The Gate of the Voyagers

Here’s To Hostility!

Here’s To Hostility! Just yesterday, somebody here criticized Crid for being hostile:

“no paucity to be hostile,” the child wrote.

Crid’s response:

hostility is again usefully propulsive. stupidity is just corrosive. and annoying.

I seconded the bit on hostility:

Now you see it

i’ll regularly reveal to being hostile.

In fact, I did when the idiots at the looping company down the block took out a restraining order on me after I called their office manager, Katherine Morgan, a cunt (for taking our residentially-zoned parking and leaving their numerous gated spaces unparked lest Tom Arnold showed up with an entourage).

The office manager complained to the judge, who wasn’t finding me terribly fright-provoking, that I was “hostile and unpredictable.”

I almost said, “Why thank you!”

Instead, I think I said something like, “Well, yes, I am both of those things, but I am not violent.

I was reminded of the exchange by a piece on anger — a piece celebrating anger, really, and criticizing the way it’s been turned into some namby-pamby psychological disorder — written by Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. An excerpt:

the wholesale supervision of anger is an attempt to enforce conformity, spearheaded by politicians, police, officials, judges and health practitioners who give every indication to prefer a populace that resigns, fatalistically, to the problems it faces, rather than one that asks awkward questions and kicks up a furious upset.

Anger was once seen as an understandable reaction to unpleasant experiences or less-than-civilised living and working conditions; it was a rational, sometimes even dignified ’strong feeling of displeasure’ (7). Now, in the Anti-Angry Decade, it has been psychologised: anger is looked upon as a condition, a disease, a moral failing on the part of individuals which must be treated and corrected.

It is striking that the MHF and numerous commentators use the disease-linked word ‘epidemic’ to describe the alleged spread of anger, and continually conflate anger with rage. Traditionally, a distinction was made between ‘rage’, which referred to an individual losing control and lashing out explosively, and ‘anger’, which was considered a passionate, even high-minded expression of displeasure with the state of things. As Thomas Aquinas put it: ‘Anger is the name of a passion. A passion of the sensitive appetite is good in so far as it is regulated by reason, whereas it is evil if it set the order of reason aside.’ (8) Today’s blurring of the boundary between the reasoned passion of anger and the unreasonable expression of rage, so that everything from having arguments to committing a crime to getting agitated in the workplace can be labelled part of an ‘epidemic of rage’, shows the extent to which anger has been reworked as a psychological disorder.

Some now talk about ‘anger syndrome’, and in the US - the birthplace of psychobabble - serious anger has been relabelled Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Fittingly sharing an acronym with Improvised Explosive Device (IED), Intermittent Explosive Disorder is ‘a behavioural disorder characterised by extreme expressions of anger, often to the point of uncontrollable rage’. Apparently, 16million Americans suffer from IED (9). These days we don’t have ‘angry young men’ - we have Intermittent Explosive Disorder Sufferers.

…The psychologisation of anger has two consequences: first it separates our anger from the experience or the condition that gave rise to it, so that our ‘expressions of rage’ are always judged to be disproportionate, irresponsible and illegitimate. This can be seen in the relentless rise of rages, from ‘air rage’ to ‘golf rage’ to ‘work rage’. People who suffer from these rages, from the alleged psychological condition of losing the plot in airports, on golf courses or around the water cooler at work, are seen as irrational individuals with moral and mental flaws rather than rational actors expressing loud’n'rowdy displeasure with having been treated badly.

So apparently it isn’t the long queues at airports, the ceaseless security checks and the patronising treatment by airline staff that make some people angry at airports; it’s because they have a diagnosable condition: ‘air rage’. Even worse, it is not low wages, poor working conditions or smarmy bosses that make people angry at work - it’s because they suffer from ‘work rage’. A recent study claimed that 79 per cent of British workers suffer from this medical condition (11). In the past, anger at work was considered by many, not only to be understandable, but to be a powerful sentiment that might be motivated to force employers to improve pay and working conditions. Today, it is seen as shrill and divisive, something that must be treated by an army of anger managers. Indeed, even trade unions ‘are far more likely to organise anger manag …

Related posts: Ashlee simpson, Cung le vs. frank shamrock, Supreme court of comedy, Flight of the conchords, Stern de

Related posts:

• Place related post plugin php here...