Outrage nation: Can America overcome its addiction to anger?
Anger has long been seen as a particularly dangerous emotion.
Poets and theologians in the West have long warned of anger’s social devastations. Homer sang of a rage “black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain” in “The Iliad.” The Roman Stoic Seneca called anger a “hideous and wild” emotion that “drags the avenger to ruin with itself.” Roman Catholics have considered it one of the seven deadliest of sins.
Such traditional warnings are part of the reasons many Americans today feel a deep sense of unease, perceiving that the nation is now descending deeper into what many call a politics of rage. It threatens what observers have for centuries seen as America’s boundless optimism, its particular civic faith that the future can be better and that Americans have a duty to make it that way.
“For all her material comforts and ubiquitous technological devices, America is a profoundly uneasy place today,” says Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Auburn, Ala. “This results directly from what we can only call the politicization of everything – from where you live and what kind of work you do
Rough-and-tumble historySocial media as ‘lighter fluid’Signs of optimism
