Against Anger

Why anger is never a force for good

Anger is one of the favorite topics of Stoic writers. Everyone who talks or writes about Stoicism has talked or written about anger at some point. Partly because anger is so pervasive in human life and so difficult to control—it’s everywhere, and it needs to be dealt with. But it’s also partly because the Stoic approach to anger is pretty uncompromising, so Stoics find much to debate with other philosophical schools on this topic. While many life gurus will tell you to moderate and control your anger, Stoicism tells you to completely eliminate your anger. And it provides both the philosophical justification and the practical techniques to do so.

I typically don’t write too much about this topic because so many other writers have already covered it, and I don’t have much new to add. But I wanted to address it today because I increasingly see people suggesting that anger is a good thing, even valorizing anger directed at perceived social or political enemies. I increasingly see a very angry society in which outrage is thought to be noble and beneficial—so much so that in some circles you are judged to be a good person if you are angry, and a bad person if you are not angry. And, unfortunately, we are increasingly seeing the fruits of this anger in the form of social discord, political violence, and an overall contentious and antagonistic society. It’s very ugly out there.

Anger is a strong and ungovernable negative emotion. It arises when a person judges a wrong to have occurred (either to themselves or to others) which produces some sort of harm (physical, emotional, psychological). It corresponds to a desire to punish the perpetrator of the wrong, either to correct the injustice, or to ensure the perpetrator is prevented from wronging others in the future, or simply for revenge.

Most people believe that anger is unavoidable; whenever harm occurs (and “harm” is often in the eye of the beholder—if you feel harmed, you are harmed), you will automatically be angry. The commonplace view is that this is natural and unavoidable. Maybe people sometimes need to lower the intensity of their anger, the thinking goes, or learn control when and in what direction it is applied. But anger itself is not a bad thing, according to this view. When you see injustice, you should be angry. This righteous anger will motivate you to action, to correct the personal or collective injustice.

The Stoics, however, reject this commonplace view of anger. The Stoic perspective is that anger is based on erroneous judgments about the world. Other people can’t truly harm you, because the true “you” is your own psyche, which no one else can touch. Others may harm your reputation, health, property, etc., but even this doesn’t justify anger. As Epictetus puts it, you can chain my leg, but you can’t chain me. From this point of view, you simply have no reason to get angry, because no harm can occur.

But what about when you see other people being harmed? This is where Stoics are often accused of being unfeeling or detached. The assumption is that because we consider that we ourselves cannot be harmed, we must apply the same advice to other people. In one sense this is true; when the opportunity arises, we might try to give other people the techniques and training to adopt this viewpoint for themselves. This is what Epictetus was doing in the lessons that have come down to us as his Discourses.

But in reality we don’t expect everyone else to act like a Stoic sage. By and large, it’s a bad idea to go around preaching this idea to people who are not prepared for it, particularly when they are in the middle of a difficult situation. We certainly wouldn’t expect someone who hasn’t gone through the necessary psychological preparation to adopt the principle of non-anger when they are in the middle of an angry episode. It takes time and practice—lots of practice—to work toward this. And even then, sometimes we don’t succeed.

In addition, we recognize the value of preferred indifferents in life, and we still want to help others preserve their own life, health, property, etc. So if we see other people being harmed in this conventional sense, we certainly want to take action. In such a situation we would aim to stop the harm and bring the perpetrator to justice in order to hold him/her accountable, to prevent him/her from repeating the harm, and to discourage other people from doing the same thing. (Unfortunately there are some people out there who only refrain from misdeeds out of fear of punishment.)

But here’s the crucial point: you don’t have to feel angry in order to take action. You can take action because you know it’s the right thing to do. As Seneca points out, if you see someone being harmed—let’s say there’s a robbery—and you could easily stop it, wouldn’t you do so? You don’t need to be actively angry in order to do the right thing.

Anger is destabilizing, draining, inconsistent. If your motivation rests only on an emotional reaction, then you will certainly reach a point where you are burned out from feeling angry all the time and you will no longer care. This is not hypothetical: burnout is extremely common among those who, by profession or social role, are constantly emotionally invested in other people’s problems. That’s why it’s so important to find ways of taking care of others without investing your emotions in what happens to everyone all the time. (I’m speaking from personal experience here!)

Not only is burnout a problem, but if you are depending on your emotions for your motivation, your motivation will be situational and erratic. You might read an emotional story and become enraged about a small injustice that you can do nothing about, while completely ignoring a much larger injustice closer to home. You might feel strongly about a famous or good-looking person (or animal) while overlooking a less famous and photogenic one. You might jump on a media-driven bandwagon because the topic has gone viral, while not caring at all about more serious or relevant wrongs that have simply not come to your attention. You might be influenced by peer pressure and embrace a cause-du-jour just because everyone else seems to be doing it.

And if your sense of justice is motivated by emotions, you will be pursuing justice from an emotional angle rather than a logical and sensible angle. We all have experience “losing our head” in the heat of anger or frustration or distress. At these times we don’t use our rationality properly. When you’re acting out of anger, you say and do things that you would not normally do. There is a physical basis to this: the pounding blood, the fast-beating heart, the (literally) hot head, the adrenaline coursing through your body urging you to do something, anything, immediately and without reflection. It has always been a recipe for disaster.

