How to control anger

Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger, explains how to deal with the rage and resentment that comes from living in a raging, resentful world

By Benjy Hansen-Bundy, GQ

GQ: Why are people so angry in America?

Mishra: People of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds are being exposed to suffering inflicted by a deeply iniquitous economic system. People are working really hard and are still unable to have a modicum of stability, a sense of well-being, contentment. It's all so rare, all so elusive. They're struggling for poorly paid and precarious work with few protections, sometimes no health insurance, taking on huge amounts of debt, multiple jobs.

This is placing unprecedented amounts of stress on everything that makes us human—growing up in a family, raising a child ourselves, sending our children to school, bringing them up in a relatively healthy environment. All these things have themselves become so difficult. That is underlying so much of the frustration, so much of the anger, that many people feel. Of course, that anger is differently expressed.

What does living with this kind of anger do to people? What changes can be observed in their behaviour?

The alarming rates of depression, suicide, the recourse to drugs—the indicators of mental health are so dismal. These are consequences of this particular economic system that have been working on people, corroding them from within, forcing them to find refuge in this or that, or simply lashing out, sometimes in violent eruptions. The election of Trump is only one of the many symptoms of a kind of breakdown. If anger cannot find any political direction whatsoever, people resort to various private means of elevating their state of frustration and anger. That has been the case for the last many years that neither of the two parties have offered a real alternative to these tens of millions of voters—they've basically offered them the same thing with minor variations. Some of this anger, let's not forget, expresses as domestic violence.

Is there a way to turn political anger into a positive thing? A force for change politically or in your personal life?

Anger is largely a destructive emotion. Any political action undertaken with anger or resentment as the dominant emotion is bound to fail. The challenge before any kind of progressive force is to convince large numbers of people who feel so disenchanted, so full of despair at the world they live in, that they're keen to vote for people like Trump. There's no way you can write off those people. They have very significant numbers. If you want to persuade them to vote for a different future for themselves and their children, then you need to set aside whatever anger and resentment you started out with and you need a different language and a different tone altogether.

How do you find that? What's the answer for people who are angry? How do you defuse it with hope, which I guess is the opposite emotion?

Once you have made an honest and accurate diagnosis of the problems we face today—which range from broader structural problems of inequality and maldistribution to these immense social pathologies of not being able to essentially conduct a normal human existence—the solutions suggest themselves. It is to actually move toward a society where human beings or human needs are emphasised over abstract economic growths, over the profit imperative, over this imperative to constantly consume, and to throw away things that you've owned and to buy new things. This kind of madness—which is also a kind of addiction, an escape from the central suffering of one's life—has to be questioned and challenged.

Is part of the solution lowering your expectations?

Traditional religions and philosophies have always, for much of recorded human history, emphasised the value of modest expectations, the value of humility. It's really only in the modern era that self-expansion, ambition, conquest, triumph have been so valorised. For much of human history, we have emphasised the exact opposite values: the values of austerity, of renunciation, of charity, of sacrifice, of self-suffering. So we start on a completely different era altogether when we start to think about desire, greed, competition, vanity as the engines of human society, as the motors of economic growth. Where economic goals were seen as more important than social welfare or collective welfare.

There's a James Baldwin quote I thought about a lot while reading Age of Anger: "I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private self." You made the point that the unstable relationship between inner and public selves is an important tool in understanding what you call today's global civil war. Why do we have so much trouble reconciling public and private selves?

It's a very good question, because that split between the private and public selves seems to be much more pronounced in societies where so much is required of the individual and so much is invested in the individual's ability to project himself as a successful, capable entrepreneur. For that reason, because there is so much more investment in this public persona, that individual gets more and more disconnected from his or her real needs and inner life. In societies where this kind of obligation exists to a lesser extent, there isn't the intense alienation that you witness in advanced capitalist societies. The psychic damage this causes was being talked about as early as the late 18th century, early 19th century, when the society that we live in today was barely visible. The industrialised, highly commercialised society we live in today was not even a fantasy back in the late 18th century. But what had started to be visible at that point was the shape of a society driven by competition and driven by vanity and driven by imitation. And as I talk about in my book, Rousseau was someone who identified the society as exacting a great cost from ordinary individuals, making their inner life a muddle, making them false to themselves and to other people.

In Michael Pollan's recent book about psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, he makes a point about how spending time in nature reduces your sense of your own grandeur, renews your sense of wonder and your relative smallness in the universe.

Nature is the one resource that remains available to people—well, to some people—even at the rate at which we are destroying the planet. It might not be available in the near future. Previously it was religion. It was the presence, or the felt presence, of transcendental authority. It was the architecture of the church or grand religious buildings that made you feel humble and pointed to your relatively modest place in the universe. Many of these reminders of our own insignificance have faded away, and what we are really left with are reminders of our ambition and our vanity on all sides. And I think it's only when you're in nature that you are able to recognise yourself as one of the many organisms in it. Very frail. Completely mortal. And also very, very small.