Anger is temporary madness: the Stoics knew how to curb it

aeon.co

39 points·gpresot··6 comments

Like all emotions, anger can a very useful tool and it is important to let it out sometimes. The belief that anger is unnecessary and needs to be curbed no matter what only leads to bottling it up and that is never good. Do not feel bad about feeling angry.

The judgment about when it's productive to feel angry or more importantly express anger is the tricky part.

We shouldn't let ourselves be abused or threatened beyond what is reasonable, but where is reasonable?

It's not good to be an abrasive difficult to deal with person who explodes at every perceived slight. So when in doubt I think it's better to error on the side of patience.

What if it’s not about when but how? Anger is there when we need to set a limit, lending us a little severity and fearlessness. Simply being very firm with someone can be a complete expression of anger, leaning on that severity and bravery to set aside conciliatory manners when they are unfitting.

It's not totally dissolving anger that the Stoics were concerned about--it's limiting reactions that do not employ foresight and use only the fuel of anger to drive them.

Aggression is usually skillful when targeted at improving the predictive model which led to undesired circumstances and usually unskillful when targeted at individuals. The brain evolved to enable survival machines for genes to make predictions. He who builds the best predictive model fastest wins.

I suppose angry and mad are synonymous for a reason.

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