Doing good ❤️ with anger 😡
Being angry about the problems in the world is an important driver of my altruism. I was unaware of this until recently. Here's why...
Summary
I sometimes feel anger, and this is part of what drives me to help others in the world.
Due to experiencing an unhelpful degree of fear and shame about feeling anger, I have been repressing this emotion.
This repression made me less aware of my own motivation and has made me generally less happy.
Noticing, validating, and finding ways to honestly express feelings of anger has been a huge relief, has made me more self aware, improved my relationships, and will likely help me do more good.
A story about anger
“I resent you for saying you want to earn even more money!” I said
I was breathing heavily, my heart was beating hard, and my face was on fire.
“I can feel my breath and my heart, and my face feels hot” I told the 16 people in the circle watching me.
I looked over at the man on the other side of the circle. He looked a little annoyed. He had just told the group that he was earning around £300,000 a year and would like to earn twice that amount.
“I resent you for saying you want to earn even more money!” I repeated.
I then explained why I was feeling so resentful:
“The thought that’s been running through my head for the past half hour is that anyone earning over about £40k is in the richest 1% of people in the world. And you still want even more money!”.1
The man continued to look annoyed.
This was on a Radical Honesty (RH) weekend that I attended this September. The intention of the weekend was to provide an opportunity to express parts of you that you normally feel unable to. You are encouraged to talk about exactly what you are feeling in the moment, good or bad. The container of the event allows you to try acting outside your normal comfort zone, expressing things that feel scary.
People express appreciation for each other and sometimes attraction, but people mostly expressed a lot of anger. I asked one of the coaches at the end of the first day if there’s usually a lot of anger at these things. He confirmed - “anger is the emotion most people have trouble connecting with and expressing, so it’s the most helpful thing to encourage here”.
I expressed a few different things that annoyed me about my fellow attendees, but as in the example above, I mostly used the weekend to express anger at others for being insufficiently altruistic.
The anger I felt and expressed that weekend was surprising. I don’t see myself as an angry person. I basically never express anger at anyone. I definitely feel grumpy occasionally, but it usually feels like the things I want to express when I’m angry are just unnecessary or irrational. So I tend to not.
The RH weekend made anger feel a little safer to express, and made it much safer to feel. I had become increasingly aware of my own anger in the months preceding the RH weekend (in large part due to meditation). After that weekend I became even more aware of subtle, low level anger that I would have pushed away in the past. The reason I haven’t been aware seems to be something to do with being afraid of it.
Avoiding feeling anger
The emotion of anger is universal across human groups and seems to have analogues in other social animals. It is the emotion we use to express our needs and boundaries when we have been neglected or harmed.
But we are often over-vigilant about possible sources of harm. Most people realise that many of the stories the mind creates when angry are not particularly accurate. This is a scary realisation, especially if you are someone who prides themselves on being reasonable.
The basic story for why I want to avoid feeling anger is pretty straightforward. Part of me believes that the feeling of anger itself is dangerous or shameful. Maybe I’ll damage my relationships if I express anger; maybe I will expose myself as being uncontrolled and irrational. But how exactly do you avoid an emotion?
Instructions for repressing an emotion:
You feel the emotion appearing in you
You feel shame about feeling the emotion or scared that you might express it (and thereby embarrass yourself or damage a relationship)
Well done! That first emotion is now gone! Now you just feel fear, and maybe shame.
I suspect you can do this with any emotion - except shame and fear - you’re on your own there… maybe try scrolling through social media?
The above process is what I believe I have been doing with anger. I was really successful at it! I didn’t even feel the anger very much, when confronted with anger-inducing situations I mostly just felt anxious.
The main downside with this kind of repression is that I found it hard to clearly recognise when someone had crossed a boundary, or not done something that I expected them to. And often the anger still comes out anyway… usually in the form of avoidant behaviour (running away), but also passive aggression, or semi-fake irony (i.e. pretending to be angry or judgemental as a “joke”). These less-conscious approaches to dealing with anger are generally less effective, honest and less prosocial than just expressing the anger directly. Anger exists to help you meet some unmet need. Without it, you still need to meet that need. Of course that isn’t to say you should just completely let go. Often anger is expressed in an unhelpful or destructive manner, that is clearly still worth avoiding.
The received wisdom of how to deal with all of this healthily, is to start by actually noticing the anger. Learn how to connect to and validate your feelings regardless of whether you express them. Anger can be then expressed in ways that don’t damage relationships. Maybe learn non-violent communication so you can express your needs and boundaries without insulting people.
