Anger, Outrage & Hatred

I don't know about you but I am feeling some really huge, painful and very difficult emotions about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza at the moment - the peoples suffering is almost too big to contemplate.

In the light of this I was talking with a member of our small sangha about the difference between hate, anger and outrage. Using the felt sense we investigated each within ourselves and came to the conclusion that they were very different from each other. I wonder what you think?

We started with anger - was it anger that we felt about the callous slaughter of so many innocents? My first answer was yes - I feel an enormous amount of anger, my own image is a white hot fury felt in my chest. However as we stayed with this it began to change into something different and I asked whether outrage captured it better? Staying with this I noticed there was something really strong about outrage, not just the emotion of anger but also the certainty that what was happening was just wrong. Nothing excuses any of it. This should not happen. Nothing made any of it right. I also noticed that when we explored this feeling their was a certain amount of closing the fist and holding it in front of the heart. This was a heart felt certainty. So what of hatred? My feeling here is that hatred is something that has become established and remains stable. It need not even be hot - we all know about cold hatred that seethes beneath the surface. There is something congealed in hatred.

Taking a breath and stepping back from these intense emotions I began to wonder a bit about them and how they worked. Anger is a reaction that comes from that part of the brain that seeks to protect us through fight, flight or freeze reactions, the amygdala. Hate is perhaps an expression of fight, certainly in its active expression. Outrage seems to me to have more thought in it. Possibly less reactive, more seeing clearly, knowing something is morally wrong. As for hatred, well we speak of hatred being blind and being blinded by hatred so back to something entrenched and deeply unconscious? Not sure …

However, just in the last moment we came upon a problem with outrage. If outrage gave us a sense of moral certainty were we not in danger of inflicting this on another? The answer to this can only be yes. Those Israeli’s who have lost people they love and fear their own annihilation clearly feel outrage towards those that have harmed them. And I am sure, once the Palestinians begin to emerge from the horror of their unimaginable trauma, they too will be outraged at their treatment. A feeling of certainty just as strong as the Israelis. So does this mean that the certainty of outrage is just as partial and therefore as untrustworthy as the faster emotion of anger or the established feeling of hate?

This is where I come unstuck. I know intellectually that this has to be true. No one holds a view that is not conditioned by previous experiences. The ‘rightness’ of feelings of outrage can only be informed by what has influenced us before. However, there is another part of me that wants to argue that there are objectively some things that are always and in all situations wrong and, if our hearts are not obscured by hatred and ignorance, are instinctively known to be so. That we have a kind of archetypal morality within us that seeks to find expression - children show it when they perceive an unfairness, and most of us when we see what is unfolding in the Middle East are instinctively horrified and repulsed at a level beyond politics. It's not just a personal opinion derived from a subjective perspective, but something inherently good demanding action?

Well something like that ….

NW with thanks to HS again. 9 November 2023