‘If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention,” goes an old slogan that made numerous appearances at recent protests against the presidency of the Bottomless Pit Of Need. I take the point, I suppose, but it’s always struck me as wrongheaded. More and more, these days, getting enraged about politics feels like a substitute for action: an addictive emotional experience that tricks you into thinking it might be effective, but mainly just serves as a distraction. The problem’s even worse on social media, which serves up an overwhelming quantity of stuff worth getting angry about, then seductively implies that firing off a zinger – or repeatedly stabbing the favourite button on other people’s zingers – is somehow a useful response.
It rarely is. The more likely result is “learned helplessness”, coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman, based on experiments he conducted in the 1960s, in which dogs were given electric shocks. Some had the option of stopping the shocks by pressing a lever. The others, which didn’t, soon learned that nothing they did made any difference – and they kept behaving helplessly even when, in the second stage of the experiment, they did have the chance to escape from the shocks. When getting angry leads to nothing much, over and over, defeatism sets in. Which is rather convenient, from the viewpoint of the politicians generating all those anger-inducing headlines.
“If you try to maintain this fever pitch of anguish and fear and outrage, your brain, to protect you, will just turn down the volume on the outrage and adapt,” Mirah Curzer, a lawyer and writer, argued on Medium the other day, making a related point. It’s tempting to imagine that the way to resist the “normalisation” of terrible things is to remain constantly, blisteringly angry about them. You can’t sink into complacency – the logic goes – if you’re spitting mad. The hitch, as Curzer notes, is that emotions get normalised, too. (Yes, it’s our old friend the “hedonic treadmill”, which explains why thrilling new luxuries eventually become mundane, and horrifying circumstances eventually lose their sting.) That’s why it’s no indulgence, perhaps even a positive duty, to step away regularly from the awfulness and get on with your life, especially the pleasurable parts. Call it “self-care”, if you like that dreadful phrase – but it’s also a way to prevent the dulling of your perceptions.
It’s strange to think of “anguish and fear and outrage” as addictive: we usually reserve that concept for experiences that are enjoyable, at least initially. But as Buddhists have always pointed out, aversion and craving are two sides of the same coin; whether you’re obsessed with yearning or hatred for something (or someone), you’re still obsessed.
You’ll be far more effective, as a campaigner, if you practise stepping away, instead of getting swept into a futile whirlpool of rage, which only serves the other side. It’s like strengthening a muscle. You might call it resistance training.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
