2020.04.12 Anger and its creation

Anger is a reaction resulting from the interruption of our established and intended modes of acting. Anger has a two fold purpose, it is meant to prevent the action from happening again and, secondly, to educate the offender into behaving in conformity to our will in the future.'

As an example, think of a surgeon operating on a patient. The surgeon asks for a specific tool, an instrument. In this example, the surgeon's request does not have the response the surgeon, from his training and experience 'knows' he needs this instrument, so he yells, chastises or in some ways educates and admonishes the assistant. The assistant learns or leaves. There is no other choice. Anger is always life and death ultimately.

In the same way, if I am doing something that I have done predictably before, and, there is interference with an outcome that I 'know' should happen, I get angry. And if it is inanimate, I smash it to remove it from interfering in the future. If I am a psychopath, this can happen with animate objects such frogs and cats and people. Anger is not moral, it is the result of training and expectation of outcomes from experienced ways of acting.

We cannot learn to control our anger in the sense of stifling it into nonexistance. What we can do to learn more about the things we are doing and to become more effective. Unfortunately, if what we are learning to do and become is essentially domination of all in our environment, the only recourse is for others to stop us as a collective norm.