I’ve known people who could choreograph their anger. Their eruptions were premeditated, calculated, tactical and finely tuned, reaching a profitable climax that paid off in spades. Most of us try to avoid ugly confrontation and will fold in the face of fury – this is how seemingly hair-trigger psychos rise tantrum-by-tantrum to corporate and cultural heights, becoming CEOs, chief editors, generals, club captains, bishops, presidents, principals and restaurateurs.
Many people use anger to get their way. Most convince themselves that while an outburst is regrettable, it’s unavoidable, a flaw in their psychology. But it’s often a mere tactic. I’ve noticed the same guy who goes berserk to get a discount from a single mum who’s put the wrong mayo on his burger oozes understanding when a 150-kilogram Samoan barman shortchanges him. This being the case, the world must seem a lot angrier to weedy folk and women than it does to those with cauliflower ears and bull necks.
Anger is a learned behaviour, and once an amateur practitioner divines its profit, it soon becomes a default reaction. It’s contagious, too, and can easily become a culture. I worked in the wholesale car industry for some years, and it wasn’t unusual to look around the yard and see half-a-dozen red-faced salesmen bent at the waist hollering godawful threats into their phones … at their own clients. High-octane invective was the lingua franca, and if everyone else is shouting blue murder then a reasonable and reasoned person is speaking a lost language. Once upon a time in the dodgy car lots of the backstreets of this town, only those who lost their temper found their mojo. Anyone who was even remotely composed became amusing, irrelevant, then invisible … and quickly went broke. The hospitality industry also ran on piecemeal fury, I believe. As did opera and ballet, though they called it “hissy-fits”.
As a child, I suffered the reign of a terrible domestic despot, until the day I flipped my wig at her – did my lolly, blew my stack, lost my shit, did my block, flew off the handle, forcing her to lock herself in the bathroom or be clobbered with the softcore frolics of a hardcover Secret Seven Adventure. She feared me after that day. And seeing how my tantrum had changed our relationship to my advantage, I became a small, blond powder-keg. Whenever I was near her, I’d twitch my upper lip like a fulminating terrier, seemingly ready to trip into a maelstrom of snarl and fang. My God, you get some respect when people think you’re an explosive nutjob. Sadly, I’m naturally a cool-headed guy and I couldn’t maintain the charade of looming wrath beyond the age of 10, after which my big sister slowly regained her throne.
While hotheads used to be a dime a dozen and anger a legitimate social interaction, it was always a cheat’s method of getting your own way. Blokes would flip their lids for the smallest of reasons. But it’s not a syndrome like Tourette’s, or a disorder like schizophrenia. Going troppo becomes a methodology because it works. You blow up and people are so shocked and/or scared they give you your way … and you are on your way to becoming an overbearing success. If you’re a known hothead, you don’t even have to blow up; people pre-empt your anger by capitulating to its likelihood.
Happily, unbridled anger has gone out of style. You don’t see it as much any more. It’s become an archaic, almost obsolete, tool of social leverage. We were once warned God was watching our every move with an eye to vengeance. Then we were told Big Brother would soon be surveilling us 24-7. These empty threats did little to curtail our eruptions of rage. No. It was technology that defeated anger. Social omniscience, the fly-eyed hoi polloi with their phones held out before them. Not Big Bro or the Almighty … the ubiquitous iPhone and the searing shame of social media.
That sushi chef who lunged at me across a lazy Susan and slapped me with a priceless slab of toro tuna wouldn’t dare today, with the inerasable gaze of 30 phones on him. Those many long-socked schoolteachers who leapt on me as if I were a werewolf cub would be captured in their frenzied strangulations and uploaded into infamy now, their careers finished.
Bespoke blow-ups, once so effective, are now readily laid before a judgmental world, and have thus become more dangerous to their perpetrator than their victim.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
