Saturday, September 25, 2004

Anger Management

I'm bored. Let's have some fun, and all of you can use your brains too. Let's just call it an inspired burst of experimentation.

~~Case Study One~~

Let's look at Person X. X has a certain tendency to be rather misanthropic, and basically X hates lots of people, and it is not at all uncommon for X to have fits of vitriolic temper when people offend his sensibilities, of which let us just say his range of tolerance is pretty narrow. X asks his friend Y for advice on his constant flaring up at people over small things which he just cannot see past, and Y tells X to try to be more patient with other people.

The problem is, is the try-to-be-more-patient strategy a good one for a person such as X to adopt? In a superficial point of view, yes, it is good, because X loses his temper less often, becomes actually more moderate in behaviour, and in all outward appearance, is basically a better person.

Do consider, however, that this new X, which we shall call X(variant) or Xv, might, in the process of trying to bear up against external intrusions or insults to his already narrow range of tolerance levels, approach the individuals who are causing said intrusions and insults by thinking to himself, I shall not lose my temper because these individuals are not worth losing my temper over. In a way, this is a worse attitude to adopt than the one X had before, because now Xv is actually enhancing his misanthropy by perceiving individuals as being not-on-par with him in terms of status, or simply in terms of worth-my-time level. His ego actually swells as he begins to perceive himself as a magnanimous person who is able to not get irritated at the things that people do, things which would have irritated X, but not now Xv. He fills himself with self-praise at not blowing up at people, simply because he (i.e. Xv) knows that he would have if he were not Xv but actually X. He goes, Ha, look at me, I'm so forgiving and tolerant and great! Who can match me in my greatness? He looks down on others simply because his sense of self-worth is now massively enlarged with respect to his view of the worth of others.

Thus, is this approach encouraging a downward spiral in terms of enhancing the negative misanthropy in X's persona? Granted, you get an Xv who is seemingly more pleasant, but that pleasantness is purely because Xv now sees the people around him as nothing more than middling ants that are not worth his time and concern, and so he is in all truth simply patronising these individuals by being nice to them, and as a result gives them the impression that he might be a pleasant person but not one who respects them.

How should X go about trying to resolve his problem of over-volatility, if the above approach is faulty in its premise? X might be prone to losing his temper, but at least he is showing his feelings frankly. Is that necessarily a bad thing in society today?

If a person is born with a naturally short fuse, is that something that this person should feel inferior about, because a quick temper might be seen as a weakness in the eyes of others, and certainly does not garner any love for the person? What we do know is that it is wrong to see this shortness of temper as a right to be quick-tempered i.e. "I get angry easily because I was born with a short fuse, so why don't all of you just live with it?"

The model answer to the dilemma would be for X to try and temper his temper (pun not intended) and also for the people around X to be more tolerant of X's temper. But is such a scenario possible in life?

For a more interesting exploration of the subject, let us look at the problem from Y's point of view. Y, knowing that his friend X has a short temper, tries to accept the fact that his friend X is just intrinsically bad-tempered and tends to lose his cool a lot of the time, and basically cannot help it, so Y just kind of like tries to ignore X's bad temper. Y, in order to not cause his friend X more grief -- i.e. by inadvertently causing X to lose his temper at Y because of something Y did that made X angry (which can be anything, really, considering the narrow range of behaviour that X is able to accept and not lose his temper at), thus making X feel incredibly guilty and angry at himself for losing his temper at his good friend Y when X has already promised Y to try to control his temper, and results in X descending in a downward pernicious spiral of self-hating and explosive anger that fuels even more anger and possibly a destruction of the fast friendship between X and Y -- Y makes an effort to keep in mind the kind of behaviour that makes X irritated and might possibly fuel some kind of temper loss, and thus consciously controls his behaviour when around X.

The problem is that X can obviously tell that Y is consciously trying to not fuel X's irritation, which is really obvious to X really, if you try to imagine your friend acting like Y is acting now, and one of the things X really hates is his friends being ultra-senstive around him (i.e. X) because of his (i.e. X's) short temper, and this causes X to really lose his temper big-time, which makes everything worse because Y goes Hey I'm already trying my best to not irritate you Have you no eyes to see what is in front of you What is the problem with you Nothing I do can make you happy It's so hard being your friend when you're blowing up at little things all the time and everything. And this aggravates X's guilt and self-hating because he hates himself for being such an ass when his friends are trying so hard to live with this problem of his and he should be so thankful for having friends in the first place so why is he doing this and making everything worse and now he really hates himself and thinks he is a worthless piece of junk that is totally unworthy of any friendship and love and so he starts being really cold to Y, to try to give Y the impression that the friendship is over, when really X is breaking up inside at having to do something so terrible, and so the friendship eventually ends up being over. And all this while X channels all the anger and hate he is feeling at his terrible self, and he wishes he were dead because of his terrible temper and how it has caused him so much grief. So eventually X goes berserk and kills himself.

Evaluate.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hmm. Got a little carried away there. But it was fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it. Just ignore the last line where X kills himself (I didn't expect that to happen). And believe you me, none of the above was based on anyone I know. It's all totally fictional, so don't speculate. Hopefully this series won't end here, but we'll see how it goes.

Avaris / 9/25/2004 01:46:00 PM

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