Anger is Easy
The Rest of Living Takes Guts

ELIZABETH GEORGE
August 14, 2026

Recently, I’ve been on the receiving end of someone’s anger, an anger so extreme that the individual has ended our very long relationship. The reason given to me was my failure to meet a set of expectations that had never been communicated to me in the first place. This unhappy situation has prompted me to think about anger in ways I have never thought about it before, specifically as it relates to what anger hides from the individuals experiencing it and, as a result, what that same anger prompts those individuals to do.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

Anger is the great default passion. Entertaining it is a go-to indulgence that demands nothing of us, just our acknowledgment of its presence and our selection of a target. For anger does not exist in a void. Anger—as well as its cousin, hate—must have a target.

Anger is easy. It never asks us to think. It never demands that we consider why we’re angry in the first place. Nor does it urge us to hesitate even momentarily in order to look at ourselves and to examine our part in whatever it is that has prompted our anger. Instead, anger allows us to simmer in our fury while simultaneously avoiding the reasons behind or beneath it.

I believe it’s the easiest passion to stir up inside of people since the main requirement of such stirring is merely to manipulate them into believing that someone else is to blame for ____________. What goes into the blank that I’ve created in the previous sentence is whatever an individual or a group perceives as missing in their present situation, or whatever that same individual or group sees as their rightful due, or an injustice done to them, or a psychological or emotional wound that must be avenged. The key is that the individual or the group in whom anger is meant to be stirred must feel or at least be encouraged to feel victimized, and this only works if the individual or the group is not asked to consider someone else’s victimization, only their own.

We’ve seen this play out in our country for more than a decade now. During this period, we have been encouraged to look at others—and particularly at other groups— as the cause of whatever it is that we might be suffering. Those others may be in no way related to what we’re suffering—and more often than not this is the case—but that’s not the point. The point is to focus attention on others so that they become the perceived cause of our suffering. This, in turn, marks them as worthy recipients of our fury.

This works best if individuals can be persuaded to blame one highly identifiable group for generating something painful, something horrific, or even something inconvenient. Examples of this can be seen in: the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City (Muslims! Islam!), COVID19 (Chinese!), opioid deaths (Mexicans! Venezuelan drug runners!), declining employment (illegal immigrants!), increasing gun violence (Black young men!), mass shootings (angry white men!). If a group can become the target of someone’s anger (not to mention millions of people’s anger) then individual self-reflection and self-responsibility need never take place.

Anger allows people to avoid the scary stuff. When people marinate in their rage, they are focused outward, not inward. They don’t have to look at themselves at all and this, to me, is the important bit.

Unjustified or unreasonable anger is a displacement device. In its simplest form, it’s a way of saying “I don’t want to look at what’s going on with me, so instead I’ll hate you.” If angry people were to say “Why on earth am I so angry at ________” while simultaneously in possession of the tools to answer that question in depth and with honesty, they might well end up with a welcome outcome: the removal of whatever it is that anger has prevented them from facing (such as profound grief or familial injury) followed by personal, spiritual, and psychological growth.

If you look back at the title and subtitle of this essay, you’ll note my point: the act of living without anger takes guts. I don’t mean that we are intended never to feel anger. I mean that unexamined anger offers us as individuals absolutely nothing save the desire for vengeance: the fulfillment of a need to strike out at something or at someone or at a group of someones, to make them pay.

At his trial in Athens in 339 BCE, Socrates is said to have delared that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” For me, that assertion holds a powerful truth. In our current life in the United States, we’re now seeing entire groups of individuals who seem bent upon living their lives in a state of outrage accompanied by its constant companion, a desire for revenge. We can see how this prompts them to operate in a way that not only demonstrates a callous disregard for other people (e.g. the elderly, the infirm, the homeless, the drug-addicted, the disease-ridden, the poverty-sticken, the malnourished, the persecuted, the attacked), for animals, or for the environment, but also illustrates a deeply seeded hunger for revenge. And because those who operate from anger and a passion for vengeance do not take a step back and ask themselves why they are striking out to avenge a perceived wrong or injury or injustice, they continue a cycle of victimization-rage-vengeance from which they gain nothing and, more important, from which they learn nothing.

When I look at people like Donald Trump, like Clarence Thomas, like Mitch McConnell, like Laura Ingraham, like Nancy Mace, like Stephen Miller, like Brett Kananaugh, like Benjamin Netanyahu, like so many individuals running roughshod over others who are doing nothing save living their lives or attempting merely to do their jobs, I want to ask “So how’s your anger working out for you?” even though I know that taking a step away from their rage to ask themselves any question requiring even a modicum of introspection is as unlikely as it would be for me to be selected queen of even the most obscure beauty contest. Yet still I ask it, if only in my thoughts, if only in conversations with my husband or with friends. I ask it because I don’t understand why anyone would prefer to wallow in an emotional cesspool of their own creation instead of growing into who they might otherwise become.

Yet, this is where we are today: a country of millions of angry people wondering why the hell someone else doesn’t do something to make everything change.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104