2.4 Mystery rage
I was one of the good guys, wasn’t I? A nice guy, an earnest guy working hard to save the world. So why were atom bombs going off in my head? Why did I feel like ripping into people? The very people I was supposed to be saving.
What was this mystery rage?
I needed to find out and put a stop to it.
A friend, who was in a twelve-step program, told me that codependent relationships typically erupt with bursts of rage, so that seemed like a good place to look.
For example, Max has a problem with alcohol and his partner Millie works hard to help him stop drinking. She works a lot harder than he does. In fact, she does all the work. She throws out his liquor. She drives him to his office in the morning and back home in the evening so he can’t stop at a bar. She does everything to save him from himself except challenge him to take responsibility for his own behavior.
Then one night she smells alcohol on his breath and she goes on a rampage, tearing through the apartment. She finds a flask at the bottom of his underwear drawer. And now she loses it. “Why am I killing myself to help you when you don’t even care? Doesn’t my hard work mean anything to you at all? Don’t I mean anything to you?”
Max is ready with anger of his own: “You treat me like a baby, but I’m a grown-up. So why don’t you treat me like one?
“Because you don’t act like one.”
“Because you don’t let me. You do everything for me before I can do it for myself, and I’m sick of it.”
“You don’t even try to do anything.”
“Because you’re always running me. You’ve turned me into your pet project, so you know what, I’m not the one who’s failing here, you are.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, you’re crazy.”
This is not two people having a bad day. Their relationship is a destructive system. And they’re both colluding in it.
Millie is relating to Max in a way that keeps him stuck in his irresponsibility. She’s enabling his bad behavior. And Max enables her enabling. He purposefully keeps hooking her into babying him. They’re using each other, which feels terrible and fills both of them with rage.
So here was a big clue that could have helped me understand my own rage, but I guess I wasn’t ready to make the connection, because I didn’t. I remember feeling sorry for “those poor people,” and being glad I wasn’t like them. But if you had looked behind the scenes of my activist work at the time, you’d have seen me tangled up in the same kind of mess.
I only had two organizing strategies, but that’s all it took to produce rage.
Sweet talk
First, I would try sweet talk.
It seemed so obvious that the world needed to be saved that I wondered why more people didn’t choose to get involved. Maybe the challenge was too big…
Yes, that’s it! So I’ll start small and coax them along. I’ll give them a starter set of solutions to warm them up. I’ll get them to take baby steps first, and then later, once they’re in motion, I’ll push for more.
That sweet little book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth was an example of this attitude. It urged us to do small things, all of them good things—composting, stopping junk mail, aerating faucets, checking tire pressure, snipping six-pack rings, and buying rechargeable batteries.
One problem, though, people seemed to think that doing little bits could make a big difference. They seemed to feel absolved from doing the harder things because they were so busy with the easy things they didn’t have time for anything more. So maybe the title of that book should have been: 50 Simple Things You Can Feel Good About Doing Even Though They Won’t Save the Earth.
Now here we are, decades later, and most of us still aren’t doing all the simple things we could be doing. And god knows, urging people to do the hard things doesn’t make you popular. They get their backs up. They click over from you to a happier channel.
It’s easier to put up a bird feeder outside your window than it is to stop the destruction of the wetlands and the woodlands that are prime habitat for birds. It’s easier to plant an organic garden in your backyard than it is to stop giant companies with political clout from pushing GMOs, which poison our food, produce superweeds, contaminate neighboring crops, diminish fertility in farm animals, and give us leaky guts.
And what about the people who want to do simple things but can’t? What if you wish you could stop driving so much but there’s no public transportation to your workplace. Or you can’t afford to live near your job because housing prices are skyrocketing, so you have to commute ninety minutes in the morning and again in the evening and not only is it a grind, but you feel guilty about how much gas you’re using and how much pollution you’re causing.
The changes we’d need to make to fix major structural problems are beyond what any individual can do or any handful of activists. Such problems belong to the society as a whole.
We haven’t figured out, though, how to get a whole society to change, not just talk about it, not just greenwash or hope-wash, but make the radical, disruptive changes we need. And we don’t know how to upgrade the human operating system, which is what drives all our larger systems—social, economic, religious, and political. We don’t know how to manage ourselves in modern mass societies.
This is so obvious, but to admit it is to admit defeat, which in my activist days I was not about to do.
Scare tactics
So I took up my second strategy, scare tactics.
