Comment by 082349872349872
1 year ago
I'm with the Inuit and Jedi on this one: anger is pretty useless[0], and if you must[1] take revenge, that's best served cold.
Sometimes I wonder if the typical Hollywood W-plot, in which the hero's best friend/significant relation is shown partying/getting the girl/otherwise living well at the top of the middle ∧ then killed by the villain at the bottom of the right ∨, after which the hero gets angry and wins the day, has been deliberately chosen to teach the proles exactly the wrong lesson, but then I remember to never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Speaking of storytelling, isn't a corollary of The Iliad that if Achilles had not been —or at least not stayed— angry, a few dozen ships worth of Achaeans would not have died (as described by Homer with lines worthy of 1975's Rollerball) in gruesome ways?
[0] is it useful for creatures that only have a limbic system? not only do we have a neocortex, but it's much more useful in these cases
[1] often simply continuing to live well oneself is far better than any revenge
"At times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice. For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric. When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth. They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry."
Agnes Callard, https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/anger-management-agnes...
Although I am not a violent person, I think some people only respond to violence. They cannot be reasoned with.
Non violence is made effective by the credible threat of a violent alternative
3 replies →
Those people are best dealt with by calm force. Or controlled aggression if that suits you better. Random violence is just stupid and wrong.
Anger is useful in a way, that it gives energy and overcomes paralyzing fear. When you are in a survival fight with no way to escape, anger can make all the difference - otherwise we would not have evolved it. But sure, it is way way better, to not be in a situation where anger is the last resort - and in all normal (social) situations, anger is dangerous. The idea is is to be in control of your body - and not your emotions controlling you.
So I am with the Inuit with this approach:
"When they're little, it doesn't help to raise your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart rate go up."
When you meet anger with anger, the fire only goes stronger.
Children mainly learn by observing the elders. If they resolve their conflicts with anger - they will mimic it. If they see the elders being calm, that is what they will learn. And if they learn, that they will get what they want, if they throw a tantrum - then this is what they will do more in the future. Consequence is key here.
But I am very sceptical about the bad stories. They don't help I think.
What helps is channeling the anger with martial arts for example. There you can learn to feel the anger raising, after you get a hit - but not become blinded by it. You stay cool. And in control.
edit: what works best when my children have their heads hot - literally cooling them with a bit of water
Anger is not at all useless, it is a powerful and extremely useful emotion. When we witness injustice, when our loved ones are threatened or harmed, when someone treats us with contempt or disrespect, anger is our signal that we must take action, and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done.
Understanding your anger and not letting it control your behaviour (ie not giving in to blind rage), is important. But there are no useless emotions, and of all the “negative” emotions, anger is among the most useful and important.
> Anger is not at all useless, it is a powerful and extremely useful emotion.
A while ago I had a loved one both harmed and threatened.
I called my insurance, who gave me a lawyer, who got the facts from my loved one and combined them with the law, giving the case to a judge, who gave us a court order which allowed us to both (a) remedy the harm, and (b) get law enforcement backup. For this outcome, very little energy, and no courage (at least on our parts), was required.
How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?
> How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?
If at any point the chain of actions had broken down, anger would have granted the motivation to pursue through the roadblock.
You do understand that this very system implicitly disadvantages those who do not have such straightforward access to it, right?
7 replies →
It sounds to me like you were driven more by other emotions — perhaps feelings of care, concern or worry. That doesn't prove that anger is useless, simply that in that situation, it wasn't the primary emotion you were experiencing or that drove your behaviour.
But let's suppose that the same situation unfolded, except you were Black, and the treatment you received by the legal system was rude and dismissive in ways that you were familiar with, having experienced racism many times before. In that situation you might experience much more anger, and you might rely on that anger to give you the courage and energy to deal with the injustice you were experiencing.
> (...) and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done.
I don't think that's true. Anger, by definition, is a primal/emotional response that leads people to act abruptly without any semblance of reflection on the potential impact of their actions.
The expressions "acted in anger" does not mean "acted with courage to do what needed to be done". It actually means someone screwed up badly without thinking things through.
Anger does literally give a person energy and what can be labelled "courage" beyond their norm. That it is still up to the human being with a fully functional brain to figure out whether or not to use that energy (and, if yes, what exactly to do with it) doesn't change that fact.
5 replies →
You are describing moral outrage. The other poster is talking about what academics associate with the fight or flight instinct.
I agree with the other poster anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success. Extreme emotions engages our primal brain which prevents our more advanced brain from engaging.
