I agree with the other poster anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success. Extreme emotions engages our primal brain which prevents our more advanced brain from engaging.
That's simply a fancy label for a particular kind of anger, as one might be able to tell from the literal definition of outrage: an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.
In my opinion there are few things quite as pathetic as people who twist themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging their emotions for what they are. Certain emotions are "bad" (anger, jealousy, etc), and so instead of addressing it when they feel those things, they just convince themselves that they aren't actually feeling them at all and that their reactions are driven by some higher logic or nobler emotion - all while still inflicting their emotional fallout on those around them.
Just call the emotions what they are, accept them in the form of not dressing them up and putting some spin on them to make people feel better about themselves (and ultimately dance around the actual emotion, via forms of denial, bypassing, etc.). And once you accept them for the simple, unadorned, and sometimes unflattering things that they are, you can then process them, and decide via understanding the root causes, contexts, and triggers, to then map out decision trees for how to respond to those feelings and emotions as the best course of action.
And like you mentioned, if you don't address the actual emotions and try to pretty them up, you're gonna leak out the actual emotions sideways, and cause unnecessary strain to those around you, and ultimately place your burden of being responsible for your emotions on others, and most likely throw up a big stink (in the form of projection, more denial, more bypassing, etc.).
Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and responsibility are very difficult but necessary things, and they often times are unflattering. But like also many other things, there's no shortcuts to learning how to manage and deal with them in real situations with real stakes.
I very much agree with your overall point. But it's literally the opposite of pathetic to elide one's own pathos. I'm actually a bit sad that such as useful word as "pathetic" was literally reversed in meaning to become a disparaging epithet.
All personality types have their own blindspots.
...a rather important part of the overall point is precisely that the people in question are not elid[ing their] own pathos.
That's not how that works.
Moral outrage is when I'm pissed off at someone else bc they don't fit my preconceived idea of how people ought to live or behave - it's not real anger, especially not in 2024.
Being pissed off bc of injustice to my family - that is for sure actual anger.
But historically when they did not result in negative long term success, they paid off big time.
Anger is not an extreme emotion. It's used all of the time to good purpose. You're thinking about rage. If the "other poster" failed to make this distinction then it's really important to make it now so that we don't start strawmanning or ad homineming based on a misunderstanding.
Personally Joy has been an extreme emotion that has done me bad. As when I experience Joy I start to stop paying attention. On one occasion I suffered a broken bone because of it.
I don't think that's true. Anger, by definition, is a primal/emotional response that leads people to act abruptly without any semblance of reflection on the potential impact of their actions.
The expressions "acted in anger" does not mean "acted with courage to do what needed to be done". It actually means someone screwed up badly without thinking things through.
Getting angry is renowned for leading people to do very stupid things that they would otherwise never do, because even themselves are fully aware it's stuff only an idiot would do.
> That it is still up to the human being with a fully functional brain to figure out whether or not to use that energy (and, if yes, what exactly to do with it) doesn't change that fact.
The original claim was "do what needs to be done" and now you backtracked to claim that instead the idiot who gets angry needs to control himself to not do stupid stuff that angry people do. What point do you think you're making?
> The original claim was "do what needs to be done" and now you backtracked to claim that instead the idiot who gets angry needs to control himself to not do stupid stuff that angry people do.
The original claim (not by me, mind you) was that "When we witness injustice, when our loved ones are threatened or harmed, when someone treats us with contempt or disrespect, anger is our signal that we must take action, and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done."
Again, I don't know how else to tell you that this is a plain fact. This is something that anybody with even a surface-level understanding of neuroscience and psychology should know. Fear and anger are both emotions that are triggered by perceived danger/threats and that prepare a person to respond to said danger. Pointing out that it is still up to you as a person to choose when and how to use that elevated state of readiness is not "backtracking", it is basic emotional intelligence. If you aren't able to regulate your emotions - all of them, not just the ones labelled negative - then that's on you, not on the sheer existence of your limbic system.
But then again I can see how this would be a confusing concept for anyone stuck in an "anger = bad" thought-terminating loop.
