The mirror of anger is …

I’ve just read one of today’s entries on Margo Kingston’s Web Diary. The entry “Anger as energy” is a response to the recent death of Dr David Kelly in the UK.

Halfway down the first of the two responses on this topic Luke Stegemann makes the comment:-

" We have been pacified by notions of "anger management", "mediation", "impulse control" and "conflict resolution", to name but a few. Children are taught it is rude to shout. Adults try at all costs to avoid argument. We are supposed to smile in the company of those we despise while we resolve workplace conflicts with counsellors.
" The right to be angry, enraged and furious has been rationalised away as asocial, pathological behaviour. One must be calm: one must not, under any circumstances, offend or disrupt. Our discontent is suppressed within us by the notion that we must not shout, must not be rude, must not embarrass or disrupt by raw emotion, by the notion that we must always seek peaceful compromises.
" We are constantly taught that anger and rage are negative, self-defeating, and ultimately, unproductive (the latter absolute heresy in a neo-capitalist world). Protest organisers go out of their way to assure one and all that any protest will be "peaceful". Why? "

And it suddenly struck me that in the last thirty odd years, as this sort of pacification of emotions have been practiced, the incidence of depression has increased.

One hardly needs the figures provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to realise that there increasing numbers of people who are either being diagnosed as being depressed or realising it for themselves and finding ways to claw their way out of what Winston Churchill referred to as his “black dog”.

According to those statistics, at least eighteen people in every one hundred Australians of voting age, would have experienced some form of poor mental health, and (if I am reading the statistics correctly) the highest frequency is that for “affective disorders”.
These are disorders that ‘affect’ the way in which one views life; whether one is wearing rose- or blue-coloured glasses. Dysthymia is a wonderful word that is probably translated best as ‘despondency’, but everyone is familiar with the word ‘depression’. It is so familiar that even economies are known to suffer from it.

John Bunyan had it right. Depression is being in the “Slough of Despond”, mired deep in the inability to see what one can do to get out.
I once read that depression is anger turned inwards, eating away at one’s inner sense of wellbeing and joy-in-life, reinforcing and deepening the depression that one is wallowing in. When the anger that one feels at the lack of ability to be heard, or because one cannot change current circumstances due to a lack of opportunity whilst being castigated for lack of motivation, then it is not really surprising that depression, and it’s related dysthymic states are becoming more and more prevalent.

If we are increasingly taught that ‘anger’ is a ‘bad thing’, when we do become angry at circumstances around us then it is not surprising that we turn the emotion inwards, because it has to go somewhere! Thus when people who are OUR representatives start behaving in a way that angers us, we no longer know how to react to it. We are removed from that wonderfully biblical phrase of “righteous anger” [1] that allows us to express how we are feeling because we have been convinced that if we do shout out about our anger we are ‘uncivilised’ and ‘childish’, denigrated as being unfit to take part in civilised converse and thus deserving of having more misery inflicted on us. I used to call it the “Way of the Bully” when I suffered under it as a child.

To get out of our Slough of Despond we need to get angry and to be allowed to express why we are angry. Until we, as a culture and indivitually, can deal with the idea that anger is not a ‘bad thing’ and can be justified, and learn how to express anger safely, then our culture is going to be increasingly enslaved by those who find it easy to intimidate us into being the ‘good’ and ‘civilised’ citizens that just ‘don’t do anger’.

And we will continue to become more and more depressed, for longer periods of time, increasing the inability of individuals to find ways out of that mire of despondency and depression that makes it easy for offensive and sometimes untruthful points of view being inflicted on us.

[1] I always did like the story about Jesus upsetting the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple!