We need some angry men.

“But anger, like any powerful emotion, does not go away. It always goes somewhere. The wounded son will wound his son if he does not cleanse himself and break the cycle.”

— James Hollis

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Riots, violence and canaries in coalmines

I first began writing this post last August after several days of rioting in the UK, sparked by the killing of three girls in Southport and false rumours that subsequently circulated on social media.

In the weeks that followed, there was a huge response from across the mainstream media (and social media). A narrative and explanation quickly formed around what had happened. And as always happens, the explanation for something deeply complex was quite reductive and simplified.

I wrote long tracts of my original post, edited them, deleted them. Wrote them again, deleted them again. The world has moved on I thought - except it hasn’t really and we’re currently seeing a continuation of the same underlying conditions. Same as it ever was, except worse.

The post-UK riots narrative went something like this: ‘Social media inflamed tensions by spreading false rumours. Certain populist politicians joined in. Mobs of violent men went on a racist and xenophobic rampage. Therefore, we need to do something about these angry men and their proclivity for violence. We also need to regulate social media companies, as it was they who stoked up this trouble.’

Like any cultural narrative that takes hold, it contains many elements of truth and some elements of an explanation. Many of the men were certainly violent, some clearly racist or expressing racist views, and social media certainly played an essential role in enabling men to gather.

But the narrative also does something else: it misdirects, identifies the wrong underlying cause and excludes crucial details that help us to understand things that run counter to this mainstream narrative. It also lets the real culprits off the hook.

As someone who experienced a lot of racism growing up in the UK, watching the footage of the riots was deeply disturbing, but I couldn’t help noticing things that weren’t being commented on. For instance, the sense of carnival about the whole thing. It looked and felt like a day out for many young people.

And I say ‘people’ deliberately. I noticed in footage from different cities that whilst the rioters were mostly men, there were also women present in the crowds. More than once, I saw what looked like young heterosexual couples laughing and joking as they watched acts of destruction, as if at a comedy show.

Photo by Christopher Furlong, Getty Images

And I couldn’t help but notice that all of the riots were in suburbs of cities that experienced severe deprivation, many of them former industrial towns and mining communities. So whilst the foreground of that footage looked like the 1984 miners’ strikes, the background often looked like an 90s rave.

One of the most insightful pieces of reporting I’ve seen is this piece in The Guardian titled ‘Local. Left behind. Prey to populist politics? What the data tells us about the 2024 UK rioters’. As good journalism should, it takes a close look at the actual evidence and seeks deeper narratives to help us understand what took place and why.

The report found, for instance, that a disproportionate number of rioters who were charged with crimes came from deprived backgrounds: “The area has levels of deprivation higher than the average for both England and Manchester. Close to two-thirds of households are considered deprived, substantially above the average. It is a common trait across the neighbourhoods from which the rioters hail. Well over half of those charged with offences – most commonly violent disorder – came from the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods.”

The data also showed that rioters were far more likely to be in poor health and unemployed. The report quotes Dr Stephanie Alice Baker, a sociologist at the University of London and advisor to UK Parliament. She described these rioters as people who have been “left behind… decades of austerity, a cost of living crisis, the pandemic, inflation, rising rents, mortgages and energy bills have intensified collective grievances.”

The dominant narrative that took hold, and still persists, overlooked the larger, more fundamental macro issues underneath all of this. This wasn’t really about male anger or violence; that was the outcome rather than the cause. What this was really about was sections of society who have been screwed over, exploited, alienated and demonised for generations.

“Riots are always the canary in the cage. They reveal broader issues in society. The claim of ‘mindlessness’ serves to hide the signal they send.”

— Stephen Reicher, Professor of Psychology, University of St. Andrews

Image from The Guardian

It’s the economy, stupid (and the community).

Show me a man who has a job that gives him basic dignity and pays a fair wage, who has enough time and resources be in a relationship, who has friends and a sense of connection to a community, and that has supportive role models in his life - and I’ll show you a man extremely unlikely to be radicalised, or to inflict hatred and violence on to others.

In the last 50 years, neo-liberal capitalism has ravaged jobs, education, healthcare, communities and social structures across developed countries (this interview with George Monbiot is an excellent explainer of this economic ideology). At the same time, whilst feminism has made progress in changing possibilities for women’s role in society, there has been no corresponding social shift for men.

