Archives for posts with tag: Anger

So, when Popper doesn’t tolerate intolerance,
he is being mean?

Intolerance is something no one should tolerate.

From where I’m looking, intolerance is like a pebble in your shoe. You may walk for a while, without removing the pebble, but the damage will be there. For certain.

And if you persevere, the damage will be permanent.

Your question is a tricky one. Popper is not necessarily mean when refusing to tolerate intolerance.
He would have been mean only if he used unkind words when trying to convince the intolerant to change their hearts.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law
if it acquires the political power to do so,
and will follow it by suppressing opposition,
subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young,
and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100.

Religion is the metaphusical ‘thing’ inside which people who hold a set of tenets to be true are able to build a community.

Religion is sociological phenomenon. Something belonging to the realm studied by those who try to understand how large number of people work together.

Religions – on the other hand – are ‘sets of tenets’ put in practice by various groups of people.
Sets of tenets which survive for as long as they continue to help the people who uphold them in their quest to survive as a group. As a community.

Religion cannot be ‘changed’.
Religion can be studied. May be better understood.
Like physics. You can’t ‘change’ physics! With what? With chemistry? Things don’t work like this. The only thing you may do about physics is to ‘deepen’ your knowledge about it.

Religions can, and sometimes have to, be changed.
By the very people who ‘use’ them to survive.

Since nobody can survive on their own, each and everyone of us needs to belong.
To a community.
To a religion, actually!

And what do people do when they realize survival is impossible in certain conditions?
Die or do something about it, right?

Now, which community can survive based on hate?
It doesn’t matter whether you are asked to hate somebody inside or outside your community.
Whether you hate individually or collectively.
Hating – or despising – somebody blinds you and exhausts you. Puts a huge burden on your back. Focuses your attention so tight that you are no longer able to notice the real dangers.
Those which actually make you less likely to survive.

And this is valid both for you as an individual and for you as a hating community.

The key word here is ‘anger’.

Had we been less angry, maybe our reaction would have been more ‘efficient’.

Instead of being angry with the sinners, we could try to convince them. Those of them who can be convinced…

After all, a sin is but a possibility. An ‘opportunity’, not a fatality.

Just finished reading, again, another excellent post written by John Faithful Hamer on Committingsociology.com

I remember now that something was nagging me after reading it for the first time. I also remember the pangs of helplessness felt almost a year ago, when I couldn’t identify what was nagging me.

Well, this time I nailed it.

“Getting angry isn’t really like releasing the built-up pressure in a steam engine; it’s far more like exercising a muscle group. Every time you give in to the desire to lose it, you strengthen your “anger muscles”; every time you resist the urge, you weaken them.”….
“So perhaps it’s time to stop preaching the gospel of expression, and revisit the much-maligned virtues of repression.”

“Anger” and “getting angry” are not the same thing.
Anger is just a feeling – and, hence, a source of ‘energy’ – while ‘getting angry’ is the manner in which we allow it, consciously or unconsciously, to take us over.
I fully agree that ‘getting angry’ only worsens the situation only I’m afraid that ‘resisting the urge’ isn’t any better. In fact that would be no different from tightening your arse because you don’t want to fart in public.
The problem is not solved, not at all, only postponed. You still need to relieve yourself.
By widening Freud’s concept of repression to encompass more feelings than the simple embarrassment we might find a reason to continue to look for a manner in which to ‘release that built up pressure’.
Only now we are faced with a new problem, since we’ve already agreed that ‘getting angry’ is not the best thing to do.
Freud, again, to the rescue.
How about widening another one of his concepts, sublimation?
How about learning to express, this time consciously, our intense negative feelings in a socially acceptable, and hence a lot more effective, manner?