The Perpetually Pissed

“People see something they don’t like, they expect it to stop, as opposed to deal with their emotions. They want us to care about their thing as much as they do. It’s why the world is getting worse, and the world is getting worse.”—Ricky Gervais, Humanity (2018)

There’s a charismatic con artist in my neighborhood who’s fooled all of us once. He’s a remarkably good actor with a winning smile and effortless charm. After a warm “Hello, how are you?” he proceeds to give you an impeccably well-scripted sob-story about his dear little sister, who’s dying in a Toronto hospital right now. He desperately wants to get on a bus to Toronto forthwith, but can’t seem to do so because his bank cards have all been frozen, for reasons which remain a mystery to him. Alas, he fooled me once. But he didn’t fool me twice. Probably hasn’t fooled anyone twice, because we’re quite good at remembering strangers who screw us over. My guess is that he’d be out of business in a week if it weren’t for the steady stream of tourists and students who come to this neighborhood to party.

A bonhomme who didn’t know how to remember slights would be an easy mark for our friendly neighborhood con artist. In fact, we’d rightly refer to him as a sucker. Our local con artist could fool this Forrest Gump day after day after day. So it seems fair to assume that in a state of nature, vengeful folk, with a well-developed capacity for holding grudges, will always prevail, sooner or later, over suckers who lack this capacity. And since we’re all descendants of the ones who made it, the human groups that survived, it should come as no surprise to discover that a heart of darkness beats within many a breast. Like a dangerous but well-trained guard dog, our capacity for hatefulness isn’t really much of a threat to our day-to-day health and well-being when it’s directed at outsiders and enemies—since, as Rousseau rightly observes in Émile (1762), most of us spend very little time interacting with outsiders and enemies, and the “essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives.”

The vengeance drive is, like the sex drive, necessary and normal; without it, we would have gone extinct long ago. But the sex drive and the vengeance drive are also extremely dangerous. They can rip human groups apart if they’re not highly regulated by taboo boundaries. The part of the brain responsible for the regulation of these powerful drives is known as the frontal cortex. When it’s damaged by accident or disease, an ugliness emerges from the human heart which is often quite shocking. Jonathan Haidt discusses such a case in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006): “A schoolteacher in his forties had, fairly suddenly, begun to visit prostitutes, surf child pornography Web sites, and proposition young girls. He was soon arrested and convicted of child molestation. The day before his sentencing, he went to the hospital emergency room because he had a pounding headache and was experiencing a constant urge to rape his landlady. (His wife had thrown him out of the house months earlier.) Even while he was talking to the doctor, he asked passing nurses to sleep with him. A brain scan found that an enormous tumor in his frontal cortex was squeezing everything else, preventing the frontal cortex from doing its job of inhibiting inappropriate behavior and thinking about consequences. (Who in his right mind would put on such a show the day before his sentencing?) When the tumor was removed, the hypersexuality vanished. Moreover, when the tumor grew back the following year, the symptoms returned; and when the tumor was removed again, the symptoms disappeared again.”

Just as damage to the frontal cortex can cause people to focus their sex drive on children and insiders, who ought to be off limits and thus subject to taboo boundaries, I suspect that damage to the frontal cortex may also cause people to focus their vengeance drive on friends and family. My reasoning is based, in part, on the following observation: excessive abuse of alcohol and certain drugs, especially speed and meth, severely impairs the functioning of the frontal cortex, and drunks, speed-freaks, and meth-heads are notoriously vengeful. They can’t seem to let anything go. When the sex drive is allowed to run free, it often destroys families and rips communities apart. The same is true of the vengeance drive.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle maintains that there’s nothing wrong with getting angry. All to the contrary, there are, he argues, some very good reasons for getting angry, especially in defense of people and things that you care about. You just have to make sure that you’re getting angry “in the right way at the right time toward the right people in the right degree” (1125b35-1126a1). For instance, Aristotle would say that this is decidedly not cool: going off on your kid when you get home from work, for some trivial infraction of the house rules, when you’re really pissed off at your abusive boss for treating you like shit all day. But this is entirely kosher: going off on the sexist asshole at the dinner party who keeps saying stupid shit about women and rape. In fact, failure to get angry at a time like this is deeply problematic: “those who do not get angry at the people at whom they should get angry seem dense . . . . to allow oneself and one’s loved ones to be trampled underfoot and overlook it is slavish” (1126a3-8). It’s slavish because slaves are forced to repress their anger; expressing it freely could, after all, result in severe punishment (maybe even death). Free men are, by contrast, free to spontaneously express the full range of human emotions, including, when appropriate, anger. Failure to get angry at a time when you ought to get angry is, then, in the final analysis, for Aristotle, a sign of moral weakness or slavishness: you’re not as free (or honorable or courageous) as you imagine yourself to be, nor is your commitment to the people and things you claim to care about particularly trustworthy, dependable, or strong. Even so, at one and the same time, he argues that being a hothead who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation is at least as vicious, if not more vicious, than being a spineless pushover.

“Aristotle clearly believes,” writes Martha Nussbaum in The Therapy of Desire (2018), “that many people get angry too much and for insufficient reasons. His choice of the name ‘mildness’ . . . for the appropriate virtuous disposition in this area reflects his conscious decision to pitch things rather toward the unangry than toward the angry end of the spectrum (1125b26-29).” So it would appear that we have here, yet another example of Aristotle’s famous celebration of moderation. Indulging in anger is fine, so long as you do so in a reasonable and moderate manner. But is this realistic? Seneca thought not.

In his treatise on the subject, On Anger, Seneca maintains that Aristotle’s attitude towards anger is remarkably naïve. Anger cannot be moderated by reason precisely because anger actively impairs our capacity for reason. The angrier you get, the more unreasonable you become. Only the mildest forms of anger can be controlled by reason. It’s much like getting drunk: if you’re a little buzzed, or even moderately messed up, you can realize you’re drunk, remember that you’ve got an important meeting in the morning, pay your tab, and head home. But there’s a point at which you’re too drunk to realize you’re drunk. The same goes for anger. If you’re a little angry, or even moderately pissed off, you can realize you’re angry, remember that you don’t want to say or do anything you’ll later on regret, get up, leave the house, take a walk, and calm down. But there’s a point at which you’re too anger-drunk to realize you’re anger-drunk. Most of the culture warriors you meet in Social Media Land have long since passed this point. Telling them to calm down is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Losing your temper once in a blue moon is like drinking whiskey for the first time: it burns on the way down, you do and say a bunch of stuff you regret, and you feel sick the next day. Conversely, losing your temper on a regular basis is like drinking whiskey daily: the burning gives way to pleasure, and you no longer regret the stuff you say and do. Trying to explain the pleasures of outrage to someone who rarely loses it is like trying to explain the pleasures of whiskey to a ten-year-old: they just don’t get it. Because getting really angry is, for them, profoundly upsetting. The even-tempered fail to see how thoroughly enjoyable anger is for the perpetually pissed. For the anger addict, outrage really is its own reward.

Although there are plenty of good reasons to be pissed off, being perpetually pissed off does not, in and of itself, make you a good person. Likewise, being in a good mood does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It’s what we do that matters, at the end of the day, not how serious or sullen or cynical we are. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying life, appreciating beauty, and feeling joy. Besides, how can you save a world you don’t really love? And why would anyone else want to embrace your worldview when it seems to be making you so miserable?

—John Faithful Hamer, Social Media Land (2020)