Sweet talk seemed to turn too many people into hobbyists instead of activists, as though saving the world were a casual thing you could do in your spare time on the weekends. I got to thinking, maybe I’m protecting people too much…
Yes, that’s it! What if I do the opposite? What if I scare them? Scare them really bad. Maybe that will push them over the edge into doing the right things, the big things, the painful things.
I was vacuuming my apartment one evening, when Helen Caldicott came on the radio to talk about the reality of nuclear bombs. She attacked her topic with vigor. She described nuclear death vividly. I shut off the vacuum so I could hear every word. Within two minutes I had to sit down because my stomach was hurting.
She explained how the people closest to ground zero would get vaporized. And how people a little further out would get killed by the blast or the firestorm. And how tens of thousands of people in the square miles around ground zero would die from radiation sickness. Then she catalogued how many nuclear weapons there were in the world and how minimal the safeguards. She spoke to us not like a dry academician but with passionate, contagious fear.
I found her perversely inspiring, so I set about building my own arsenal. I read books which were the perfect incarnation of scare tactics—three hundred pages of frightening facts jammed in there with no filler, just punch, punch, punch, and then at the end, a short conclusion with an upbeat flourish, like a little red caboose of hope tacked onto a long train of horrors. I wonder if the publishers told these authors they’d better end on a positive note or else their books would not sell. In any event, the final rah-rah chapter didn’t hold nearly the conviction the alarming chapters did.
And what did I find out?
It’s not hard to scare people.
But once I had them scared what did I do with them?
I took them right back to sweet-talk solutions.
Even after I gave them a solid blast of fear, I still didn’t believe they would rise to the occasion. And how does it feel to have someone scare you as bad as they can and then talk down to you? What are you supposed to think…
When you’re wrestling with Godzilla fears and someone gives you pixie hopes?
The real message behind my activism was despair…
If I baby you that means I don’t believe in you. If I scare you that means I don’t believe in you. Either way I don’t believe in you. In us.
And working so hard only to end up in despair made me mad, really mad. But still I didn’t let myself understand what was causing my rage.
Karpman’s Triangle
Then I made a new friend who introduced me to the work of Stephen Karpman, a therapist and key figure in Transactional Analysis. Back in the 70s, he had cachet. And he had a Triangle.
He called it the Drama Triangle. Drama because people acted out emotionally charged melodramas instead of taking direct personal responsibility for their actions. And Triangle because there were three roles people played when they got caught up in this mess.
First, there’s the Rescuer. I didn’t like the term “codependent enabler,” because that sounded like a wimpy loser, but a “Rescuer” was a bold, heroic guy, wasn’t he? So I accepted the label. And began calling this the Rescue Triangle because I wanted to be center stage.
Next came the Victim, who the Rescuer rescued from her incompetence by taking charge of her life for her. And what could I say about those Victims? They were sad cases. They needed me.
Karpman capitalized these roles because they were inflated and unreal. I remember late one Sunday night after a week camping in Yosemite, I was driving home in the dark on a narrow two-lane highway when a guy on a motorcycle up ahead hit a deer mid-flight as it leapt across the road. The guy was thrown from his bike and landed unconscious in a ditch. Several of us pulled over. Just ahead of me was a nurse who got to work to stop the bleeding. I set out flares, because it was scary how fast cars were coming up over the blind rise. Then I dragged the dead deer off the road by the antlers so it wouldn’t cause another accident, maybe wiping out all of us. This was a genuine rescue. That man could not take care of himself. He absolutely needed our help.
But when we’re talking about the positions in the Rescue Triangle we’re not talking about helpless people. We’re talking about…
People who are acting helpless in a way which is not real.
And we’re talking about…
People who are acting helpful in a way which is not real, either.
And these roles have staying power. People can live inside them for years, decades, even their whole lives.
But behind the scenes rot sets in. The Rescuer gets exhausted, the Victim chaffs at her dependency, and neither one directly addresses their core need for genuine love. But while that need goes unmet it doesn’t go away. It nags and prods and writhes and produces misery. And this is upsetting, but instead of getting angry at the Triangle and taking it apart, the folks trapped in there get angry at each other and leave the system intact. And now the third position in the Triangle becomes visible…
Both the Rescuer and the Victim turn into Persecutors.
Here, finally, was the answer I was looking for, and this time I could see it. I could see how codependents like Millie and Max fit perfectly into Karpman’s paradigm, and how my own life fit.
And I saw, too, that in my activist work…
I was playing Savior and trying to rescue my Savees.
And if I were to put that doomed relationship into words, here’s what it would sound like.