> You are describing moral outrage.
That's simply a fancy label for a particular kind of anger, as one might be able to tell from the literal definition of outrage: an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.
In my opinion there are few things quite as pathetic as people who twist themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging their emotions for what they are. Certain emotions are "bad" (anger, jealousy, etc), and so instead of addressing it when they feel those things, they just convince themselves that they aren't actually feeling them at all and that their reactions are driven by some higher logic or nobler emotion - all while still inflicting their emotional fallout on those around them.
5 replies →
> anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success.
But historically when they did not result in negative long term success, they paid off big time.
Anger is not an extreme emotion. It's used all of the time to good purpose. You're thinking about rage. If the "other poster" failed to make this distinction then it's really important to make it now so that we don't start strawmanning or ad homineming based on a misunderstanding.
Personally Joy has been an extreme emotion that has done me bad. As when I experience Joy I start to stop paying attention. On one occasion I suffered a broken bone because of it.
"Engages our primal brain ... prevents our more advanced brain engaging"
That's not how that works.
Moral outrage is when I'm pissed off at someone else bc they don't fit my preconceived idea of how people ought to live or behave - it's not real anger, especially not in 2024.
Being pissed off bc of injustice to my family - that is for sure actual anger.
In Sanskrit literature, a term often used when describing heroes like Rama and Arjuna is jitakrodha, “one who has conquered his anger”. The idea is for you to be in control of your anger, rather than for anger to control you. Rather than anger arising in response to external circumstances and causing you to be carried away and doing things you may regret later, instead anger should be a tool, something you invoke or bring on, when you consciously decide that you need to do battle (or something requiring that energy) — like fire (something anger is frequently compared to), it is dangerous and destructive but a useful tool when one employs it deliberately.
"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."
The problem is that there's about equal amounts of malice as stupidity in the world, so you never really know why. Assuming stupidity by default doesn't always make you feel better and may still lead to an emotional reaction you don't want to have.
The better solution is to not care why, and do what ya gotta do. Usually that's creating distance from the source of problems and you and your work.
> The problem is that there's about equal amounts of malice as stupidity in the world
Also, they are often connected. People who don't know something often refuse to learn it or even to hear about it. Not knowing something is stupidity, but refusing to learn is a conscious decision to be stupid in harmful ways, and that is a form of malice.
Distance is the only solution I know of when the malice is significant and it is at an all time high right now in the USA.
on that subject, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268138
I always think twice about my revenge and definitely serve it cold. However thinking about it, Inuit are some of the coolest cultures out the here, right next to Japanese. Their commitment to stay cold-headed and be hard working is something to we should all aspire to achieve.
The Iliad is the greatest LGBT love story of all time and I will die on that hill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_Patroclus
If you read the Iliad as a man losing his childhood lover, everything makes sense. Many in the classical greek period took this interpretation.
Painting the Iliad as a modern-day LGBT story is missing the forest for the trees. It encompasses so much more than the single-minded focus on physical attraction of today allows for: kinship, loyalty, adoration, piety, and veneration were all expressions of love to the ancient Greeks, and most of them existed without any physical component.
This is oddly topical considering how that Alexander docudrama just stirred this pot with Alexander and Haphaestion.
I haven't seen it but I read an article where the reviewer states something like "we've got to the point it's all right for 2 guys just to make out in a series made for the masses" he said something like he was pleased to realize that.
Your comment feels like you are seeing the forest but missing the trees. Yes, Greek masculinity seems better than modern masculinity, apparently they were far more comfortable conveying and displaying the forms of affection you identified, hence the universal acceptance of their deep friendship.
OP means they were actually f*cking tho and that does change motivation for the plot and subsequent events of the story considerably - perhaps even more adequately explaining the behavior and actions of Achilles than the traditional "best bro" interpretation.
That was the specific tree in the forest OP was referring to
Every day I become more convinced that Hanlon’s razor is an example of malice.
How so?
Obviously I have no evidence to back this up, but it seems to mostly be used on the Internet in an intellectually lazy way to avoid confronting the fact that many people really are malicious, and the effect of Hanlon's razor, in my experience, is to lower the quality of discourse (which is why I think its invocation is usually malicious even if it's not intended to be).
Edit (addendum):
> but then I remember to never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Even though there's plenty of evidence of malice in Hollywood. For an example that everyone agrees on, there's military propaganda in almost all movies and video games made about the military.
1 reply →