The other day, I was reading an excerpt from Seneca’s On Anger (De Ira), and there was one section that caught my eye:
Do you not observe that with each advancing grade of fortune there goes the greater tendency to anger? It is especially apparent in the rich, in nobles, and in officials when all that was light and trivial in their mind soars aloft upon the breeze of good fortune. Prosperity fosters wrath when the crowd of flatterers, gathered around, whispers to the proud ear: “What, should that man answer you back? Your estimate of yourself does not correspond with your importance; you demean yourself”—these and other adulations, which even the sensible and orginally well-poised mind resists with difficulty.
I found this section to be particularly relevant to activist circles, especially as they function online. There, displays of wrath by those who have amassed a following are often rewarded by fans, friends, and flatterers who mistake anger for passion and dedication. The anger becomes theatrical, and it stops concerning itself with the actual cause. Instead, the wrath becomes the point.
But you should always be wary of flatterers who encourage your anger. They don’t want the best for you. In fact, they are encouraging immature emotional reactivity all because they wish they themselves were bolder and are trying to live vicariously through you. It will win you the admiration of people like that, sure, but at a cost to whatever you are fighting for and to your personal growth.
Anger does have its place in the emotional life, and it is an emotion that can act as a motivator. But anger specifically directed at individuals in a spectacle for onlookers is, in my opinion, more a display of how dedicated someone is to themselves than to the cause they say they care about.
“…fans, friends, and flatterers who mistake anger for passion and dedication.”
so true
… and mistake cruelty for wit
Interesting. I always think that class and classism is affecting things too. Recently, I saw a woman gangpiled on a Radical Feminist thread for saying "unacceptable" things that I mostly agreed with. The rage at her was horrific, including a threat to call the police to see if she was "okay," meaning to lock her up as mentally ill. For disagreeing with the norm. Scary.