a tense exchange with your boss about what he called “peculiarities” in your expense account. Then, on your way home, as you were inching toward a tollbooth on 294, it happened again. You had 20 minutes to get home, pick up your daughter, and drive her over to her dance lessons. No chance, right? The traffic was going nowhere when suddenly, thank God, another lane opened up. You went for it. So did the guy in your blind spot. A Hummer, cutting right across your bow like you weren’t even there. And off you went, laying on the horn, screaming obscenities, spittle flying, face contorted. If you could’ve caught a peek of yourself in the rear-view mirror at that moment, you would see an absolutely insane person.
REMEMBER, YOU ARE NOT HOSTILE. YOU’RE A BOY SCOUT TROOP LEADER, FRIEND OF THE LIBRARY, PARENT AND PTA VOLUNTEER. YET YOU HAVE THESE MOMENTS when the worst parts of your nature bubbles to the surface. Moments when the world seems to be conspiring against you and the frustration builds inside you and the frustration turns to rage. This morning, for example, you ran late for an 8:30 meeting and you just wanted to get your latte and bagel from Starbucks and run. Of course the guy in front of you had to spend 10 minutes talking to the barrista behind the counter about the most alluring of topics, the Weather. You’re ashamed to admit it now, but you were on the verge of balling up your $10 bill, throwing it across the counter, and screaming at the barista for survive. Actually, the whole day has been a little like this. At work, you had
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OCTOBER 2014
HERE’S THE THING and maybe you’ll find all this comforting or maybe you’ll find it frightening. There are a lot of you out there. Rage seems to be all the rage lately. Look around; it’s not difficult to conclude that the world is becoming more and more angry. Our politics are angry, dominated by Bush-haters and Clinton-haters and even Nader-haters. Our popular music is angry, spiked with misogynistic rants and paranoid fantasies about rage. Our highways run like rivers of anger. As Peter Wood points out in his book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter, 2007), automakers are even making angrier cars, with grills and that snarl at whatever gets in their way. Are we really that angry? It’s not an easy question to answer. There simply aren’t a lot of practical ways to measure how pissed off we are. Judging by the space on the nation’s bookshelves taken up by books about anger, we seem to be living in the age of wrath lit. You can find books about the perils of anger, books about how anger can work for you, and books that relate personal battles with rage. Does this Wrath Lit explosion indicate a growing level of anger in the world or just a greater interest in the topic ? Are we really angrier or just trying harder than ever to understand our anger? For that matter, is there just more anger being released into our world or are our camera-phones just capturing more episodes of angry behavior and websites such as YouTube making them more accessible? “Have rates of public rage from seemingly normal people gone up, or has our awareness of it gone up?” Colorado State University psychologist Jerry Deffenbacher asks. “We don’t know. But there are a lot of angry people out there.” Not even episodes of road rage are easy to quantify. In 1997 the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety released a study
that detailed an increase in road rage incidents of as much as seven percent each year since 1990. Media outlets, already awash in trend stories about the road rage phenomenon, reported the study widely. USA Today described “an ‘epidemic’ of aggressive driving.” Then a piece by Michael Fumento in the Atlantic Monthly punched holes in the AAA study, arguing that any increase in reported incidents
of road rage was the direct result of increased awareness. The newly coined road rage label had become a convenient way to describe episodes that might not have been reported at all prior The article quoted one researcher saying, “You get an epidemic by the mere coining of a term.” Barry Glassner, in his book The Culture of Fear (Basic, 2000), asked why journalists became so interested in the road rage “epidemic,” when—even using AAA’s statistics—angry drivers accounted for no more than one in a thousand fatalities between the years 1990 and 1997. HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? It’s the kind of question that comes to you as you sit in your car in line at the tollbooth once you’ve emerged from your meltdown and regained some self-control. Is there something in the way we live our lives—maybe the frantic pace we set, maybe our relentless emphasis on personal fulfillment—that is bringing our hidden anger to the surface? Or is it, as Wood suggests, we’ve made a virtue of expressing our anger, so appearing pissed off, defiant, and aggressive is all really just part of keeping it real? Certainly you’ve never thought you might need help. You are familiar with the increasing anger management industry that have sprung up to provide help, but the process makes it all too easy a target to be taken seriously. After all, you’ve seen the recent Adam Sandler - Jack Nicholson movie Anger Management. Then, you suddenly remember about spouses trapped in angry violent marriages, about kids being scarred by a parent’s misplaced rage. Ask one of them if the world is getting angrier or if they might welcome some help for some of the scariest people ever. AS ONE OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS , anger holds an exalted place but is a bit of a misfit in the group. It’s the only one of the seven that doesn’t benefit us in our self-interest. For people who have never been unusually prone to anger, that makes the emotion difficult to understand. There’s no obvious payoff to a fit of anger. Only an outburst, hurt feelings, or worse yet violence. Hardly ever any real resolution to the problem that started the whole thing. But where’s the temptation in that? Lust and gluttony we can understand. They may be wrong and hurtful, but we acknowledge sometimes its hard to ignore that
MACGREGOR ANDERSON
THE ABORTION CLINIC BOMBINGS and schoolhouse shooters of recent decades may be the most violent examples of contemporary American rage. But don’t forget strident bloggers, finger-pointing cable-news hosts, brawling athletes, and those Little League parents who go after umpires. It’s likely that more often than not, anger
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wired’s senior writer on behavioral science. ANDREW SANTELLA:
