ANGER

Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002) ("I have grown increasingly impatient with the blithe reductionism of the so-called self-help movement. I have grown impatient at seeing the laudable idea that life is a series of struggles to be undertaken--or questions to be asked, or burdens to be borne--replaced with the idea that life is essentially a set of problems to be solved by the adoption of the right program (spiritual or electronic) or the purchase of the right product (pharmaceutical or electronic)." Id. at 9-10. YES! "I have also grown increasingly angry at our full-bellied acquiescence to social and economic injustice. I'm referring to the notion that everything other than the perfectible self is too vast and complex to admit to any remedy whosoever, and that our best course of (in)action lies in ironical detachment or in the cultivation of an abrasive attitude that deliver some of the release, but packs none of the punch, of well-aimed rage. Our advertising and even our arts covey the idea that we as a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraints, when the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel." Id. at 10. SO TRUE!! From "Anger as Mentality": "Of course, if you have actually been a victim, or if you live in an abusive relationship or in what amounts to a war zone of violent activity, you can hardly be accused of exaggerating your danger...." "For many of us, however, I suspect that the opposite is true. "We have an exaggerated view of the dangers of our neighborhood, because our neighborhood is perceived as a composite 'world,' which, strictly speaking, does not exist except on paper, on a screen, and in our heads. Inhabiting such a virtual neighborhood is not necessarily a humanizing experience. It can engender a kind of fantasy life in which the dangers of people everywhere add up to the sum total of our danger, not by way of sympathy, but by way of paranoia, which expresses itself in daydreams of revenge and self-defense.  These daydreams can often be formulated as a series of 'if' clauses: 'if someone ever did something like that to my family,' 'if what happened six thousand miles away ever happened right here,' 'if this stranger I'm seeing before me turned out to be another version of the person whose face and name are now on the news,' and so on. The 'then' clauses that follow the 'if' clauses can amount to actual anger in responses to imaginary provocation With the right stimulus, they can lead to actual violence." Id. at 69, 72-73. Contemplate all the personal resources that are wasted to address the fear generated by the "if-clauses/then-clauses" that in one's head. One gets a stronger lock for the house, even though the old lock was strong enough. One limits one's nighttime activities, even though the likelihood of one's being victimized approaches zero. One advocates for a still larger police force, or extra patrol in one's neighborhood, etc. One looks more distrusting at one's neighbors, and one's neighbors at one. One's barters away liberty for the sake of a greater sense of safety. And it may well be only a greater sense of safety, not greater actual safety, that is gained; if that.).