Anger: The Most Dangerous Emotion

This is a full lesson from one of the premium courses inside The Stoic Vault. We sit with anger through Seneca, who treated it not as a sign of strength but as a kind of chain, something that quietly runs your life while telling you it is protecting you.

I find anger the hardest emotion to be honest about, because it does not always show up as shouting. Often it is the low simmer you carry around all day, just as corrosive but easier to hide. This session is about learning to notice it, name it, and let some of it go.

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Transcript

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Currently, my highest rated course is Seneca's Stoic Toolbox for Anger Management Sixteen Practical Steps to Achieve Calm. This course is designed for people that have deep rooted anger issues, but not only such individuals. We all experience day-to-day frustrations, irritations, and anger, whether that's expressed outwardly or felt inwardly. This course has been taken by 1,700 students and has a perfect five out of five rating. I'd like to share with you now lesson two from this course, which is entitled Anger The Most Dangerous Emotion. If you enjoy this lesson and you'd like to access the full course, you can do so with a free trial actually by visiting stoichandbook.supercast.com. Or if you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can just access the premium version of the podcast there. Details are included in the show notes. And with that said, I hope you enjoy this lesson and start to see anger in a new light. When it comes time to letting go of a negative emotion or a craving, the first step is awareness, mindfulness, recognition of the situation. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it's believed that one has to hit a rock bottom before they can make a change. If people think that the situation isn't actually that bad, if you think that anger is kind of okay some of the time, you're probably not going to have the requisite motivation to work on it. So we're going to start this process by taking a look at the problems with anger. The aim is to get very clear on whether or not we want anger as part of our personality. Seneca writes, quote, We shall prevent ourselves from becoming angry if we repeatedly place before our eyes all anger's faults and form a proper judgment of it. It must be tried before the jury and of our own hearts and found guilty. Its faults must be searched out and dragged into the open. In order to reveal its true nature, it should be compared with the worst evils. Throughout the ages there have been different interpretations of anger. Aristotle, who is a student of Plato, Plato being a student of Socrates, is arguably one of the most influential and highly acclaimed thinkers of all time. He believed that if one is angry at the right time and in the right context, in the right amount, in a balanced way, if anger is done properly, it can sometimes be justified. In theory this is hard to argue with. Is there ever a situation in which anger could be done well? Yes. But there's a catch. Anger always justifies itself. When we are angry, we always feel like our anger is justified. But who decides when anger is justified? Objectively? Is an angry person capable of sound and wise judgment on this matter? Do you express anger the right way, the right time, in the right context? Do you know anyone else who does? So while in theory this idea makes sense, in the real world, practically, the expression of destructive anger is a high risk emotion. Seneca thought that anger was a vice with few, if any, exceptions. I mean the fact that Seneca wrote an entire book on anger shows how much importance he gave to this emotion. And there are three main reasons that Seneca saw with anger that made him very cautious of its effects. Let's take a look at those reasons now. So the first problem with anger is that anger makes you a slave. Surely every man will want to restrain any impulse towards anger when he realizes that it begins by inflicting harm, firstly on himself. In the case of those who give full reign to anger and consider it a proof of strength, who think the opportunity for revenge belongs among the great blessings of great fortune? Do you not then want me to point out to them that a man who is the prisoner of his own anger, so far from being powerful, cannot even be called free? In order that each man may be the more watchful and keep a careful eye on himself, do you not want me to point out that, though other vile passions affect only the worst sort of men, anger creeps up even on the enlightened men who are otherwise sane? This is so much the case that some men call anger a proof of frankness, and it is popularly believed that the most obliging people are particularly liable to it. When we are angry, we lose control, we become a slave to the emotion. We're more likely to make mistakes that we'll end up regretting later, and anger creates a sort of future blindness beyond the immediate moment, making our rational or higher selves a slave to a lower form of present, impulsive consciousness. This isn't to say that anger as an emotion is wrong. It exists evolutionarily for a good reason. The feeling is a lesson, it's telling you something. What I'm referring to here is the destructive expression of anger, inappropriate aggression, rage, passive aggressiveness, etc. The second reason is that anger cannot be slowed down easily. Seneca writes For though the rest of the passions may be amenable to such postponement and may be cured at a slower pace, this one, with its rapid and self-propelled violence, does not proceed gradually but reaches its full scope the moment it begins. Unlike other vices, it does not tempt the mind but carries it off by force, and drives on those who, lacking self-control, desire the destruction. It may be, of everyone, spending its rage not only on the targets of its aim, but on whatever happens to cross its path. The other vices drive the mind on. Anger hurts it headlong. Even if a man may not resist his passions, yet at least his passions themselves may cease. Anger intensifies its force more and more, like lightning and hurricanes and all other phenomena beyond control, as they do not simply move but fall. Anger, as Seneca defines it, is a binary emotion. The moment you realize you are angry, you are already under its control. The emotion of anger has a forward momentum that is far more intense than the other emotions. When you are in the middle of acting out in anger, you are typically unconscious of any other course of action. You are already moving headlong into a path of destruction and chaos. You don't want to be calm when you're angry. Anger justifies its own existence. Sometimes it feels good to rage in a strange way, to vent, to let off steam. The phrase loses their temper, loses their temperament. In other words, their temperament, their behavior gets away from them. You might have heard people say about others, oh when that person flips, there's no calming them down. Oh she's a nice person, but if she loses her temper, she turns into someone else. Anger when it gets going is very hard to slow down. The third reason is that anger is contagious. Some people believe that Seneca's writings include some of the first psychological observations on group psychology, and Seneca didn't just see the problems with anger on an individual level, but also anger in groups. He wrote, In short, the other vices seize individuals. This is the one passion that sometimes takes hold of an entire state. Never has an entire people burned with love for a woman. No state in its entirety has placed its hope in money or profit. Ambition seizes men one by one on a personal basis. Lack of restraint does not afflict a whole people. Often they rush to anger in one mass. Men and women, old men and boys, the nobility and the rabble are in accord, and the whole crowd, spurred on by a handful of words, succumbs to a greater passion than the one who spurred them on. They rush at once to weapons and fire brands, declaring war on their neighbors or waging it against fellow citizens. Entire houses are consumed by fire, root and branch, and the man who was lately admired for his eloquence and held in high esteem is now the victim of his own followers' anger. This is, you might have noticed, mob behavior, the stuff you see in riots. They existed in Seneca's time too. Making humans work well together in an organized, cohesive way typically takes infrastructure and management. But sometimes when anger spreads, individuals can become one large, chaotic, functioning, angry organism that seem to work perfectly together in a unified vision of havoc. So the practice I want you to do today, but also in an ongoing fashion, is to become a psychologist of anger. Find out if Seneca is right. Does anger make you a slave or does anger make you free? Investigate that in your own life, but also pay attention to angry outbursts in your social circles and whenever you encounter human beings. See if anger really is contagious, if it can spread, if the charisma of anger can affect you and make you angry. See if anger can be slowed down when it gets going. Don't just take Seneca's words at face value, but investigate them. Think of anger similar to fire. Fire in the presence of people who don't understand it can burn forests, houses, and kill. It's extremely destructive, it spreads, it's uncontrollable, has a life of its own. But when human beings learned to master fire, to understand it, to even create it, then fire could be used for cooking and for warmth, to create steam, to travel. Understanding and mastery over fire turned it from a chaotic, dangerous entity to something that benefits everyone. My challenge for you is this can you become a master of anger? It starts with examining it, just like Seneca. I'll see you back here for session three.