Threats & Injustice

People tend to view anger as a monolith, as if all anger was the same. While the physical results might look the same on the outside, two very different internal triggers can cause what we call “anger.”

One of them is perceiving a threat. As biological, evolved creatures, we not only have ways of detecting potential threats, we have hard-wired automatic reactions to them. We want to chase them away, intimidate them, or – if necessary – kill them. All that stuff requires adrenaline and energy, so our brains evolved to dump a bunch of specific chemicals into our bloodstream when we think we perceive a threat and those chemicals cause the physical and emotional reaction we call “anger.”

If an animal bites your foot, that’s a threat – so the ancient humans that survived were the ones who detected the pain of that bite and got their angry juice hard and fast, and fought off that predator. And that’s all well and good, except your nervous system still does that, because we’ve only been out of the savannah for a few thousand years, which is not nearly long enough for your brain to have evolved a way to quickly differentiate between “animal biting my foot” and “stubbed my toe on the credenza again.” Both of those are pain, and so both of those trigger the angry juice, and now you understand why some people yell at or destroy inanimate objects when they trip over them.

Over time, we have (many of us, at least) worked very hard to overcome the instinct toward “threat anger.” Threat Anger is what tells us to fear a person different from us, because they’re an outsider and thus probably a rival. Through a lot of societal advancement, we’ve both tried to diminish the overall intensity of our responses and tried to better calibrate our thinking about what’s actually a “threat.” The best of us try to condition our brains away from attacking – or even wanting to attack – the unfamiliar, the inanimate, and even the unpleasant. We try to learn that people of all races and creeds aren’t your outgroup, that accidents happen and you can be harmed without malice or intent, and that even people you don’t like don’t rise to the level of “threat.” We are better for these efforts, and we should continue to improve ourselves in this way!

The second kind of anger is far less examined, in my experience. Besides anger from threats, the other kind is anger about injustice.

Humans have a very sensitive sense of fairness. For what it’s worth, that’s important! Our sense of fairness and justice is a big part of what helped us evolve a functioning society. In the same way the ability to detect and react to threats was essential to our species’ survival, our ability to detect and react to injustice was essential to our ever rising above hunter-gatherers. It might have been brutal, but if early tribes of humans didn’t punish, exile, or kill those within their own ranks that stole, sabotaged, or otherwise damaged the delicate social fabric, we’d have never remained cohesive enough to take the next steps.

While we’ve done, as a whole, some work on tamping down the intensity of our responses, in my view we’ve done a much worse job calibrating that sense to reflect which things are actually just.

An interesting place where we have at least started to talk about this in some circles: Road Rage. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you get irrationally angry about it, it’s not because you perceive the other car or driver as a threat. Half the time you don’t even have to brake – it’s just that you waited patiently in the slow-moving exit lane only to have someone else drive up the shoulder and cut in at the last minute. You waited and they didn’t, but they still got in ahead of you. Injustice!, your amygdala cries, flooding your brain with angry juice. Destroy the rogue human!

Of course, we now know that everything about that impulse is bad for you. Road rage is a killer, and it kills the victim as often as anyone else. Angry driving is bad driving, and the interstate is no place for a bumper car match at eighty miles per hour. So we’ve talked about bringing down the intensity. We don’t talk as often about calibrating the actual sense of injustice itself.

Sure, disobeying traffic laws makes everyone a little less safe, and so this one is at least true, if probably less severe than we tend to believe. But many things we perceive as unjust enough to get mad about are no more unjust than a coffee table is a threat.

I like to start with a definition. Since our original sense of injustice was tuned to people whose actions were actively making many or even all other people in the society worse off, that’s how I’ll define injustice. An unjust act is one that enriches only the acting party at the pure expense of other, unwilling people.

If we take this as a definition, it’s much easier to calibrate. Is cutting in line at the bagel place an unjust act? Yes, because it shortens the cutter’s wait while lengthening everyone else’s – purely bad for the unwilling people behind. If someone has just purchased a bagel after a long wait and you offer them double the money they just paid for it if they sell it to you, is that unjust? No, because while it enriches you by shortening your wait, it doesn’t do so at the expense of any other unwilling people. The person who sells you the bagel chooses to do so, and everyone else still in line is exactly where they were before.

Now, something about that example might be scratching at your brain. You might be frowning as you imagine yourself in position number 6 in that line, getting upset at what you just saw. I’ll tell you from experience (and I imagine you’ll agree) that lots of people in that line would get angry at watching this take place.

I posit to you that their anger at this is the same as getting angry at a piece of furniture you just stubbed your toe on.

In both cases, you get a sensory input that is similar to a sensory input that, to an ancient version of you, would have been strongly associated with a real threat/injustice. The pain in your foot is very similar to the pain of something biting you. And watching someone else who didn’t adhere to the same social rules as you get a benefit before you is very similar to seeing someone steal or cheat.

Some people’s rapid impulse is to yell at and kick the ottoman, just as some people’s rapid impulse is to yell at or jeer the person buying the second-hand bagel. But for the same reason, we should treat both of those as immature.

Just as the furniture isn’t a threat and didn’t attack you, the bagel-buyer isn’t unjust and didn’t rob you. You’ve lost absolutely nothing – if you were in position number 6 before, you’re still in position number 6 in that line. You’ll wait exactly as long for your bagel as you would have if the stranger had never appeared. They stole nothing from you; they stole nothing from anyone, in fact, since they paid for the bagel and it was a willing transaction.

In my experience, if you are the kind of person who naturally felt like that example was unjust, you still do, even after my explanation.

Not to call you out! But people defend their anger. If someone is prone to smashing coffee tables, then you’ll find that they frequently defend even their anger over their stubbed toe as rational. They’ll say things like, “I’m angry at whoever put it here!” Or maybe “I’m angry at whoever distracted me while I was walking!” Angry Juice takes a while to dissipate, and people rarely respond well to others pointing out that they’re only angry due to poor internal calibration.

Likewise, the kind of person who has their injustice sense triggered by the bagel exchange is very likely to defend their anger as rational. “He shouldn’t be allowed to do that, he should have to wait in line like everyone else. Just because you have money shouldn’t mean you don’t have to wait in line, even if someone else is willing to sell you their bagel. Now that person has to wait in line again, and that’s not fair either!”

Of course those arguments don’t hold any logical water, but you already know that. But just like the table-kicker, it’s hard to accept that your sense of injustice simply misfired because it was poorly calibrated. Anger feels rightous.

Part of what you have to do to calibrate your sense of injustice is the same as what you have to do to calibrate your sense of threats. You have to examine the sense when it isn’t being triggered. You have to wait for a moment when you’re not in any pain to say, “You know, I’ve had to buy four new end tables this year. Maybe I need to really think about the way I respond when I knock my shins on one.”

Likewise, you have to wait until your sense of injustice isn’t being triggered by anything to examine what you think justice and morality really mean. Study some philosophy and some ethics; there are many books on the topic. Do what I did and define your terms, so you have a steady measure you can check against. And give yourself some sort of reminder to do so when the time comes.

I don’t want to live a life where I perceive many non-threatening things as threats (and maybe miss a few things that are). Just as vehemently, I don’t want to live a life where I perceive perfectly fine things as unjust enough to get angry over, all while ignoring a few things that are. I like to be angry very rarely – but when I am, I at least want to be right.