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Wednesday, June 21, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Commentary...
Might as well face it, we’re addicted to rage
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
Jeremy Christian, who
fatally slashed two men on
a Portland MAX train and
wounded another last month,
is a rage junkie. He is full of
bilious anger toward anyone
who is not him. When three
men intervened as he spewed
his wrath and anti-Muslim
abuse at a pair of teenaged
girls, he turned that rage on
them and left them in a welter
of blood.
James T. Hodgkinson, who
opened fire on Republican
congressmen and staffers at
an early morning baseball
practice last Wednesday, was
a rage junkie. As a column in
the Los Angeles Times notes,
“There seemed to be little
about America that James T.
Hodgkinson agreed with. He
had a hero, Bernie Sanders.
But his enemies seemed to be
endless.”
Americans are becoming a
nation of rage junkies. Most,
of course, will never act out
their rage in such spectacu-
larly destructive fashion, but
rage can also work insidi-
ously, eroding and corroding
souls and the ties that bind a
society together.
Rage is powerful and
addictive. Rage arouses and
stimulates — it makes us feel
more alert, more powerful,
more alive. Nothing like a big
hit of righteous wrath to make
you feel better about yourself
— at least for a moment.
It supplies that delicious
shot of dopamine that our
brains crave. But like any
powerful drug, the effects
wear off, leaving us feeling
less than we did before —
and needing another, heavier
hit to get high.
Rage addiction is nothing
new, of course — it’s been
wired into us since we first
climbed down out of the trees
on the African savannah. But
we have some new and novel
tools at our fingertips with
which to feed the addiction
— and with which others can
exploit it for fun and profit.
In a National Review col-
umn recently, Ben Shapiro
notes that:
“…something new has
happened to American poli-
tics in the last few years:
Politicians have realized that
the simplest path to power is
to humor everyone’s anger.
If you take someone’s anger
from them, you’ve emotion-
ally castrated them. More
important, you run the risk of
driving them into the arms of
someone who will feed their
anger — an anger that will
now turn on you for the sin of
having discounted that anger
in the first place.
“This is deeply unhealthy.”
You think? And it’s worse
than that. There are people
getting very rich off of stok-
ing the fire, and they’re using
sophisticated neuro-psycho-
logical prompts to elicit our
addictive behaviors.
Talk radio and cable info-
tainment networks build their
entire business model around
feeding anger. And more than
a few people spend hours
each day punching the but-
ton over and over, sharing
memes and screeds on social
media— just one more hit.
Just one more.
Whatever you hate, what-
ever really hacks you off, you
can share it in a second and
maybe get a hit of valida-
tion as a chaser. Appalled by
Trump? Rent the guy space
in your head all day long
while you shoot out dozens
of screeds and call it “resis-
tance.” (Ironically, if any-
thing brings Trump down, it
will be his inability to control
his raging Twitter finger.)
Scorn the “libtards”?
Share that killer demeaning
meme. Oh, that really got ’em.
Feels good. Do it again.
That’s not discourse; it’s
not discussion; it’s not debate.
It’s just pushing buttons —
our own and other peoples’.
The horrible results of
addictive rage are obvious
when they manifest them-
selves in acts of vicious vio-
lence. But the vastly more
common and more insidious
effects of constant rage are
not less horrible for being less
self-evident. A friend likens it
to “slapping a saw.” The saw
is impervious to our rage —
and the teeth will inevitably
tear us up.
This is not to say that
all anger is misplaced. The
world is — as it has ever been
— full of folly, greed, venal-
ity and outright evil. Anger at
such things is legitimate and
justified. It is, in fact, neces-
sary. Anger channeled into
effective action can effect
significant change.
What gets harder and
harder to distinguish is what
is effective action and what is
slapping a saw? Are we doing
something useful with our
anger or simply looking for a
quick hit of emotional payoff,
hitting the button repeatedly
like a crack-addled monkey
— tearing ourselves up as a
result, to no good end at all?
Ultimately, we are what
we do, not what we feel or
what we say. An artist friend
tells me that “we are respon-
sible for building the world
we want to live in.” Seems
like picking up the toolbox is
the antidote to rage.
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The Variable Message
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US-20/126 take next right.”
The message will appear
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