Anger and Power
I have a complicated relationship with anger. I suspect that’s almost universal; it’s a complex emotion, which shapes all of our lives on multiple levels, starting early in our childhoods.
Anger is deeply tied up with control, and with power. ‘Losing your temper’ implies a loss of control, but expressing anger also asserts a claim to power. People in subordinate positions are typically expected to keep theirs bottled up — at least in front of those above them in a hierarchy. People who feel powerful sometimes use expressions of anger to keep others in check.
I was just so furious, but I couldn’t show you, ’cause I know you, and I know what you can do
— Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
(all quotes are from this album, which deals with themes of freedom, gender, power and rage. Playlist, full lyrics, her notes on the songs)
It’s not necessarily a conscious thing, but anger is often a response to a perceived lack of sufficient control. That ‘sufficient’ bit is where power relations come in: the higher someone perceives their own social status to be relative to someone else, the more control they expect to have, and the more likely they are to see anger as an appropriate response when something doesn’t go their way. Indignation can be a tool for keeping subordinate parties in line; someone lower down the hierarchy might experience the same frustration, but feel they need to suppress any outward-focused rage. This may leave them with feelings of humiliation.
I used to go on the Ferris wheel every morning
Just to throw my anger out the door
Anger and shame often go together. I don’t want to overstate the extent to which human relations are hierarchical, but it is not uncommon for angry people to try to pull someone else down: to reduce their power, and often to make them ashamed of their actions. This is one of the ways that anger becomes counterproductive, because shame is arguably an even more destructive emotion. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that shame is so difficult to sit with that it is often transmuted into anger! When people feel bad about something, convincing themselves that it’s someone else’s fault is an easy way of making them feel better. Defensiveness (which often means going on the offensive) can be a handy antidote to shame.
Evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch
Shame is just one of the emotions that get channelled into rage. Anger is sometimes described as a ‘secondary emotion’ for this reason. People get angry because they don’t know how else to deal with being scared, disgusted, or confused. This is often tied up with ideas of masculinity, inseparable as they are from domination: Real Men aren’t supposed to let anyone know they feel small or weak, but rage is always available to cover up those feelings of inadequacy. Most other emotions can be interpreted as signs of weakness: fear, grief, joy, pain… All are signs of insufficient masculinity, according to some.
Dominance, though, is fragile.
Being King of the Castle means defending against all who might want a taste of your power. This is why the rich are less happy in highly unequal societies, even though they are even wealthier; the higher you get compared with those around you, the harder you have to work to maintain your position, and the further you have to fall. Inequality, imbalances of wealth and power, make everybody insecure, and insecurity breeds anger. Those at the bottom of the pile are angry at being put there, while everyone else is scared that their positions are under threat, and angry with those who challenge them.
You maim when you’re offence, but you kill when you’re on defence
And you’ve got them all convinced that you’re the means and the end
All the VIPs and PYTs and wannabes, afraid of not being your friend
When you are in a ‘lower’ social position, expressing indignation is risky. Women are seen as ‘shrill’ where a man in the same position would be ‘assertive’. Black men are seen as ‘threatening’. Disabled people are seen as ‘ungrateful’. This is why people talk about ‘tone policing’ — people with legitimate reason to be angry about things are prevented from expressing themselves in ways that get that across. Sometimes they are shut down for seeming angry, even when they are just expressing passion.
When those in powerful positions choose to elevate those with less power, they are more likely to raise up those who don’t kick up too much of a fuss — and that has a deep impact on people who might have plenty of cause to complain.
I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me
As an autistic activist I often find myself rationing my anger carefully, and I am sure that many other activists do the same — especially when advocating on behalf of marginalised groups that they are part of. Too much anger, and people get scared off, or write you off as too emotional. Quietly nettling someone until they respond angrily is a classic tactic for making your opponent seem unreasonable, popular with bullies everywhere. Too little anger, though, and people won’t believe things are really all that bad. How much is too much? How much is too little? Nobody can say, but they’ll let you know once it’s too late to do anything about it.
I can see that you keep trying to bait me
And I’d love to get up in your face
But I see if I hate you for hating me
I will have entered the endless race
Anger is the emotion that tells us that something is worth fighting for: that something is wrong, and maybe we can do something to make it better. Lama Rod Owens, in his book-length meditation on Love and Rage, strongly makes a connection with woundedness. Anger is usually born out of hurt, and it can sometimes be a way of avoiding facing that hurt head-on, but it can also spur us to constructive action.
