Brendan O’Neill on the war on anger:
The psychologisation of anger has two consequences: first it separates our anger from the experience or the condition that gave rise to it, so that our ‘expressions of rage’ are always judged to be disproportionate, irresponsible and illegitimate. This can be seen in the relentless rise of rages, from ‘air rage’ to ‘golf rage’ to ‘work rage’. People who suffer from these rages, from the alleged psychological condition of losing the plot in airports, on golf courses or around the water cooler at work, are seen as irrational individuals with moral and mental flaws rather than rational actors expressing loud’n’rowdy displeasure with having been treated badly.
[…] This leads to the second consequence of psychologising anger. In robbing anger of its social element, and transforming it into a personal problem that requires one-on-one corrective therapy, the anger-management movement nurtures a society that is obsessed with policing individuals’ inner lives rather than focusing on transforming the world around us. From the anti-angry worldview, society should devote its resources to correcting rage-afflicted individuals rather than fixing the things that made us angry in the first place.
[…] The war against anger is not a top-down conspiracy. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four, with faceless authoritarians decreeing that certain emotions must be outlawed. Rather, today’s nervous and insecure elite instinctively fears certain emotions and champions others; indeed, it is precisely because the authorities are adrift and directionless that they feel the need to police the mind and to pacify what looks to them like an unknowable, untrustworthy mass of people: the public.
I agree with O’Neill because increasingly society wants us to believe that anger has no value and that angry people (especially angry women) are just a bunch of irrational or self-indulgent people who should be feared. Anger is as legitimate an emotion as joy and I believe that it is the most powerful emotion of all because one cannot who s/he is unless s/he knows what makes her/him angry. One of the scariest problems with modern societies is that their members have become too apathetic in a futile attempt to achieve total control over themselves and their lives. Anger has become inconvenient because it highlights the possibility of losing control and more importantly because it reminds us that sometimes shit happens and that we may not be able to do anything about it.
The power of anger comes from its ability to force us to confront our own powerlessness, to accept it and then to do something about it. There is a war on anger because people don’t want to hear that they don’t have full control and that in spite of their prayers, their efforts, their aspirations, or whatever else, things may still end up badly, terribly, or tragically to them. A society where it is forbidden or considered crazy to be angry is a dying society crippled by its belief that humanity only deserves to survive if it becomes perfect and if people avoids necessary clashes with reality. I am willingly to bet my right pinky that the most violent societies are the ones where anger is the most vilified and where people learn very early that they have to bury their anger.
