Living My Beautiful Ideal

By Zesmerelda from Flickr.com (http://flickr.com/photos/zesmerelda/175053378/) CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by the posts titled Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? and Fuck You I Won’t Do What You Tell Me!, I wanted to write up something providing an alternative to the Raw. Fucking. Rage. advocacy put forth by flogleviathan. To quote Max Nettlau:

But they must not imagine that all people are constituted after their model and likely to come round to their views or remain “unreclaimed” adversaries on whom no sympathy is to be wasted. Let them but look on real life, which is bearable at all only by being varied and differentiated, in spite of all official uniformity.

Although I have substantial sympathy for Mr. Flog’s point of view, I am not constituted after the model of Raw. Fucking. Rage. In fact, I have made and continue to make a conscious and purposeful effort to steer myself away from that model. Furthermore, I don’t consider it bullshit that I work to find ways to channel my anger that are healthy for me.

My intention here is to provide for your consideration a varied and differentiated alternative to mindless rage. Feel free to do so or not. Feel free to hang onto every ounce of your rage even if you do consider it. In fact, feel free to have some of mine if you’re not sufficiently enraged for your liking. I can probably find a bit to spare for someone in need.

I am the second oldest of seven children in my family, and I grew up in an unhealthy, angry, and fairly violent environment. I cannot recall a single day in the last ten years that I lived at home—or any visit thereafter—that didn’t involve screaming, name calling, ridicule, blaming, threatening, and so on. When those failed to coerce compliance, compliance was forced. Compliance was forced from me, and I in turn learned the best way to get compliance from others was through force as well. I also attended Catholic school from kindergarten through senior year of high school, which works on more or less the same principles, albeit with somewhat less yelling. Having been conditioned over decades that this was a normal way to live, it is no surprise then that I wound up in unhealthy relationships as an adult—a very angry adult.

I have plenty of right to be angry. You have the right to be angry. Every one of us has the right to be angry. There is no shortage of horrors and injustices for us to be angry about, perpetrated by government and corporations, not to mention our fellow human beings, including people who are supposed to love us. But, but, but…

Is our anger serving us, or are we serving our anger?

For hints as to the answer to this question, we might pay some attention to how we feel when we are angry. I can recognize several clear physical indications in myself when I am angry. These may include such things as tightness in my throat, shoulders, and chest, clenched teeth, crossed arms or hands balled into fists, sometimes a headache, and almost invariably a nauseated feeling in my stomach. Most of these are also symptoms of physical illness- a good indicator that I am not at my best.

I know that I am also impacted mentally, particularly when I am in a chronic state of anger. Rather than being a motivating force for change, anger often leaves me with a lack of energy (also known as a case of the oh, fuck its) and feelings of disempowerment and depression.

After years of misery, I finally acknowledged that, while it was a rudimentary form of protection from abuse in childhood, my anger was no longer serving me as an adult. When I realized that, I discovered that I also had no idea how to be any other way. It has taken a long time to learn to use other tools for relating to other people. The process has been slow, frustrating, and perpetually ongoing, but also immensely empowering and satisfying.

Anger is easy and very often convenient in the moment. Such qualities make it powerfully seductive, but anger has a way from morphing from a snarling dog at the end of a leash we control into an overpowering monster that has us in its clutches. In the form of this monster, it manifests in hatred, cruelty, violence, and so on. That is not a place I want to be.

As that creeping, insidious change takes place, anger loses its power as a driving force for constructive change and increasingly becomes an uncontrolled and then uncontrollable destructive force. “Fuck you. I won’t do what you tell me!” becomes “I will unthinkingly do what you tell me not to do, just because you told me not to do it, regardless of the unjust and harmful consequences to myself or innocent bystanders.” There is a reason why the word “rage” is frequently modified by the adjective “blind”. All too often we do not see that in our mindless insistence on clinging to and stoking our anger against authoritarians, we have unwittingly given up self-control and, in fact, have given them control over us.

