Martin Luther, Charles Manson and Dinosaurs

or “A Theory on the Dichotomy of Anger”

Recently, in an interesting turn of events, I had the honor of spending the better part of a week arguing with a very ill tempered woman via email, for which I will spare you the details. I say honored, because even though it was a heated contest of words, it ultimately had me taking my mind off the petty irritants in my life and focusing on what was really important. Namely my family, for which I am grateful.

In the end, I grew weary of all the negativity being flung about like so much food during my fourth grade lunch periods. So, being a generally peace loving person, I left her with true wishes of peace.

In the beginning though, very different story. I was incensed that she had been using anger towards another person as the means to her end. I was angry with her for being angry! Later on, when I began reflecting on this thought, I began wondering if anger solves anything.

Which brought me to the question: “Is anger good or bad?”

As I began musing this, I remembered that the Chinese have two words to define our one word “selfishness.” Roughly, ones meaning is, something you do for yourself that helps you to improve and the other, an injustice you do to others for your own personal gain.

Which then got me to thinking: “Does anger have two definitions as well? Could it be good and bad?”

After a quite a bit of contemplation, here is what I came up with. If anger has two sides, they are this: Righteous Indignation and Malcontent.

Righteous Indignation is defined as:

My thought here is that this is anger’s better side, if you will. My reasoning is that it is what leads people to try and change an unsatisfactory situation. Apartheid, unions, woman’s rights and even the United States are all the result of righteous indignation. Being generally peace loving individuals, it is our reactive anger to an injustice we see laid upon ourselves or fellow human beings. This reaction comes from the deepest place in our soul and has a tendency to provoke us into action, whether we are calling the authorities because we see a child being mistreated by a parent or separating ourselves into a new nation for the opportunity to make our own laws. The part of us that wants ourselves and the world at large, to be the best version of itself. The part that knows we can only improve conditions by challenging those in the contented comfort zone of the ‘other’ side.

Feeling this particular version of anger, we might approach it singularly, or by gather together like minded people to present a united front and bring about change in the name of fairness. We argue for what we want.

Having said that, being aware of what we don’t want is okay. It allows us to be better aware of what we do want.

Martin Luther, the great 16th century theologian, summed up righteous indignation by saying:

“When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations are gone.”

Indeed.

In the larger scope, it is the constant pressing to create equilibrium. But just as the ocean will never be without waves, I think humanity (at least in the foreseeable future) will never be without conflict.

Malcontent on the other hand, is righteous indignation’s evil twin. Defined as:

This rather singular definition is an individual’s (usually) unconscious belief that, being chronically dissatisfied with all things in life will provoke change and, ultimately bring about happiness. To which I can only say, “Huh?”

But like spreading a disease around so everyone can see how bad it is, the malcontent person tends to believe that disseminating information about every injustice in the world will change it for the better. Maybe in hopes of inciting a little righteous indignation? The ironic thing is, they typically are not doing a thing about it and so we think, “Why should I?” After all, they are not offering any plan of action to remedy things, which we would maybe then consider. They are expending countless quantities of energy focusing on how bad things are and how they don’t want things to be.

The only thing that does happen is, the world becomes a little more disillusioned place by the one more person who becomes depressed because of the information. Outside of that, nothing else has changed.

I consider the nightly news the largest transgressor in this regard. Which is why I do not watch it. I started turning off the TV during news hour several years ago after watching a rather heinous story that left me crying and depressed for almost two weeks. Before I began turning it off, I would watch each story and ask myself “ Is any information in this story helping me be a better person?” You may be able to imagine the answer. Since stopping, I have found that if there is some important news that will actually effect my life, like a hurricane is going to attempt of level my house is a few days, everyone I know will tell me about it. Barring that, I do not need to know that a mother on the other side of continent just murdered all her children. In effect, the news brings disillusion to millions of people in a one fell swoop. Every night.

I may begin watching again if the reporters start offering up ideas on what can be done to improve the ugliness that they are reporting on. Although, I may begin to wonder just how many causes I can get behind.

Like Mom always said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

So, malcontent is communicable as well. Think of Jonestown and Charles Manson. This is an example of malcontent jumping into the deep end of the crazy pool. Those leaders were dissatisfied and paranoid with the world and united others in their misery and brought more sadness and ugliness to the world.

On a smaller scale, think of the malcontent, disapproving parent. How frequently to do their poor kids turn out to be happy, well-adjusted adults? While his was certainly an extreme worst case scenario, Manson’s subsequent adulthood was an example of this kind of parenting.

Malcontent could be described as the love child of an ego and learned unhappiness. It takes the ego’s mantra of “I am separate from everyone else” and applies a heaping helping of unhappiness . This then blows that simple statement WAY out of proportion until what’s left is a gaping, empty, lonely hole in our hearts. It then vigorously backfills the hole with learned animosity to cover it’s tracks. The truth is, we all want the same basic things in life. We all want to be happy, we all want to be connected to each other, we all want to be loved and we all want to belong to something greater than ourselves. Ideas that are the arch enemy of ego.

Speaking of egos, I will digress here for a moment to opine. Egos, I think, may have been originally built into our makeup as a mechanism for survival. A very long time ago, you couldn’t exactly “be one” with a hungry T-Rex. That is, unless your life’s desire had been to one day be picked from some very large teeth.

Lacking the hungry dinosaurs and other things that wanted to eat us, our egos began separating us from each other. With the T-Rex, we had to be united and forget our petty differences in order to fight for our very existence. Since there are no more nefarious dinosaurs, we have turned our ego driven fighting instinct on each other.

Anyway. Malcontent was deposited on my proverbial doorstep in the above mentioned dispute like a steaming paper bag of dog poop. This God-fearing woman kept reiterating that I would get my karma. Meaning, of course, that karma would rear it’s ugly head and reign down untold horrors upon my life because, in essence, my very existence was upsetting her. So, I posed the following to her:

“Believing in karma, to me, is like believing that God is a punishing, vengeful god. Having said that, when does Satan get a chance to play if God is doing all the punishing and serving up all the revenge? Just wondering.”

When something goes awry in such a persons life, she (or he) seems to think things such as “That horrible person will get what they deserve” or, more forlornly, “this happened because I did something similar to someone else” and slap the moniker ‘karma’ on it. Karma in it’s true religious context means basically, “the fruit of your actions”. Westerners have misinterpreted and reduced its meaning to “if you do this to me, then the same will happen to you.” or some similar hair-brained varietal. In her case, an almost direct translation was “I can’t hurt you but God will do my dirty work for me. You just wait and see!” To which I could only raise an eyebrow and chuckle a bit a the malcontent dripping from her words.

So there you have it. My theory on the dichotomy of anger.

To follow up on my own idea, I will leave you with a few encouraging words on designing for change.

Ghandi knew this when he said:

When I imagine true change taking place, I see the issue at hand as a pitch black, cavernous room. Then someone lights a candle and changes the darkness. That single candle brings some light, but the true magic begins as others enter with their candles and light them. As the room begins to fill, at some unknown point, the room suddenly becomes a brightly lit place and change has happened. We don’t bring more darkness to illustrate to everyone how dark it is. It doesn’t accomplish anything. We bring what we want to the cavern. Light.

So for me, in the end, the residue of my debate has helped me rivet my gusto back towards positive change . If I am to bring about the change I want in my life and my world around me, my best bet is focusing on what I want and to avoid giving attention to what I do not want. To focus on what I want with optimism as my companion and maybe even a big, cheesy grin plastered on my face. Barring that, a little righteous indignation now and then might also work some wonders.