#Cover: *The Atlantic* Asks Where America's Anger Comes From

Anger can be a tool for improving society, a way for businessmen and politicians to profit, a motive for revenge—it depends on how you handle it.

Anger is taking over public life. Political scientists at Emory University found that in 2012, fewer than half of American voters were furious at the opposing party's presidential candidate; by 2016 the share had reached 70%. Pew Research Center surveys show that in 2001 only 8% of Americans were angry at the federal government; by 2013 the number had tripled.

Anger used to be defined as an emotion with no place in modern life and no use to society—a problem to be fixed, something a mature person, and a mature society, ought to hold down. Then came a 1977 experiment by James Averill, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

To find out how often ordinary people get angry, why, and to what effect, James Averill picked a quiet small town and handed out questionnaires. Greenfield had just 18,000 residents, mostly comfortable middle-class families, and twice as many churches as bars. Averill expected people to lose their tempers only now and then, and to feel embarrassed afterward. The results were the opposite. Most got angry often, and over small things: who takes out the trash, when the kids come home, politics at the dinner table. They usually expressed it in restrained conversation, and it rarely turned physical. More important, expressing anger helped settle the problem—afterward both sides listened better and relaxed. More than two-thirds of the people who had been shouted at said "they realized they had been in the wrong."

Averill concluded that anger is one of the most information-dense forms of communication we have: it forces us to listen to each other and face the problem. Since then, anger has become a field of study for many scholars. Later findings: people tend to see those who express anger well as more capable, stronger, better suited to lead. Anger can push people to take on hard work, and can even make them more creative.

But over the past year, anger has mostly shown its destructive side. The nine-hour hearing over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who accused him of sexual assault, distilled the anger running through American politics. From the October 27 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue to the November 7 shooting at a country bar in Thousand Oaks, California, the attackers had posted hate speech online before they acted.

In The Atlantic's January cover story, Charles Duhigg examines how this emotion came to dominate, how it has changed American life and written American history, and what people should do about it. For those of us who are regularly swept up in anger, the account is worth reading too.

"Righteous" Anger

Anger has often been an important tool of social movements—especially when it is legitimized, when it turns from a personal feeling into a moral judgment about right and wrong.

Cesar Chavez was one of its ablest users. In the mid-1960s the civil rights movement was in full swing in southern California, while central California stayed quiet. There, 250,000 farm pickers lived hard lives. Most were undocumented immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines who spoke no English and made a living picking grapes and other fruit in the heat, facing dismissal any day their output fell behind. Unions had never managed to reach them. They were so poor and so powerless that even once they were brought to the bargaining table, some would pull out as soon as an employer offered a small favor.

Chavez stepped forward as a leader. He logged timber by day and gathered supporters at night and on weekends. He founded an organization called the National Farm Workers Association and started a paper called El Malcriado (The Brat), and at meetings he spoke, sang and prayed with fervor. Chavez believed that to hold an organization together, having people fight for their own interests—back wages, better conditions—was not enough. You needed a goal that struck an emotional chord, a shared anger to build solidarity on. The anger he used was not the kind Averill described, released on the spot; he turned it into a movement for justice.

He then proposed that the association's members walk 300 miles to Sacramento, the state capital, to draw attention. On March 17, 1966, about 50 people set out with sleeping bags and bundles—the youngest 17, the oldest 63. Local police stopped them, but the public noticed. By the time they reached Sacramento, 10,000 people had turned out to watch, and stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles, once they learned what the marchers wanted, stopped buying grapes from the central-California farms. Chavez soon got a call from farm managers agreeing to raise pay and improve conditions, and the plight of the region's migrants finally entered public view.

Stanford researcher Hayagreeva Rao has studied how successful social movements convert private anger into moral force. He found that the Indian uprising of 1857 grew out of a small change. The British East India Company had been there for decades, and local soldiers, badly treated as they were, had never protested. The change came with a rumor about rifles: the cartridges for the upgraded rifles were greased and had to be bitten open, and word spread that the grease was made from beef and pork fat. For Hindu and Muslim soldiers, that turned an everyday grievance into a moral affront. The anger had been made righteous.

The Businessmen Who Make Money From Anger

After Averill published his findings, the follow-up research caught the attention of large companies. Stanford professor Robert Sutton found that managers at a debt-collection firm had built a script out of it. The firm had 200 employees and made 80,000 collection calls a month. On a call, the employee would start out feigning anger, speaking with hostility. Once the debtor broke down, the employee would soften, offering comfort and understanding. The debtor, relieved, became far more willing to cooperate.

