anger management

The buzz phrase says it all- anger needs to be managed.

Recently though I have been in arguments (muted, fairly respectful but still a failure to agree) with friends about the value of anger.

I've discovered that the less contact-physical a friend is (ie. never been a physical fight, no martial arts training or rugby) or if they have never enjoyed adventurous travel, the higher a value they put on 'anger'. They all repeat some half baked notion that anger must have evolved for a reason and therefore anger is, if not 'good', at least 'ok', kind of like a big mac- alright as long as you have a balanced diet...

But anger isn't OK. Like those other products of evolution- laziness, lying and betrayal- it needs strict management.

The other notion along with the bogus evolution argument is that anger must not be 'repressed'. This hand-me-down Freudian notion has no basis in reality - neither in the latest scientific research nor my own experience. The reason for its proliferation and for other positive notions about anger is that expressing anger can very often generate substantial attention. Since most people in the Western world are signally bad at managing their attention needs they confuse the buzz of getting attention from being angry with some value in anger itself. Simply by 'acting angry' the same result would occur. But to return to the main point- repressing anger is bad - first off, the latest neuroscience supports Hebb's Law- what fires together wires together. Therefore the more we express anger the more we wire it into our neural networks and ...the angrier we become. The latest research over the last twenty years points in one direction- we are learning machines and we learn from what we repeat and give attention to. 

A deep inability to express certain emotions such as sadness and loss may give rise to anger- frustration- but what is being repressed is a feeling of loss not anger itself. Why? Because anger is simply the fight or flight mechanism finding one form of expression. If you act angry when you feel the adrenaline rush of a fight or flight situation you are simply giving rise to one kind of behaviour. You could equally run or punch someone. Indeed after one very heated and angry argument I went for a five mile run- pure adrenaline to burn off.

I used to suffer from road rage. As my job at that time was driving a van in London there were many opportunities to get angry and shake my fist, bang the horn etc. One day I realised I was getting angry at least once a day. Heeding the oft mentioned requirement of most religious systems that anger is a bad thing I thought I ought to do something about it. So every time I felt like angrily responding I counted to ten first. By some incredible magic the angry impulse was entirely gone by about seven, sometimes by three. Because I had stopped a connection being made. No fire, no wire. And amazingly I stopped getting road rage in about a week after this. Anger simply does not exist- unless we act 'angry'.

And I believe it is this imaginary quality of anger as much as anything else that makes most moral and religious systems very keen to avoid anger. As it is said, 'Anger and Enmity" have no place in the Sufi Way. If anger is an illusion in the very real sense that it can disappear by simple waiting and counting, then why should we pay heed to it? My good Iranian friend Farhad Nasre always said never make an important decision when you are angry. So right! If we did, we'd half of us be divorced, out of business or otherwise in a bad way. So if anger screws up our personal lives how come some people think anger should be a guide?

One reason I have mentioned- the attention buzz. The second is that after a life of getting sand kicked in your face these non-physical types feel powerful when they are angry. They feel tough and sometimes they make a stand and the other person stands down. So anger has finally been rewarded. I have experienced something similar in Egypt where I found that shouting at policemen often got me through checkpoints and other hold ups. Then I tried shouting at a policeman in the Sinai who had (I later learned) just been machine gunned by some would-be terrorists. He very quickly shut me up with the point of his gun menacingly held in my direction. Though anger may get results it breeds bad habits. Now I try to always reign in anger but use the adrenaline I feel to keep me sharp and not to lose focus- if you can, silently count to five during the 'interview phase' of any altercation (sometimes ten is too far away!) before launching in (the interview is the bit that precedes most verbal and non-verbal fights where insults escalate). For a very good in depth treatment of how to manage the fight or flight reaction I suggest the excellent "Mind my Back" by Geoff Thomas a former bouncer.

The non-physical people have usually not had enough real experience of fighting to know that anger can really let you down in fight and that being playful in a fight is often a way better strategy- if you can manage it. Sometimes of course it gets very nasty and gritty early on- but thinking of anger here as chanelled aggression is probably a much better characterisation. Thinking of aggression and violence in precise terms- like in using a hammer to deliver the right power to drive a nail in- is one way how you 'manage' anger.

As for those stories about Sufi and Zen teachers who shout and rave at disciples from time to time, the answer is: they are feigning or exaggerating anger to impart a specific lesson. Very often to warn a student away from some bad influence, rather in the way we may shout at a child playing near a busy road. It is another precise tool and very far from feeling angry about something you can do nothing about.

