Does anything in being correspond to our capacity for anger?
We all know or have seen animals and children and people of all ages who fall
into a rage over nothing, which is to say that the trigger of their rage is
something other than the event that is its ostensible cause. The rage is inside—fear
the true cause. Fear is unconditioned. We are programmed for self-protection
and for this to manifest exaggerated fear. Overproportioned fear is safer. But
fear relative (or less than so) to the danger is a necessary condition of
knowledge. The extreme of fear is removal from the world. The basis of
knowledge is engagement, overcoming fear. But I stray from the point. Pain and
death are personal. They are the worst that can happen to us as individuals.
But the fear of these is not the source of rage. Rage is characteristic of the
fundamentalist of any sect or indeed the fundamentalist of any ism. The Tea
Party rage, the Al-Qaida rage, the Klan rage. So much rage. This rage is functions
to protect one’s “philosophy,” one’s “discourse” or “world view,” not one’s
mere life. It protects one from thinking, re-evaluating—which is an exhausting
process. (Nietzsche would relate it to power, but that is an
oversimplification.) We have an exhausting catalog of methods for keeping the
blinders attached. What can we say? Rage
erupts from weak causes. Rabies. Neither the psychological cause and the environmental
trigger nor the two together buy this effect. Meanwhile, greater causes, truer
justifications for rage, rarely raise it: actual injustice, murder, rape,
genocide, any sort of violence. Unless one is the victim, unless one’s self is
at stake, one is more likely moved to sadness or complacency or cynicism. And
if one is moved to rage in these
circumstances, it is not because of the injustice, but because one’s self is at
stake. One’s self. Not one’s life, not one’s body. Revenge often kills the
revenger. Rage is always a danger to the enraged. There is much in being that
corresponds to our capacity for anger. But it does not seem that our anger is
ever directed toward it.
