[Lightly updated from the original, which was posted on Medium circa 2020]
Anger is one of the most valuable signals we have, but only if we attend to it correctly.
The emotion of anger is produced (most often) by the violation of expectation. People don’t tend to flare up in rage and fury at stuff that was completely predictable, that they knew was coming, that was already part of their anticipations about the future.
Instead, people get mad at other drivers for failing to follow commonsense rules, like we all know we’re supposed to. They get mad at their roommates for failing to do their fair share of the cleaning, as agreed. They get mad at their children for doing what they’ve been told a thousand times not to do.
Even more deep and serious anger—at rapists and murderers, at corrupt politicians, at one’s mortal enemies—it usually has its roots in some kind of should.
You shouldn’t hoard billions of dollars while other people starve on the street.
You shouldn’t use epithets that have a history of denigrating and delegitimizing millions of people.
You shouldn’t write laws that reach all the way into the privacy of my own home, my own body, my own willing interactions with other free, consenting agents.
These shoulds and shouldn’ts aren’t just intellectual. They’re not just reasoned positions. They live deep within our bones. We don’t just recommend these things, we expect them, on a visceral level. They seem so obviously part of how one ought to go about one’s day, how to make things work, that we’re often blindsided by the reminder that other people aren’t necessarily on the same page. The anger of a road-rager often starts with shock, surprise, sudden dismay—they weren’t planning on nearly being run off the road by some idiot texting (or, less forgivably, on being pointlessly held up by some idiot going three under in the fast lane).
But of course, there’s no physical barrier preventing people from driving slowly in the fast lane. There’s police enforcement, and social shaming, each of which can punish or deter such behavior, but the universe itself, on the level of strict possibility, does not share our should.
Similarly, the universe doesn’t prevent people from bullying your child, or keep you from tripping over loose concrete, or prevent doctors from performing abortions (or protestors from bombing abortion clinics). All sorts of things which shock and surprise and outrage us are completely allowed, as far as the universe is concerned.
And this means that anger is an epistemic warning flag. At least four times out of five, anger is a hint—that You Believed Something Which Is Not True.
That you expected that the drivers around you would conform to a shared set of norms and behaviors.
That you expected that your romantic partner would not cheat on you.
That you expected that everyone would agree that something must be done about climate change, and that everyone would share your outrage over income inequality.
You expected that people would immediately understand the overwhelming and obvious truth that mass shootings represent an almost impossibly tiny fraction of total gun use, and you expected that this understanding would prevent them from proposing laws which impose enormous costs upon tens of millions of law-abiding citizens while not even making a dent in the actual problem.
You expected the code to compile, this time.
"But..." Harry said slowly. "Lucius was Sorted into Slytherin, he's got to realize that Hermione was just a pawn. Not the one he should actually be angry at. Right?"
"No, Harry Potter," Albus Dumbledore said heavily. "That is how you wish Lucius Malfoy would think. Lucius Malfoy himself... will not share your desire that he think that way."
All of these expectations were, in fact, false, as your recent and unpleasant experience proved. They were miscalibrated—even if you knew that failure was possible in some distant, technical sense, you didn’t see it coming, you weren’t braced for it, and so you shout and pound your fist on the desk and honk your horn (or you smolder internally and take it out on the dog when you get home, because you didn’t expect the dog to rip up your loafers and dammit, that’s the last straw).
And so the anger is a signal, that you could do something better inside your own mind. It’s a trigger, and one of the possible actions in response to that trigger is to revisit and reevaluate your expectations and beliefs.
Feel anger → Say, out loud, “I notice I expected something else to happen.”
And from there, decide what to do next. Not from the standard default “something else should have happened,” but from “I thought that something else would happen.”
From a place of realizing that you had an expectation, and that your expectation failed to match reality.
(Here I am distinguishing between the moral should, which I have no objection to, and the anticipatory should. Sometimes this is referred to as the “is-ought” distinction. I think it’s absolutely fine to continue thinking that people ought not to rape, in a moral, prescriptive sense. And in fact, anger and outrage are a tool toward that end, via signaling and punishment and so on.
But it’s silly to expect that you can put a few million people together in a city and have zero sexual assaults occur, at least at this point in our moral and social development, as a species. It’s a shame that we use the single word “should” to describe two so very different things.)
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t (heh) stay angry, either, or that you shouldn’t act from anger. Anger, in addition to being an epistemic flag, is also a useful source of motive energy, and a way to put pressure on the social structures around you. It’s okay to be outraged by things that are outrageous.
But there’s a difference between someone whose anger is likely to be effective, because it’s channeled and targeted well, and someone whose anger is…
…random?
Wishful?
Likely to be ineffective, because the very same part that is running the show and making all the decisions is the part that just demonstrated that it’s mistaken about how things work. Likely to be unstrategic and counterproductive, because it’s emerging from unexamined false beliefs, and those unexamined false beliefs probably extend to what impact they expect their anger to have, on the problem.
Anger is evidence—and it’s evidence about what’s going on inside your head just as much as it’s evidence about what’s going on in the broader world.
I'm not sure if it's all just a matter of expectations. Like at any give day, based on my experience, I would expect a non-negligible chance of some idiot driving like a tortoise in the fast lane. Occasionally, it happens, as expected. That doesn't stop me from getting angry, on the contrary it makes me even angrier, "true enough, an idiot like this shows up right when I expect it". I feels like it's more of a matter of desire than expectations. I want to drive on a road where everyone drives according to a shared set of norms and behaviors, and I get mad whenever someone violates that, regardless of how it may be in line with my expectations.
My anger is evidence of how right I am; your anger is evidence of how wrong you are.