By Ziona Strelitz

We consistently get conflicting messages about anger. Anger’s bad for you. Let the issue go. Stewing’s corrosive. Just move on.
Anger’s good for you. Don’t be uptight. Recognize your repression. Confront what you’re sitting on. It’s appropriate to feel mad. Just vent — relief will follow.

Are these perspectives binary? Is the evaluation of anger’s relevance and merit necessarily contextual? Who decides when anger has constructive purpose? Or when it does us a disservice by blocking our wellbeing or impeding our personal development? Or when our anger is an unacceptable imposition on others?

We think of anger if terms of heat — and the color red denotes it. Is chili angry? (Red’s also our symbol for love — anger and love both have passion). But there’s also cold anger — the stiff, embedded intransigence that does see things in binary terms. You wronged me, you fell from grace, “It doesn’t matter why — only that”! Is this emotion a different color? Icy white? Or blue? Are ice mints angry?

Last year, at the 2018 House of Beautiful Business, I was privileged to participate in a (very oversubscribed) dinner conceived as “Twelve Toasts to Rage.” My own impetus in going was to explore — I’d greatly valued participating in a Silent Dinner at the House in 2017, and was curious to experience yet another distinct modality of eating together. Taking turns, everyone seated at the rage dinner table described a personal cause for feeling angry. The proceedings were subject to Chatham House rules, and even if they hadn’t been, there was a bond of trust about our very personal accounts as fellow-ragers, so I won’t share others’ content here. Still, there are instructive “safe” points to harness from the evening.

Most of the sources of anger people described resided in personal relationships, where shifts of direction, twists of fate, or clashing expectations had led to hurt. The contingent point is the palpable sense of relief that individuals seemed to feel when they’d aired their stories. It brings to mind the current tag line on London’s public transport system. “See it, Say it, Sorted’ is a campaign to promote awareness and recognition of behavior that may threaten public safety, and to bring attention to it. Without presuming that the narratives shared as their “toasts to rage” solved the underlying problems involved, recounting them out loud did seem to assuage some hurt. It left me pondering: if a measure of alleviation is so accessible, why wait for an external nudge — here the House dinner — to voice your anger? Or do we only perceive and grasp an opening to defuse when we’re ready?

As it happens, I shared two incidents at the rage table, one of which was scarcely personal. It concerned the punishment by flogging of the Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi. Hearing about torture always gets to me as nothing else, and Raif’s plight galvanized me to join a protest outside the Saudi embassy in London, chanting: “Flogging for blogging, shame on you.” I hadn’t been at a political protest for ages, and — embarrassingly — I found the experience of a protest event unexpectedly self-affirming and pleasurable. Without doubt, that hadn’t been my motive for attending the rally, and the sense of virtuous “feel good” made me feel bad (though I can’t say sufficient to be mad at myself). But despite the layers of anger involved, this story enlisted little traction at the rage table — certainly less than my second, more personal story, and less the other diners’ accounts of personal hurt.

Where does anger sit on the personal-political axis? Is it anger when it’s about my persona, and concern when the focus is social? What tips concern into activism? Do we need to feel a perceived social ill as a personal wound to move to action?

In the face of so much, such widespread, and deeply felt political concern currently abounding, we mostly stay complacent. In the UK, the large proportion of the population who want to remain in or close to the EU has been remarkably inactive in promoting their passionately held desire. So what is the trigger that has now mobilized thousands of schoolchildren — with their evocative slogan — ‘There is no Planet B’”— to strike for climate action? We need to know more about such shifts from the personal to political domain.

Of course, in the political domain, the definition of good and bad anger is situational. “Good anger” serves to further values and principles that I hold dear, and if our world views are aligned, I’ll count your anger as worthwhile, too. The correlate is that the anger of those with counter-views is “bad.” Back to the binary — the freedom fighter versus terrorist conundrum. Except that conviction in our own “rightness,” and the other’s “wrongness,” is the age-old basis for social rifts that greatly disserves us all right now. How instructive to learn from the Nelson Mandelas and Desmond Tutus of this world (OK, I accept they’re without compare) to understand and address the opposition’s hurts — a necessary condition to lower the heat of social schisms, and enlarge the umbrella.


Ziona Strelitz is the Founder and Director of ZZA Responsive User Environments.