“The Stoics have offered us invaluable lessons in the dangers of failing to discipline our passions.”

“If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” proclaims the well-known bumper sticker. Many of us are paying attention and are outraged. Others of us who are paying attention feel not only outrage but compassion fatigue. However motivating outrage can be, it can also over time elide into despair, inaction, or into reckless, ill-considered reactions that only make matters worse.

Examining our sense of outrage

Outrage is a fascinating fusion of emotions: chiefly anger, but also dismay, resentment, and fear. Together they often erupt from a feeling that one of our personal standards, cherished ideals, or expectations of how humans ought to behave has been violated. While a practice of Stoic principles is meant to point our thoughts, words, and deeds toward our ideals, it is not meant to amplify outrage if they are breached. Instead, we are enjoined to practice self-awareness by rationally examining the conditions that trigger our outrage with curiosity and detachment. Doing this is far more conducive to constructive and corrective responses to any odious state of affairs.

Unchecked anger

Stoic literature offers abundant counsel against unchecked anger and how we might better manage the anger that is endemic to the human condition. Indeed the Stoics viewed anger as akin to madness, as rooted in defective beliefs. Throughout the Stoic canon anger is frequently depicted as a kind of slavery. Seneca, for one, devoted a whole book to the dangers of anger and what to do about them. This extended essay, On Anger, which he dedicated to his elder brother Lucius Annaeus Novatus, prescribes ways to prevent anger, and should we fail to prevent it, to at least curtail its expression as much as possible.

I am especially fond of Marcus Aurelius’ teachings on anger, because he is so relatable. Marcus repeatedly discloses his own difficulties controlling his rage. He sympathizes with his readers by knowing that inner composure isn’t necessarily easy to come by. Still, regulating our anger is something we must train ourselves to achieve, because the alternative is unacceptable. He offers many examples why it is in our best interest to commit to such training. One of Marcus’ strongest pieces of advice for subduing anger is to stop and remember our own flaws and weaknesses. In doing so, we create a space for empathy to bloom. As our empathy grows with a person or group of people whom we initially believed merited our wrath, our anger’s strength begins to ease off. We behold our glaring hypocrisy expecting others to behave in ways we ourselves haven’t evinced in our own lives.

Anger does more harm than good

Over and over Marcus, Seneca, and Epictetus remind us that anger does more harm than good, that it actually injures us by degrading our character. To the Stoic the quality of our character counts more than anything. It is through the progressive earnest refinement of our character that inner freedom and its consequent serenity are possible. This is a summary of the whole Stoic aspiration.

If you have had even a taste of that inner freedom, that serenity, it is very hard to go back to letting your emotions, especially anger, yank you around. True, capitulating to the seductive force of our passions is easy. However, if you pay attention time and again, you start to see how fundamentally unsatisfying it is, for example, to throw a tantrum. It’s embarrassing and demoralizing. It makes you feel weak and out of control. We’ve all seen such behaviour doesn’t tend to bring anything good in its wake.

Can we banish anger completely?

Are we truly capable of banishing anger altogether, and is that something we really want to achieve? I would answer a qualified “no” to both questions. I believe the Stoics have offered us invaluable lessons in the dangers of failing to discipline our passions. I think a beneficial Stoically-inspired approach to emotion, particularly anger, is to view it as a signifier, as a pointer. Anger indicates there is something deeper to investigate.

If we feel it arising within us, we would do well to first notice that anger is happening and to then ask ourselves “why?”. More often than not the awareness of our anger can help us settle our minds and understand that an injustice has taken place, a hurt has been inflicted, a wrong has been perpetrated; in other words, something needs to be corrected, put right, skillfully communicated, compassionately repaired, or otherwise settled in a civil rational manner. Unchecked anger too easily leads to destruction. Anger observed through reason and compassion leads to constructive solutions. Which choice of the two to take seems obvious.

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Sharon Lebell is the author of The Art of Living. She is co-founder with Simon Drew and Kai Whiting of The Walled Garden, www.thewalledgarden.com. She can be reached at www.sharonlebell.com.

 

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