In the end, as commonsense tells us, if you cannot act to remove something that potentially angers you then you must...do nothing. Including the rather feeble reaction of 'getting angry'. As another saying goes- griping and complaining are the kicks and punches of the weak.

building a homeworking shed for under £1k

I built a homeworking shed for about £300- but then i realised it was really in the end too small. I also thought about people who wanted to get up and running NOW rather than muck around with old pallets and plywood. So this is the ONE K shed plan- which two of my friends have done.

1. Buy a flimsy 12 foot by 8 foot standard garden shed from Shedmaster, Gardenstore or similar brand who deliver. The bigger the better. Also check out free or used ones on ebay. The new ones range in price from around £600 for the cheapest which is what you want.

2. Lay out paving stones for where the floor will touch the ground. Erect shed with a pal- will take a day.

3. Look on gumtree and ebay for old sheets of one inch foil backed insulation. Or buy one inch polystyrene sheets from internet (2.5 inch kingspan insulation is even cosier, but it is not essential and costs more). Cover this with hardboard (or 3mm ply if you can find old sheets on ebay or gumtree. Insulate walls, roof and floor. Leaves holes for ventilation or install a cheap bathroom type open/shut fan.

4. Paint interior a cheerful shade. 

5. Run an outdoor extension cable through a drilled hole in the house wall to the shed. Do not faff with a buried armoured cable- instead run your cable above ground where it can't be cut by a lawnmower (along a fence for example).

6. Install woodburner if you find one cheap. Or simply use an electric-oil heater on a timer. Put the heater under your deak with a cloth hanging all around to trap the heat.

7. Use greenhouse glass to make simple double glazing (£4 a sheet).

8. Rig heavy curtain over the door to keep in heat.

9. Find old bookshelves on ebay, gumtree and facebook market place. I have even found them in the street or in skips.

10.Install daylight flourescent lighting to combat SAD. Also several powerful floor and desk lamps.

11. Ready to work!

fascism and communism

Fascism looks to the imagined past for its inspiration, it is nostalgic and fearful. Communism looks to the imagined future for its inspiration, it is hopeful and envious. In the current era all groups that use 'nostalgia for a more solid and predictable reality' are fascistic, even ones that look fondly on the communist past. That they believe their own propaganda is neither here nor there.

3 art thoughts

Art is the celebration of the fact that there is something rather than nothing.

Art is about the balance and tension between negative space and positive space within a frame.

Art and craft are on a continuum - not a line, but a circle that touches at both ends, which is why it is hard to separate them.

why has control freakery increased?

I remember the first time I heard the word 'control freak'- I was in my 20s- so this was the late 1980s. The term itself had first appeared in the US in the 1970s and had gradually filtered through to mainstream use in the UK and elsewhere. Before 'control freak' we had the more Freudian 'anal'. X is really 'anal' people said. Then anal sex became a mainstream topic (even featuring in Family Guy) and this term disappeared to be replaced by 'control freak'. 

Control freakery has increased in my lifetime. The less you FEEL in control the MORE you have to ACT as if you are in control. Control freakery is micromanaging things that don't need this approach. It is different to being a 'details' person. A control freak wants every leaf on their lawn hoovered up by a menial every day. A detail person is more concerned about the trees and plants and lawn as they interact. A control freak is someone concerned about details that don't matter. A details person is someone for whom a specific detail can call forth a whole vision. When doing a portrait such a person might start with a detail and expand out of that rather than making an overall sketch. An actor might construct a whole character from a certain pair of shoes and a cane. A details person is someone who sees the whole VIA the parts. A control freak only sees parts.

Control freaks see a scarey world in which everything is changing fast. Things have always changed, it is the nature of reality, but now the things that are changing affect basic security: shelter, health, family. Instead of embracing a radical form of flexibility the control freak doubles down and tries to change their little world in order to give meaning to their lives. As the nihilistic notion of a random world gains universal traction through the education system in the industrialised developed world the idea of a unified meaningful existence becomes shattered. When you disregard even theorectical notions of deep unity, meaning becomes harder to find. But micromeaning can be derived from being creative and building things and being a control freak is the form creativity takes in destructive people. They scrabble for meaning by imposing their will on others. It is a mild form of sadism...

But why has it increased? Because the overcomplicated nature of modern living encourages it. If your day is spent sitting in front of a computer screen sending emails that basically have no great meaning in the context of reality then you are going to look for alternatives. Micro meaning comes from caring for others, building things or how you face up to adversity. Modern institutions have weakened human ties and made caring a bureaucratic procedure, further diluting meaning. Building anything is another overcomplex dilute process. Suffering exists of course but victim culture tends to undermine a stoical response- so another path of meaning is closed.

