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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

anger « Previous | |Next »
October 20, 2003

I've little time this week to write as I am painting the holiday shack at Victor Harbor. I'm pretty tired in the evening.

But I have noticed a lot of anger in public life in Australia amongst the political elite. It mostly takes the form of revenge and payback for past wrongs, defeats and humilitations.

You hear about the anger in Tasmania where those in the forestry industry are consumed by anger towards the greens.

These examples of anger in public life reminded me of Seneca. He wrote about it.

This is his essay On Anger.

Why Seneca? Two reasons. First, I just happening to be glancing through Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy between the breaks in painting.

Secondly, I'm full of anger in my personal life. It is eating away at me, turning me into a different kind of person.

And De Botton? It is easygoing, well written, easily understood, peppered with illustrations and pleasant to read. From what I can make out consolation is about soothing our spiritual aches. It is a kind of like those self-help books about achieving happiness that are touted on daytime TV.

He's a doctor of the soul who deals with life's emotional problem. Hence his text is working within the tradition of philosophy as a way of life.

Can he help us to deal with anger in our personal and public lives?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)
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After I finished painting the "master bedroom" in the seaside shack late this morning I took a quick spin along [Read More]

 
Comments

Comments

I find writing my blog makes me angry, gotta give this one up when the year comes round, got another planned, all sweetness and light...

meatspace friends tell me my blog is 'so dark' compared to the me they know...

hmm,
anger is seen as bad. Is it just dark?

Should there be anger in public life? Or should it be banished.

What would public life without anger be like?

Gary, Howard has made us party to the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents and the interminable incarceration in cages of yet more innocents. If Seneca thinks the emotions this arouses in the civilised breast inhuman, I'm angry at him, too.

It is less about us becoming inhuman that a way of governing our passions in private and public life.

Why is governance be necessary? Because the anger of some becomes a fury that treats others as inhuman; or worse as an enemey that has to be exterminated.

A lot of Australian public discourse is build around this.eg. the history or the cultural wars.

Hence we should look at the role anger plays in public life.