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Comment by blindm | Hacker News Reader

> My decidedly Holocaust-centric childhood failed to instill in me hostile emotions toward Nazis, or anti-Semites generally.

Stockholm syndrome?[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I remember a lyric by Rage Against the Machine that went:

    'Anger is a gift'.

Yes you can channel anger in positive ways, but I personally find it a low frequency emotion that serves no purpose.

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In Buddhism anger is viewed as a poison. Over the years I am agreeing with this more and more. It seems lately it has become very fashionable to constantly being "outraged", "angry" or similar. Sometimes anger can motivate people to change things but usually it causes a lot of friction and prevents finding solutions to problems. Anger can also easily be exploited by political leaders.

I've seen the phrase "Anger is a good servant but a terrible master" used to encapsulate some of this. The idea being that if you control it but get energy from it then it can be used positively, but if you become angry and lose control then that will lead to bad things.

I don't know if this can be squared with the Buddhist view however. Is seeing it as poison meant to say it's bad in all measures, or is there an appreciation of the dose making the poison?

Yeah I subscribe to that. Anger is a good sign, let it out slightly to get the message across, don't let it boil in, don't let it rot but don't ignore it.

This is definitely not the Buddhist view, which, clumsily reduced, is that you want to root out the cause of the anger, which is not actually external to you. (i.e. Your buddy doing something didn't make you angry; you chose at some level to get angry when your buddy did something.)

There is no exception for "good anger" or "motivating anger".

At least, I'm pretty sure that applies to all strains of Buddhism, but there are many, so YMMV.

There is a “wrathful Buddha”. As far as I understand he is angry at the state of the world and uses this anger as motivation to reduce suffering.

In the end I think most important is to keep perspective on things and don’t get stuck at anger which so often seems to be the case.

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