Wisdom from Gabor Maté on healthy anger, and how to process unhealthy rage.

There seems to be an epidemic of anger, and it’s been this way for a while now.

I made a traffic mistake today, took my turn too early at a four way stop. My mistake, no big deal, no near miss. But the guy immediately laid on his horn and flipped me off, and not briefly.

One of my neighbors plowed the snow off the alley and the next time I saw him I thanked him. He told me another neighbor came out while he was doing it and started griping at him because as the snow was being moved, it blocked a part of his driveway. The first guy offered to fix it but second guy snapped “I don’t need your help.”

We’ve had some unpleasantness on micro.blog this week. I stumbled across it and was shocked at the heatedness of the accusations. Everything cranked to eleven. Accusations of bigotry and fascism. It was a lot to take in, given the normally placid nature of the micro.blog timeline. In my dismay at the fury, I called someone’s response “unhinged.” That was not a helpful word to use. Nevertheless, all this anger is deeply disturbing.

For years now, our politics have operated in the register of anger, and now more than ever. Anger is one of the primary languages of social media (the other being sarcasm). Based on the behavior I’ve seen over the past few years, it would seem that people walk around just at the boiling point. How else would they explode so quickly when something goes wrong?

What is it like to live with such rage all the time? No wonder there is so much addiction!

When the guy disproportionately reacted to my traffic mistake today, I waved back at him through the back window–with all five fingers. I tried to pack a spirit of contrition into the gesture. He must have caught it, because he backed off.

When I saw angry neighbor shoveling snow shortly after he griped at helpful neighbor, I asked him if I could help. I’d been making an effort to be friendly with him since last summer. He’s a prickly old guy, but I found out he’s had back surgeries. My dad had back surgeries; I know how that kind of pain and discomfort can affect a person. Angry neighbor appreciated the offer and we talked a bit about how heavy this snowfall was.

Heaven knows I’m not holding myself out as an example for anyone. I’ve waved back at other drivers with a single finger, plenty of times. In fact, all of my worst outbursts of anger happen behind the wheel; I don’t know what that tells us about driving, but surely it means something.

What I’m saying is that there is an epidemic of anger and we must take care not to catch it. That will require some practical steps to avoid anger triggers. It will require some self-examination and–dare I use such an abused term?–shadow work. What causes anger to rise most quickly in you? Could it be a violent reaction against something you have repressed in yourself? Are you acting out of some unacknowledged trauma? The source of the red hot, fast rising rage I’m talking about is never really its object.

The epidemic of anger will burn the world down around us. It will start wars, foreign and domestic. In 1954, some students asked Jung if nuclear war could be avoided. He replied:

I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.

That is, it will depend on our recognition of the messy strangeness within each of us, patiently sitting with the tension that runs straight through our souls. Or, alternately, we can join the anger party and impose our pain on everyone else. Your choice.

I realized this morning I’m still 47. I’ve been thinking I’m 48 for…I don’t know…months now?

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Matthew 16:26)

There is nothing more urgent than the preservation of your own soul—not from the fires of hell but from destructive forces here and now. There are powers at large today seeking to rip love from your heart and replace it with fear and hate. In the name of all that is beautiful and holy, you must not allow it.

The powers of destruction are using your politics to get to you. They don’t care about your opinions; your opinions are tools the powers will use to corrupt you. Do you feel that will to dominate, defeat, demean that other, with whom you disagree? The degree to which you feel that is the degree to which the agents of destruction have gained power over your soul. You should be alarmed.

How you play is what you win. (Ursula Le Guin)

If you win through violence, what you have won is violence. What is won by violence must be kept through violence. However noble your intentions, the territory you win through violence will be ruined, dead, sown with salt.

This is a plea for you to resist, not politicians (the poor fools), but the demons running freely through a population, jerking people around like marionettes.

What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis? (Bayo Akomolafe)

You’re playing a game rigged by the powers of destruction; you can’t win. They have captured your mind and they’re dosing it with fear and anger. The angrier you get, the more you play the domination game, the more you buy into the myth of separation—the more lost you are.

Listen to that still, small voice that you can only detect when you’ve quieted yourself. That voice will call you to nobler, humbler action. That is the voice the powers of destruction need you to ignore. You will feel the echoes of that voice when you look into that formerly hated other’s eyes with compassion. How they react when you attempt that connection is not your business. The only soul you can save is your own.

“Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison.” General Ludd, we need you now more than ever.

It feels sometimes that critics of euthanasia laws–see the closing paragraphs here–expect everyone to die like Christ on the cross. Why should we force people to endure a death that can only be endured gracefully by saints and martyrs, but which is slow torture to regular mortals?

I’ve been enjoying the Axe and Anvil blacksmithing YouTube channel, though he doesn’t seem to be active there anymore. I found out about him because he’s teaching an upcoming Mortise and Tenon course.

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Apparently, give too much attention to one of the people least deserving of such attention.

