The Demonisation of Anger

We aren’t angry anymore. We don’t care if we aren’t. We are made to feel inadequate if we are.

We have been taught and shepherded to simply care for ourselves. We are raised in families to grow into lovable, agreeable and pliant income-generating adults, who in-turn are brainwashed to only look after their families. We have compelled humans to think small. When we think big we have been conditioned to equate ambition with money.

Corporations think about profits. Investors want entrepreneurs to talk passionately about numbers. Governments think of investment only as avenues for ramping up the GDP. Individuals are obsessed with how much money they bring home. Families justify equivalence of comfort, success, happiness with things that money can buy.

Our political and economic systems put a high premium in deadening our senses, emotions and passion. In authoritarian systems it is easier to curb anger with an iron fist. In China, for instance, there is a massive clampdown on any expression of anger in public either through protests or dissent. Anger is controlled in China through a massive censorship system, which includes heavily curtailing the right to freedom of speech and disallowing free media.

However, it is interesting to note that in Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s Little Red Book there are these startling quotations supporting free speech: “Don’t blame the speaker” and “Say all you know and say it without reserve.” Even Karl Marx defended the need for a free press to express society’s discontent and claimed that censorship is a tool of the bourgeois elite.

Is it possible to express individual and societal discontent passively? The establishment of an industrial and post-industrial society with elaborate rules and legal processes required a systemic de-senitisation of society to ensure that those holding money and power continued to stay in control. This required delegitmisation of passionate, honourable, non-violent expression of discontent and anger.

The crux of freedom is contained in the citizen’s ability of holding those in power accountable. This requires the citizen to engage with issues of equity, justice, equal opportunities, affordable and equitable access to quality public services and spaces and most important of all to ensure that the society, community and country’s resources aren’t cornered by a handful of powerful or wealthy citizens. To do this anger must be legitimised as an authentic emotion, which springs from deep sense of sincerity, honesty, integrity and public spiritedness.

But our public institutions, private sector and educational systems have been co-opted to demonise anger. Unfortunately, the democracies on planet Earth have moved with a singular ambition to chill our emotions to make us anger-less citizens. They have done it with relative ease by locking us in unending, conflict-ridden public debate between alternating Lockesian and Kantian choices.

As terrorism rips apart and destroys everything we have learnt about living and life in multi-cultural, multi-religious, plural societies we have fallen through the cracks of these two choices — the need to ‘voluntarily’ tailor human rights (through the consent of the citizens as expressed through democratically elected representatives) in the interest of national security and a society where everyone can speak freely with the expectation that such a society will guarantee the security of the State better than any other measure.

This dilemma is so visible in the United Kingdom where the society rattled by repeated terror attacks is finding it so difficult to legitimately express anger without the anger being politicized. The liberal political opinion is seen to be mollycoddling violent, extremist Islamists and any expression of anger against extremist Muslims is seen as bad behaviour or categorized as counter-fundamentalism. Today there is no space for individuals and citizens walking on the middle path because the moment they express anger as an outcome of reasonable reflection, it immediately finds an unwelcome political label.

In the 21st century there is widespread anger resident within an individual, community and society as life and our ways of living get increasingly uncertain. Is this why there is a concerted effort to delegitimise anger? Why is anger delegitimised? Why is it categorised as a negative emotion? When a young mother with an infant is accosted by a gang of rapists, the baby throttled and thrown away, and the mother sexually assaulted how are we supposed to feel and express our emotions? When agitating farmers are shot by the police and the government justifies it by describing those killed as “miscreants” what should our emotional response be? When women are unceaselessly eve-teased and sexually harassed in public places shouldn’t we express our disgust in anger? When children are sexually abused should we keep quiet? If the schools where we send our children aren’t safe, aren’t parents naturally expected to be get angry?

Why have the ethics of anger, critical to keeping society deeply engaged with the issues of our times, been rewired in our minds and emotions as being incompatible with empathy and compassion? Picture this — A young Indian with enormous intellect, schooled in the best institutions, trained to hunt for the highest paying job begins a career in a fat mining corporate with a fat paycheck. What is expected out of this person, as a person and as a citizen? Should the individual be so desensitised to support, let’s say, land-grab by the corporate? Should the citizen inside the individual feel angry or should any feeling of anger at the sight of poor co-citiznes being evicted from their lands be banished as negative emotions?

Our institutions — from the levels of family, community, education, religious, law and justice, governance — are ostensibly aligned to a societal contract for the good of all, but it deliberately ignores the importance of anger and its deep connection to empathy. It is when we step into someone else’s shoes that we begin to experience the other person’s realities.

Step into the shoes of a woman domestic worker and experience her interaction with the world around her. What does it do to you? Does it move you emotionally? Do you feel angry at how she is treated at her work place? Do you smile when you are called a “servant” or treated with discrimination? Don’t you cringe when you are labelled as a “helper”, when in reality you want to be treated as a professional worker maintaining the homes of those who have the wherewithal to hire your services?

The truth is this — we have been conditioned to live in an “everyone a vocation” world. Our modern society runs on a singular motto — Get a job, get money in the bank, spend for attaining comfort. We are praised for our restraint when we are focussed in our pursuit of happiness. We are deliberately sidelined when we take responsibility to change things around us.

Our schools do not prioritise cultivation of sensibility and sentivity. Our young people are whisked away from any opportunity to express anger through immersive empathetic journeys to understand societal problems and solve them. They don’t learn to get in touch with their anger and channelize it towards empathy and vice-versa. This journey is important to become a changemaker. An angry-empathetic changemaker is always seeking solutions to problems around her. Anger has a positive co-relation with a call to action, which in turn has a positive co-relation with empathy and our consequential response when our action is informed by empathy. That action needs legitimate inspiration, which stems from us being angry with the status quo and our desire to effect change.