(b) That an adrenaline dump provokes a significant boost in cardiovascular performance is true. We are neither fighting anachronistic saber-toothed tigers, nor are we in the wild west, we are in civilised countries in the 21st century. When should improved cardiovascular performance improve any outcomes?
And, again, if you don't have the emotional regulation to not fly off the handle at things that aren't actually dangerous or threatening, that's a you problem not a problem with the existence of your limbic system.
To be explicit: had I acted out of anger, I might've tried to fight the guy, and (especially if he had had friends), it would not have ended well. Having instead used my neocortex: his initial advantage lay in choosing the time, manner, and place; time there was nothing to be done about; manner I negated by switching first to grappling, then to grappling in a situation where I had the cardiovascular advantage; and place I negated by moving to a location where there were other people.
(in retrospect, if I'd just not tried to shortcut through an alleyway at night in a strange city, I would never even have had to make use of my normal cardiovascular capacity)
When was the last time you faced a threat of violence for which increased cardiovascular performance improved the outcome?
A while ago I had a loved one both harmed and threatened.
I called my insurance, who gave me a lawyer, who got the facts from my loved one and combined them with the law, giving the case to a judge, who gave us a court order which allowed us to both (a) remedy the harm, and (b) get law enforcement backup. For this outcome, very little energy, and no courage (at least on our parts), was required.
How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?
But let's suppose that the same situation unfolded, except you were Black, and the treatment you received by the legal system was rude and dismissive in ways that you were familiar with, having experienced racism many times before. In that situation you might experience much more anger, and you might rely on that anger to give you the courage and energy to deal with the injustice you were experiencing.
If at any point the chain of actions had broken down, anger would have granted the motivation to pursue through the roadblock.
You do understand that this very system implicitly disadvantages those who do not have such straightforward access to it, right?
Justice is depicted as blind in statuary for a reason.
Edit: upon reflection, even in the Old Country, where accessibility to the law is debatable, anger doesn't seem useful. Either someone has the power to gain remedy by extralegal means or they do not, and whether they are angry or not when they make that attempt has little —despite movie plots— to do with the actual state of their power.
(in fact the latter rash attempts are likely to be advantageous for one's adversary, hence the original "hollywood for proles" conspiracy theoretic hypothesis given above)
Here's a decent article on the anger spectrum: https://psychology.tips/levels-of-anger/
It uses five degrees of anger (one could easily quibble, and add or subtract, based on general or personal ideas of anger): Irritation, Frustration, Resentment, Rage, and Hatred.
Ask how anyone would be motivated to gain a legal or extralegal remedy if not feeling at the very least irritation.
It's a serious mistake to only equate anger to rage or hatred.
> Impaired Decision Making: When consumed by anger, rational thinking tends to take a backseat which could result in poor decision making.
(In fact, because my major interest is in good decision making despite high adrenaline levels, I lump Irritation, Frustration, and Resentment into a boring Dissatisfaction; I can appreciate that distinguishing these as well as linking them to the highly-limbic expressions of anger would be useful for people who are discussing non-adrenalised states, but for me the non-adrenalised/adrenalised boundary yields a clear qualitative distinction between dissatisfaction and anger)
I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
I'm not overly familiar with this part of psychology, but I think a good distinction is between emotions and mood states. Adrenalized anger would probably be considered a mood state. I'm probably wrong about this though, as a quick search leads to distinctions between emotions, feelings, and moods. It looks like there are also "mood disorders" which seem to be extended affective complexes of particular emotions.
> I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
Probably the largest reason it doesn't is because while the majority of humans experience visual sensation similarly enough (white/blue dress notwithstanding), the emotions are something else entirely. We spend so much time in certain emotions compared to other people that it's like wearing colored wraparound spectacles all of the time.
(affect and mood may be well defined within a discipline, but cursory googling seems to reveal substantial interdisciplinary inconsistency)
Understanding your anger and not letting it control your behaviour (ie not giving in to blind rage), is important. But there are no useless emotions, and of all the “negative” emotions, anger is among the most useful and important.