Does anyone else feel like they–along with most Americans–are subject to some strange bewitchment? Is it some kind of New Thought glamor magic that compels so many of us to obsess over him? Is it some kind of magnetism generated by an uninhibited narcissism?

What if we just didn’t? What if we just stopped clicking on news stories about him and trust that if something is important enough, it will find its way to our attention? What if we just nope out of voluntarily surrendering to a man so deeply desirous of having all eyes on him?

Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine:

In 1589, William Lee of Calverton developed one of history’s most quietly revolutionary technologies. The legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process. Lee’s machine, about the size of a large desk, allowed its operator to use pedals and bars to automatically mimic the movements of a hand knitter, making it much easier, and faster, to produce stock-ings, socks, tights, and other knit garments. (At the time, men wore tights, not pants.)

The machine worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent, and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: “You aim high, Master Lee,” she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his device would affect. “Consider… what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee died broke, oblivious that he’d sowed some of the earliest seeds of the Industrial Revolution. His brother James Lee pressed on with his invention, however, and it later became a key tool in England’s booming textile industry.

At our point in the timeline it’s virtually inconceivable that someone in authority would stop some new automation because of the harm it would do workers. We all look on helplessly because we know our tech overlords are unleashing destructive forces and we know no one in power will stop them because the economy must grow at all costs.

Video about the meaning of Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog. “Servant of the secret fire.” I’m putting that on my business card.

Austin Kleon mentioned The Book of Building Fires in a recent newsletter and, of course, I’m interested. Good book so far. I finally got my order of dried guajillo peppers, which means it’s time to make beans again.

Spring Mill (and Rachel!) in the snow.

The view out our front door

Happy birthday to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “inhumanist” poet of the central California coast. In one of the highlights of 2022 and possibly my life, we visited Tor House and Hawk Tower and got a personal tour. They ask visitors not to post any interior photos, so here I am standing outside the gate while we awaited our guide.

I have three birthdays of people unrelated to me on my calendar: Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robinson Jeffers. They are there because each writer’s unique vision has formed me in important ways.

If Wendell Berry is my icon for the close, domestic, and dear, then Robinson Jeffers is my icon for wild and indifferent nature. He is medicine for our innate, human egocentrism. He called his outlook “inhumanism” and described it like this:

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies have realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. This attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

…

To sum up the matter:–“Love one another” is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind; love on the surface implies hate in the depth,–(Dante who hated well because he loved)–as the history of Christendom bitterly proves. “Love one another” ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying,–this too a counsel of perfection, i.e., a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule,–“Turn away from each other,"–to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. To persons of Christian faith, if any should read this, I would point out that Jesus himself, intuitive master of psychology, invoked this balance. “Love your neighbor as yourself”–that is, not excessively, if you are adult and normal–but “God with all your heart, mind and soul.” Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.

Our lives are so taken up with ourselves. We spends hours of each day talking to each other, watching and dreaming about each other. Jeffers, though, sitting atop his pile of sea-washed granite overlooking the Pacific, writes of hawks and storms and takes a long view of history. Reality is out there, beautiful and pitiless.

Credo
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean; out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

The winter storm seems to have moved out at this point. This is one of those times I’m thankful to live in town rather than the country. Apparently the country roads are impassable. We’ve been under the highest level of travel warning for a day or so now.

Some pictures from the neighborhood today. Rachel and I have been listening to the Telepathy Tapes for most of the day. While we’ve been listening, I’ve been playing solitaire. Haven’t done that in years, especially with real cards.

There were a couple of us in line to fill up our kerosene tanks in advance of tomorrow’s winter storm. Around here, it seems, only the smallest and dingiest stations have kerosene. The shiny, new ones never do. I wonder why that is?

Alexander Beiner:

So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”

They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.

Stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it: “Stand by Me” by the Staples Singers. 🎵

First Day Hike at Spring Mill state park.

I’m glad to have encountered Lewis Mumford’s phrase “life cannot be delegated.” I’m also glad for the way L.M. Sacasas invokes Illich to relativize an idea that could become overly rigid–because, of course, a great deal of our work is delegated:

The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.

Any recommendations for reduction in blue light exposure? I wear prescription glasses but I think adding those flip down lenses to my existing glasses would look a bit goofy. I’ve switched my laptop and phone to night mode all the time. I will likely attach a filter to my laptop screen.

I’ve listened to two episodes of “The Telepathy Tapes” and my brain is melting. It’s a podcast series that explores the clear evidence of telepathic (and other remarkable) abilities of some non-speaking people with autism. It’s astonishing–and it pretty clearly breaks scientific materialism.

I’ve gotten away from hiking over the past year—and I felt it today. It does me a lot of good in a lot of ways when I’m regularly in the woods. I’m going to get back to that.

After the recent rain, there’s a lot of water rushing out of Donaldson Cave at Spring Mill State Park. You might call it chthonic water. (Ha ha?)