I’ve been pretty angry these past few days, over a dispute relating to the reimbursement of travel expenses that’s left me quite a bit out of pocket.
The details are unimportant. What matters is how awful it’s left me feeling, how helpless I am to get the parties involved to do what I regard as the right thing. It’s left me stewing with rage, in a way that’s overtaken my thoughts in quiet moments.
Well, I decided I just didn’t want that feeling in my body anymore. So the next time a wave of anger rose up on me, I decided to try and figure out what was going on.
It seemed obvious to me that my rage was bound up in impotence and humiliation – in lacking the power to change a situation I regarded as unjust. So I was tempted by the proposition that anger is a failure mode of control: that it arose because I couldn’t make the situation behave in the way I wanted it to.
But on reflection, that “wanted” is at the core of it. What I really mean is that anger is a failure mode of *desire*.
This might be obvious to you. Arguably, it should have been obvious to me. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be quite generally the case: anger is the body’s response to lacking whatever power is necessary to make the world behave as one wills it to. It’s what we feel when the world or some actor in it doesn’t do what we want, and we lack whatever levers would make it otherwise.
Our desire may be just, the state of affairs we want to bring about may be righteous. Or neither of those things might be true. Or (probably most often of all) those concepts and categories might be irrelevant. Whichever it is, the feeling of wanting something to be a certain way *and being unable to make it that way* seems like a necessary precondition to anger, its surest and most reliable precursor state.