Pain and anger

Pain and anger – by P.K.Odendaal – April 2016

The ideas which I wish to explore today relate to emotions and I wish to explore two aspects of it:

·         Is it possible that the intensity of emotions might follow the curve posited by Malthus in his Malthusian Growth Model?

·         Can one emotion be replaced by another emotion as a surrogate such as when we replace sugar with honey?

These are two weird and totally unconnected ideas, so we must accept that they are valid just becasue they are weird. It is only the obvious ideas which turn out to be fiction.

To explore that we need to know what the Malthusian Growth Model is.

Malthus postulated that the growth cycle of ecological populations like micro-organisms follow a curve in which the growth tempo and not the growth remains constant. That would give us an exponential function in the form of a hay stack and that form almost exactly fits the totally unrelated probabilistic function. The basis of this theory is that food increases linearly or arithmetically like in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and so on whilst populations grow geometrically or exponentially like in 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 and so on. That means that growth will quickly outnumber food and the decline will begin.

 

This concept was thought by Malthus to apply to populations, but it has become a universal concept applying to the rise and fall of nations, the rise and fall of individuals, the rise and fall of capital and labour, and presently I will be applying it to the rise and fall of emotions.

We start at anger. As long as the food for anger outstrips the anger, it will grow and explode exponentially, but once the food is limited, it will calm down and even disappear. However, in its ascent it is apt to destroy anything in its path. Let us say the source feeding anger does not go away and feeds the anger continuously, we are bound to have an explosion of that anger and it may manifest itself in many ways, one of which is revenge. Once that gets going, the source is also bound to increase in intensity in a tit for tat process.

How can we dissipate this anger in ourselves or in someone else, because what we all want is peace and happiness.

The way I would suggest is to try and transform the person from an aggressor to a victim and the emotion from anger to pain. It should not be very difficult, as we are all one or other time a victim to something and these days we are all victims of the corruption of politicians. We may tell the person that what is happening to him is in fact happening to all people and we are a fraternity of victims – just look at so and so …

Once we get the anger to change into pain, as it many times does by itself, we can start to treat that psychologically. It is much easier to treat a victim than an aggressor. So in this process we would see that there is an abundant supply of victims and stories of victims. Once the pain starts to grow, the anger starts to subside, even regardless of the source. In fact we can even become blasé about the source of anger and laugh at it.

We will not stop there, We need to treat and work on pain, and most people can do that. The people who cannot do that will turn their attention to delusion and become neurotic – a condition also much better than anger and revenge.

Lastly we will start to change the pain into happiness, which is even easier than changing anger into pain. I do not want to go into the detail of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here. Suffice it to say that happiness is independent of the wealth of a person – quite contrary to most people’s beliefs today. It seems to me that everybody think that by giving money and goods to poor people it will calm or change their emotions or circumstance - in fact it calms the emotions of the giver. 
As an example I will cite the delusion most of us suffer from and that is thinking that we can make someone happy by giving him or her something. The only thing which we can give which can make people happy is our self. I often see that rich people think poor people are unhappy because they are poor. That is not so. I think rich people are unhappy because they are rich. To understand this better you might want to read my article on minimalism.

Most people are happy because they do not have pain or anger.