Our Angry Era

How angry are you these days? Me, too.

When my husband and I lived in New York City, we frequented a local Chinese restaurant. Over time, I couldn’t help noticing I kept getting a theme in the fortune cookies: 

• Watch your temper. Short temper is a loss of face. 
• He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding. 
• The greatest remedy for anger is delay. 
• Anger, like fog, often distorts the way. 
• If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. 

I thought these fortunes elegant and beautiful, and was struck by how different they were from pop-psych advice pervading American culture: 

• Lose your temper. Expressing anger shows your status. 
• He that is quick to wrath understands that others will knuckle under. 
• The greatest remedy for anger is to sound off now. 
• Anger, like a flashlight, illuminates the path. 
• If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will lose your place in line. 

We are the only species that can say “The more I thought about it, the madder I got.”

At the time, for a book on anger, I was learning how many of the widespread American beliefs about anger—it’s a normal biological instinct, it’s out of our control, it’s healthy to express it, it’s unhealthy to keep it in, I’m entitled to say what I feel—are flat wrong. Suppressing anger doesn’t cause ulcers; H. pylori does. Expressing anger mostly raises everyone’s temperature, inflames rage and self-righteousness, and provokes counterattack. And whereas human beings share with other species a physiological disposition to become angry when threatened or attacked, we are unique in one crucial way: we are the only species that can say “The more I thought about it, the madder I got.” Your beagle will respond in kind to snarls and growls, but if you insult her mother, she’s likely to just come over and lick you. 

And right there is the problem, the thorn in our nation’s psyche: What’s an insult? The fact that people are not universally angered by the same perception of an offense illuminates the role of cognitions—and, in turn, ideology and identity—in generating anger. The best summation I ever found of the common ingredient in anger is that it stems from the violation of an ought: You ought to have remembered my birthday. You ought not to have stepped on my foot. You ought to agree with me. You ought to believe in God. You ought not to believe in God. You ought to do the laundry more often. You ought to be on time, like me. You ought not to have posted such a stupid comment. You ought not to be so stupid, period. 

The “oughts” that generate anger today—at an individual level and at the level of politics and society—suggest why we are living in an almost constant state of polarizing rage. 

Violations of Expectations 

When people expect something and don’t get it for reasons they believe are outside of their control, they rarely say, “ah, well, luck of the draw.” Rather, they typically feel angry. Since World War II, Americans have benefited from a world of rising expectations—college for all, work for all, expanding benefits and opportunities for women and formerly excluded minorities. The strongest predictor of depression—economic and psychological—is lowered expectations, which is where we are now thanks to globalization, the shrinking or eradication of many thousands of jobs because of automation and other technologies, and the skyrocketing costs of college and health care. It doesn’t help to hear “but progress isn’t linear; things were worse before the Middle Ages/Civil War/Industrial Revolution/New Deal.” People evaluate what they have now against what they had recently and what they feel entitled to in the future. 

Self-Justifying Interpretations 

Here is a paradigmatic study of the disconnect between events and emotions: students had to describe their thoughts and feelings before taking an important test, and again after getting their grades. The students’ emotions were related not to their actual grades, but to their appraisals of the reasons for their grades. The students who got poor grades but explained them by saying “I should have studied harder” or “my parents will kill me,” felt guilt. The students who were thinking of the impact of the grade on their future—”What if I flunk out?”—reacted with anxiety or panic. And the students who interpreted the exam (or the instructor) as being unfair responded with … anger.¹ Needless to say, that’s the explanation du jour. C.R. Snyder, who studied the psychology of excuses, worried about the transformation he saw from people who make excuses to those whose identities are the excuse.² Instead of saying “I’m sorry I lost my temper and said those awful things; I have been under a lot of pressure lately,” people are now more likely to say, “I’m sorry I lost my temper and said those awful things, but I can’t help it—I’m an angry person.” 

A Belief That an Event, Decision, or Behavior Is Unfair 

Melvin Lerner’s classic studies of the “just world phenomenon” explained why it is difficult for many people to accept evidence of an injustice that threatens their delusional but comforting certainty that “life is fair.” People who can’t deny that this bad thing happened to those people can decide “those people” deserve what they got. Lerner found that if two people work equally hard on a task and—by a flip of the coin—one gets a hefty reward and the other gets nothing, most observers will rate the unlucky partner as having worked less hard.³ And they know it’s random! 

The best summation I ever found of the common ingredient in anger is that it stems from the violation of an ought.

Today, the anger generated by the widening chasm of income inequality stems less from the fact that some people are enormously wealthy—it was ever thus in the world—but from the belief that their wealth was unfairly acquired: unearned, stolen, insufficiently taxed, or fraudulently created. Human beings (and other species) have a fairness bias that seems part of our evolutionary heritage—monkeys and toddlers alike will be distressed when they perceive an unfair allotment of treats or rewards.⁴ John Jost and his colleagues have studied the phenomenon they call system justification: Many people who were born into great wealth and power justify that position by claiming they are entitled to it by virtue of their superior abilities and native talent, whereas all those poor and struggling people are unable or unmotivated to succeed.⁵ As the football coach Barry Switzer said, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” (Jim Hightower made that great line famous, referring to George H.W. Bush.) Anyone still trying to get on base at all might understandably be angered by that attitude. 

A Failure of Empathy 

There are two primary reasons to express anger: One is: “I’m pissed off, and I want you to know it, and I want you to feel as bad as I do, you son of a bitch.” The other is that you want the son of a bitch to change his mind, you want her to change her behavior, you want redress of your grievance, you want justice. The former strategy is not generally going to achieve the latter result, but it is easy to confound them—as we see in the typically useless and inarticulate explosions of fury on college campuses that seem to involve no goals other than “end racism!”, “fire that teacher!”, “disinvite that speaker!” Anger draws attention to a problem, but it’s the next step that is the hard one—doing something about it. This is why conversations across political lines frequently devolve into exasperated explosions. Neither side wants to change its mind or accept that the other side might have a point. 

These tributaries into the river of rage in America today have always been there; it’s just that the levees that once kept them from overflowing have been breaking down. For example, one of the key conditions under which the expression of anger is likely to be cathartic and beneficial (instead of backfiring and making matters worse), is this: your target doesn’t retaliate. When people can roar and hurl insults and allegations with no consequence, then, just like the child who has learned that persistent shrieking gets the cookie, that’s just what they will keep doing. Après nous, le déluge de l’internet. 

I do often feel despairing and angry as I survey the current cultural and political landscape in this country. I’ll do what I can to support my goals and beliefs, and to learn what my side is doing wrong as well as what the other side believes. But day to day, I try to live by the parable of the wolf. 

Expressing anger mostly raises everyone’s temperature, inflames rage and self-righteousness, and provokes counterattack.

A boy went to his grandfather to complain about a friend who had done him a great injustice; the boy was very angry.

“Let me tell you a story,” said the grandfather. “I too, at times, have felt a great hatred for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. He saves all his energy for the right fight.

“But the other wolf, ahhh! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hatred are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing. Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit.”

The boy asked: “Which one wins, Grandfather?”

The grandfather smiled and said, “The one I feed.”