November 30th, 2005
So you wanna know where most anger in this world comes from?
Fear.
I actually used to separate anger into two categories:
- Female anger - Which is completely justified
- Male anger - Which is completely unjustified
It's not a very good model, and it was slowly leading me down the path to quiet insanity. These days, I'm much louder and overt, because I've simplified my model of this into a single category:
- Anger - Which is the result of someone stepping a little too closely to our fears
That's it, baby ... none of this "good" anger or "bad" anger. It's all about what we don't want to show to others.
I've already gone on about this (probably at length1) so I'll just summarize again here: There is virtually nobody in this world without at least one soft bruised part of his/her personality. And I think I even once went so far as to say that the bulk of those bruises run in the "How do I look to others?" or the "How does my life compare to others?" phyla.
* * *
You might think that I am overstating the case. Or that I am hopelessly wrong because I am simplifying an idea to apply to everyone. Well, no, actually ... I'm not.
Now, we've all met folks who want to categorize the world into "two types of people": 2
- You're either with me or against me
- There are those that love things and use people, and those that use things and love people (aww, isn't that cute)
- You're either "attracted to the beauty of nature", or "attracted to the nature of beauty" (by the way, what the hell does that really mean?)
- Detail man or big-picture man
- Conservative or Liberal
Well, we all pretty much know that it's simplistic and ultimately erroneous thinking, don't we? And yet, here I go and make a sweeping broad one-size-fits-all statement about everyone! Am I twice as stupid as the people who say that you're "either with me or against me"? No. I am not. It is not a broad sweeping generalisation to say that all humans need to breathe and somehow eat to survive and so it is also not a generalisation to say that all humans have soft spots in their personas that trigger anger when they are pressed. About the only distinction I can make is that the anger is internalised by some (and results in stinky weasel behavior) and it is sometimes externalised by others—and in various shades of grey in between.
Right, so when you come across someone who is angry, you can be sure that they are at their most vulnerable. They have just had their own sore spots massaged, and now they are defending themselves. About the only piece of advice I can give you is this: Stand clear, they're not going to be any less angry just because you want them to. And if you do somehow manage to quash their externalisation of it through intimidation, more fear, or through coercion, you have just made the world a little bit worse.
1) Right, so I have ample evidence of this. The other day I was listening to one of my own songs while I drove home from work (is that egocentric?) and I started to have a mental discussion with myself about why I wrote such a song. By the time I was launching into a digression of a digression, I realised that the song was long over; in fact, the next one in my playlist was finishing up! My words about the song lasted at least twice as long as the song itself.
Perhaps Reader's Digest will publicly declare me their natural enemy soon.
2) Reminds me of something a coworker used to have up on his desk: "There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary counting, and those who don't."
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