Brendan O’Neill
‘I’m a bloody billygoat trying to screw the world, and no wonder I am, because it’s trying to do the same to me.’ So said Arthur Seaton, the hero of Alan Sillitoe’s angry young masterpiece Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Seaton was a womanising wideboy, who worked in a Nottingham factory by day and drank himself stupid by night, and spent the rest of his time, fuelled by booze and fury, ‘fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government…’ (1)
These days, Seaton would be carted off for a short, sharp dose of anger management therapy. He wouldn’t be given the respectful title ‘angry young man’ - he’d be labelled a ‘victim of the rage epidemic’. Anger, or at least the unmediated expression of it, has effectively been outlawed. The emotional police have declared war on anyone who remotely resembles an angry young man (or woman). The aim, it seems to me, is to turn the ‘billygoats’ into sheep, yet barely an eyebrow has been raised in response to this insidious campaign of mental manipulation, emotional conformism and spirit-dampening...
...This all-out war on anger is driven by the authorities’ deep suspicion of edgy or assertive emotions. It may dress itself in the caring language of protecting the population from breakdown, sickness and heart failure, but in truth the demonisation of anger - more than that, the borderline criminalisation of anger - is part of today’s new insidious, intimate policing of the emotional mind. The wholesale management of anger is an attempt to enforce conformity, spearheaded by politicians, police, officials, judges and health practitioners who seem to prefer a populace that resigns, fatalistically, to the problems it faces, rather than one that asks awkward questions and kicks up a furious fuss...
...Anger was once seen as an understandable reaction to unpleasant experiences or less-than-civilised living and working conditions; it was a rational, sometimes even dignified ‘strong feeling of displeasure’ (7). Now, in the Anti-Angry Decade, it has been psychologised: anger is looked upon as a condition, a disease, a moral failing on the part of individuals which must be treated and corrected...
...The psychologisation of anger has two consequences: first it separates our anger from the experience or the condition that gave rise to it, so that our ‘expressions of rage’ are always judged to be disproportionate, irresponsible and illegitimate. This can be seen in the relentless rise of rages, from ‘air rage’ to ‘golf rage’ to ‘work rage’. People who suffer from these rages, from the alleged psychological condition of losing the plot in airports, on golf courses or around the water cooler at work, are seen as irrational individuals with moral and mental flaws rather than rational actors expressing loud’n’rowdy displeasure with having been treated badly...
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