My introspection here, and being more in touch and accepting of my own feelings more recently has felt like a huge relief. Expressing anger more has only resulted in a small number of conflicts. All of these, while not easy, have proven to be valuable, bringing me closer to the person I was feeling angry at.
Anger is part of why I do good
I have been very focussed on trying to help others for a lot of my life. This has increased in the past few years due to being encouraged by the Effective Altruism (EA) community. In early 2017 I started giving 10% of my income to charities and stopped consuming animal products. I also started thinking harder about how to have a positive impact in my career. I am now working full time on a project helping others plan more impactful careers.
If you had asked me six months ago why I direct so much attention toward altruism, I would probably have said something about feeling compassion for all the suffering in the world. If I was in a more critical or cynical mood I would have talked about a few darker interpersonal reasons: Something about trying to seem like a good person to others, or a feeling of obligation (i.e. guilt). For example, in a previous post - I talked about trying to be more motivated by compassion instead of these darker social motives.
But now I would add anger.
Things about the world that make me angry
The anger has clearly been there since the beginning. When I reflect on what it feels like to look at the problems in the world, it often feels like anger. I get hot, tense, my breathing gets heavier and I find myself very motivated to do something about it. Unlike compassion, my thoughts are more focussed on the perceived perpetrators, than those in need of help.
I’ve found addressing global poverty particularly compelling since I was a teenager. I had noticed how wealth appears to be largely due to luck, making it outrageous that our global society is so appallingly unequal. Many people are born into a level of poverty that they have little to no opportunity to escape. The top few percent of the richest people in the world (which includes me, and probably includes you) are able to spend our money on trivial luxuries. That money, if spent on addressing inequality, (e.g. by giving money to effective charities), would be able to save lives and empower many people to escape poverty.
There are currently over 70bn animals living on factory farms. These farms account for 90% of animal products, and they are dreadful. I was recently enraged after watching this video of pigs being beaten repeatedly in the head for no reason. Most people seem to be indifferent, or willing to turn a blind eye to this abuse.
A bunch of expert predictions about risk suggest that the chance every human dies is over 10% this century. This is mostly due to possible risks for emerging technology. More specific risks of disaster from nuclear war or runaway climate change are very well established. But some hard-to-pin-the-blame-on-anyone-specific combination of institutions, politicians, and voters don't seem to be doing enough about any of this. We are hugely neglecting these massive risks. Those with power seem to constantly have nearer-term selfish goals…
This anger is part of what motivates me to do altruistic things in the world. I want this mess to be fixed because it’s awful.
I don’t believe in “justifiable” and “unjustifiable” anger, but I still feel it
Anger is an evolved human emotion that we can’t directly control. This emotion evolved in a context where harm, neglect and boundary violations were local and interpersonal. Our emotions are not built to be well calibrated to catastrophes that affect billions of people or harm against non-human animals that are often kinda weird and hard to connect to.
On top of poor calibration of anger, it’s also easy to find reasons to forgive perpetrators, especially if you “zoom out”. All the systems and people that it would be possible to be angry at are the product of causes and conditions outside their control. No-one constructs themselves, and free-will doesn’t seem all that free. The “enlightened” response to our situation is empathy and compassion at the suffering. No-one is ultimately “to blame”.
So I don’t think you should share my anger at any of the above. I don’t think there is such a thing as objectively “justified” or “unjustified” anger. Conversely you might feel judged by me because of the above list of thing that I don’t like. That would be understandable, but I’d emphasise that I am trying to describe some of my feelings and motivations, not some objective sense of right and wrong.
If you can fully internalise these previous paragraphs, and only ever see individuals as deserving understanding and compassion, then well done! But I haven’t, so I’m still angry.
Final thoughts
I’m still exploring my understanding of this emotion, so can’t offer a huge amount of sage advice. But I am now clearly aware that anger is not as scary as I thought, and repressing it was not helpful. I suspect that some people reading this will also have difficulty noticing and connecting with anger.
Social norms against big expressions of emotions can be good for social movements. These norms might avoid the trap that many movements fall into, of being unreservedly driven by group anger. But these prosocial norms can be maintained alongside more honest connection with angry motivations. It’s possible to accept anger without damaging relationships or pushing the people around you to feel the same way as you. Many people who are part of groups with strong emotional reservation norms (e.g. EA) will be in a similar position to me due to also wanting to remain calm and reasonable.
Noticing and validating my own feelings of anger has allowed me to better understand myself and my motivations. I am now a little more able to make conscious choices about how express to myself. This has already helped me feel much better, improved my relationships, and I suspect will help me do good better too.
https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i