Story Time
While studying, I worked at a burger joint. I didn’t flip the burgers, but stood out the front and took orders. Actually, I didn’t sit either because it was exhausting, but sat on a milk crate, caught up on my Uni assignments and occassionally transacted for cheeseburgers. The joint itself was stowed away in an alley, so it attracted either die-hard fans or confused, shady characters who remembered the alleyway as an ideal place to do drugs, getting more than they bargained for when they stumbled down and saw me peering back at them.
To my dismay we got very busy one night. Reading Derrida and deep in intellectual masturbation, I looked up and there were thirty people waiting to be served. Hospitality workers will know exactly what I’m talking about; you can consistently make the same money every night for six months down to the dollar, and one fateful night you’ll get inundated with a school group, a clown troup and three hungry couples emerging from a movie date at once. Amid the din and clowns shouting orders, a chef - let’s call him Dongface - came out of the kitchen and told me we were out of bacon. Fine.
The night went OK from there; you have to roll with the punches sometimes, handle the orders and fuss and not take anything personally. By the time closing crept up, everyone was on their way and I was nestled back on my milk crate. One last clown rounded the corner and ordered a burger, with bacon. I forgot, and passed the order up to the kitchen. Dongface, having had enough malarkey for one night, walks out and shouts down at me “Hoysted we’re out of bacon, get your shit together.” Ouch. I went upstairs to collect the order and politely ask Dongface not to swear at me in front of customers. He cut me off. “Don’t be a fuckin’ idiot and I won’t have to,” he said dismissively.
I exploded. I don’t even remember what I said, but I emphasized the word ‘fuck’ a lot and yelled at the top of my lungs. I completely lost my shit and went bananas about showing respect while Dongface went white as a sheet. To the credit of Dongface and the entire kitchen staff, none of them said a word - they just jumped at my screeching and went back to what they were doing. Dongface may have said something, but my heart was pounding and I couldn’t hear and all I can remember thinking was I have to leave.
I walked out and spent the rest of the night restocking Coke cans, hiding out the back, marinating in shame and the barbed-wire heat of residual rage. I think it took me a good thirty minutes to calm down. Dongface waited a respectful twenty before coming down to apologise - he was a chef, and these sorts of outbursts are de rigueur in the kitchen. Pros at dealing with childish outbursts. Sorry I didn’t apologise too, Dongface.
Honeyed Tip
Most people are under an apprehension that anger solves things. Sure, not the sort of anger my tantrum betrayed. My tantrum was a vulgar display of emotion, but actually vulgar displays of emotion are dressed up in all sorts of virtuous ways. There’s nothing quite like a sense of righteousness to infuse a tantrum with a veneer of nobility. Or the overt coolness of passive aggression because we never lose our temper.
We’re incentivised to hide anger because it’s terribly unattractive these days. Let’s thank our civilising forces for making violence an unacceptable outlet for rage - especially male rage, else me and Dongface might have no choice but to settle our differences with a duel (as I type these words there’s a perverse, primal part of me yearning for duel culture again, it was clean and simple).
We pretend we’re not angry at our peril, though, because anger is seductive. It will say things to flatter you, fool you into thinking you’re better than others, take you out for dinner and never call again. The Buddha called anger a poisoned arrow with a honeyed tip. Even as my blood boiled it felt fucking amazing to unload on Dongface, an orgasmic, carthartic cleansing of pent-up energy locked away in some secret vault inside. Surprise twist; I also think of myself as a calm person. I am told all the time people cannot imagine me angry, and occasionally I succumb to my own bullshit start thinking I’m some kind of Zen Master.
But no one is immune to anger’s derranging influence.
I believe, for instance, that unacknowledged rage drives a remakable amount of online engagement, possibly the majority. Actually, it’s worse than that - just by engaging with social media, we will become more likely to feel and elicit outrage from others. The internet was already an experiment in unacknowledged pathologies. A dose of rage is just what this poisonous chalice needs. Check out these random news articles I plucked from this week:
A major aged care facility underpaid its staff, but this former worker will get nothing (ABC News)
Dutton locks horns with ABC reporter on Hezbollah’s terror status (The Australian)
These headlines are designed to trigger outrage. In fact, noticing what triggers you is a pretty reliable sign of your politcal identity, as data companies have found. Conservatives cheer on Dutton owning an uppity ABC reporter; lefties bristle at the exploited worker. Having principles is great, but principles are also reliably exploited. That honeyed tip is making tech companies a lot of money.
Cass Gets Crass
No, you’re not a bad person for clicking links designed to exploit the pleasure in anger (I’ve even used the same technique in this week’s title, oopsie), but you might be forgiven for thinking you don’t leak rage. You don’t fall for the gimmicks, certainly don’t cave to anger, and above all, don’t treat other people differently because of it.
Except that you do. You are not immune. Harvard legend Cass Sunstein ran an experiment to measure these effects among left leaning people in Boulder, and right leaning folks from Colarado Springs. Before splitting them up, participants wrote down their views on controversial topics, like same-sex marriage and climate change. They then went off with their like-minded teams to deliberate and come back with their views. Their views had changed in three important ways:
1. Liberals became distinctly more liberal post-deliberation. Conservatives became distinctly more conservative.
2. Division on opinion between groups became more pronounced post-deliberation.
3. Diversity on opinion within the two groups, on the other hand, decreased.
In other words, they became more extreme and groupish. They weren’t aware they had become less agreeable with the other side. They didn’t know they had become more combative, or even that their ‘principles’ had suddenly become malleable just by discussing it with likeminded others. The internet is unique in that it somehow made us feel worse about ourselves and the rest of the world. Quite the achievement. We’ve created the perfect arena in which untrammeled and unexplored sides of ourselves can find a landing space for further provocation. No wonder Alain de Baton said we’re all using the internet like a diary.
The Modern Superpower
Diaries are useful because they give the diarist a place for difficult emotions (like, say, anger) without fear of reprisal. The internet, unlike my handwritten journal, is not free from reprisal. It might feel like it; digital avatars and text on a screen simply don’t trigger the same empathic responses as face-to-face interaction, but as people routinely find out, the internet bites back. Moral outrage feels even better when you’re part of a disapproving mob, but the pleasure we’re secretly indulging in might be something malignant in disguise.
Because we all leak our shit. This is simply what it means to be human. Sorry, but you probably don’t have a handle on your depths and emotions and traumas because those take a long time and a lot of effort to excavate. What matters is how you deal with it. What matters is how that anger emerges through you. Honestly, I can’t imagine many more pathetic and less constructive ways for it to emerge than as part of some mindless mob (shouting at a chef called Dongface is close).
I had another recent life event that produced a ton of anger. One of my conceits is thinking of myself as a calm dude and it took me by surprise. At first I did the predictable, and tediously blamed the world outside at what I thought was the source. I’m realizing the anger was directed at myself, because of my less admirable traits like passivity and permissiveness. To my credit, I’ll never blame Dongface for my anger again, but that doesn’t make it easier. When we’re confronted with our own ugliness, sometimes the only thing we can do is wrestle it down and try and spin our shit into salad.
Fuck, I think, why can’t this be simple?
Because, Hoysted, you’re the easiest person to fool.
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