- Janice Lea Vanlandingham I think that we are just frustrated, and that can lead to alot of stuff. anger, acting out etc
- Alan Petrillo Janice, I agree. We are a nation of angry people. That anger, I think, does in fact spring from frustration.
- Charlie Martin "Become" is the problematic word, here, Alan. Our political discourse is actually pretty weak tea compared to most of history.
- Janice Lea Vanlandingham Alan, I am not an addict to anything. I do get pretty ticked when people want to take a soft posture to something that is going to make them a rug for others.And if enough people do this so that my nation falls victim, I'll defend her as I have sworn. First you are a rug then you are a victim. People who have become a victim don't understand how they end up there, because I have been a victim and recognize the well laid and worn path, when I see people setting themselves up for victim status I try (like an idiot) to change their path. I, like an idiot, take this refusal personally. Now I make a reasonable attempt and if that does not work and I feel anger rising, I let them go, I am not here to save the world and when it comes down to defending myself, family and home I then will step up and fight the threat face to face with violence if necessary. The issue of illegal immigration and burning of the American flag brought my mean side to the public. I have no regrets in the words I spoke, no withdrawl of them either. If people won't acknowledge the danger that they are in, God speed to them in the future that they wish for.
My stance on Illegal Immigration will never change as I have stood on the front lines of that war. The same about burning an American Flag on this soil, I have very adamant attitudes with regard to that action. And the burner will suffer if I am around. Now this is my last entry with regard to this. I have said enough, - Alan Petrillo @Charlie: Good point. Then there are the stories from around the world of legislators behaving badly.
- Alan Petrillo I understand that, Janice. Trust me, I know some real anger addicts. You, that I've seen, don't engage in the self stimulation that real anger addicts do in order to maintain their anger high. There's a difference between being angry and being an anger addict. You are angry, but from what I've seen you aren't an anger addict.
- Janice Lea Vanlandingham Yes thank you. I would be a terrible person were I addicted to anger. There use to be a whole s**t load of things that would fire me up, but my health (ulcers) would not support that attitude, and as I grew older I suppose I have mellowed (sorta).
I don't care less I just realized that I could not change most of the things that pissed me off. I don't argue much, I save the energy for when I can do something. So now I select that which I can do something about. Like I can't stop people from burning the American flag but God help the fool who lights or tries to light one in my presence. There would be a barbeque! LOL :} - Janice Lea Vanlandingham On the" anger addict's" you are right and I can see of what you refer.
- Alan Petrillo I'm with you on the flag burning issue. If someone tries to light one up in front of me then someone is going to find themselves covered in fire extinguisher compound. At least.
- Alan Petrillo BTW: You've found what I mean by anger being a central nervous system stimulant. Keeping yourself in that state of excitement can cause a number of deleterious health effects, ulcers among them.
- Janice Lea Vanlandingham You are nice, me I think the stop drop and roll works great. stop em, drop
(how ever) them on their ass.And roll em gently with a firm application of
my boot. Repeat as necessary! LOL - Alan Petrillo LOL! I know some customers I'd like to do that to!
- Janice Lea Vanlandingham ;D Old fashion communication "first you get their attention..." I know you have heard the stories about the mule..?
- Robert Luis Rabello "Everyone knows everything, and no one's ever wrong . . .
. . . until later." - Jay Ashworth My favorite descriptive phrase for this?
"Recreational indignation".
And BTW: I will defend to the hilt the right of those people to have me put them out with a fire extinguisher. :-) - Jay Ashworth PS: your long-form writing has improved markedly. :-)
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth wow. what are the permissions on this post? it's worth of spreading around.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth late to the party and I generally try to stay out of anything political but I've found that people can fight over anything, and teenage girls will threaten physical violence over Justin Bieber (in my defense, a friend was reading Jezebel and she tweeted it - it was stunning - and now it's gone, and I didn't save it, but it was pretty scary.)
Also, of course, in this country in the past little while, people (in the media) are paid big bucks to stir people up.
