No Legal Targets
Sometimes we get angry.
If you’re a toddler and you’re angry, you might kick over your bowl of applesauce, throw your toy robot, scratch your brother’s arm, and scream at your parents.
If you’re not a toddler, these behaviors are somewhat less acceptable.
One thing that I have noticed is that as my life grows longer and my toolkit grows richer, there is a diminishing number of legal targets for my anger.
At some point, for instance, I picked up empathy for the poor, beleaguered waiter who’s twice screwed up my order and left me without a drink for half an hour.
Before developing that particular thread of empathy, it was easy to get angry at the waiter, and to vent my frustrations upon his richly deserving form. That’s what my father did, when I was growing up. That’s the pattern I would have followed, if I were just a straightforward copycat learner.
Now, though, it feels like the waiter isn’t a legal target. It doesn’t feel allowed to get mad at him, when the real problem has to do with the system that left him overloaded and unable to cope. He’s just a guy working less than minimum wage, trying to cover twelve tables at once, and on top of that, he’s probably not going to get any good tips on his most stressful and hardworking night.
Get mad at the manager, then?
Ehhh, seems like the manager is also doing the best they can under less-than-ideal circumstances…
And so on.
The more I learn about human psychology, the more I learn about economics, the more I learn about politics, the more I learn about religion and education and the cultural patchwork that is morality…
…the more I learn, the harder it is to let my anger settle on a target.
It seems like there’s always some explanation, some mitigating circumstance, some deterministic clockwork set of causes and effects that mean that it’s not his fault, and it’s not her fault, and really this is just a reflection of how you were raised, and sure, it might feel satisfying to honk at you and roll down my window and throw a middle finger at you after you cut me off, but that’s not going to actually fix the problem. If I want you to actually change, then I’ve got to start by being on your side, developing mutual trust and respect, sharing the reasons for my beliefs and actions and investigating yours with genuine curiosity and openness, et cetera.
(It would be nice if this made the anger go away, but it doesn’t. Not really. I mean, in many cases it sort of undercuts it, causes it to fail to appear in the first place, but there are still plenty of times that my system produces rage commensurate with that of an aggrieved toddler. I just can’t do anything with it and still maintain my self-image of being a Good Person.)
Two dynamics emerge.
One: the anger just sits there. I’m not level-one stupid, I know I’m not supposed to suppress it. And I know that stuff like punching walls doesn’t actually help, that it can in fact set up a feedback cycle that just makes you more angry.
But the flaws of the system aren’t your fault, so I’m not going to dump my anger on you. And I’m not going to dump it on my friends and colleagues (I hate when people are like, I’m just in a bad mood today, as if that makes it okay to punish people who’ve done nothing wrong).
It just…sits there.
And I guess it piles up? Not straightforwardly—there’s got to be some drainage, and some erosion, and some compacting down of early angers as later angers pile on top of them.
But if there’s no legal target, I’m not going to fire. I simply cannot. I can not bring myself to just yell at someone unfairly.
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So it sits there, slowly turning into whatever anger turns into when it ferments.
Except when—
A second dynamic emerges.
What about when you do find a legal target?
Someone who damn well knows better, who has all the right resources and knowledge and education, and nevertheless is being a shithead in entirely avoidable, preventable ways, just outright defecting on me and you and the whole collaborative project—
Ah. Well, in that case…
This week, the news went crazy over a snippet of video showing a kid in a Make America Great Again hat sort of awkwardly stoic-smiling at an older Native American veteran who was beating a drum in front of him. Initial reports framed this as some snotty, privileged, white-male-Christian racists ganging up to threaten political activists like the Native American and a nearby group of black Hebrews.
And what happened next makes sense, if you understand that there’s a group of people out there who have fewer and fewer legal targets for their anger, while at the same time having no less anger than the rest of us.
A bunch of leftists—
(and for all the faults you might assign to the group ‘leftists,’ you have to admit that they really truly do seem to be trying not to take out their anger on women, or gays, or blacks, or Jews, or the disabled, or any of the other groups that were historically safe targets for oppression and hate)
—a bunch of leftists got ahold of what they thought was the name and identity of this asshole racist Trumpist teenage bully—
—and they unloaded. Doxxed a boy named Michael Hodges, threatened his parents and his relatives, overloaded his school with demands for his censure and expulsion, found out where he’d been accepted to college and flooded the college with demands that they reverse their acceptance…the whole nine yards.
Turns out, Michael Hodges wasn’t even there.
Also turns out, the kid who was there, Nick Sandmann, was behaving like 95x more normally and acceptably than the original news story made him out to be.
And sure, there’s a whole lot going on here. People are meaner when they’re sorting themselves out by tribe, political tensions are high, a lot of our worst nature comes out when we’re insulated by distance and part of a mob and can scream near-anonymously over the internet.
But one important thread, I think, is this no legal targets thing.
Because there’s a group of people out there who are very mad. They feel frightened, and threatened, and their country seems to be abandoning them, and norms they thought were sacred are being turned upside down, and they kind of want to blame Christianity but no, religion is not a legal target and they kind of want to blame America’s working classes but no, the poor are not a legal target and they kind of want to blame stupidity but no, can’t go around using the word ‘retard’ as an insult, that’s morally horrific—
And this group of people, which has to thread this increasingly complex needle of what you’re allowed to say and do and think and which things you’re allowed to hold people accountable for versus which are supposed to generate empathy, it’s not their fault they’ve been abused by the system and stripped of all their resources and oppressed—
Well, when you can’t allow yourself to get mad at anybody, most of the time, even the thief who smashed your car window last week or the homeless guy who screamed at your significant other in the parking lot yesterday, and then you find one person who’s just unambiguously terrible, who’s definitely across the line of propriety and goodness and is a part of the Inhuman Outgroup—
It kind of makes sense that you’d go from zero to eleven pretty quick.
(I’d get mad at you for it, but it doesn’t really seem like I can blame you. Seems like the sort of thing any human would do, if put under that same set of stresses.)
God damn it.
