I consider myself to be a fairly standard American male, in the sense that, as an adolescent anyway, my cultural identity was drawn largely from watching sports and action-adventure movies. My role models included actors such as Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and various other such personalities.
I don’t wish to draw too large of a generalization here, but in these movies, the apex of the plot usually features a massive expression of violent anger.
To sum up the plots: The bad guy (who is really really bad) has done something nasty to someone vulnerable (usually the child, grandchild, or highly virtuous wife of the good guy). So the good guy/hero, who is normally very calm and easy-going, becomes a victim for 80 minutes. He not only has his loved ones severely threatened, he also usually takes a pretty good beating himself. Then, just as all seems lost, in lieu of eating a can of spinach, our hero loses his temper, gets a huge surge of added anger-induced energy, and then (hooray!!!!) vents a serious amount of rage-filled hurt on the bad guy. Much to our collective delight.
It is not that difficult to understand that, after so much repetition of this scenario, one might start to think that the violent expression of anger is a noble and desirable trait of masculinity, so much so that one might start to actually cultivate one’s anger, by imagining and presuming that bad guys are right around the corner. After all, if anger is manly, why wait for a bad guy to show up, why waste time, let’s get angry in advance. (not to say that women are not taught to get angry too.)
I will confess to you, I used to indulge in a fair amount of what I suppose could be called rage- aholicism. In fairness to the movies, I think they were just echoing the anger that was pre-existing within me. But in fairness to me, having so many of these movies come at you from so many directions, they did serve to reinforce this behavior.
What finally dawned on me one day (as I was writing a failed book on sexual stereotypes) was that I was completely wrong about anger. While it is easy to think that anger is an expression of personal power, it is in fact the exact opposite.
The real key here is that in the movie scenario, there always has to be a helpless vulnerable entity in the mix. The anger does not stem from power, the anger comes from the sense of vulnerability, victimization, injustice, and helplessness. The fact that it never results from anything noble should tell you something.
The real harm caused by indulgence in anger as a “justifiable/heroic” response to a sense of helplessness, is that, by becoming angry, you are essentially saying to yourself this totally untrue statement: in your calm non-angry rational state, you are not powerful enough to deal with your problems.
Believing you are powerless is bad enough by itself. But what is worse about this is, this makes it ever so likely that you are going to turn somewhere else for guidance and assistance in dealing with this problem.
And that, my friends, is why you get so much anger-inducing media thrown at you so often. By presenting some powerful villain to you, people who wish to influence your voting decisions will at first make you feel helpless, then you may reinforce the sense of helplessness by becoming angry, then the anger drives you to throw all of your support towards the person who told you about this terrible powerful villain in the first place. If you were to not careen into this highly charged emotional state of anger, it would be much more difficult to gain your support, as that would require a lengthy logical argument.
Being in a state of anger/rage makes it very unlikely that you will think calmly and rationally. And believe it or not, there are some people that really don’t want you to be thinking for yourself. They want to control you, and they can do this by indirectly presenting outside supposed threats to your fragile well being.
So the next time you find yourself getting incensed over a news report or something that someone is saying on talk radio, try this experiment: do not allow yourself to become angry. This will, sadly, expose your sense of helplessness and vulnerability, but if you think about it for a moment, you may discover that the factual basis of the initial scare doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny. It’s usually a vague implication, if not a downright lie. There is a big difference between a person who has a difference of opinion with you over fiscal policy and a 60-foot demon from hell, but the news media doesn’t want you to know that.
Also, anger that stems from imagined righteous indignation is very dangerous in that it just feels so darned good. It’s actually addictive. But in the longer term, the creation of large amounts of anger creates polarization and factionalization. By hindering calm discussion and debate, this favors certain entities who would prefer that we not work cooperatively together, as this would be unprofitable to them.
So anyway, to sum up: anger is not power. Anger is an attempt to cover up a belief in your own powerlessness. You are not powerless. By not indulging in anger, you have more power, not less.
© Justin Locke
