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Acceptance, Anger, Britain, Broken, Change, Current, Enlightenment, London, News, Personal, Philosophy, Politics, Riots, Self Discovery, Seneca, Topical
It seems that everyone this week is talking about ‘Broken Britain’. Several nights of looting, rioting and violence on the streets of London, and a number of other major cities, have invited criticism from around the globe and yet more bickering from the politicians’ clubs within the country. On the box we see countless images of the violence. Are we looking at political activists, rash revolutionaries, the desperate poor, ferral youths, or just plain criminals?
It is my feeling that we are probably looking at a mixture of all of the above, and plus some. There is a lot of anger throughout the land. The working body of tax payers are paying more for a poorer quality of service, both in the public arena and in the private; food prices are soaring thanks to the shady dealings of large corporate bodies like Tesco; bankers just keep getting their bonuses; first-time-house buyers can’t get on the ladder because the rungs are just too high off the ground and the boys’ club that run Britain just keep charging their expense accounts.
So it is perhaps clear, then, why people are angry? It would seem they have a right to be. …Don’t we? Or wasn’t it all just a little bit inevitable? This is consumerism. We bought into it. Didn’t we know really, deep down, that it was flawed from the first luxury purchase? We just wanted it… and we had to have it… right there and then! Buying things was a lot less time-consumming than looking out for each other. Arn’t we really a bit angry at ourselves?
Whoever we are the most angry at, it can’t be doing us too good as individuals. The system is surely corrupt but we don’t have to be. Smashing, burning and stealing may release some tension but it certainly does nothing to improve blood pressure, self worth or community relations between those disenfranchised and those struggling to make ends meet.
The Roman philosopher Seneca believed that anger was a type of madness. He wrote that anger is: “…wholly violent and has its being in an onrush of resentment, raging with a most inhuman lust for weapons, blood, and punishment, giving no thought to itself if only it can hurt another, hurling itself upon the very point of the dagger, and eager for revenge though it may drag down the avenger along with it….it is equally devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of ties, persistent and diligent in whatever it begins, closed to reason and counsel, excited by trifling causes, unfit to discern the right and true, the very counterpart of a ruin that is shattered in pieces where it overwhelms.”
Seneca felt that in order to combat anger we must use reason. We must wake each morning expecting the worse, expecting everything to go wrong. We must anticipate that the car won’t start and that then the bus will be late and that the curb will be slippery enough to send us sliding onto a now broken ankle. When the worst doesn’t happen we can feel pleased, that a victory has been won because things haven’t been as bad as what we imagined they could have been.
So, I’ve been giving Seneca’s method a whirl recently and my anger has seemed to subside with day to day living (although my sunny deposition has suffered somewhat). I don’t let my working day get to me so much. I’ve found calm in letting the little things go. …However, I can’t seem to make it work so well in imagining a country where Tesco has even more power, where the politicians eat up all the money from taxes and privatise all public services, where food prices are so high that sectors of society simply starve to death and where the banks freeze all accounts and use the funds soley to feed their big bonuses. …Unfortunately, it just doesn’t feel imagined enough to be at all comforting.
Perhaps another approach could work: I think it is important to accept the things you cannot change or else anger will indeed break you, as many of the arrested looters are discovering this week.
When it comes to changing the things you cannot accept, well that is a different story…