Anger

I tend to go to Whole Foods when I need hippy things–in general I like the people that work there, and the CEO wrote one of the few intelligent things I saw about Obamacare when it was being “debated”–but the other day I needed something they didn’t have, and went to my locally owned health food store.  As I was walking in, I was thinking about what I had recently read about peoples eyes being detached due to trauma, about anger being displaced, about reason and intellect being used in lieu of honest emotion.

And I thought: what do all the peace and love people do with their anger?  What do they do when anger and outrage are genuinely warranted, as they sometimes are?  I think of the pale and unsmiling faces I have seen so often in such places.  I think of the obsessions with abstractions with regard to food and supplements.

And it hit me that hippies first suppress their anger by pushing it down into the inner depths of their being, so they can put stickers about love on their cars, so that they can share in the glory of the Dalai Lama, and read all those very nice books talking about how we just have to be nice and everything will work out; and they allow it out at socially appropriate occasions, at preapproved targets, like Pro-Lifers, like alleged racists, like Donald Trump.  At such points, the anger exceeds what is necessary, because it was not allowed out before, and since most of them have never learned mature ways of processing and feeling emotions they want to reject in total, as part of a violent world they do not want to admit exists, they have no effective restraints.

Being nice is not a suitable goal for someone seeking psychological maturation.  It is an OUTCOME of developed emotional control and social skill, but it is not compulsive when someone has options for setting mature boundaries, for feeling anger when genuine emotional or physical threats are present, and for then NOT being nice.

To suppress your rage because you want to believe the world is nice is a child’s game.  They were called the Flower Children, and clearly remaining in contact with a childlike joy and connection with life is good, but avoiding adult responsibilities–the development of personal AGENCY–is not.  You do not avoid all the bad things: you empower them.

Radical Muslims, to take the most obvious examples, are ghouls who rape and kill without remorse because they ENJOY it, and their religion teaches them to enjoy it.  We do not become better people by ignoring this patent fact.  We do not alleviate human suffering–we increase it.  We do not increase human wisdom–we degrade it.  We do not serve the cause of justice–we violate and abdicate it.

All of this comes from failing to integrate the necessary and useful power of anger in healthy and mature ways.