Comment by adriand
1 year ago
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?
That's why I moved to a country where (a, specifically) the rule of law is accessible to all, and (b, generally) important things rarely break down.
Justice is depicted as blind in statuary for a reason.
Edit: upon reflection, even in the Old Country, where accessibility to the law is debatable, anger doesn't seem useful. Either someone has the power to gain remedy by extralegal means or they do not, and whether they are angry or not when they make that attempt has little —despite movie plots— to do with the actual state of their power.
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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.
> Anger does literally give a person energy and what can be labelled "courage" beyond their norm.
Getting angry is renowned for leading people to do very stupid things that they would otherwise never do, because even themselves are fully aware it's stuff only an idiot would do.
> 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.
The original claim was "do what needs to be done" and now you backtracked to claim that instead the idiot who gets angry needs to control himself to not do stupid stuff that angry people do. What point do you think you're making?
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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.
I side with this school of thought.
Just call the emotions what they are, accept them in the form of not dressing them up and putting some spin on them to make people feel better about themselves (and ultimately dance around the actual emotion, via forms of denial, bypassing, etc.). And once you accept them for the simple, unadorned, and sometimes unflattering things that they are, you can then process them, and decide via understanding the root causes, contexts, and triggers, to then map out decision trees for how to respond to those feelings and emotions as the best course of action.
And like you mentioned, if you don't address the actual emotions and try to pretty them up, you're gonna leak out the actual emotions sideways, and cause unnecessary strain to those around you, and ultimately place your burden of being responsible for your emotions on others, and most likely throw up a big stink (in the form of projection, more denial, more bypassing, etc.).
Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and responsibility are very difficult but necessary things, and they often times are unflattering. But like also many other things, there's no shortcuts to learning how to manage and deal with them in real situations with real stakes.
> there are few things quite as pathetic
I very much agree with your overall point. But it's literally the opposite of pathetic to elide one's own pathos. I'm actually a bit sad that such as useful word as "pathetic" was literally reversed in meaning to become a disparaging epithet.
All personality types have their own blindspots.
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Hmm. I would argue addressing the root cause of our emotions requires the use of a more precise clinical analysis. Which is the opposite of extreme emotion.
> 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.