Pan

Psygast

P

PAN

Anger

Oh I'm just so bloody angry all the time. I can't work out whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose we should start off by saying what we mean by anger. And as we said in our last week's installment when we're talking about pride. Aristotle wearing the crown, the virtue

ethics is probably our best place to start. So the great ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle

as we know and love him, said that anger was composed of three parts. Firstly, he says it's a response

to a significant damage to someone or something one cares about that that person believes was wrongfully inflicted.

Second of all, he thinks that anger involves an unpleasant feeling, but a hopeful feeling of

payback. Thirdly, he thinks it always involves a slighting or downgrading of somebody else.

So if you just have the first part, if you just have a response

to significant damage and feel like something was wrongly inflicted, you could just feel a sense of

sorrow or sadness. Someone kills one of my loved ones. I can feel really bad about that. But that's not

anger. It turns to anger when I have an unpleasant feeling I want to get back at them in some sense. So perhaps I want the law to take justice on them. I want to go around and beat them up myself. I want the cosmos to kick them in the bum on the next runaround in the cycle of samsara. Or I might just hope that it all goes badly. So someone wrongs me, I think, I really hope they don't get that really good job now if they punch me on the face on the way to the interview.

So there's always that thing that comes with it. And the third part is perhaps a little bit more contentious. We can talk about that in a moment. The idea that it always involves a slighting or downgrading of somebody else. Yeah, so let's take road rage, right? It's a really good example of anger. Let's say you're driving home from your busy day at work and you drive this road every single day and you're coming up to a junction and someone just cuts it up real, real bad. They cut you up. Now, with the first part of our Stottles definition of anger there, the annoyance comes from the fact that you're just obeying the rules of the road, going at the speed limit, and this person's breaking the rules. There's a frustration there, an antagonism. So what do you do? The second bit, you beep your horn, you beep, and then you beep, because you're swearing so profusely, right, in your car. You're really angry at them. And then you can see from this example that actually a lot of people get confused between anger and frustration, and they're not necessarily the same thing, right? So anger is looking at a potential injustice. You feel like you've been treated unjustly and wanting there to be some form of retribution, for want of a better word, for that, right? So I'm going to swear at them, I'm going to beat my horn at them. I might cut them up at the next junction if we're going to go full need for speed on this. But actually, that's very different from just, oh, I'm a little bit annoyed that someone cut me up.

There's something that switches in your brain.

And for a lot of people, it's not something that's conscious.

A lot of people don't go, wow, I now have road rage, and now I'm going to swear profusely

and beat my horn at this person.

It's almost like an instinct and an emotion. I wanted to piggyback

off that and talk about the anger that people might have towards things that aren't actually

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