Road rage

ANGER and aggression are two different things. Anger is an emotion while aggression is an action that results from anger. Thus one can actually be angry or rage about something yet do nothing about it. How many of us have been angry at some illdisciplined drivers yet did not act on it?

Moreover, anger can be good as when it drives a person to commit to correcting and not repeating his/her mistakes or those of others. It is good for citizens to be angry enough at injustice, corruption, criminality in society as to want to participate in civic activities to minimize them.

It is anger that results in aggression and harms others that is the problem. Aggression, not anger, is what society needs to manage.

First is management of the external instruments of aggression. These are mainly cars, guns, alcohol and drugs which, if regulated and kept away from angry motorists, will definitely reduce road rage incidents.

We cannot eliminate cars but local authorities could find ways to limit their number or to instill stricter discipline on their use in our roads. Next, if we must allow some people to carry guns these should perhaps be required to be in a gun case in the car’s trunk and not unholstered in the person of the driver or passenger. Finally, the law against driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs should be strictly implemented.

However, the more difficult management of aggression is on the internal level of the person’s psychosocial make-up. Psychologists trace the roots of aggression to self-absorption or inordinate love of self (in short, narcissism) and the sense of entitlement that goes with it. Anger can result in dominating and violent aggression from people whose inordinate love of self makes them feel entitled to preferential treatment or to getting what they think they absolutely deserve.

Narcissism and a sense of entitlement are not monopolies of the rich either. The poor can feel just as narcissistic and as entitled as the rich because they want to get what they think they deserve equally with the rich but which society, as dominated by the rich, has not given them.

The neo-liberal mono-culture of unrestrained competition to acquire goods is driving people to compete for next-inline promotion at work, for every inch of the road, for every advantage and to push aside anybody that gets in their way of getting somewhere first.

In this simmering cultural cauldron of anti-social emotions parents and guardians are hard put to raise children and to produce adults that possess only the right dose of self-love and have zero sense of entitlement whatsoever.

Anyway, there you have it. Anger is not the problem. Aggression is and we know whence it comes and what feeds it.