The Uselessness of Anger

The first strike against anger is its radical injustice. It almost never lands on the right person. In the heat of passion, the innocent are punished for the guilty's offence; trivial slights are treated as capital crimes; a single careless word provokes a punishment that no proportionate system of justice would sanction. Anger pretends to enforce right — but it operates on the logic of a mob.

Anger is the great dissolver of social bonds. It spares neither friend nor foe, makes us inaccessible to our companions, and renders us unfit for the roles that society requires of us. The angry person, absorbed in their grievance, cannot be a good parent, a reliable colleague, or a dependable citizen. They have withdrawn from the implicit contract of mutual respect on which civilised life depends.

Finally, even the practical argument for anger fails. It does not make us safer — it makes us enemies. The apparently powerful rage of an angry person is no more fearsome, Seneca observes, than the apparent danger of an adder or a scorpion: the creature that relies on fear to protect itself has already conceded weakness. True courage, the courage that actually deters, is calm, self-possessed, and measured.

Chapter V of Of Anger is the treatise's philosophical centrepiece, engaging directly with the Peripatetic defence of moderate anger and dismantling it with a threefold argument that became influential throughout later Stoic ethics.