Outside of fear and hatred, there can be nothing more corrosive to the human spirit than anger. And there seems to be plenty of it to go around.
Why are so many people so angry for so much of the time?
There’s no simple answer to this as anger can be influenced by various factors, including personal circumstances, environmental stressors, and individual differences in emotional regulation. There are, however, certain things that can be pointed to as a cause.
Stress is a big one and there’s a lot of stress-inducing stuff going on in the world of people’s lives right now. If people experience a lot of stress or continuous and non-alleviated stress, it can be difficult to manage their emotions. Chronic stress can affect both physical and mental health negatively, making it even harder to regulate emotions effectively.
Individuals may also have personal issues such as relationship problems, financial difficulties, or health concerns, that can lead to feelings of frustration, resentment, or anger. The COVID pandemic didn’t help, as it pretty much divided us into two mutually exclusive camps, maskers and non-maskers, vaxers and anti-vaxers.
Traumatic events or mental health conditions like depression or anxiety can contribute to feelings of anger, as well as difficulty keeping one’s emotions in check.
People may feel angry due to external factors like social injustice, political turmoil, or environmental concerns. Our politics is unhealthily partisan and unprofessional, and this trickles down to the masses. It’s even intended to be spread to the masses, to fuel their outrage, to light fires then pour gas on them. Our democracy is threatened and weakened as a result.
And then there is growing evidence that people are being whipped into anger by bad actors who have an agenda that is political in nature. People are bombarded with malicious messaging intent upon bringing institutions into disrepute, and even people, most notably politicians, into disrepute. People stop trusting things like government and media and start believing conspiracy theories that help them explain the world around them and what’s happening in that world. In short, people are being lied to on a massive scale, often by people they think they trust, and often very effectively. Soon they don’t want to hear anything contrary to what they’ve been inculcated with and have incorporated into their own mind-set. They’ve lost the entrance to the rabbit hole.
People should ask themselves who benefits from all this anger? They themselves? Has it made their life better in any way to be mad or angry at government, media, other Canadians? Who in the world would be happy at the prospect of a weaker Canada, America, European Union, or Great Britain? This is almost right out of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. Rather than have the enemy fighting you, have him fight himself instead. Get him angry and tell him why he’s angry so hat he can carry that anger into his own associations corrupting them with the toxicity of his anger. After all, every time your enemy makes himself weaker, you grow stronger to a degree.
This why it’s important for us to look at foreign interference in our societies and in our democracy. It’s not just China, it’s Russia too, along with Iran and North Korea. What a nice little playpen of nations that is.
Yes, anger is a normal and natural emotion, but it’s important to learn healthy ways to express, manage, and cope with it effectively. It’s also important to know that it’s an easy fire to stoke, and to be alert to others who attempt to use it for their own ends.
Every time you fly a Canadian flag upside down, the Baby Vladimir smiles.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 