extra slice of pizza, hard to say no to the noontime quickie. In The Enigma of Anger (Jossey-Bass, 2002), Garret Keizer writes that his anger “has more often distressed those I love and who love me than it has afflicted those at whom I was angry.” Knowing that anger doesn’t always pay off doesn’t necessarily make it easier to control, which may help explain why anger is so prominent in our lives. The Christian religious tradition centers on a God who, when provoked, turned people to salt, drowned entire armies, and sent floods and pestilence as tokens of his wrath. The most famous episode of anger in the New Testament is Jesus lashing out at the money changers in the temple. The Romans preached self-control, and Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne advised marshaling anger and using it wisely. He urged people to “husband their anger and not expend it at random for that impedes its effect and weight. That advice recognizes one of the paradoxes of anger: It’s often destructive and wasteful and its very unhealthy, but sometimes, anger can be beneficial for us . ANGER CAN FUEL OUR DRIVE to achieve, help us maintain our self-respect, stop the world from walking all over us. The trick, apparently, is getting angry at the right times and not getting angry at the wrong ones. Mark Twain recommends this: “When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” Wood, in A Bee in the Mouth, argues that one of the most telling signs of a national anger problem is the hostile tone of our political discourse. He calls it a new style of anger. “For the first time in our political history,” Wood writes, “declaring absolute hatred for one’s opponent has become a sign of good character.” As an example of political discourse that delights in its own vitriol, he cites Jonathan Chait’s 2003 essay in the New Republic begins, “I hate President George W. Bush.” Such language is typical of what Wood calls our “angri-culture.” Wood argues that Americans are proud of their rage, so eager to broadcast it, so determined to assert their rage as a badge of their identity. I’m pissed off, therefore I matter. Wood recognizes the vein of anger that has runs through American history, but he may not do full justice to the venom and the power of historical fury. Contemporary wrath-mongers like Ann Coulter are loud and all too visible. But compare her to self-appointed avenger Preston Brooks, the South Carolinian who took a cane to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. Clearly, extreme fury and violence is nothing new in American politics.
plays itself out on the home front. We often see it on the news or worse yet, straight from someone we know. The wife-beaters and screamers-at-kids are probably doing more damage with their anger than most of us.
Once you start looking for anger, you see it everywhere. Then again, maybe we’re not angry enough. Given war, the ecological crisis, and economic depression, maybe we should be out in the streets in force, demanding change. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently said that the “anger quotient is much too low.” Too angry? Not angry enough? Not one of the sources I consulted recommended that we, as a society, have arrived at precisely the appropriate level of anger for our circumstances. Like perfect happiness and fulfillment, this “anger quotient” must be an elusive target. So is there any hope for you and your anger? Is there a reason to believe that someday you’ll be able to endure the afternoon commute without screaming like a psychopath, and tailgating or pointing fingers? One option, of course, is to seek out help with anger management. The very phrase has become such a familiar part of our lives—how often does a
day pass without hearing of some kind of offender being sentenced to attend anger management sessions?—that it’s easy to forget that it is a relatively recent coinage. Raymond W. Novaco may have been the first to use the term, in his seminal 1975 work Anger Control (Lexington), but the term didn’t begin appearing in the media until well into the mid 1980s. The first and most influential popular books on anger was Carol Tavris’ 1982 Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (Simon & Schust). Her book was a response to the then-popular “ventilationist” strategy that suggested that loudly articulating our anger would free us emotionally. Tavris insisted on a subtle approach to anger, one that acknowledged its constructive aspects. “I have watched people use anger, in the name of emotional liberation, to erode affection and trust, whittle away their spirits in bitterness and revenge, shrink their dignity in spiteful hatred,” she wrote. “ And I watch with admiration those who use anger to seek for truth, who challenge and change the injustices of life.” Two decades later, researchers still probe for the constructive aspects of anger. A January 2000 article in the journal Health Psychology suggested that calmly discussing angry feelings
of thinking. And there are, as you can guess, pharmaceutical options. Emil Coccaro Noir, chair of psychiatry at University of Chicago, has explored utilizing Prozac as treatment for explosively angry people. WHATEVER ADVANCE ANGER management professionals claim, they are clearly dealing with new realities that make it all too easy to vent rage. John Duffy, a Chicago-area psychologist and life coach, says many of the teenagers he works with use text messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace to lash out at classmates or authority figures who have crossed them. This spring the New York Times reported on the popularity among high school students on “hit lists”—sometimes posted online, sometimes scrawled on a school wall—of people an angry student wants to harm. Part of the appeal is the spewing bitter thoughts at targets without confronting and dealing with them as humans. Anger has been called a sin. It has been called an emotion. One thing anger cannot be called, not yet anyway, is a form of mental illness. Even the most patient of us can put together a long list of things that piss us off in the course of a day. What does it for you? People who fail to say “excuse
DECLARING TOTAL HATRED FOR ONE’S OPPONENT HAS BECOME tA SIGN OF GOOD CHARACTER. and working toward solutions with others can have health benefits. But the emphasis, the researchers pointed out, must be on solving problems, not merely venting feelings. Anger management professionals work from a menu of strategies that include everything from deep-breathing to muscle relaxation techniques to visualization exercises that help people regain their calm. Other interventions stress cognitive approaches that aim to alter unhelpful patterns
me” when they crush your foot with their baby stroller? What if they could all be convinced to disappear? What if all the things that pushed your buttons just went away? You’re a decent person. At your core, your very nature is good. Remember how you stayed late to clean up after the book group meeting last week? If you could just avoid the jerks, the rude idiots, and the button pushers, how much calmer would you really be? Continue Reading on page 183