When I come across these things, I feel despair more than anger, so I stick to smaller battles that I can never win like Kate Gosselin (I feel she is a child abuser, and you know why I would care about that) and Facebook Privacy (if they'd never promised any, I wouldn't be here - but a status update or 4 to all my friends beats "1 really long email to one friend and then having to ignore the rest cause I'm all typed out" - daily. I'm torn between "they really think these are features" and "they are lying thru their teeth" (must look up the origin of that). I don't generally lie awake wanting to go back to the argument but I really do understand the concept.
I also think (on another front) that when people are unemployed and frustrated, they often look for something to be angry at.
I did however once have a big fight with a guy I liked. And when it was over and he no longer hated me I was sad - because he went back to ignoring me. - Alan Petrillo Pam, you have my permission to use this post as you like, just give me credit.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth of course.
- Alan Petrillo Update: After getting excoriated by a couple of militant feminists, I have to add them to the list of anger addicts. The ridiculous thing is that I'm on their side, but apparently I don't get offended at the right things, and that's a problem.
- Frank Lhota I would recommend to anyone that feels American politics is particularly rude or nasty go to YouTube and look up UK parliamentary debates. The following video is the most popular political video in the UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
youtube.comDaniel Hannan MEP: The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued GovernmentDaniel Hannan MEP: The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government- Alan Petrillo Oh, understand that politics in a lot of other countries make our politicians look like pansies by comparison, but I'm not talking about politicians. I'm talking about people in general. Everywhere I look I see someone unreasonably angry about something. Creating and feeding anger is something the 24 hour media machine does very well, and profits handsomely from it.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth yes, that was my question as well. I don't remember the public in general being at each others' throats like this in the past. Maybe back in the 60's student movement but that seemed more like a generational thing. (really, my mother looked at that and didn't want me to go to college. I'm pretty sure it had calmed down by the time I graduated, though.)
I wondered whether it was Facebook and Twitter that made all of this fighting suddenly visible to me, but I'll buy 24 hour news, slanted by network and raided to the decibel level (and intelligence level) of a Boston Herald Headline. - Pamela Jaye Ashworth Notes don't have Audience Icons?
- Frank Lhota Even when we talk about people in general, it is not at all obvious that we are angrier in this country or in this era. Are people really angrier now than during the height of the Viet Nam war? Are are divisions deeper than the Irish Catholic / Protestant division? It seems that people idealize both the past and other countries. It reminds me of a bit from "The Mikado" where the Lord High Executioner includes in his list of potential victims:
"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own" - Pamela Jaye Ashworth hmmm... I once posted a parody about Mormons and two people jumped on me (even with the "some of my friends are mormons" note) . I had to delete the post just to keep people from fighting over it. We seem so quick to jump lately.
Maybe I just wasn't aware in the past. But after all that United We Stand stuff, we are so far from that that it's not funny. (granted, freedom of speech is great but the name calling... Republican, Democrat are epithets people can't seem to stop hurling -- even at the Rally To Restore Sanity some couldn't let it lie.) - Pamela Jaye Ashworth Catholic/Protestant may be a political thing in that country, but the Crusades and The Inquisition also took place. I never considered it political (though it was, in a way). I don't know... maybe people's political fights have risen (sunk?) to the level of their religious ones?
- Alan Petrillo I think it was Jay Ashworth who coined a good term for this: Outrage porn.
- Jay Ashworth I stole it, but yeah.
- Alan Petrillo The latest set of outrage addicts I've run into are the Islam bashers. And they insist on bashing those of us who hold to Enlightenment ideals of tolerance almost as hard as they bash Muslims.
- Jay Ashworth Yup.
Now: the question is: are they doing that because their religion tells them to, or merely because *they think* their religion tells them to. - Alan Petrillo The particular bashers in this case are atheists. So I guess you could say that their religion tells them to.
- Jay Ashworth I'm a bit tired of Atheists who forget that there's no document telling them they have to proselytize...
- Craig McGregor FU!!! IM NOT ANGRY DAMMIT!!!!
- Craig McGregor hee hee
- Alan Petrillo <snicker>
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth Strange. A friend of mine just posted something like : why do atheists fight with Christians over Christmas. It you don't believe in God, you don't care. She thinks they aren't really atheists, just Antichristians.
As long as you don't put the Christmas Tree on my desk (happened once) or make me wish you Merry Christmas, wish me anything you want. Freedom of religion goes both ways. - Pamela Jaye Ashworth And apparently it is not possible to even copy this post using the Android app. Darn. It took long enough to find it and I really wanted to share it with somebody who has been posting accounts of Trump rallies.
