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Zen-ish Thoughts About Anger

Anger Ostriches

Anger is powerful, and destructive. Anger is often disproportionate, and tenacious. Anger can run anywhere between sharply focused and utterly chaotic. It can be intensely determined, even when it is entirely misdirected. Anger about one thing, or a dozen things, can spurt out against something else, sometimes even something that wouldn't usually evoke anger at all.

Because of all of these factors, we instinctively fear anger, and we don't teach much about anger beyond "it's bad, so suppress it". Consequently, we are unskilled in how we deal with anger in ourselves or when it comes from others. Conversely, all of the above should actually drive us to study anger and become as skillful as possible with regard to anger. Instead, we make anger mismanagement the most likely outcome by committing ourselves to willful ignorance, and avoidance of instructive practice.

We get into a lot of trouble because one person's "attack" that must be be avenged is another person's "get over yourself". We get into trouble because disagreeing often feels like an existential threat. We get into trouble because some people exude misplaced anger quite a lot and don't see it for what it is or its impact on others, or are too angry to care about its impact on others. We get into trouble because some people enlarge and misdirect other people's fear and anger to do tremendous harm.

The Wisdom of Anger

While no culture unconditionally glorifies anger, it is generally seen as a legitimate and even morally necessary response to dishonor, injustice, or oppression. Distinctions are made between unjustified and righteous anger, disproportionate and measured responses, misdirected and well-targeted responses. Being enraged that the local ice cream shop is out of you favorite flavor, or that someone cut you off in the parking lot when they actually didn't even see you there is bad. Not being enraged that narcissistic, misogynistic, racist, psychopaths are co-opting the highest levels of government is worse.

Taking action against oppression is a moral imperative. Thinking you are oppressed when you are merely becoming less privileged, or when your own thinking and choices are the primary agents of your so-called "oppression" is bad.

The wisdom of anger begins with it alerting us to something being wrong. We should begin by inspecting if the thing that is wrong is our own expectations, perceptions, feelings, values, or thinking. We should spend an awful lot of time there before suspecting that someone else is the source of whatever is wrong.

Once we conclude that we or someone else is in the wrong about something, we should hold that still as a tentative conclusion. It is so very often the case that we are troubled by something only to learn that a factor we had not anticipated in the slightest causes us to see the whole thing in an entirely different way.

Even when we or someone else is indeed in the wrong, it is typically the case that trust, respect, and understanding pave a surer path to correction than blame and hostility. Even when we or someone else is in the wrong, we are often not alone. What else needs to be addressed as well? Who else needs to be involved as well?

Anger is a legitimate response to several quite different types of circumstances: accidental harm, intentional harm, carelessness, neglect, disrespect, insufficient effort, disappointing progress, poor judgment, chronic pain or disability, the cumulative weight of a string of unrelated problems, violence, breach of good faith in a relationship, politically mobilized hatred, systemic oppression, …

The wisdom of anger is when it informs us that something is wrong, we correctly identify not only what is wrong but also how to address it, and we do so skillfully.

Taking a Zen-ish Approach To Anger

It should be clear from the above that when we are angry, or someone is angry with us, we must begin with a lot of emphasis on what is so. We must do this in the most Zen-ish manner possible, working our hardest to see what is actually so, unfiltered by assumptions, by defensiveness, or by anger itself. This is very hard to do. Be gracious, yet persistent.

Corrective action takes the form of a conversation, but the form the conversation takes is itself variable. It might be a conversation with yourself, if you are the primary agent of interest. If it is a conversation with one or more other people, it must begin with collecting the views of all parties on what is so, with as little assumption, defensiveness, and anger as possible. If the core issue is political rather than or in addition to personal, the "conversation" will also have to be political, which is to say, some sort of public speaking, writing, and or protesting.

Having difficult interpersonal conversations, and conducting public "conversations" are each the topic of separate articles.