‘Angry people are not always wise,” Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice.
She was right. In the past week, anger has been everywhere and wisdom nonexistent. Fury is televised and recorded, while intelligence struggles and gets thrown in the dump. Rage-Against-Everything is our national sport, the team captain being the prime minister himself, seething like The Hulk, fists clenched and all, while a few wise men were silent and invisible.
Anger is functional. It makes art, drives change, moves people, stirs revolution. But when anger is an easy way out, when it breathes fire like a dragon and shuts out other qualities that make us human, then anger is just pride (and prejudice), and it kills everything else on its fiery path.
Everyone cringed at the spectacle of the explosive wrath of PM Prayut Chan-o-cha on Tuesday, a quivering podium-banging rage and nearly unintelligible monologue against bad guys, bad politicians, bad press, bad fate, bad everything. Let’s just not forget, however, that recently we have witnessed other cringe-worthy incidents and the nuclear reaction of outrage outside the prime ministerial realm, and many of us were complicit in this phenomenon of instant temper.
It was impossible to contain our anger reading about the horrific gang rape of a young woman and the murder of her boyfriend — he was forced to watch the barbarity committed against the girl before he was shot dead. The criminals deserve the harshest penalty, no question. And yet the heated gospel sung by moralists and middle-class do-gooders is startling: once again, they call for unconditional death sentences for all rapists, demanding eye-for-an-eye retribution. The moral indignation is understandable because we share it too, but it’s hard to take the hot wind of self-righteousness that wipes out other nuanced reasoning in the complex social structure and judicial process, or the fact that killing monsters doesn’t always stop monsters in the making. This is the hot wind of anger that comes in blusters — because it will pass quickly before the crusaders move on to be angry at something else.
Such as the case of the defaulting dentist. What she did was outrageous — she went to do her PhD at Harvard and bailed on a government scholarship, leaving her four guarantors to pay off the total of 10 million baht since she has moved to the US and doesn’t appear to care. A civil case of financial misbehaviour has collected the vengeful steam from the public, and now some people want to hunt her down through Google Maps and lobby Harvard to kick her out. That the whole saga makes society angry is one thing, but the way any small crime and misdemeanour can now push our anger button and blow the fuse is another.
I’m actually telling this to myself every day too, because it’s difficult to be angry at the right person, for the right reason and to the right degree. Our access to the abundance of information means we should be able to weigh an issue with level-headed balance; instead it facilitates our instinct to feed on the fire of hatred and revulsion. Like drugs, anger is gratifying. And when the high is over, we seek out other drugs to transport us — to make us feel better, morally and psychologically, to convince ourselves that no matter how cruel we are, there’s always something more cruel than us. The effect of social media is instrumental for this angry echo-chamber. As a result, we seem to have left behind a trail of corpses that still stink, for we maul our targets with raw, fetishist anger, the kind of anger that doesn’t make art, doesn’t drive change and stirs no revolution.
So how should anger serve us? Partly, collective ire drove Yingluck Shinawatra out of office — we couldn’t tolerate the badly managed rice scheme, the Mae Wong dam, the expensive high-speed train, the amnesty bill shenanigans, and public fury brought out the tanks. It’s surprising, then, that as we spend time fuming at the dentist, we’re not very angry at the more expensive medium-speed rail project, the half-hearted rubber price solution, the megaprojects that are likely to harm the environment and communities, the flawed constitution that has consumed so much budget, and other cases of tax money being spent without proper monitoring. Selective anger is understandable — it’s called prejudice. Maybe what we are angry at shows the kind of person we are.
So brace yourself, the display of temper will continue at government briefings. That the PM is stressed out is a given, and that he wakes up at 4am every day to find a way out of the labyrinth gets our sympathy. But when he loses it, we wonder if we’re stuck in the age of fury. “Angry people are not always wise,” said Austen. No. They are never wise.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.