On Controlling One’s Anger Among Others
The following is a slightly edited version of a brief reply I offered to a regular correspondent who expressed disappointment in her seeming inability to bite her tongue, let alone to control her emotional response outright, when faced with irrational or obnoxious ideas or behavior from those around her, such as coworkers.
This kind of self-control is especially important when the people you are with are those with whom you would least wish to feel “exposed” in a weak moment – and as we discussed previously, expressing anger in an uncontrolled way always makes one feel small. But why? And where have we talked about a similar “diminished” feeling recently?
Of course, it was when we talked about the “drinking culture.” As you know, one of my biggest criticisms of after-work drinking events, university drinking nights, and other such gatherings, is that they reduce everyone to the same level. How? By making the higher kind of person, when he drinks, feel a little less in control of himself, a little looser in speech and behavior, a little more foolishly open and expressive than he would normally wish to be, especially in this environment surrounded by people among whom he would rather be reserved and private, not exposing and therefore reducing himself with moments of overly emotional weakness, foolish behavior, or loose words and thoughts.
Anger in most social contexts is a near cousin of drunkenness. Even a little bit of it – not even ragingly drunk with extreme ire, but just a little “tipsy” with excessive annoyance – is enough to cause us to lose some control of our thoughts, actions, and words. Suddenly, once we let this form of intoxication into our soul, we are likely to say something we would not normally have said, to answer another person more sharply than we would have intended, or to show our frustration on our face too openly. This too, like the other form of intoxication, makes us less moderate, reserved, and thoughtfully detached in our interactions, and therefore causes us to behave in ways that we know are not our best self, or even our true self at all — assuming we reject the big lie of modern psychology, namely that our raw feelings represent our deepest truths. Such outbursts are merely the mocking game of the little demons we normally hold inside very easily, breaking out of their cages today because we drank in just a little too much intoxicating anger, and therefore let go of some of our mature self-awareness and our soul-defining reason.
