Summary of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, Seneca on Anger (Part 3)
A couple months ago, I started a six part blog series aimed at summarizing a fascinating film I’d recommend to anyone, Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. The film is broken down into six parts each of them honing in on one philosopher’s thoughts that might lead us to being happier.
Part one focused on Socrates and his wisdom on self-confidence. Part two highlighted what Epicurus had to say about happiness.
This post will be a summary of the film’s third installment, Seneca’s thoughts on anger.
Anger is a problem that nearly everyone deals with. Before I saw this segment of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, I had never considered the rather simple solution to anger that Seneca offers. Well, it’s at least simple to comprehend. I’ve found it’s quite another thing to actually internalize it and live your life by the wisdom he offers.
Seneca was a Roman philosopher who was alive at around the same time as Christ. He pinpointed anger as a major problem in the Roman empire and decided to make it his mission to help calm people down. He had good reason to be concerned about anger. Seneca lived in the days of murderous, short-tempered dictators. We might think anger is a problem in society today, but in Seneca’s time a small slip-up could anger the wrong person enough to lead to you to being thrown to the lions. He called anger, “the most hideous and frenzied of all emotions.”
Seneca did not view anger as an uncontrollable human emotion. He viewed it as a philosophical problem that could be treated. His central tenant was that anger arises due to irrational ideas held about the world. Seneca thought that the main fault of people prone to anger is that they are far too optimistic. This makes a lot of sense, I think. When we expect or hope too much, we become angry upon the inevitability that reality will collide with our unrealistic expectations.
Most of us are prone to getting upset about things like traffic jams or our Internet service going out. In Seneca’s estimation, these things are neither unfair nor surprising. They are merely a feature of being alive. Anyone who gets angry about these things simply has the wrong expectations of how the world operates. Seneca’s primary piece of advice on curbing anger is to be more pessimistic. He felt that if people are more pessimistic about daily life that they will be less surprised by disappointments and thus less angered by them.
Seneca suggested that we are not really as free as we think we are. Rather, we are more like dogs leashed to the back of a moving chariot. Our leashes are long enough to give us some freedom and maneuverability, but not long enough to allow us to move wherever we want. We are still on a leashed and anchored to the chariot of life. With this being the case, Seneca pointed out that it is sometimes far better to follow along in a direction that you don’t want to go rather than to kick against something that you cannot change.
Being able to identify what we can and cannot change is a really important ability that can be a key to our freedom and happiness. We have an ability to change our attitude towards things that we cannot change. I’ve read advice before that suggests complaining is always irrational. If you’re complaining it’s either about a.) something you can control in which case you should make the changes necessary to satisfy your disappointment or b.) just banging your head against the wall over something you can’t change. In either case, there is never a particularly fruitful purpose to complaining.
One observation Seneca made in his life is that prosperous people are more prone to anger. I have made a similar observation since living in Playa del Carmen. The only angry or unhappy people I ever encounter here are usually Americans (myself included). I’m not sure I can offer a single example of a time I saw a Mexican act upset or angry. Even when Mexico blew a 2-0 lead with an 11-10 player advantage in a soccer match vs. Brazil, or when Manny Pacquiao could should have lost in a judge’s decision in a boxing match against Mexican fighter Juan Manuel Marquez, the Mexican people watching those events in the same bar as me seemed hardly fazed. In America, you’d have guys rioting in the streets or beating their wives over those outcomes. Here, there was a mere shrug of the shoulders as if it was really no big deal and they went home. I was way more upset in both instances and in the case of the boxing match, I even had money on Pacquiao!
So it’s easy for me to believe Seneca’s presupposition that wealthier people tend to have more expectations. Rich people tend to believe that their money will insulate them from disappointments which is simply untrue. Poorer people have a certain advantage in avoiding anger due to a tendency to expect less out of the world. I think that generally speaking Americans have a harder time with anger issues than people in poorer countries since basically we’re incredibly spoiled and have come to expect things to always go our way.
A practical approach that Seneca gave to avoiding anger was to prepare yourself mentally for disappointment. He believed advice like, “don’t worry, it will be fine,” was actually cruel because it leaves people unprepared if things turn out not to be okay. He recommended an opposite strategy: a daily meditation on all of the things that might go wrong. It might seem like preposterous advice, but imagine how much more enjoyable life might be for all of us if we left our house in the morning not really expecting too much. It leaves us in a position to be pleasantly surprised and grateful when things actually do go smoothly for us. Seneca is not saying to never expect things to go well for us, but rather just to be psychologically prepared for a day when they don’t.
Seneca did not just talk the talk. He met death after being implicated (perhaps wrongly so) in a conspiracy against the Roman emperor. Seneca accepted that there was nothing he could do to wiggle out of his death sentence and calmly slit his veins as he had been ordered to do.
You might say the guy was a bit of a defeatist. But his understanding of the key to remaining calm and avoiding anger is inspiring some 2,000 years after his death.
“What need is there to weap over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” – Seneca
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