- Alan Petrillo You should be able to share it.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth It's friends only
- Alan Petrillo Huh. I thought it was public. I'll have to fix that.
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth I thought it used to be too
- Eliska Reilman Adema The irony of all these angry people supporting Trump is that he is part of the cooperative that created conditions to make them angry
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth I can't link it, but at least my tablet allowed me to find it for a change.
- Alan Petrillo Pamela Jaye Ashworth, odd, because its privacy is "public".
- Pamela Jaye Ashworth There's a share button from here but I don't think here is where I was and it doesn't matter because I needed to share it to a different thread so I would have needed an actual link.
Have we become a nation of anger addicts? The more I see of our political discourse, or lack of discourse, the more I think so.
I have recently spent a two weeks trying to inject some sanity into the discussion of illegal immigration. I found that it's frustrating, extremely so, to try to discuss intelligently such a topic when the people on the other side of the discussion absolutely refuse to see reason. At the end of my attempt I was so frustrated, and so angry, that I was lying awake at night thinking about the issue, and unable to sleep. All I wanted to do was get up, get on the computer, do more research on the topic, and continue to fight the argument.
Then I realized what was going on.
It was as if I'd taken a stiff upper, and then tried to sleep. Anger, it turns out, is a powerful central nervous system stimulant. Really, think about it. What happens physiologically when you get angry? Your adrenalin level increases, your heartbeat increases, your blood pressure rises, your lungs open up, your thoughts become very focused, and you get a burst of endorphins that reduce your perception of pain, and contribute to a feeling of wellbeing. It's everything you would get from taking a lot of caffeine, or even cocaine or methamphetamine. It is exactly like being high on a stimulant drug.
People who get angry about a subject, unreasonably angry, for a long period of time, begin to act like addicts. They get addicted to anger.
This epiphany, courtesy of the angry folks on Facebook's “Stop Illegal Immigration” page, caused me to look back at a number of similar discussions I've had over the years, on a number of topics, and in retrospect I've seen the same kind of behavior over and over again.
A person gets angry about something, and it doesn't much matter what. In the case that brought this to my mind it was illegal immigration, but I've seen the same process with abortion, gay rights, same-sex marriage, politics, religion, divorce, drug policy, food policy, animal rights, and a host of others. It doesn't matter what the origin of the anger is. The subjects are rather like brands of whiskey to an alcoholic. It doesn't really matter what the brand is as long as it contains a strong dose of the drug of choice, which in this case is anger.
Then the addictive process begins. The CNS stimulation sets in, and the anger addict gets high on it. They get every bit as high as they would be if they had taken an illicit drug. And they feel not just good, but great! They feel alive! They're energetic and raring to go fight the good fight! And then their anger runs out of steam, and they start coming down off of that high, and it feels rather like being run over by a truck. The endorphins ebb away, and they begin to feel all of those aches and pains again. Often worse than before. The adrenalin high fades, and leaves them feeling drained, tired, and even depressed. It is every bit like the crash coming down off of speed. This drives the anger addict to feed his anger, so he dives right back into the subject of choice to get another fix.
In the case of an anger addiction there are 2 mechanisms at work feeding the addiction.
The first mechanism at work feeding the addiction is the search for information. Specifically, information that angers the addict. The addict will continually search for information in his particular subject of choice that agrees with his prejudices, and feeds his anger. Psychologists call this behavior “self stimulation”. Reports or articles in his subject area which do not feed the addict's anger are either ignored, denied, or dismissed as irrelevant. On the other hand, reports which are materially, demonstrably inaccurate will be accepted by the anger addict without criticism when they do feed his anger.
A case in point of this is the perception of people who fight against illegal immigration. Media and popular culture have fed the idea that the US is swimming in illegal immigrants, and illegal immigration is at the root of all that is wrong in America today. Anger addicts who have latched onto this issue continually scream statements like “it's an invasion”, “they're all driving drunk”, and “all they want to do is steal our jobs and rape our women.” They continually scream these jingoistic slogans despite the fact that every single report on the issue from every credible reporting agency published since 1998 has shown with a certainty approaching 100% that illegal immigration is declining, and drastically so since 2008. For the anti-illegal-immigration true believers, and especially for the anger junkies, these reports, no matter how verifiably accurate, are either wrong or irrelevant, because they don't feed the anger of the addict.
