Anger is the one common ground.
Peter Baker, New York Times,
Jan/Apr 2021
Well, the people were very angry.
Donald J. Trump, March 18, 2021
interview with Jonathan Karl on the Capitol Riots
Departure 1: ‘A virtue, being self-sufficient, never needs the assistance of a vice: whenever it needs an impetuous effort, it does not become angry, but rises to the occasion, and excites or soothes itself as far as it deems requisite’ – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Anger.
Stoicism is ‘back,’ though it is more a rebuild than a resuscitation of Stoicisms of yore. But why Stoicism, and why now? In the cant of Howard Beale from the 1976 film Network: ‘We know things are bad, worse than bad, they’re crazy! … Things have got to change! But first, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say: I am as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ It’s axiomatic that ‘if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,’ which is to suggest that your anger is a measure of your moral compass. That axiom became a clarion call for antiracists following the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer (whose social media adopted the dictum) at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though the inventory of items stoking our anger is somewhat altered, we are mad as hell, all of us, but as anger has become more continuous script than episodic release, it has proved to be less cathartic and cohesive than destructive and divisive. The adverse psychological and physiological impact of prolonged anger and associated behaviours is well-established. A brimming slate of popular books, retreats, and media bloom hail Stoicism as a nostrum against the negativities of anger. Anger management techniques are on the rise, and some of the same forces that prompted the distillation of mindfulness-based programmes and the mindfulness movement from traditional forms of Buddhism are now at work on premodern Stoicisms. These modern secularised phenomena are making common cause with cognitive behavioural therapies and other psychological modalities and emerging as potentially useful techniques for managing difficult emotions like anger, anxiety, and fear. Some ‘modern’ Stoics extol the overlap with therapy and seek to integrate Stoic concepts and practices with modern psychotherapies. Others mine Stoicism for ‘life hacks’ purged of any fine-grained cultural or ideological freight.
What did Stoics think about anger? In short, that it is a form of self-harm, that it is communicable, that it is antisocial, and (critically) that it is manageable. Stoics taught that virtue/happiness is an ‘inner’ path. In the view of the formerly enslaved Stoic sage Epictetus:
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