It sounds to me like you were driven more by other emotions — perhaps feelings of care, concern or worry. That doesn't prove that anger is useless, simply that in that situation, it wasn't the primary emotion you were experiencing or that drove your behaviour.

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.

> How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?

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?

That's why I moved to a country where (a, specifically) the rule of law is accessible to all, and (b, generally) important things rarely break down.

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.

To be more explicit: either one has the power to gain remedy via extralegal means or one does not. If one does, doing so angrily or not doesn't change much. If one does not, I claim that first gaining the necessary power ("sleep on brushwood and taste gall") is much more likely to be effective than rashly attempting something in the expectation anger should somehow magically augment one's initial lack of 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)

Emotions are motivation.

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.

Aha, that's our problem: for me, anger is part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response and so Irritation, Frustration, and Resentment aren't included because they don't necessarily involve that article's:

> 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...

That makes sense, and sure.

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.

How about this: because we are capable of the (potentially motivational) conscious feeling anger, relying on the unconscious emotion anger has questionable utility?

(affect and mood may be well defined within a discipline, but cursory googling seems to reveal substantial interdisciplinary inconsistency)

Given human variation I'm not quite willing to generalize that much. I'd say pretty much anything our minds do is of questionable utility when taken to an extreme. But this extreme will vary between people.