Every chapter of this pandemic has had its attendant emotions – and since we’re all in this together, it’s possible to sense a collective emotional experience along with the physical experience of lockdowns and restrictions.
Initially there was confusion, then deep fear and anxiety, then when lockdowns lifted joy and pride. With Delta we returned to fear again and later weariness, depression, lethargy and listlessness.
But at this point of collective experience the predominant emotion that many are feeling is anger, even rage.
“How are you?” I asked a usually mild-mannered Melbourne friend last week.
“Angry, actually. There’s a lot of rage in Melbourne at the moment,” he said.
He’d had a week of riots, an earthquake, rising case numbers and was heading towards the prize no one wants – the most locked down city in the world.
The rage was coming from “having done all the right things and still we’re in this mess”, he said.
The anger was out on the streets in the roiling protests against vaccine mandates. It was anger at the people refusing to get vaccinated. It was anger at the government for mismanaging the rollout. Anger about the discontinuation of jobkeeper. It was in the lack of empathy and compassion shown to Australians abroad who want to return home.
This week on ABC Melbourne Virginia Trioli interviewed a man whose wife had got permission to fly to London after her mother died and her sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Despite having the right papers, when returning she was turned away at Heathrow after being told quarantine in Melbourne is full. The text and talkback line was full of people unsympathetic to the woman’s plight.
In Sydney anger is on the roads where according to my driving instructor there’s been a change in mood – and “people are more angry than they were before the lockdown and less considerate, more impatient.”
In Russia there are two different words for “anger” — one that’s directed at a person, “serditsia” and another that’s felt for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, “zlitsia”.
The anger that is emerging from this pandemic is both. It’s diffuse political anger, moving around various atmospheres – the internet, the roads, the talkback lines, the group chat, but the anger can also flare in our domestic lives. It is a sudden escalation of temper in the middle of remote learning that sends a book flying through the air and doors slamming, or the rage directed at the partner over something small after you’ve been cooped up for months. It’s having a meltdown at your boss or colleague. It’s abusing or unfriending people on social media who don’t agree with you.
And the rage is global. Fuel and food shortages in Britain. American ICUs full. Increases in passengers being violent on flights. A US House panel has been hearing evidence of an escalation of angry incidents on airlines in recent months. According to the Guardian, “flight attendants have reported having to endure racial epithets, kicking, biting and spitting from passengers in recent months, as reports of unruly behavior have soared.”
One of the most popular television show in the world right now is the violent Squid Game, where characters are regularly mowed down by machine guns. We love it!
Yet while we are counting the cost of this pandemic in relation to mental health outcomes, anger and rage are rarely addressed.
The media and government are full of advice about how to get help for the more damp and subdued emotions such as sadness and anxiety. But there is precious little written about anger – both how to overcome our own and deal with the anger of others.
This silence is in part because rage carries so much heat that it can be hard to bear and look at full-on. A person in full rage is frightening and unpredictable. The first instinct is self-preservation, to stay away. So the rage festers and blows up unchallenged. Even worse, embedded in the complex structure of anger is the propensity for it to multiply itself. Rage begets rage. Someone lashes out at you and in reaction you lash back. Walls come up. This dance is everywhere. It shows up as the need to be right, and increasingly intolerance over different points of view.
In these angry times, we run the risk of all this rage becoming normalised, until it becomes like ambient background noise, until rage is just the accepted rough texture of life. We are already almost there. “Of course the comment section under an article will be a toxic mess,” we say. “Of course the text line of an ABC local radio show will be grim”, “Of course Twitter is foul.” This assumption that certain areas of the public commons will be so filled with rage and anger that they become emotionally radioactive no-go zones is a dangerous one. It means anger has won – or at least its expression has been seen as a legitimate form of communication.
Which of course it is not. Anger is our most destructive emotion and it’s also wholly preventable, with its initial seeds able to be channelled effectively (ie towards social justice) if there is sufficient discipline and will.
“No plague has cost the human race more,” Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote on anger almost 2,000 years ago.
Many of the great thinkers of that time were preoccupied with the question of anger, because they recognised the damage it could do not just to our own personal lives (how many marriages and friendships have been ruined by a fight?), but also the commons.
Better to have a conversation (or in the Stoics case, a philosophy) about rage and how to deal with it, rather than try and deal with the consequences after the rage has found its full, destructive expression, after it has been unleashed on the streets.
But we’re not there yet.
In a recent Substack newsletter Charlie Warzel asked, “The main question occupying my mind is: Where does all that rage go? Eventually, the pandemic will subside. Healthcare workers will have a slight reprieve from this hell. But the immense grief and PTSD will stick around. I imagine the anger and resentment will too. What happens then?”
What does happen then?
We know what happens to rage that is not properly processed or catabolized. It makes itself felt in increased domestic violence, assaults and substance abuse.
It is fuel for the political fringes – for the once unpalatable social positions – such as blaming immigrants for taking jobs or Big Pharma for creating the pandemic – to enter the mainstream.
Donald Trump was the master of harnessing rage for political ends. There is now an investigation into what role he might have taken in inciting his supporters in the rage-filled storming of the Capitol on 6 January.
The political and social landscape will be transformed by this long, rage-filled moment that we are currently experiencing. New political parties will be formed, unlikely alliances will be made, power and politics will swerve in gut-clenching new directions. The rage of today will transform the politics of tomorrow. And until, as a society, we learn – as the Stoics did – how to overcome our own personal and societal rage – we will all be victims to it.
