Delphic Maxim 16: Control anger

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

16. Control anger

Of all the emotions that we experience, I reckon that anger would have to be the most destructive. It festers away inside us, poisoning our relationships with people and the world around us. It’s often the quickest reaction for which we reach when something doesn’t go our way, be it road rage, social media rage, or anger when we feel we’ve been slighted.

I don’t mean to completely write off anger, of course. There is a kind of anger oriented towards social justice, what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called ‘righteous indignation’. This sense of anger at the way things are can be constructive, if it inspires us to get up and do something about it. To borrow from the great Gough Whitlam, to ‘maintain the rage’ in the pursuit of noble political outcomes.

But this is anger when it is controlled, a focused anger directed towards something worthwhile. I think this maxim responds to the kind of senseless fury into which we sometimes slip, a blind grasping for revenge or pure feeling. Today’s Delphic Maxim aligns neatly with the views of Stoics like Aurelius or Seneca: it’s okay to feel, but ultimately you should be in control your emotional responses, rather than allowing them to control you.

I have never achieved anything through unbridled anger, except a painful burning in my chest, and a clouded mind. Every seething argument I’ve had with somebody close to me has left me feeling hollow and empty, drained because I caved in to something base, and nobody feels good after a fight. When cooler heads prevail, apologies are made, and a more sensible and conciliatory outcome is found. People react to anger most often with anger — or pity — and nobody benefits from this sort of negative vortex. The best things we achieve happen when we put plenty of thought, design and effort into them, not when we respond with a half-cocked take on an issue.

I think this is pretty timely to reflect on as well, because our politics seems to be informed more and more by anger. I could do pop-theorising about how the rise of social media has given voice to communities of rage, how people no longer have time to reflect to themselves and think deeply before putting a view out in public. But that would take a whole lot more effort, and thinking, and I’d probably miss a thousand other causes on the way through. So let me instead talk about what I see, rather than why I think it’s happening.

There’s a more visible politics of rage. On one side, this includes hatred of immigrants, of people from different ethnic backgrounds, there is a reflexive criticism of ‘the left’ and an angry rejection of the science of climate change, of science itself, and of any proposal to remedy the injustices and inequalities of our society. This isn’t necessarily an ideological disagreement: an ideology requires that people have taken the time to flesh-out a coherent idea of how the world works. This is an angry reaction to an identity position, it’s politics played as emotion, and as a personal attack. It’s a sense of ‘values’ tied to a flag (whether that’s the flag of nationhood or a metaphorical flag for particular causes), and supercharged by anger in online communities.

However, this isn’t a one-sided use of anger. While I (obviously) lean to the other side of politics, I think it’s worth recognising the role that rage and fury has come to play in our politics as well. The rush to denunciate anyone and everything that causes offence isn’t a productive expression of ‘righteous indignation’, it’s a paralysing jam on dialogue. I recently read a wonderful article on outrage, and I think this is the progressive’s negative corollary to the straight up rage of the other mob. Rather than thinking through how best to focus outrage into something productive, people are content to blast emotion into the cyber void, all fire and fury and out of the ashes…what? More ashes, and that painful burn in the chest, and our heads filled with smoke.

Anger brings a fog that prevents us from seeing clearly, and foggy minds are difficult to navigate.

This maxim is one that I fail at all the time, but something that I try to work on. I know that reason can’t trump emotion in an outright battle (and I use the word ‘trump’ quite deliberately). So we all need to make a conscious effort to take the heat out of a situation if we want reasonable and peaceful heads to prevail.

So control your anger, especially online, and especially when you’re trying to achieve something productive. It’s okay to feel angry — it’s perfectly natural, in fact — but what you do with that has a serious impact on the world around you.