Trump Protests, New York City, 2017
Anger is an emotional response, that in our culture tends to be vilified. We are made to feel guilty about anger. A great movie example is ‘Anger Management’, the one with Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. Sandler plays this ‘everyman’ who has repressed his anger for so long that he doesn’t know to handle it until pushed to his limits, he discovers he is just as angry as the next guy, Nicholson plays the obstinate psychotherapist who shows Sandler just who he really is. America is currently in similar place. Where many are angry or more correctly, in the stages of grief. We are trained from an early age that anger is what we should be suppressing, at least to a certain degree. That to truly be outraged is unhealthy for the self.
There have been countless protests since the induction of Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Yes, there have been angry violent protests made by members of the Anti-Trump brigades, equally in measure, those on the Right have also shared in violent response. However, no true lasting anger has been present enough to invoke sustainable changes. The problematic issue with emotions like anger is that it shares, no matter how pure in motive it might be, the same shortcomings as idealism. In that, it fetishizes certain ideas over others and then, to a fault, demands that its interpretations are the only correct ones to be taken seriously in a sea of multiplicity. This is not to agree with the culture of denial so prevalent in the West, quite the opposite, the argument here is that the current anger being show is not self-sustaining, and is too idealistic.
With idealism, there comes a certain desire for a nostalgic return to something primal that has been lost (This is precisely why Trumped worked so well for so many, he played on the oldest lie-in-the-book). It’s an age-old idea that was instilled in stories like the mythical Garden of Eden, where somehow the human race didn’t trust a higher power enough and did it on their own and then angered the deity into rejecting them outright. So, in this kind of narrative, we are made to believe that we all lost something intrinsic to who we are. Whatever “it” is, and we need to get it back, at whatever cost that might be.
This is extremely shortsighted in that, it only sees life as this endless chase after something that doesn’t exist. The greatest lie we ever believed, was that something is wrong with us. But, this article is not existential in nature, this is about how the nature of anger rests upon some old archaic ideas of entitlement. That when we get angry and demand things, we revert back to our 4-year old selves who do not know how to express our desires, so we depend upon on a bio-physiological response to tell others how we feel. We throw a tantrum, we throw things, or we rely on violence. However, this is not to fall into the current trap of many Leftists who fetishize pacifism, on the contrary, it’s a call to critically engage with our ideologies, with our culture of emotional denial which has come to short-circuit our understanding of how anger is never meant to just remain anger, but rather to transform us all into creative and active participants for a better world.
The route of anger is meant to lead to some form of transformation, an outcome, if it does not, it’s just a display of narcissism and immaturity. If it progresses outside of itself, and relies upon a network of other emotions, then there is hope that the anger can lead to something better than the present circumstances. This is does not necessarily insinuate utopia, but rather, it should assume a form of corporate working together to enhance the human experience beyond its current state. So, in one sense, why the Left is failing and not achieving much (more precisely in the area of protesting) is that it is not angry enough. It is not accelerating the process of anger, it enjoys its disillusionment to the point of immobility.
Trump is against the American people but is simultaneously for the ideals of America. Individuality. Happiness. Capitalism. And the ongoing development of the self against all odds. This is like a religious person who is zealous about their ideology, that they commit wholeheartedly to its tenets above and beyond the people it was meant to convert. In this simple sense, Donald Trump is like a blind extremist who worships at the altar of his own version of American idealism at the expense of those he is meant to be serving. Trumps anger is one that is stuck in a Sisyphean loop, never going beyond itself and always returning to itself. Much like a pre-linguistic toddler who doesn’t acknowledge reality beyond their own nose. Trump is actually not angry, nor is he representing any form of disillusionment from the Right, he is only embodying his myopic mal-informed understanding of how to run a country, with no regard for anyone else around.
To conclude, the current state of protests in America, and possibly the synchronicity shared across the globe needs to be much more angry, in the sense, that it needs to push its anger beyond idealistic anger into a movement where creativity has an outlet, where rage has a place to impose its dynastic dynamic plasticity onto a world waiting for new forms of re-birth. The more idealism and anger are bedfellows, the more and more the protests will share the failure of the Occupy movement. Were the Occupy protesters angry? Sure. But not enough, they got too caught up in the idealism, they let their passion be subdued by some Utopian nightmare (think Huxley’s Brave New World) that was simply the opposite of what they were protesting. They didn’t allow their rage form into creativity, discourse and ultimately discovery of new possibilities. These are crossroads the current protests are at. The time is for more creativity and trust in that.