A generalized anger against the world is extremely difficult to contain. Even anger management seminars have limited effect. Anger predisposes the mind to faultfinding fired by a powerfully generalized perception of victimization in which others constantly owe you big time – especially if the person or persons so blamed sought to help you, yet while deriving only limited results. Then one’s own failings are angrily laid at the feet of those who most sought to help you and most sought to inspire hope. I think that the mass shootings that we sometimes see in America are explosive attempts in a “land of promise and opportunity” to vindicate personal failure by laying that failure at the feet of others seen to be reprehensibly culpable and responsible. On a broader scale, here we find direct hints as to the principal taproot of terrorism – the sustained inability to accommodate self-criticism within a mushrooming mental matrix of self-justifying anger.
The Bard's Reprieve (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66)
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
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