Is anger expressed toward others rooted in self hate?

Dr.Nick Riviera said:

I hate myself, therefore I hate every one else? Make sense to me.

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DirtyEyeball696 said:

That makes sense why you troll others posts.


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Dr.Nick Riviera said:

LOL, I'm in your head and it's feels sooooo good.

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Heisenberg said:

Sometimes, probably. The faults we find in others are often things we do not like about ourselves. However, human emotions are too complex and nuanced to think that all anger is redirected self-hate.

Often, we tend to excuse our own undesirable behaviors as being a result of external factors, while at the same time attributing the same behavior to internal factors when we notice them in others. So, when we are treated rudely by the cashier we tend to think that he or she is just a bitch whose parents did a poor job of raising, but when we noticed ourselves being rude, we blame it on having a bad day, dealing with a flat tire, or feeling under-the-weather. This is known by psychologists as the fundamental attribution error.

This is similar to the self-serving bias, in which we tend to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external factors. So, when we are successful we imagine it is because we are strong, determined and clever, but when we fail we blame it on others not supporting us, on life being unfair, and even things like the weather.

If you want to see this in action just watch any episode of of Kitchen Nightmares (or any show where an expert is brought in to save a failing business). The business owners never attribute their failure to themselves; they blame the staff, the customers or bad circumstances. But when they talk about why they deserve to be successful, they say it's because they are strong and determined people who have sacrificed a lot to get where they are.

The human brain has great capacity for coddling itself.

“The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.” – Michael Foley

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DirtyEyeball696 said:

You kids have cute pictures to post. Is that how you express yourself when you have no defense for anything but to post pictures. I have one word that has many pictures connected to it:looser:


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Heisenberg said:

Being mean is cheap and easy. It doesn't require much mental resources, and often feels cathartic. Actually making the effort to put yourself into someone else's shoes is a high-energy task. It takes willpower and self-control because you are resisting tribalism. Tribalism exists deep down in your lizard brain. So, when you find yourself tending to be mean it probably indicates that you are frustrated, tired, or distracted. Feeling bad about yourself is certainly a distraction, and probably indicates depleted self-esteem, but is only one reason among many that causes people to treat others badly. Remember that self-esteem is a limited resource. There is only so much to go around at any given time, and your brain has evolved to protect its resources, and especially its ego.

So, you are on the right track when you observe that how you treat others often says more about your mental state than it does about the person you are dealing with, but the fact that you often observe self-dissatisfaction as a common thread is just incidental. The real common thread is simply subconscious resource management.

And again, this would only describe some instances of treating others badly. Human behavior is exceedingly complicated. Consider that science has penetrated physics to the point of being able to fly to the moon, has unraveled biology enough to be able to transplant a heart from one human to another, yet in that same time has only scratched the surface enough to give us a fleeting outline when it comes to human psychology.

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New Age United said:

Do you think it is possible that the brain could ever evolve to be free of ego and do you think that could lead to a better world without so much anger and conflict?

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Heisenberg said:

The ego is the glue that holds together our psyche. While is can be beneficial to sometimes detach ourselves, it's probably good that this is extremely hard to do and only temporary. And ego is not necessarily correlated with anger or selfishness. Someone like The Dalai Lama has a very strong ego. Again, things aren't so simple. It's naive to think that because ego can be the source of so much irrationality and distortion that having no ego at all is then the desired goal. What's wanted is a homeostasis. A balance between ego and humility. A mindfulness.

Our brains do not tend to redesign themselves. Rather, more gets built on top of the foundation that is already there. That's why our lizard brains never really went away. Other stuff got built on top that does a better job, yet that stuff can't do its job without the underlying architecture that already existed. So, we need our lizard brains in order for our ape brains to function. Imagine if you couldn't replace your motherboard with a new version, but instead had to just keep building on newer components to handle newer and more complicated jobs. These components would have to find a way to do these more complicated jobs while still working within the confines of the old motherboard. They would always be both limited by and dependent on the old technology. If we got rid of that old technology, the new stuff would fall apart.

So if you like being able to separate the signal from the noise; If you like being able to apply meaning to that signal, and then use that meaning to derive a narrative which then allows you to form mental models and drive decisions, you're going to want your ego.

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Heisenberg said:

No doubt that the ego has a lot of baggage that comes along with it, but packed somewhere in that baggage are some very useful items we need to make the trip. It can be hard to talk about these subjects because they are so ephemeral, so if defining ego the way you do helps you to communicate, then there is nothing wrong with it. It's a way of getting your head around it, so to speak. I think we all understand the kind of ego you are talking about, but we have to remind ourselves that it's just one aspect.

