Near the end of my Sanskrit textbook, I find the following selection from the Baghavad Gita:
Krodad bhavati sammoha/sammohat smrtivibramah/smrtibramsad buddhinaso/buddhinasat pranasyati.
“From anger arises total delusion, from total delusion unsteadiness of memory, from unsteadiness of memory destruction of intelligence; because of destruction of intelligence, he perishes utterly.”
This is part of a sequence of stanzas that inspired Yoda’s “from fear comes hatred” etc. monologues in Phantom Menace, surely one of the most faux-profound things in the Star Wars canon. However that may be, I thought this stanza was pretty cool – not just because of its content, but because of the way in which it shows how some things about the ancient anger-management tradition that seem obvious to us are actually idiosyncratic and culture-bound.
First things last: the Greco-Roman analysis of anger is primarily non-cognitive, involving our minds (for the Stoics at least) only so far as it takes for them to give assent to the initial angering impulse. From that point onward we’re out of control, like witnesses at our own performance. Non-cognitive components of the mind or body take over and force us, like an injured animal (one of ancient writers’ favorite points of comparison), to pursue revenge against whoever or whatever angered us in the first place.
The BG text proceeds differently, describing the hold anger has over us not as a temporary surrender on the part of the hegemonic soul, but as permanent damage to our intelligent mind. That gives us an “internal” reason for avoiding anger that most Greco-Roman accounts, which focus on the external dangers of letting yourself go (it’s that western illusion of human nature again), are missing or grasping after.
How could anger produce delusion and, consequently, weakness of memory? To make sense of that, we’d first need to invert (or at least complicate) the etiology of anger as it appears in a text like Seneca’s De ira. First, we perceive something that is of the sort to make us angry; then, we either assent to an angry response or refuse it. The rightness of the initial perception is never in question, only our response to it. In the BG, by contrast, it seems as though one of two things is true: either anger is causally independent of perception and warps our perceptions so as to create its own cause, or else anger is causally dependent on perception but warps subsequent perceptions (and our memories, too) by way of sustaining itself. The second of these accounts seems more plausible, especially considering claims made elsewhere in the BG for the therapeutic value of withdrawing our senses from perceptibles. The premise that emotional states can cause us to perceive things wrong is one that both accounts have in common.
I think this approach is actually better than the Greco-Roman one for understanding certain brain-melting aspects of modern political anger. My anger towards Republicans and towards Trump in particular has led me into delusion before and would do so again in short order if I let my guard down. Certainly it works the other way too, and I would say this is a skid into which the modern Republican party has swerved. An anger that distorts reality to feed itself is potentially a powerful weapon: it produces infinite engagement and the kind of frantic loyalty that any politician would buy if he could.
One wonders if that means that the BG has an accurate cognitive model of anger, or just because the internet (by serving us algorithmically with stuff we’ll click on, which usually means stuff that makes us angry) simulates the perception-distorting properties that the BG hypothesizes. In the latter case, it’s a question about the internet rather than about anger as such. Should we, as the BG advises, withdraw from the internet entirely? Or is it possible, as the Greco-Roman tradition suggests, to mainline a feed designed to trigger us and not even be mad?