That’s why many people have suggested that we try to moderate and properly channel our anger. But, some say, it’s fitting to be angry at someone who really deserves it. This leads to a common moral position I see reflected in much public discourse today. It goes something like this:

Anger is good and necessary because it motivates you to respond to injustices. If you don’t get angry when you see people being harmed—not just physically harmed, but being treated unfairly in some way—you are a bad person. Good people get angry when they see or hear of anyone in the world being treated unfairly or wronged in some way. Good people get angry when they themselves are treated unfairly or wronged in some way.

Obviously there will be different versions of this argument, some more nuanced than others, but in outline this is an assumption I see undergirding much of the social, political, and cultural discourse at the moment. (A few academic examples of this argument are here, here, here, and here.) Not just that anger is benign, but that it’s virtuous. And that staying calm, forgiving or understanding others, working through disagreements by listening to “the other side” or finding common ground—these are bad. If you stay calm, so the thinking goes, it means you’re not recognizing or attempting to address an injustice. If you try to find middle ground with the perceived enemy, you are weak and not committed to the cause. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention or you simply don’t care. Or worse: you’re the enemy.

Anger always has to have an enemy, a target. The physical and psychological energy that builds up in anger must always find an outlet. Even when there is no clear bad guy—even it’s an act of God or a faceless social force—angry people must find someone to take the heat. What they don’t realize is that the scapegoat is not really to blame, and their anger is simply causing another miscarriage of justice. Anger makes things worse.

The Stoics tell us that we will get closer to justice if we do not allow ourselves to become angry. Strong negative emotions take away our good judgment; even if we are right to take action in a certain situation, anger will lead us to behave in selfish and short-sighted ways. In contrast, if we aim for virtue, our reasoning ability will tell us that we need to fix the problem, and it will also guide us toward a better solution. We will be acting from a desire for justice rather than from a desire for revenge. We will see the situation more objectively and we will be capable of compassion toward others. Angry people are rarely able to show understanding or compassion to anyone they consider their opponent. Anyone who stands in their way becomes, in their eyes, a legitimate target of attack.

We don’t have to look very far to see examples of this around us. I’m not going to spend time going into examples here, since I think they will be obvious to everyone, but we could also mention polls and surveys showing the increase in negativity. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that living in an angry society, where people are praised for being angry, has extremely bad results.

When anger is seen as a virtue, this gives license for it to be exercised by anyone in any context that they judge deserves anger. And while Aristotle and reasonable voices would surely suggest that those circumstances should be limited, who determines when and where anger is justified? It’s a judgment call—and we all know how easy it is to rationalize your own questionable judgments. I’ve seen articles suggesting that more intelligent people are easily able to fool themselves because they are so good at coming up with arguments to justify their beliefs. We can all come up with reasons why it could be right to get angry in a given situation.

I think many people also apply a double standard to anger: it’s virtuous for me to be angry because obviously I’m right. It’s not right for the other side to be angry because they are wrong. Clearly most people don’t pause to consider the double standard, since they just believe they are right. But for those who wish to examine the issue philosophically, you would have to justify why it’s okay for your side to be angry but it’s not okay for anyone else to be angry. (Or else you’d have to show why it’s a good idea for everyone to be angry.) Very often this forces us to realize that anger is undesirable; if we don’t think it’s justified in others, it’s also not justified in ourselves.

But most people will probably be more readily convinced by the real-world impact of anger rather than philosophical argument. Since we don’t live in a utopia, it will never be possible to eliminate anger from society completely. People will continue to get angry. But what’s different now is the valorization of anger. Anger is not seen as a slip-up, as a regrettable imperfection, or as something we are working to fix. Rather, anger is often seen as righteous, powerful, and good. It’s expected, encouraged, admired. There is nothing holding it back. And so it grows.

I would love to think that at some point influential cultural figures would realize all the harm they are doing by encouraging people to be angry. That’s probably not going to happen, though, so it’s up to us as individuals to rein in anger. Starting with ourselves, of course, and extending our compassionate mindset to everyone we interact with. It’s obvious that if you meet anger with anger, the result is always more anger. Anger will become more and more strident, more aggressive, more grandiose. The only way to stop it is to apply those patient qualities of wisdom: love, understanding, compassion, goodwill, reconciliation, social harmony.

These qualities may sound banal, boring, or weak to the aggressive people out there trumpeting reactive anger, but there is a reason they are at the heart of almost every great wisdom tradition. The societies that came before us also experienced the impact of great anger. Others before us have seen it and realized that anger never has good results. True social goods come from prosocial forces, not from anti-social forces. Trust, cooperation, inspiration, creation—these things all come from prosocial goodwill, not from anger. What trust builds, anger destroys. And if left unchecked, anger can destroy almost anything.

That’s why I believe the Stoics get it right when they insist on eliminating, not merely moderating, anger. Of course, moderating could be a good step, once you admit you have an anger problem. But the first order of business is to stop valorizing anger, to recognize it as the harmful, destructive, blinding force it really is. Then, and only then, can we begin to tame it.

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Photo credit: Engin Akyurt via Unsplash