So I’m wondering what your opinions are about what the emotion anger is for? What is its evolutionary purpose? I tend to feel anger when things happen that are out of my control, so I’m thinking anger is related to reason in that you will use reason if it is possible to persuade and if reason is not allowed you will use anger to persuade. Does anyone have a good way to separate legitimate anger from illegitimate anger?
The function of anger is to give you energy to act to defend yourself.
The smart way to go about it is usually to take a moment to think that what this anger is guiding you to do, if it is actually the best way to get what you want, or if there are better ways to go about it.
Like all emotions, anger isn’t really a tangible thing. There is so many degrees of anger, anger at loss, anger at threat etc… I think the word anger is used to simply summarize our feelings of unease with our current situation, and thus maybe the driving force behind human action.
Socio-biogically I agree with the post above, if we didn’t have anger how would we know if something was wrong or threatening our being?
Consult the stefbot. [:)]
Your cerebral cortex.
In other words, logical reasoning. Notice how the mind works: we cannot get angry unless we can place blame (on something, someone, or even ourselves), and to place blame we have to go through a rational process - however brief and cursory it may be. We’re wired so that in order to get angry, we have to have worked out some justification or rationalization that makes it OK to get angry in that instance. No blame = no anger.
Looking back over my life, I don’t think getting angry has ever helped me in any way. But I’ve also never been in a serious fight; it may help there for self-defense in certain situations, but given our current system of law I think in most cases anger will still be a much more likely enemy than ally.
In modern society, to which we are not yet physically well-adapted, I would say we get angry far more than is healthy or necessary. I personally think anger is an obsolete emotion outside certain very specific types of life-or-death situations (such situations must have been much more common previously in our evolutionary history). Fortunately, whether we get angry is fully under our conscious control, because we have to blame someone or something in order to start the process. If we simply refuse to blame anyone (including ourselves) and instead just think how we can most beneficially deal with the situation as it is, we will not feel anger. Try it out if you don’t believe me. Certainly it takes a massive effort of will, but it is not in any way impossible. In light of this, I hope we can master ourselves and find a way to leave such unhelpful emotions behind.
That’s the function of the fight-or-flight response, which has no necessary relation to anger.
However, I’ve heard that in a real street fight, barring any major size or skill difference (and assuming it’s 1-on-1), the guy who truly wants and aims to kill the other guy is almost always the one who wins. Since the raw desire and conviction to kill is probably hard for most people to summon up without anger, I can agree that anger could indeed help in certain life-or-death battle situations.
Anger was created by god to stop us from cooperating with gay black democrats. Duh.
Seriously what is this doing on mises?
Its in misc->general and people here tend to have good insight.
Yea I have reasoned out that your thoughts come before your emotions. Have you felt anger in situations you have no control over? Because I can’t really see where blame factors into that. I was thinking there would probably be two types of anger, healthy anger that causes internal change perhaps, and unhealthy anger that initiates a physical response.
Use your rationality to focus your feelings/instincts and let your feelings/instincts stimulate your rationality, do not make a dichotomy of them. The best warriors and athletes are the ones that can use their rationality and instincts at the same time.
In blaming, we focus on someone or something else’s control over us, so situations you have no control over are classic examples.