I've seen four types of anger. One is directionless anger;
another is racket anger; another is illegitimate or ignorant anger;
and legitimate anger for the righteous cause.

The first is something I've seen in a lot of men and some women. I've
seen it in both the rich and the poor. It is a self-defeating, self-
destructive force that collapses upon oneself - similar to pissing in
one's own bed or destroying one's possessions. It ends up being
directed against the people who care about the angry person, while the
rest of the people could care less and see the person as a loser. The
person ends up destroying everything good in his or her life and ends
up losing completely, while those who made the person angry in the
first place sit back and laugh.

The second - racket anger - is the case of a person who wants to do
harm to another person coming up with fake reasons why the other
person deserves to be mistreated. Thus, a man who is angry and wants to
treat women like garbage comes into the relationship expecting the
woman to mistreat him or cheat on him - and, through his paranoia and
cruelty and possessiveness leads her to such a terrible place that, in
many cases, the woman is indeed tempted to have an affair just to
regain her sense of self-worth - after which the man crows that he was
right all along and the women are immoral and deserve to be kept under
lock and key and beaten every day. This is a very insidious, very
hideous mechanism, and the correct response to it is to reveal it for
the injustice and dishonesty that it is and recognize that, whatever
the sins of the other person, the sin of viciousness, cruelty, and
total lack of forgiveness or understanding or caring that the person
running this racket exhibits is a far worse sin.

Illegitimate anger is anger based on false premises, confusion,
ignorance or shallow and incomplete thinnking - equating symptoms with
essences, drawing incomplete conclusions, seeing intermediate causes
as true causes and failing to see things for their true essence. We've
seen this with people blaming love, or sex, or romanticism, or artists,
or beauty, for the fact that most people do not have the knowledge and
understanding and wisdom to know how to cultivate love and beauty and
make it produce its fruit - and for the fact that, in a social climate
poisoned with paranoia, suspicion, cruelty, toxic psychology and
hideous, poisonous attitude, love was hard to come by and many
relationships went down the tubes. THe correct response to the
foolishness and hysteria motivating illegitimate anger is to see the
whole picture - to see things to their essence as well as
manifestation - and see and know true causes of everything instead of
the false causes that evil, dishonest, cruel people seek to
artificially and manipulatively inflict upon the unsuspecting.

Finally there is legitimate anger: Anger in face of oppression,
injustice, nastiness, cruelty, destructiveness, malice, poison,
deception and wickedness. This is anger that needs to be brought into
a sharp focus and sent like a flaming arrow into the heart of wrong.

Ilya Shambat.



--- UseNet To RIME Gateway {at} 2/10/05 6:47:09 PM ---