More often than not, we are told
anger is a bad thing. There are plenty
of examples where anger has terrible results, elides care, or serves
ignorance. Things are even worse when
rage is considered. Horror
movies and worst-case-scenarios come to mind.
Anger? Awful. Rage?
The ultimate fail.
But such blanket condemnation is wrong. Should anger appall us like some rabid
animal, even when justified? The bias
against anger extends to passions in general, whose expression is consigned to
certain forms, at certain times, under the imperious rules of an onerous etiquette. These proscriptions, built into the cogworks
of daily life, delimit an acceptable zone for conversation, especially at the
levels of power. It is a rather grey and
formulaic space.
I watch the babblers on the news, glib
yet clad in the soporific tones of normalese.
Their phrases blur into so many dried out husks, eroded into a shuffling
mass by the windspeak of their faux objectivity. Without emotion there is no color, only the
colorless numbness of the norm. These
talking heads not only reduce news analysis to sound bites between commercials,
not only add their spins, slants and fallacies, but also imbue the tenor of their
presentation with an insensitive nonchalance, or worse, the merest touch of
saccharine concern. After watching for a
while, the speakers’ jaws seem to go wooden, like those of puppets, and their routines start
to paralyze the soul, that seat of dream-riled inspirations.
Shallowness is good fodder for the mind control
of the masses. It is good for
consumerism. It is good if you don’t
want people to think too much about lopsided wealth curves, about the sweatshopping
of the weak, about the nuclear threat to life itself, or ecosystems smashed on the nihilistic anvil of avarice.
Passion in service of justice, in
contravention of the puppet show, isn’t shallow. It doesn’t dull, deaden or oppress.
Western
tradition has a long history of placing the ‘rational’ above the emotional. If a newscaster or pundit dares to show
emotion they have lost their ‘objectivity’--and then, wow, nightmare, debacle,
castigation (this applies to serious topics, involving money, military, law and
politics, but not the cutesy sideshows).
In Plato’s writing, Emotion is the bad black horse, always in trouble
unless strictly reined in by Reason, aided by the good white horse, Willpower.
The grand problem with this ancient
worldview is that, ironically, it fosters ignorance. The ‘smarter’ conquering people are superior
to the defeated ‘savage’ peoples. Men
are ‘clearly’ superior to women, as they are more ‘logical’. Conqueror over conquered, man over woman,
human over animal, these oppressive splits draw from the false, enduring dual
frame.
The result has been a more-than-poignant
history of atrocious sagas. If the mechanisms
of oppression continue, world collapse is imminent, brought on by the Narcissism
of the Masters; Greed sucking us all
down into its gold-toothed, war-hawking gyre.
The oligarchs, no matter how many trophies they accumulate, seek fix
after fix after fix. It is accelerative,
addictive. No empathy. No concern beyond the immediate grab (“We
must maximize profit this quarter!” “We
must win this election!” “We must defeat
our competitors!”).
Civilizations have died from top-heavy
egoism. Given our global
interconnectivity, the next iteration of such pathology will take us all
down. As I say below, this is why we
must evolve our emotional competency or
perish. If we do, it will foment a
true breakthrough in the understanding of the self.
Here’s what psychology tells
us: reason is an integrative process. It involves many parts of the
mind, interacting complexity in an ocean of memory/experience. The brain’s neural
nets trellis as we go along. These
dendritic vines shape our interactions with the world, even as they shape us back.
The
sophistry of the status quo would have us belittle and box our anger and other
passions. But these sprightly forces are
integral to the mind’s grand holistic schemes.
Its magical fractals of
neurotransmitted sparks. Passions are not
alien to the pyrotechnics of cognitive expression. They are players within its multidimensional spotlights.
In a reflection of my Western bias,
my first impulse, when drafting this essay, was to consider passions as being much
like instruments in a mental orchestra. But
this metaphor is just another version of Plato’s Chariot. The 'rational' charioteer imposes harsh
objectifying control, keeps taut the reins.
Passions are much more than
instruments leashed to scores or scripts.
They are different than horses. They
are manifestations of voices within a greater sentience ( note that even the self is a player in the greater arena of the mind, as we can see in our dreams). Imagine instruments and conductor so
entangled as to be fused into a mutuality, one that thinks, lives and performs together.
Importantly, it is not as if the
instruments merely absorb the conductor’s will, or become living
mirrors of the conductor. They each bring their own voice to collective.
Carl Jung broke critical ground when he introduced an intrapsychic pantheon
of archetypes. Autonomous or semi-autonomous presences within the greater psyche.
On this
picture, if you segregate passions from the overall performance, and
try to bridle them like a horse, or control them like a musical instrument, you not only
diminish the music but also the ability to compose and orchestrate.
****
Adrienne
Rich was eulogized by the New Yorker as
a poet of “towering rage.” This was not
pejorative. She stepped out bravely in
the face of inveterate social inequality, the sort that lurks unacknowledged yet ubiquitous. Entrenched.