The Savior opens the drama with a bold announcement:
“Listen up, everybody! Rejoice! We’re here! Me and my colleagues are here to save you and all humanity. It’s what we live for.”
The Savees are thrilled:
“Oh, yes! You’re exactly who we’ve been waiting for. We’ve been so scared about the future and have been feeling so helpless. But you say you have the answer? And you say you’ll do the work? And we’ll get the benefits? Bravo! Go for it!”
So the deal gets struck and things are fine as long as the honeymoon lasts, which it does until the Savior gets to feeling overworked and begins to deflate:
“Hey, Savees, I’m getting tired here. I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve got no time for a personal life. I live alone, my place is a mess, my car is falling apart, my paycheck is pitiful. Come on, make a little effort, show me you care, I’m not asking for much.”
And it’s true, the Savior really doesn’t want much, because he doesn’t want all those Savees to actually become Saviors like himself. He wants to be special, because the more special he is the more approval he earns.
If there are too many Saviors and he becomes just one in the anonymous crowd, what good would that do him? He wants to be one of the few, the proud, the Marines of Salvation.
But it turns out that Savees, once you’ve made your deal with them, don’t really like to be asked to contribute.
And the Savior’s request has a judgmental edge, and Savees resent that edge:
“Hey, you’re the one who decided to be a Savior, so stop whining. You took the job, so do the job. Don’t tell us about your problems, we didn’t sign up for that. You said you’d do the saving so we don’t have to. We’re holding you to that. You don’t get to bail.
Rescue us, but don’t you dare make it feel like a rescue. Make it look easy. We don’t want to see you sweat. Show us your happy face. Don’t you understand how embarrassing it is for us to have to be saved by a dragged-down, miserable burnout like you?”
Well. Match in the gasoline. They’re attacking, so now the Savior feels free to give it right back to them:
“You Savees have all the fun, and I have none. You’re out partying while I work, work, work. You have no idea what I’m sacrificing for you. You have no idea what it takes for me to do what I do, or how hard it is. You have no idea what it’s like to be me.
Come on, you lazy jerks, step up, do something to help! It’s because of you we’re in such terrible danger. It’s your fault our species is dying. Your apathy is killing us. So damn you. Damn you to hell.”
And the Savees?
“Don’t talk to us like that. Don’t put us down. We hate that, and we hate you. Maybe if you learned how to talk to us in a respectful way, then maybe we would maybe do something maybe.
Meanwhile point your finger at your own self. You took on the assignment, and you’re failing. This danger we’re in is your fault. So damn you right back.”
When the chickens of Rescue come home to roost…
They come home shitting rage all over the place.
Karpman says if you step into any one role in the Triangle, you end up in all three. Once the Rescuer realizes his Savees are taking advantage of him, he begins to feel like he’s the real Victim.
Meanwhile, the Victim is rescuing the Rescuer. How so? Because she’s saving him from having to face the truth that she actually could take responsibility for herself if she decided to, and therefore there’s no real need for him to do his rescuing, which would end the game he’s so dependent on.
And then the Rescuer and Victim attack each other, because both of them are in pain, and each believes their pain is being caused by the other one.
Suddenly, I saw what my problem was…
I wanted to get rid of my mystery rage, but I did not want to have to quit playing the Rescue game which produced it.
So I joined a weekly group for guys who were Rescuers. I coasted along happily at first, feeling a bit above it all, because I was graciously hosting the meetings at my apartment and providing snacks for everyone. Then on the third night, Michael, the leader, looked me in the eye and said…
Rich, you’re a liar.
No, no, no! I believe in telling the truth.
But when you play Rescuer and you let someone pretend to be a Victim, you’re lying to them. You let them believe they’re helpless when they’re not. And, Rich, there’s more. You’re hurting people.
Oh god, no! I work so hard to help people. That’s what I’m known for, helping, always helping. From morning to night.
But every time you help someone play Victim, and do for them what they need to do for themselves, you keep them from developing their own abilities. So instead of strengthening them, you’re keeping them trapped.
No! I’m trying to do what’s best for them.
But you’ve got a conflict of interest. You’re so hooked on playing Rescuer, you can’t let your Victims get stronger because they wouldn’t need you anymore and then who would you be?
That stopped me in my tracks. I had no more protests left.
Michael softened his voice and asked…
What if tonight you just simply told us the truth about how hungry you are for real love?
Why did I let Michael talk to me like this? Because I knew he was on my side. He was my advocate. I could feel it in my bones. He said very hard things to me that night, but I remember him with fondness.