I see a common misconception pervasive in pro-freedom circles that if you aren’t angry, if you don’t hate the enemy, if you don’t have a battle mentality, and so on, that you aren’t a hardcore activist, a serious anarchist, and so on. I see that as not only a common misconception, but often a harmful and counterproductive one.

We are not always at our sharpest, our most strategically minded, effective best when we are angry. When anger crowds out the intellectual process completely rather than complementing and balancing it, we may make foolish mistakes, undermine our own efforts, and collapse in on ourselves with irrelevant infighting and cult-like formation of cliques.

We may also repel those who generally agree with us on principles but are turned off by our attitudes and how they are affected by them. A recurring example of this comes to mind. Every so often, someone writes an article on the topic of Why Aren’t There More Women in Our Movement? or some such. Almost invariably, the problem is blamed on women as a class—as in, women don’t love liberty as much as men, women are more dependent than men, and so on. Whatever. It’s typically chalked up to an inherent and uniquely female defect (never mind scads and scads of evidence to the contrary), and pro-freedom folks are let off the hook. Here’s an alternate hypothesis: a lot of libertarian and anarchist types (male and female) are angry assholes and repel those who don’t particularly care hang out with or be pushed around by them. Just a thought.

But the effects are not necessarily isolated to ourselves or our little activist spheres. Anger can also be used as a form of controlling others—something I suggest is not in the best spirit of anarchism. Even if not intentionally used to coerce others, our anger may unintentionally incite defensiveness and avoidance in others. Where advancing ideas requires an engaged and open dialogue, we do ourselves no favor by influencing others to retreat and close off from communication. Hell, I don’t want to be around you or listen to if all you’ve got going on all the time is anger. Why would someone who has serious disagreements with you to begin with want to deal with you in that state?

To be clear, I am not saying that anger is never an effective driving force. I believe that it can be, depending on the circumstances. But one of the down sides of being effectively driven by anger is that one risks conditioning oneself to believe that anger is the only thing by which she can effectively be motivated. I propose a little experiment. Next time you want to change a light bulb, get out your hammer and give the new bulb a few whacks to pound it right in. Then let me know how that worked out for you. I think that is a nice physical model of how rage works when it’s the only tool you’ve got in your toolbox.

As much as we have the right to be angry, we also have the right not to be angry. We have the right not to allow ourselves to be gripped by that monster. We have not only the right, but also the ability, to be compassionate and connected, happy and hopeful, and mentally at peace and still to be motivated and effective change agents in our communities.

Rather than to allow myself to become entrenched in that angry mentality that I have found does not serve me, I often consciously try to focus on other forces that drive me. Above all else, I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning and respect the person I see. That driving force has not only pushed me forward in major personal life changes, it has also forced me to re-evaluate and get more control over my anger and what actions of mine are motivated by it. Passion for knowledge and understanding of the world around me often drives me to advocate for the conditions—such as freedom of thought and inquiry—necessary to gain that knowledge and understanding. After leaving a soul-destroying day job a few years back, I rediscovered creativity, wonder, and fun. These can be great sources of action by way of humor, art, and other non-threatening means with which to convey a message without leading people to disengage without ever hearing it. And these are, of course, just a few examples of many.

This is not to say that I don’t feel anger or that I am never pushed forward by anger. I do. I am. That usually comes with being human. Fortunately, that is not the sum total of the human experience, and I don’t care to allow it to become so in my own life. Reckless, raw rage undirected by the intellect is the companion of injustice and violence. To acquiesce to the notion that anti-authoritarianism is most often or most properly driven by such would be to devalue the very philosophies that I embrace.

Emma Goldman, anarchist and anarchist activist, recognized this as well. She outright rejected the notion that to be proper anarchist change agents, we must abandon what makes life worth living for us and instead live according to someone else’s dour specifications:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

My vision of the world I want to live in does not involve me abandoning my intellect and wallowing mindlessly in rage. I will not wait for that world to materialize before I begin to live my beautiful ideal in any way that I can.