no mechanism to determine if this situation matters enough to get angry."
I also never learned explicitly from my parents what "kindness" (the inverse of anger) is - it puzzled me when it started to become clear in my 20's that this is an important concept and I did not understand it and needed to.
If you are responsible for taking care of others, keep in mind that the way you act will stick with them
this was the biggest motivator for me to change my behavior. when i saw my kids doing things i didn't like, i realized that i was doing the same, and that they were most likely learning it from me, or if it wasn't me then i wasn't doing enough to model a better behavior.
the challenge is that many of these behaviors did not come out until i had kids. when you learn something from your parents, very often you don't get to apply that without kids, so you are not even aware that you would act like that until you are in the same situation with your kids.
Anger is the mind perceiving something it finds wrong (or undesirable), and then feeling it must do something to change it. Feeling anger isn't a bad thing; it's what inspires us to right wrongs. The problem is when we let the feeling dictate when we act and how. Feel your feeling of anger - and then stop, and ask yourself if this thing really is wrong, if you personally need to right this wrong, if you need to do it right now, and how you can right it in a way that creates more good than harm.
Anger at the world is a motivation for many engineers. "That shit ain't right, I know how it could be better. See me fix it".
I feel the article takes a widely useful human capability and isolates it to a set of negative, socially contingent actions. Revenge is a social thing. Anger is not necessarily social.
I can get angry at the mess and thus promptly put things in order.
It seems to me Nelson Mandela used his anger strategically. It wasn't that he wasn't angry, and that the derivatives of non-anger were the golden solution. After all, as the article mentions—but here in my phrasing—his strategy collapses into violence when non-violence won’t work, and then virtuously claims it is based in non-anger (the favored party always uses violence "correctly" and instrumentally as a last resort, while the opponents are seen as just angry and violent). Mandela was angry, but he used it under the disguise of a set of virtues he deemed superior to those he hated. He likely idealized himself as a non-violent person, but was deeply angered—and, in my view, there's nothing wrong with that. His strategy being a long-term one. I do not know too much about Mandela, and these are my speculations grounded mostly in psychological observations, which makes me not easily believe things are as they appear.
Anger is highly productive in an often harsh evolutionary framework.
> The central puzzle is this: the payback idea does not make sense. Whatever the wrongful act was – a murder, a rape, a betrayal – inflicting pain on the wrongdoer does not help restore the thing that was lost.
My understanding is that the "tit for tat" algorithm explains why anger can make sense as a game theory strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
I mean sure. Anger (revenge) is purely destructive in one isolated interaction, but its possibility may prevent actions against you next time (or at all). Its "irrationality" makes such a response more likely even if you might rationally (or out of timidity etc) decide against it, which increases its scope of protection. It all makes a lot of sense.
Today was Plato's Academy's seminar on The Philosophy and Psychology of Anger
The video should be posted, I think. Most of the talks were very good.
Love the downvote. Here's the video.
From anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool.
The evolutionary purpose of anger is to coerce others / control the behavior of others.
I think Martha Nussbaum thinks that it signals that our status has been negatively affected. That seems right to me.
Or its role is to react toward perceived injustices within a social group in order to strengthen and reinforce cooperation.
Your article is insightful. Anger is not a solution. Yet, you write as an individual who has no idea about the actual motivations of the headline character you involve in this narrative. Mandela was a terrorist. Plain and simple. In his “struggle” he concocted plans to harm innocent individuals in bombings - what about their anger of their family members? In his career as a politician, he initiated a systemic destruction of society and order in South Africa, the effects and repercussions of which are in evidence today. What a lazy and convenient use of a figurehead you have chosen to make your points!