I had been looking for psychological insight…
But what I got was moral confrontation.
My way of helping people was hurting them. It was one thing to hurt myself, I was used to that. But for me to hurt other people, me, the guy who wanted to create a world of nurturance and love, that was unacceptable.
Still, one swallow does not make a summer and one moment of truth does not make a transformation. There was a long road ahead of me. I had to turn that confrontation into a new way of life. I had to learn, contrary to everything I was taught as a child by my church, that there’s no such thing as saving or being saved.
And that’s true simply because…
You cannot do someone else’s moral labor for them.
And…
You cannot have someone do your moral labor for you.
If you need a ditch dug, you can hire somebody to dig it. But if you want to develop your physical stamina, you can’t hire someone to go to the gym and do your workouts. And you can’t develop your moral chops if you have someone else do your decision-making.
Salvation is moral abdication. It’s the opposite of moral fight. That’s why salvation hope is dangerous.
The more I was able to let go of my attachment to the idea of salvation, the more I could see how it actually worked. I could see how one thing followed the other in necessary succession in a repeating plotline which I began to call the Salvation Story, and it goes like this:
Despair generates fantasy.
That fantasy inflates into salvation hope.
That hope collapses into rage.
That rage loops back to deepen the initial despair.
Which makes us demand an even bigger fantasy.
Which implodes into an even more bitter rage.
This is the perfect example of a vicious circle. And it’s got three key elements that propel it. So let’s look at each of them in turn.
1. Despair
This is where it begins, because despair is the hand inside the puppet of salvation. When things are going well we have no need for a salvation fantasy. But things are not going well for us. Our society is failing and our species is failing, so we need salvation, real salvation in the real world. We can’t have it but we need it.
2. Fantasy
The more desperate we become, the more grandiose we make our fantasies. And grandiosity should always be a warning, never a comfort. We can see this in everyday life.
Take Jim, for example. During childhood his parents told him he was stupid, over and over. That assault took its toll. He’s grown up now, yet he still believes he’s hopelessly stupid. But he can’t stand feeling that way, so he overcompensates. He pretends he’s super smart, he turns himself into a caricature of smart, and wherever he goes he feels driven to prove he’s the smartest person in the room by reciting volumes of tedious facts and spouting ersatz wisdom. Which annoys the other people in those rooms. His one-upmanship makes them feel one down. His neediness pushes them away.
He goes home after each inevitable failure feeling more lonely and isolated. Which then compels him to go out the next day and act even smarter, even though a little voice inside tells him that’s the dumbest thing he could possibly do, and even though this steady diet of futility is deepening the rage in his core. But he can’t bring himself to listen to that little voice, so he keeps on living out his own personal salvation story, which does nothing but hurt him.
How hard is it to give birth to a salvation fantasy? Not hard at all. It’s way easier than giving birth to a child. All it takes is a few minutes and a touch of imagination.
For example, we did that in the child abuse prevention program I used to work for. Once we got our organization up and running, our work took off quickly, and we were wildly successful. Lots of kids were actually using the self-defense strategies we taught them. I’m thinking now of a mom who drove down to our office to thank us in person. She said, “I have my Annie today because of your program.” She told us how her ten-year-old daughter, because of what she learned in one hour in her classroom, had used her special safety yell and quick thinking to get away from a very bad guy who tried to take her to his car.
And there were many, many more stories we heard about kids getting away from kidnappers, molesters, and bullies. Now, you might think that would be enough, but it wasn’t. With eighty-one projects working together, covering all of the cities and counties in our state, we trained four million kids in prevention strategies in five years. But it wasn’t okay to just make a difference for some kids, not even for some millions of kids…
We decided that we had to save all the kids forever.
So we pulled out a piece of paper and sketched out what that would take. We figured we’d see every child in our state five times during their school career to provide them focused, age-appropriate training in person. We wrote out a budget, which was big but not outrageous. And there it was, such a beautiful plan that we fell for it at first sight. We were going to put an end to child abuse in one generation. That’s one school generation. Thirteen years.
That’s how easily we turned our real work into a salvation hope. Our program did in fact make a difference. It did in fact generate real hope. We had every reason to believe that if we went to work today just like we did yesterday, and gave it our best, kids would learn, and lots of them would be better off for it. This was a modest, sustaining hope based on facts.
But we let ourselves imagine and then believe that our humble program could somehow manage to conquer an enduring human problem that had come down through the ages. That was the leap we took, and we took it because…
We were desperate for every child to be safe.