Debt collectors were not the only ones who understood this. Harvard Business School now teaches a course on using anger effectively in negotiation—getting employees angry at a common enemy, for instance, so that they pull together. The classic example: in 1997, with Apple in trouble, Michael Dell suggested it might as well declare bankruptcy and give the money back to shareholders. Asked at a company meeting what he made of that, Steve Jobs said simply, "Fuck Michael Dell."

Corporatized outrage works, but it is at bottom a way of manipulating people, and it tends to sacrifice the weak to protect the rich and the powerful. It has little to do with social justice. Nowhere is this clearer than in the media.

In 1987, a daytime talk show hosted by the television journalist Geraldo Rivera was drawing dismal ratings. To manufacture a story, he brought white supremacists, skinheads, Black people and Jews onto the same panel. Predictably, the argument turned into a brawl; the set was wrecked and Rivera's nose was left bleeding. The show was a hit.

In 1996, cable channels including Fox News and MSNBC took the method further. One former Fox producer reasoned that if watching people rage was entertaining, joining in might be more entertaining still. "The O'Reilly Report" followed, with host Bill O'Reilly tearing into elite academics and the liberal press every episode—and into people who said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." The show turned the disgust viewers wanted to vent into the main course.

In 2013 the Pew Research Center reported that 85% of MSNBC's programming was opinion and only 15% news. At Fox News, news accounted for just 45%. Anger, in other words, was being used to make talking points and hold ratings. Producers wanted the audience angry all the time; what stoking that feeling might lead to, and how to let it out, was not their concern.

On social media, anger became more public still. People now direct it at strangers who would rather fight than listen. That is a major source of business for the social media companies, and a vicious circle for everyone caught in it.

Politicians work the same emotion for their own ends. Steve Jarding, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, explained the campaign craft this way: "If you can figure out what voters fear, and turn that fear into anger by pointing at your opponent's moral failings, they will vote for you. Anger and fear are the essence of campaigning now. That's how you win."

Trading on fear pays for businessmen and politicians, but it eats away at American democracy and pushes public feeling further out of control. A Washington Post survey found that in the 2018 midterms, 35% of voters in battleground districts said "angry" best described how they felt about the election; 24% chose "patriotic."

When Anger Goes Unanswered

Righteous anger can lift a complaint into a demand for a fairer world. But anger that goes unanswered convinces people fairness is out of reach, and sets off retaliation.

The public school teachers' strikes that began last year and have run into this one are an example. Larry Cagle, an English teacher in Oklahoma, organized a protest last fall: 50 teachers from different schools in the area would call in sick on the same day, and he would get television crews to cover it. "Let me tell you why these teachers are so angry."

State funding for Cagle's school had fallen by US$300 million over the past 10 years. It was the best state school in the area, and still teachers did not dare turn on the air conditioning, winter or summer; to save money, many schools in the state ran classes only four days a week. Cagle earned US$1,980 a month, half what he had made teaching in Florida. "I have three kids in college and a car I've been driving for 14 years and can't afford to replace. We can't live like this."

After the Oklahoma strike made the news, teachers in West Virginia, Colorado and Kentucky walked out one after another.

Anger did not solve the problem; it produced a loop of blame. Researchers call this rumination, and believe it is what breeds the appetite for revenge. Thomas Tripp, a professor at Washington State University, explained: "When people feel the mechanisms of fairness, or procedural justice, have collapsed, revenge becomes much more common."

What to Do With Anger

The Atlantic's answer is simple: look at where the anger comes from. "If we can stop and see how often our anger is being used by others, we can gradually learn to escape their control."

A group of Israeli social scientists ran an interesting experiment in Giv'at Shmuel, a conservative community on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Its residents are observant Jews who support right-wing politicians. The scientists set out to persuade them to let go of their hatred of Palestinians and accept a halt to Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.

Rather than tell the residents they were wrong, the researchers went along with them, running online ads in favor of the conflict that praised "fighting for the sake of fighting." One ad carried the face of a famous Israeli war hero above the line: "Without war there are no heroes. For the sake of heroes, we need war." The ads ran for six weeks, long enough for all 25,000 residents to see them.

Surveys afterward showed the share of residents who held Arabs entirely responsible for Israel's past wars had fallen by 23%, and the number who thought Israel should take a harder line with Palestine had dropped by 17%. The ads never mentioned settlements, yet 78% of residents said Israel should consider stopping construction.

"Nobody wants to stay angry all the time," one of the researchers said. "Sometimes it's hard to realize you've already become an extremist unless someone points it out."

Cover image:

Self-Portrait 2018, by the Algerian artist Oulmi Hocine