Even if we were able to fix the ego, we'd still have other problems. Something that causes as many problems as your brain's need to protect and inflate its ego is its need for consistency. Our brains like to see themselves as consistent and congruent. Put simply, your brain assumes the way it feels right now is the way it has always felt, and the way it always will feel. Of course, our intellectual brains know that we were different people when we were teenagers, and that we will undoubtedly change our minds about things in the future, but deep down in the older parts of your brain, it fights against this. It will go as far to alter your memories to fool you into thinking you haven't changed that much. "Even though I used to think X was wrong, I always kinda felt it could be right, so I haven't really changed my mind."

Have you ever noticed that people will very easily add new beliefs to their mental list, but fight very hard against removing those beliefs? If we hear that a certain tea helped Aunt Susie cure her headache, we tend to add that belief to our list. But if we are then told at a later date that this tea has been tested and shown not to have an effect, we don't just immediately drop that belief. We tend to require much more evidence to remove a belief than we did to add it. That is another way the need for consistency messes with our worldview.

It's not hard to see how, when our consistency is comes into conflict, it can be a source of anger, selfishness and even violence. For this, we can't blame the ego. Of course, when our beliefs tie closely into our identity, we then face conflict with both ego and consistency. In those cases, changing our minds becomes exponentially unlikely. That's one of the reasons politics can divide people so deeply. It's also why, when we do manage to change our minds on such subjects, it feels like revelation.

The main problem seems to be that, although we can talk about these things in the abstract and break them down, when they are happening in our minds it doesn't feel wrong or sloppy or biased. Instead, it feels to us like wisdom, common sense, and even enlightenment. Knowing we have a blind spot in our vision doesn't help us to notice it, and knowing we are looking at an optical illusion doesn't stop the illusion from happening.

Knowing that we are fools doesn't stop us from feeling clever.

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Heisenberg said:

Being mean is cheap and easy. It doesn't require much mental resources, and often feels cathartic. Actually making the effort to put yourself into someone else's shoes is a high-energy task. It takes willpower and self-control because you are resisting tribalism. Tribalism exists deep down in your lizard brain. So, when you find yourself tending to be mean it probably indicates that you are frustrated, tired, or distracted. Feeling bad about yourself is certainly a distraction, and probably indicates depleted self-esteem, but is only one reason among many that causes people to treat others badly. Remember that self-esteem is a limited resource. There is only so much to go around at any given time, and your brain has evolved to protect its resources, and especially its ego.

So, you are on the right track when you observe that how you treat others often says more about your mental state than it does about the person you are dealing with, but the fact that you often observe self-dissatisfaction as a common thread is just incidental. The real common thread is simply subconscious resource management.

And again, this would only describe some instances of treating others badly. Human behavior is exceedingly complicated. Consider that science has penetrated physics to the point of being able to fly to the moon, has unraveled biology enough to be able to transplant a heart from one human to another, yet in that same time has only scratched the surface enough to give us a fleeting outline when it comes to human psychology.

Click to expand...

Bugeye said:

Best song I've ever heard regarding bias! Ok, maybe the only one I've heard.

Are you a psychologist? As I said, you seem to know this stuff well.

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Heisenberg said:

Nope, not an expert at all. Just someone who has been studying skepticism and critical thinking for a few decades now, and who has access to people with advanced degrees. My partner has a MSc in cognitive anthropology from Oxford. So she aims not only to understand how human cognition works, but how evolution shaped it to be the way it is. We are both practitioners of mindfulness meditation as well. Throw in some good bud and it makes for some very deep conversations.

If you'd like to delve into any of the subjects I've mentioned I'd be happy to provide some "further reading" type links.

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Heisenberg said:

Sometimes, probably. The faults we find in others are often things we do not like about ourselves. However, human emotions are too complex and nuanced to think that all anger is redirected self-hate.

Often, we tend to excuse our own undesirable behaviors as being a result of external factors, while at the same time attributing the same behavior to internal factors when we notice them in others. So, when we are treated rudely by the cashier we tend to think that he or she is just a bitch whose parents did a poor job of raising, but when we noticed ourselves being rude, we blame it on having a bad day, dealing with a flat tire, or feeling under-the-weather. This is known by psychologists as the fundamental attribution error.

This is similar to the self-serving bias, in which we tend to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external factors. So, when we are successful we imagine it is because we are strong, determined and clever, but when we fail we blame it on others not supporting us, on life being unfair, and even things like the weather.

If you want to see this in action just watch any episode of of Kitchen Nightmares (or any show where an expert is brought in to save a failing business). The business owners never attribute their failure to themselves; they blame the staff, the customers or bad circumstances. But when they talk about why they deserve to be successful, they say it's because they are strong and determined people who have sacrificed a lot to get where they are.

The human brain has great capacity for coddling itself.

“The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.” – Michael Foley

Click to expand...