Analogies for Aggression, Anger and Rage
As I was reading more about aggression in the latest module due Friday, I was fascinated with the popular idea of catharsis, and how I personally know lots of friends and family that believe in it without question.
Learning more about the spread of this false idea was really helpful for me in understanding the more complicated explanation of how aggression is created in our minds. I wish there was a better analogy to describe anger to people, as elegant as the catharsis idea (being a pressure system that needs a valve to release anger) that we know is false, so I can explain it to others. This made me remember an analogy for rage/anger I read about by German Philosopher Peter Sloterdijik, comparing rage to a bank.
Here is an excerpt from an in-depth review of his 2006 book Rage and Time: "Like happiness, rage lives in the present and has no temporality. Rage functions like a “bank” from where the subject deposits their rage into it and their bank is managed by a banker that takes the form of an ideology, or an individual, usually charismatic, what Sloterdijk refers to as an “entrepreneur of rage”. This bank asks that subjects situate themselves to a perspective and orient themselves to a history." https://danieltutt.com/2012/03/02/rage-management-and-leaderless-revolutions/
Sloterdijk ties anger and rage to the world around us. Politicians, ideologies, our outlook of the economy, and history are all formed by our consumption of media. In a way, I see this as a really elegant way of explaining how the media can "deposit" rage and anger into our minds.
And then politicians and corporate leaders in charge of the media, are the bankers who are able to make "withdrawals" from our minds from the anger and rage the media has over time built up. Whether it be about policies, economics, or even violence. The only thing about the bank analogy I disagree with after reading is that after money has been "withdrawn" in a bank, it disappears. But anger does not disappear, it remains unless we do something actively to change that. Example: no longer believe in the ideology that anger was drawn from. Just look at the recent insurrection at the capital in DC. QAnon, Trump, and the Republicans stoked the fires of anger and rage in many disenfranchised citizens about the election being a fraud- "depositing" anger and rage into their followers. All it took was Trump at his last rally, to "withdraw" that anger and use it against his own coworkers who were ratifying the election.
What are your thoughts about this analogy? Sure, it may not be perfect, and Sloterdijk isn't a psychologist, but he has a PhD in philosophy and media theory.
