Anger Makes You Feel Powerful
Why do we relish our anger when it is the cause of so much malice?
There is a trichotomy within our emotional system, so that any perceived threat is reacted to by either fear, anger, or sadness. If a threat is both inescapable and insuperable, we become saddened and resigned to our fate. If a threat is insuperable but can possibly be escaped from, we become scared and flee. If a threat is capable of being overcome, we feel anger. Anger, then, is a privilege.
Whenever one feels anger, in the place of fear or sadness, it is because they perceive their own power as sufficient to match the threat before them. It is for this reason that the emotional mechanism within us has laced the emotion of anger with a pleasant feeling of power. Pride, the emotion of power, which we experience when we are feeling accomplished and formidable, is calm and pleasurable.
Anger and fear are like liquid and vapor, that is, different forms of the same element. For example, a man may be confronted by another man in public, but he perceives this antagonist as physically superior to him, so he cannot muster a feeling of strength enough to feel anger; he feels only afraid. Yet, as he returns home to a wife and child, before whom he is physically dominant, his fear transforms into anger and his irritability is readily expressed. He might throw things about, yell, and otherwise make demonstrations of rage.
Many people develop a personality of malice because they are so often afraid. They bully the weak because they fear the powerful. Anger is preferable to fear; feeling powerful is preferable to feeling weak. It is a welcome reprieve to be able to exchange the frantic, unbearable agitation within us for an aggression that carries with it at least a trace of calm and control.
There are only good people. Evil in humans comes in two forms, neither of them blameworthy in their origins: The first is mass persuasion, which can be so convincing as to make atrocities seem appropriate. We are able to convince each other of what we could never justify ourselves. The second is fear transformed into anger. Being frightened — blameless fright — is the seed of all blameworthy malice. If there were a third, it would be madness and ignorance, but this is not evil; this is a child failing to realize the consequences of their actions. It is blameless throughout.
The rich inner life of a human being brings with it sundry causes of fear. We build up layers of fear with our farsighted awareness of causality. We are afraid of suffering through ridicule, hunger, and the harsh elements, so we fear losing our home. In turn, we fear losing our job. Thus, we fear upsetting our employer. Ultimately, that remote fear at the bottom of this invisible structure, which has spread its tentacles throughout, manifests itself in the most insignificant happenings, leading us to be filled with panic because we’ve slept in one morning. Suddenly, a small discrepancy, like 30 minutes earlier or later, carries with it the potential to induce worry.
We are afraid of abstract and invisible things: loneliness, failure, judgement, purposelessness , etc. A person, afraid that they will be judged as inferior on some measure, lives their life in near-constant fear that their insecurity will be exposed, and seeks refuge in that one other form that fear can assume: anger. You see, then, a person who is angry and cruel towards any whom they meet and perceive as weaker than them. All because anger is the refuge of the frightened. All because anger makes you feel powerful.