Additionally, in the age of the internet, the addict no longer has to go places like his local library or read his newspaper to feed his anger. Today all he has to do is use Google and search for pages in his particular subject of choice. Since the internet is available nearly everywhere on a 24 hour basis, the anger addict now has the power to feed his addiction continually, around the clock, without even needing to leave his own house.
As part of the addiction process, the addict over time needs more and more of his drug of choice. As the anger addict's body begins to need more and more stimulation to get that anger high, the addict will seek out this self stimulation more and more frequently until the behavior takes up every minute of his free time. The addict will also seek out more and more outrageous incidents to get his anger fix. He will also need higher and higher levels of anger until his anger level gets so high that it results in dangerous, self destructive, or even deadly behavior, and it could drive his stress level high enough to kill him.
One poster on the “Stop Illegal Immigration” Facebook page has a penchant for posting pictures of gruesome murders from the cartel war in northern Mexico, because they feed his anger like nothing else. Another poster on the page says that he is so angry he has “lost his humanity” over the issue. I've seen similar behavior in other subjects as well, especially abortion, gay rights and same-sex marriage.
The second behavior is the seeking out of people of like mind, and like addiction. This is not at all different from alcoholics going to a bar or cocaine addicts going to a crack house. In the past this happened in various social ways. Social societies formed, like The Moral Majority, The Temperance League, PETA, the Earth Liberation Front, and a host of other groups, including hate groups like the KKK. Today, in the age of the internet, it's as simple as finding or setting up a web page. People in these social groups, whether in real life or online, feed each other's anger. Online forums are particularly good for feeding the addiction, because they're easily available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Further, the online forum acts in a kind of synergistic way, because the various anger addicts can post things to the forum and feed each other's anger. One addict can find something that gives him his anger high, post it to the forum, and it can feed the anger of all of the other addicts there. After which the other addicts can all find their own items that anger them, post those things to the forum, and the anger level escalates from there.
As part of the social group involved in the anger addict's subject of preference, the addict becomes one of a community of like minded addicts in which anger becomes normal, and feeding the anger becomes a normal behavior. The online forum becomes both a mutual acceptance society and a mutual back-pat society. The anger addict finds himself at home on the forum among a community of like minded addicts. When the addict brings in a fresh infusion of outrage to the forum he is rewarded, not just for feeding his own anger, but for feeding everyone else's as well. Likewise, when another member of the forum brings him a fresh infusion of outrage the addict will reward that person, along with the rest of the addicts in the forum. This process is self-reinforcing.
The current words-of-art for this are “echo chamber”. As people all over the internet sort themselves into like minded groups, regardless of anger level, they become less and less exposed to people who disagree with their prejudices. We see this happening especially in the arenas of politics and religion, but also with other areas of controversy, and the more extreme the views reverberating around the echo chamber the more the anger addict will be drawn to them as a method of feeding the addiction.
The news and news-entertainment media are a part of the issue as well. The anger addict will seek out media outlets, and celebrity firebrands that agree with his prejudices and feed his anger. The media world is replete with these celebrity firebrands. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Keith Olbermann, and Michael Moore are just a few examples. Their suspicion and dismissal of “educated elites” eliminates our ability to intelligently debate issues, and their constant resort to emotional arguments feeds the anger of the anger addict. Indeed, many of them denounce intelligent debate entirely.
After a while the subject doesn't matter anymore and the anger is all that remains. Regardless of the subject, the addict has his anger, and he feels his anger is all he needs. Reason is lost, critical thought is lost, everything is lost except the anger.
And this is the situation in which we in America now find ourselves. We have, collectively, become a nation addicted to anger, always in need of a new outrage in order to get our fix. This overabundance of anger has caused us to lose our reason, which is a disaster. Reason made America great. Reason lifted us out of the poorest ranks of nations to the place where we are now as the last remaining superpower. We have lost that reason, and become addicted to anger. If we cannot dial back the anger and reclaim our reason then we as a society, as a culture, and even as a nation, are doomed.
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