My experiences of anger as a child were shaped by growing up as autistic, but not knowing it: being a misfit, widely seen as weird, my emotions often misread by other people. I largely experienced the anger of others as baffling and unpredictable, and often deeply unfair. Many of my peers and some of my teachers seemed to be angry at me just for existing — or for my many failures to conform, whether I was unable to, outright refused to conform to things that made no sense to me, or I was simply unaware that I was even supposed to try. For my part, I was angry at these unreasonable expectations, and at the many injustices of childhood, especially those inflicted on others.
I was also angry at injustice in the wider world. I was raised in Thatcher’s Britain, under the shadow of the Cold War, in a family where we talked about this kind of thing. My childhood saw the defeat of the miner’s strike, the brutal repression of Traveller communities, and the implementation of Section 28 — a law aimed at preventing schools from talking about homosexuality, which I marched against with my mum, wearing a pink-triangle badge. In spite of all this, it was a time of hope; the Conservatives attacked these things so ruthlessly because they could see that their power was under threat, and for many of us, it felt like a better world was in reach. There was a mass culture of resistance, of shared struggle, and of ridiculing the powerful, which took a good part of the sting out of the horrors of Tory rule in those days.
I’m pissed off, funny and warm
I’m a good man in a storm
Among other things, anger is one of branches of our bodyminds’ threat-response system: the FIGHT in fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Understanding this can give us a sense of why anger can be confusing and difficult to face — it is common to cycle between these, and it can often be hard to know where to direct our anger. Sometimes we might direct it at ourselves, other times we might lash out at anyone in front of us.
Understanding the place of anger in our threat-response system also suggests some insight into what it means when people talk about losing control in a moment of rage. If you’re not in control, who is? Nobody else, of course, but when our threat-response systems are engaged, the conscious, orderly parts that we like to think are rational take a back seat. Those are the parts ourselves that most of us identify with most strongly (in brain terms, they are concentrated in our prefrontal cortex). In their place, we experience an intense drive to neutralise the perceived threat, whatever it takes. A series of physiological stress-responses kick in: things that evolved mainly as reactions to physical threats in our immediate environment, like being confronted by a predator. It becomes much, much harder to think about things carefully.
One key thing to know about these responses is that chronic activation of the threat-response system seems to result in it just staying activated in the long term. This is at least part of the explanation for anxiety, which can be thought of as persistent activation of the ‘flight’ response; and depression, which may be a long-lasting version of the ‘freeze’ response. In this light, it is unsurprising that they so often come together.
Both depression and anxiety are experienced as profoundly disempowering, and both are more common in those who are already disempowered: people in poverty, women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, queer people… anyone else who is persistently marginalised. Typically, people in any of those groups have plenty to be angry about, but fighting all the time will wear a person out. Sometimes there are other, calmer ways to address injustice, but people have a right to rage against the wrongs they face.
You get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row
The bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know
Another thing about anger as a threat-response is its use as a political tool — often in close interaction with its fellow threat-response, fear. Unlike fear, anger feels empowering. It feels like there is something to be done, and many people desperately want the world to be different — something that ruthless politicians have been exploiting for their own ends for as long as there have been politicians. Remember that threat-responses tend to shut down rational thought and critical engagement. If you are a politician whose power relies on a lack of critical engagement, perhaps because it depends on ongoing injustice, this suggests a clear and well-worn strategy. Convince people who are already insecure to be scared about some group; rile them into being angry at that group; tell them that you will go after these perceived enemies, but you will need their help.
Of course, the groups identified as enemies rarely have much to do with the reasons people were insecure in the first place. Typically, the chosen scapegoats are in positions of relatively little power, and being targeted by politicians and other demagogues makes them even less powerful, without making anybody else any more secure. Still, populism as a political strategy depends on identifying an ‘elite’ whose interests run against those of the general population, and this often seems very effective despite the supposed elites having very little power — and despite those who employ it often being very powerful indeed.
Anger can drive us on to confront injustice, but it is hard to stay angry and rational at the same time. That makes it a dangerous emotion, open to manipulation, and too often misdirected. Anger is often abused by the powerful, both as a justification for their own actions and a cynical tool to get others on their side. Building good things will often achieve more than tearing bad things down, and if you can do it in solidarity with others, it can also be easier to sustain — but many of us have plenty to be angry about, and well-placed anger is still a much-needed response to wrongs that need righting.
Kick me under the table all you want
I won’t shut up
I won’t shut up.
