I want to talk about anger (and perhaps self-recrimination, but especially anger). And of course anger is not “allowed.” Anger is somehow a sign that you are “maladjusted”, which is an interesting term in itself – that you should adjust yourself to the indignities, inequities and injustices of the world. And if you display anger, you can be dismissed as emotional. And, if you’re a woman, hysterical, because anger is hot, and rationality is cool and calm. Never mind that rationality has led us to this point in human history or a version of rationality anyway.
You’re not allowed to be angry at slow violence, because “that’s just the way the system works and you benefit from it. So if you criticize it, you’re a hypocrite.”
And what all this adds up to it’s a beautiful, from the perspective of those in charge, preemptive silencing. It’s one of the incumbency’s many advantages – that most people who criticize it are going to get angry after they’ve been fobbed off, and lied to and then can be ignored.
Aristotle said that anyone could get angry, but the key thing was to get angry with the right person at the right time in the right way. Aristotle was living when 5000 people in one place counted as a big city. I’m probably going to walk past the houses of, I don’t know, a thousand People on my way to the gym, and I live now, in a small town, not much bigger than a village. And because of that mass, you can’t really get angry with an individual about things being the way they are.
Even if you could on a spatial scale, everything is now so interlinked globally, and there are the historical factors, that it’s impossible to be angry – as a thoughtful, historically, and sociologically-informed person at one individual, or one group – without considering the broader linkages, or at least I find it impossible.
And that historical perspective and that sociological perspective can dilute your anger. And you play along with the games of “Well, it’s not my fault. Speak to him, speak to him.” Like in that Dickens novel. I think David Copperfield, of the legal partnership where one partner could always blame the other.
And so in the absence of any place to really put that anger then you’re in pain and you have a couple of options. One [if you have a cushion of middle class affluence] is just to stop looking at things that make you angry whether it’s the destruction of habitats and the extinction of species or the injustices is being dealt out to indigenous peoples other species most members of our own society who work in horrible bullshit jobs and have no meaning or control – or they have meaning but it’s very hard one
Or you turn the anger on yourself as some people do. But that anger is like the blood of a face hugger when you chop into one of its arms holding on to John Hurt’s face. [This is a reference to the 1979 film Alien, btw] if you’re not careful, it has to bleed all the way through the spaceship’s hull. And most people most of the time find it wise not to cut the arm, find it easier just to turn their anger elsewhere onto them onto “the Other”.
And of course, those in charge are very good at creating those enemies. I’m not going to mention the Nazis. nstead, I’m going to mention the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, where the drill sergeant is brutalizing everyone turning them into Marines. He knows that he needs to refocus and channel the anger and hate that he is creating away from himself as a representative of the Marine Corps and onto one individual among them. In this case, played by Vincent D’Onofrio. Stanley Kubrick is good at this stuff.
On the whole anger is one of the emotions that social movements are scared of because, of course, anger is perceived to be with some cause synonymous with violence or threats of violence. And for most social movements in the West violence is the death rattle before the end. Violence can make it much harder to recruit and retain. And it gives carte blanche to the security services…
And so violence is understandably eschewed. And ‘lifting the lid’ off anger would make eschewing violence much more difficult, but in the process of gatekeeping to protect oneself. Social movements are then unable to do anything with people who are angry and have no outlet for it.
And what social movements and social movement organizations say about emotions tends not to be good enough. It doesn’t help people orient themselves and understand what’s going on inside their own skulls. And if social movements can’t help people understand what’s going on in the world, understand what’s going on in their skulls and give them a viable and plausible path to participation, especially in high-risk activities [and unfortunately, in the 21st century, any participation is high risk], then the social movements in my opinion, will founder. They will be unable to maintain momentum. They will be unable to retain people, because the psychological and emotional needs are not being met.
And when that happens, people who may not be able to articulate this, we may not be able to articulate anger and their needs, will vote with their feet.
And I’m afraid that’s what we’ve been seeing. Time and again. But who has the time and the skills to create social movements with that level of “Collective Emotional Literacy? It’s a hard cel. See what I did there, cel?
Okay, I have deliberately taken a slightly longer route to the gym this morning, in the hope that this gets me up towards my 1000 words, I don’t know why I set the goal of 1000 words. Nice round number. (“base eight is just like base 10… If you’re missing two fingers”.)
If you have ideas for topics that the Doom Diary entry should be about. Let me know if you have hard facts about the North Atlantic Temperature Anomaly or the meaning of the Antarctic sea ice increase and maybe what that will do to up swelling, etc. Please let me know. And if you have opinions, especially ones that say “Marc, you are completely full of it, and here is why” then please get in touch. If you’re just a climate denialist please fuck off, because I might get angry with you
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