Anger Revisited
I've written before about the increasing evil of anger. I haven't changed my mind. I still believe anger is unproductive and de-energizing, that the increasing anger we face these days is making our society more and more unpleasant. I've recently read two articles about anger, one describing the uses of anger to promote the illusion of strength and the other urging anger as a defense to improper behavior of others.
The first article notes that anger and aggression can sometimes produce positive results, if only in the short term. It describes the increasing levels of anger in the workplace and how some use anger to create a shield against the demands of their employers and colleagues. The second talks about how we sometimes try to be nice even in the face of nonsensical or abusive conduct by others. It notes that we're inundated with nonsense and that failure to become angered by it only helps the purveyor.
Even though the first article notes the possible benefits of anger, it concludes with the warning that in the long term anger hurts the angry, if only because other people so resent it that they try to hurt the career of the angry. And the teaching of the second article is not really that we need to get angry but that we need to resist nonsense. I would argue that we can politely and nicely refuse to accept nonsense and still accomplish the author's goals.
Having thought about these articles, I haven't changed my mind. I still believe that anger hurts both the angry and the recipient of the anger. I also believe that anger can be controlled simply by refusing to become angry. If we recognize the evils of anger we can defeat it. All we need to do is think about it.
Defeat anger by thinking calmly, seek the calm by insisting upon it. After all, anger is a sin, one of the seven deadly sins. I'll write more about the sin at a later time.
10-31-05
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