No, it’s not because Mercury is in retrograde or some other mumbo-jumbo.

Anger is everywhere – road rage, parliament, protests, the list goes on – but what is the underlying cause of all the rage?

Well, if you take a few deep breaths and just calm the hell down, you might actually learn something.

Wooooosah.

Here’s a pretty interesting take from the Guardian:

There is a discipline known as cliodynamics, developed at the start of the century by the scientist Peter Turchin, which plots historical events by a series of mathematical measures…

These measures yield a map of history in which you can see spikes of rage roughly every 50 years: 1870, 1920, 1970 (you have to allow a little wiggle room to take in the first world war and 1968). Cycles of violence are not always unproductive – they take in civil rights, union and suffragette movements. Indeed, all social movements of consequence start with unrest, whether in the form of strike action, protest or riot.

Some situate economics at the heart of the social mood: the Kondratiev wave, which lasts between 40 and 60 years (call it 50 and it will correspond neatly with the cycle of violence), describes the modern world economy in cycles of high and low growth, where stagnation always corresponds with unrest.

We are not in the age of Aquarius, but rather the age of rage.

And given how everyone and their auntie is now online, this particular 50-year cycle is angrier than ever:

We are in an age where the trigger event can be something as trivial as a cranky git who does not like nudity. Thanks to Facebook, 15,000 people can get a righteous thrill of expressed rage. Wherever we are on the Kondratiev curve, ours is a materially different life experience to one in which you would only come together in fury for something serious, such as destroying a ploughshare or burning a witch.

Yeah, Facebook outrage is the new ‘burn the witch’.

Once you get that anger and outrage high, it’s hard to go without it:

Like any stimulant, it has addictive properties: you become habituated to it and start to rove around looking for things to make you angry. Rage has an illusion of power, the way the Incredible Hulk takes peculiar pride in the destructive potential of his strong emotion. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” is such a curious catchphrase; the only logical response is: “I don’t like anyone when they are angry.” But it manages to make sense on a deeper, primeval level.

Rage Against the Machine, good band. Rage against everything, bad for society:

The important consequences are not for your own health, but rather for that of society as a whole. Unprocessed anger pollutes the social sphere. Every outburst legitimises the next. And we have landed – I like to think by accident – on a technology that perpetuates it and amplifies it, occasionally productively, but more often to no purpose at all.

Scream into the void, if you must, but you’re probably not doing yourself any favours.

If you can wean yourself away from social media, too, you might just find you’re triggered less often.

Number one reason – not seeing the inane bullshit people you used to respect insist on sharing with the world.

[source:guardian]