Imagine a broken light bulb,
shattered in its socket , shedding no light; and yet suppose the people around
it all say it is glowing. You challenge them,
“The bulb is broken,” and trot out the evidence, already feeling like you are
in Wonderland, because it is ridiculous to have to explain: the brokenness is obvious, immediate, empirical.
But the group gets angry. They call you
a liar and worse. If you resort to anger
yourself, you discover it is a prerogative of the in-group. Their anger is just fine. They are, at the core, ‘rational’. You, on the other hand, are branded as ‘emotional’,
an exile-worthy stigma. If you are a
woman, like Rich, your ‘emotional’ status validates the prejudice that women
are ‘weepy’ and ‘weak’. The group might
suggest you ‘stay in your place.’ If you
are a male, your ‘emotional’ status might be taken to validate another
stereotype, and get you labeled as gay. For them, homosexuality
is an abomination.
This light-bulb allegory only hints at the viciousness of the counterattack that activists
confront. From the ramparts of the denialists,
there is simply no controversy. The
broken light bulb is glowing. The white race is superior. Men should rule. LGBT is
evil. And on and on.
This sort of
reality-bending has a term in mental health jargon, “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is used to describe an abusive
person (in the full criminal sense) who manipulates and threatens so much
that the victims snap. They embrace the implanted,
false picture. If the abuser says the light
in on, it is certainly on in the eyes of those mentally (and often physically) battered.
Indoctrination into society as a
whole is abusive this way. Citizens get
gaslighted from all sides--media, commercial, family, government. This assembly line of acculturation is backed
by an omnipresence, the Panopticon as Foucault would say. Young children are the ones who often point
out the contradictions and cruelties in our ways of living; that is, before they
themselves get molded into walking echo chambers of the loud, standardized
scripts.
The
subconscious, interlocking reinforcement mechanisms of our canons and
institutions, the citadel-like strength of the Panopticon, cannot be easily
defied. Immense honesty is necessary,
the sort that fueled Rich’s “towering rage.”
Such rage is natural if you don’t
hide from the truth. Republican leaders dismiss
global warming as a hoax, even as evidence piles to the contrary. They call it a hoax despite an extreme
consensus among climatologists. Similarly,
Republican leaders don’t seem concerned by the current mass extinction event, or
the unprecedented pollution and overtaxing of the Earth itself. They balk at racism even as they hammer
racism into the hearts of their followers with paranoid, delusional rhetoric. They employ homophobia and misogyny as recruitment tools, couching them
in insidious ‘dog whistle’ references. Their
shortsightedness reveals the danger of passion imprisoned, passion harnessed by deception.
We understandably fear anger in
such cases because it resembles a powder keg.
But artists and poets, like Rich, effectively work with intense anger. They are alchemists of emotion, wielding pen
or paintbrush. Anger wedded to honesty opens
the mind and stimulates thought. It is liberatory,
cathartic and cleansing. It motivates
vigilance and seeks evolution of the collective consciousness.
Much of what I’m saying relates to
the academic discussion of emotional intelligence. “The [Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence] helps people
build effective emotion-regulation strategies, equipping them to transform
powerful emotions like anger into action that targets unjust systems.” This is a vast step in the direction of
saving humanity. I would go so far as to
say that humanity will either persist or crash depending on how far we can
evolve our relationship with our intrapsychic forces.
We can no longer afford a planet where sociopaths take center stage,
pushing the anti-virtues of fascism on susceptible masses, even as they seek to usurp the right to choose how and when we go to war. If psychological maturity overwhelms bigotry, the malice of demagogues who seek power for ignoble ends will be readily thwarted.
The problem I see with the Yale
Center’s philosophy is the talk of 'transforming' anger, as if it were a mere stage in an hierarchical process. Obviously anger, and all passions, need to
coexist with wisdom. The artist hurls
paint at the canvas, the writer hurls words onto the page, the protesters yell
chants or cover themselves in fake blood.
They don’t throw rocks. If the voices of anger are allowed to speak, the mind might be cleared for moods of peace. Organic experience will be cyclical, not hierarchical. It’s not as if one passion is better than
others, or that peaceful moods are superior. All participate in actualization.
As the contexts and stories of our
lives change, so do the cognitive weather patterns within
our brain lobes. If some ‘rational’
tyrant of an ego imposes shackles on the stormy emotions, it has tremendous
consequences.
Wise relationship with the forces
within the mind, a sort of respectful, mutual management, is hard. It requires acceptance. Purging. Dealing with wounds and shames. Heroic effort goes into working with anger and other passions. But the honesty, the truth, the raw wonder
and release that leave one feeling quintessentially alive; the soulfelt urge to
heal this world and strive for love not hate, compassion not greed, these are
no mere perks to be acquired, no mere trophies for a shelf. They are liberatory centers of action with many
offshoots and implications.
By marrying truth and ethos--merging the science of psychology with the most noble concepts we can discern, such as human rights--we can live
deeply and well, and strive to navigate
the perils of the current age, of doomsday weapons and extinctions, despots and
wars-- and confront the very gaping curses, not yet begun to heal, forged from the awful, monumental genocides, starting with the invasion
by Columbus.
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