Real hope is not big enough to save the world. Salvation hope would be big enough, except it’s not real. And it’s because real hope is so limited that we make our salvation hopes so big. Just as supernovas are the grand fireworks that accompany the death of a star…
Salvation hope ignites when we give up on real hope.
What if, during the days of our 13-year plan, you had shaken me by the shoulders and said…
Rich, think about what you’re saying. Stopping child abuse forever. Do you really believe this?
Maybe I would have admitted our vision was too good to be true. Maybe I would have come back down to earth.\..
But I didn’t want to come back down to an earth where children were being beaten, molested, kidnapped, and killed, and we couldn’t make it stop. All of it.
We were fiercely determined, and yet our plan had so much air in it that I carried it around like a giant soap bubble on a big plastic ring, holding it very, very carefully so it wouldn’t burst.
I think this is why we give salvation stories special status, why we make them holy. Behind their impressively confident appearance, they’re really very fragile.
And there’s another problem. I call it the Savior Seduction. If you collect even just a few followers you can fool yourself…
People hang on my words when I preach my gospel of hope, so I must be a Savior, mustn’t I? And if I’m a Savior then I must be saved, right?
The irony of me playing Savior was that I didn’t have the answer for my own life, but I decided I knew what to do about the life of the world.
I think Saviors are actually more deceived than their Savees. But the Savior game is compelling because you get to tell yourself…
I’m not like the passive masses. I’m one of the elite. I’m the solution, not the problem.
If people would only do what I tell them, everything would be okay.
And if they don’t, if humankind goes extinct, well, at least it won’t be my fault. You can’t blame me. I’m exempt. I get the Savior waiver.
The salvation mindset is despair’s dirtiest trick. It makes you think you’re making progress when you’re actually stuck running in place on despair’s treadmill. A salvation story only saves us from seeing that we can’t be saved…
We turn to salvation, not as our first hope, but as our last hope.
It makes a promise of rescue, but that promise is broken in the instant it’s made because it’s made by despair.
3. Rage
The kind of rage I find most troubling is not the florid, stomping and shouting kind. It’s the nice-guy kind. You package yourself in a well-mannered, well-spoken public persona, but meanness is actually the undercurrent of what you say and do. That was how I did my rage. It makes for an effective deception.
It’s hard to believe a nice guy full of inspirational words can hurt you, but he can.
Nice guy turns nasty
To illustrate this, let me pick on Al Gore for doing on a grand scale what so many of us Savior wannabes have done in our smaller ways.
In 2009, he published Our Choice. He spent three years writing this book, during which time he held thirty intensive summits with leaders from around the globe. He gathered together all the best strategies he could find to stop climate change, reduce poverty, and secure our future. The book is beautifully produced. It’s got gorgeous photos and graphics. It’s packed with reports of remarkable people doing remarkable things.
But then Gore takes one more step…
He turns his tale into a salvation story.
He begins where all such stories begin, with despair. In his introduction, he describes the odds against us…
“…it seems absurd to imagine that we as a species are capable of making a conscious collective decision. And yet this is the task we are now confronting.”
He says we’re in danger of succumbing to “paralyzing despair.” And he continues…
“The danger is that this despair may render us incapable of reclaiming control of our destiny in time to avert the unimaginable catastrophe that would unfold on this planet if we don’t start making dramatic changes quickly.”
Gore makes survival sound impossible, then pivots immediately to the window of opportunity, saying it’s still open, but…
“We need to make our choice to act now.”
Next, he assures us the choice is in our hands…
“We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we choose to solve it, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed.”
This uplifting statement would be very encouraging except it’s a fantasy. There’s no way we can possibly get billions of us to pull together to make that choice. And since it’s not a real option, we can’t call it a choice. It’s like saying, “If this thing which is not going to happen actually happened, then we would be saved.”
The statement is true, but we’re still not going to be saved.
Finally, Gore turns salvation into damnation. He tells us that if we fail to make the choice he demands of us…
Then we deserve to be condemned.
He imagines a generation years from now that realizes just how badly it’s been screwed by our careless inaction. He concludes that those future people…
“would be entirely justified in looking backward at us in our time as a criminal generation that they would curse endlessly as the architects of humanity’s destruction.”
Notice those words of attack: “criminal,” “curse endlessly,” and “architects of destruction.”
If
If you commit yourself to a Salvation Story…
It will turn you mean.
If you play Savior or Savee, either one, this will be your life…
You will damn and be damned in return.
And sooner or later you will learn that…
Falling for a salvation is like falling in love with someone who hates you.