America, anecdotally, is modestly rich in control freaks- one clue is the name having originated there. In as much as the US leads us down the path to modernity we can expect it to lead in exhibitons of control freakery. An additional reason more relevant to the US than elsewhere, is the insecurity of Americans in regard to identity. Like any colonial power they used their superior power to acquire the land from non-industrialised indigenous people. They then reneged on treaties in order to get even more land. It is a country in which the lies and deception (they are not alone in this, few countries are squeaky clean) on which it expanded are in the historical record- an uncomfortable fact for anyone trying to work out their 'US Identity'. Add to this the way status is determined in America by financial or media success. Of course this is a feature of everywhere in the world- but places with more 'history' and a population who are mostly indigenous allow for easier identity formation. In some places you only have to lived there a long time to be a somebody: there are no towns in the US that can boast churches built on sites that are thousands of years old- which is the case in the UK. And in Europe, to have a business for a long time (hundreds of years) even if it is small, is a meaningful thing. In America if you still only had a single shop after 400 years you'd be classed a loser- why no franchise? the American dream is to invent some product or business and then work out a way to mechanically reproduce it like a viral infection. Every high street with a Macdonalds and Subway and noting else...All this is good, as they say, for business, but it means that your status (which is a behavioural need of the human animal) is not assured by birth alone. You have to work to get it (rather than simply work to get food and goods). And that puts additional psychological pressure on everyone. Halfway through life you may wake up and realise you will never get the status you crave. The solution is start acting like a boss even if you aren't one. Start bossing your environment- in other words become a control freak.

It feels good to be the boss. In charge of something. But only if you are scared and a bit desperate. Welcome to the world of the control freak.

how do we screen out destructive people?

Traditional societies- preindustrial societies- operated on such a small and decentralised scale- that destructive people, if they gained control, were limited in their influence. More importantly, a traditional approach to life which emphasises family, growing food, managing wildlife requires individual acts of a constructive nature. Being a control freak or a tyrant isn't quite as easy. There were exceptions- but when you live close to nature you have to follow nature's rules which means honouring life forces rather than death instincts. In these societies destructive people stand out and can be avoided. There are no institutions for them to hide behind.

But once you have a modern industrialised state you have many many hidey holes for destructive people. These are people who are more pessimistic, more superficial and more lazy than most. The hard job of recongnising them is they are adept at hiding their true colours. The pessimistic can hide behind 'realism', 'making hard choices' 'getting things done', 'incentivising with money'. The superficial can claim an interest in art, religion, politics and literature- supposedly 'deep subjects'. The lazy can use constant pointless activity as deep cover.

If you run a business, are looking for friends or workers, are choosing to vote for someone how do you spot these covert destructors?

1. They love war metaphors and yet lack any real war experience.

2. They may talk of building things but their building plans fail.

3. They love office politics.

4. They are control freaks.

5. They attract masochistic followers.

6. Their hobbies are not creative.

7. They prefer centralisation to decentralisation.

8. They do not trust.

9. They do not take responsibility.

10. They like job titles rather than the reality of the job.

11. They prefer stupid symbols of 'progress' to real quiet work in that area.

12. They use email to shift the burden of work rather than to solve something.

13. They gravitate towards appearances rather than the obvious truth of a thing.

The problem is that we all have some destructive elements in the sub-personalities that run our lives. Depending on which personality we roll out, the level of destructiveness changes. This is where is gets confusing- when someone has a good sense of humour (usually a non-destructive sign) this may be a side of a better personality that has been tacked on to a more destructive one, which itself has been called forth by the demands of a job. 'Going over to the dark side' you might call it. Then the attractive qualities of charm and humour may become tools for a destructive ego- the classic sociopath. But humour is an odd thing. Many 'funny' people have none- and their stoneface is part of their act- a kind of sadism in fact. Destructive people lack humour in the face of adversity is my only observation. Normal people retain and rely on humour to get them through their failures. They readjust their perception of reality with humour. Destructive people try to break something instead.

shove your 10000 hours!

I have just been reading the superb and very readable biography of the Beatles by Craig Brown. I had until now fallen for the line peddled by the 10000 hour crowd that it was the hours and hours of drudgelike performing they did in Hamburg that made them the super musicians they became. Not a bit of it! After a lacklustre first perfomance they were told by the manager to 'make a show'. So Paul, George and John started to lark about- insulting the audience, sometimes fighting each other and most interestingly seeing how long they could stretch songs out for. Once they managed to stretch out a Ray Charles number for an hour and a quarter. Only Pete Best sat dutifully plugging away, his face set and sour. The others were...playing. And it is in play that we progress at any art form, not dutiful practise like some kind of robot. Learn to play, for therein lies experiment and interest and life! and to play for 10, 100 or 10000 hours is no big deal at all....