But the ‘Systems’ around us don’t want all of us to be changemakers. They resent a world where everyone is a changemaker. However, the fact is that we have entered an everyone a changemaker world. People are angry because their institutions aren’t responding to their needs. They are angry with the government and the tardy justice systems. That is why governments are giving into anger, instead of embarking on an arduous task of legitimising and authenticating it .

Recently, the Maharasthra state government in Western India gave in to the anger of the agitating farmers by waiving of 30,000 crores ($5 billion USD) of farm loans. Instead, why didn’t the government legitmise the anger in the farm communities by admitting that its agriculture policies aren’t able to respond to the needs of the farming communities? That the government had made mistakes and will work with the farmers to co-create an agriculture policy that works for them? Legitimising anger is perceived as admitting failure, which may carry electoral consequences. Therefore, it is convenient to accept demands of agitating farmers to ensure that expression of anger is seen as a “law and order” problem and, therefore, wholly unneccessary.

In democracies the institutions are willing to “listen” if the listening process whittles down and squeezes out the anger. So in Jammu and Kashmir, the government is willing to listen to grievances provided citizens stop demanding justice for their community members who are missing or have been killed in extra-judicial executions. The same pattern is visible in India’s north-east dotted with insurgencies and insurrections against the State and in the areas under ultra-left wing armed rebellion.

The legitimisation of anger and its acceptance by the State, its law enforcement and judicial systems would mandatorily require moderating power with the help of empathy. This would mean genuinely saying “we are sorry” for what we did. But the architecture of the modern democratic sovereign State isn’t compatible with expressions of apologies. The foundation of the modern State is built to perpetuate power. Any deployment of empathy by the institutions of State is viewed as depleting the muscular nature of the State. Therefore, the State rescinds from and is repelled by the idea of sanctioning authentication of official expressions of apology and remorse because doing so would legitimise anger.

Demonising anger is an important tool for retaining power and the ego of power. Every aspect of control and domination, including the need to domineer, is rooted within this tool’s construct. The project to demonise anger has been so successful that it has leached into our lives in unseen ways. Roop Sen, an activist, recently put out a post which triggered a discourse on anger on his facebook wall. “Its worrying when mental health professionals equalise expression of anger with violence. Not all expressions of anger need to be violent. And when anger is suppressed, it leads to toxicity in the body and mind, that screws up one’s health and relationships.”

Demonisation of anger is a direct threat to democracy, human rights and life. It is a form of social control and punishment. It’s intent is to use the brute force majoritarian social opprobium to deliberately marginalise passionate inconoclasm, rejection of traditions, constant questioning and dissidence within the family, society, institutions, public spaces, private spaces and at the workplace. For instance, if a human in our times calls another human a “servant” and is aggressively challenged within the safe boundaries of a home, then ‘demonisation of anger’ is a convenient tool to negatively equalise it with violence.

This plays out in subtle ways. What is really happening when a Chief Minister of a State in India commits racial discrimination by asking apparently “unclean” citizens to wash themselves with soap before seeking his audience? Or what really happens when such convenience is applied by patriarchal, but educated middle class working women against women who are routinely discriminated? What happens when a priviledged working woman calls a woman domestic worker a “servant” and is met with an angry challenge? Is that violence or pushing the boundaries? How does feminism reconcile with the marginalisation of underprivileged women by privileged feminism-inspired women who also are unapologetic carriers of patriarchy?

These questions are as subversive and dangerous to the carefully created projections of individual personas living in the glare of 24 X 7 digital media as to the personality of the State. Strangely, in the 21st century society the individual and the State find merit in demonising anger because opinions and attitudes that drag them out of their comfort zones are seen as “angry” questioning of their ideas of responsibility and accountability. Normalizing the de-legitimisation of anger is a common cause of both the privileged citizen and the State. The New American magazine published an article in May 2010 highlighting the curious additions in the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association which listed new varieties of mental illness such as “oppositional defiant disorder.” What is being attempted here? The attempt is to represent those who have “negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures” as individuals with mental illnesses!

The article stated — “Those familiar with psychiatry in the Soviet Union will cringe at this sort of neo-psychiatry. Authority, for example, may often be wrong in a society. The right to contend with authority has long been considered a primary right of a free people. Soviet psychiatrists, however, institutionalized and “treated” those who defied Soviet authority, which was considered, per se, a variety of mental illness.”

“Cynicism is often the most sensible attitude of those who find government and politics to be a cesspool of corruption. The presumption that society and government are functioning properly, which is implicit in these new psychiatric “disorders,” looks very Orwellian. Only the dullest mind, or the most sheepish people, can look at our tax code, our school system, our immigration policies, and our foreign policy and see only goodness and wisdom.”

So do get mad. There is an upside of anger. The New Scientist in a February 2013 feature said “we think of it as a negative emotion, but used in the right way anger can improve your health, job prospects, relationships — and whole societies.” In ‘Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice’ American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, introduced a new concept about the necessary role of “public emotions rooted in love…foster[ing] commitment to shared goals.”

Nussbaum later said in an interview to Michael Edwards: “In a family or a community, we’d never accept the excuse that people are too busy making money to care for one another, and I don’t see why we should accept this excuse in a nation…Indeed part of what gets portrayed as lovable is the idea of critical freedom and dissent.”

Legitimate anger is deeply connected to the idea of protecting our freedom, the right to dissent and our ability to deploy empathy both as a value and a skill. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle, made us aware of the fundamental role that anger plays as a positive emotion in pushing us out of our comfort zones in his classic work ;The Art of Rhetoric’: “Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.”

Non-violent anger is an emotion that contributes to the deployment of empathy as we seek solutions to a more meaningful life. Stop demonising it.