So whilst traditional male roles and identities are being asked to change, there is little empathy or patience and scarce resources for men to re-examine their identities. Nor is there an acknowledgement of the confusion and fear this might bring.

This should be no surprise really. Modern capitalism depends on men being isolated, in competition with each other and viewing themselves only as providers. Marx described alienation as being distanced from the means of production. This has been the lived experience for almost everyone since the dawn of modernity and capitalism.

For men and boys, it has come hand in hand with a deep socialisation that alienates them from their own feelings and from each other. To be ‘feeling’ as a man is weak and inconvenient to the demands of capitalism. To be gathered in collectives and communities is a threat to the power structures of capitalism, the owners of capital.

I saw a few lines someone shared on Substack recently, that said something like this: It shouldn’t be considered radical to expect that someone working in McDonald’s can afford to pay their rent, their bills, to buy groceries and to live - because that’s the point of having a fucking job.

And yet, in the space of just a few decades, the possibility of having a single blue-collar job and supporting yourself or a family has been eroded - and we’ve barely noticed. Blue-collar work like manufacturing is no longer the secure choice it used to be, and vast numbers of people, especially men, have been forced in multiple gig-economy jobs which are even less secure, lacking in dignity and barely make ends meet.

“Today less than 25 per cent of [UK] workers have their terms and conditions set by negotiations between unions and employers (one of the lowest levels in Europe). But in the 1970s over 80 per cent of UK workers were covered by a collective agreement. That drop is the reason that real wages have not risen since 2007... More people are on benefits in work than those on benefits out of work. Some 14.4 million of our citizens live in poverty and 3.8 million in destitution… Such is the triumph of neoliberalism.”

— Lord John Hendy KC, Chair of the Institute of Employment Rights, ‘The neoliberal backdrop to the miners’ strike’

It seems to go unnoticed that gig jobs like Uber & cab driving, parcel delivery and fast food delivery are largely male workers. The prevailing narrative about the patriarchy focuses on the ‘tech bros’, male politicians and billionaires, holding them up as representative of all men when, in fact, they make up less than 0.1% of the male population. Importantly, these elite few are themselves instrumental in exploiting boys and men all over the world.

Whilst we may be shifting away from ‘provider’ as a dominant male archetype, men still need the dignity and purpose of work. It provides structure, meaning, self-sufficiency and connection.

Having decent, secure employment removes one of the fundamental lies that the far-right use to stoke anger and hatred: that immigrants have taken all of the jobs. And crucially, it also weakens the notion that female empowerment and liberation are a threat to masculine identity, something that numerous male influencers like to claim.

That TV show

One of the other significant cultural moments since I first started writing this post, was the release of a TV mini-series in the UK called ‘Adolescence’. You’ve probably heard of it, it seems to have become a global phenomenon.

I watched the show a little while after it was released, as my wife and I wanted to watch it together. In the period before we saw it, I was constantly hearing from people asking if I’d watched it and sharing their opinions on what it portrayed.

In case you haven’t watched it, I’ll do my best to summarise it concisely. It depicts a lower-middle-class family, a mum and dad with a son and a daughter, living in suburbia somewhere in northern England. The show centres on the 13-year old son, Jamie, who commits an awful crime, stabbing a girl to death. We later learn that he has been radicalised by hateful ‘manosphere’ content and social media, all from the supposed safety of his bedroom computer.

We also witness a loving family doing their best, with a focus on a father who works shifts and long hours running his plumbing business to provide for his family. The show later explores his feelings of failure and disbelief that having supposedly done all the right things, he still feels he has failed his son.

There’s much more to the show, including a whole thread with the police officers investigating the murder and the female psychologist who assesses Jamie.

There were all sorts of critiques about the show and what it tells us, but one theme in particular that struck me was on anger - specifically ‘male anger’, a term I see a lot in public discourse but without much exploration of it.

Much of the critique focused on the final episode, which is set a year after the murder with Jamie still in custody and awaiting trial at which he will plead guilty.

In that episode, it is the father’s 50th birthday. We see the family rise for breakfast determined to make it a celebration. The attempt at joy is soon punctured when the father goes outside to see graffiti sprayed in large letters on his work van: ‘PAEDO’.

We learn later that it is the work of local teenagers who cycle past and taunt him. We also learn that, due to the very public nature of his son’s crime, his business is on the brink of collapse as no-one wants to hire him.

They scrap their plans for birthday breakfast and head to the local hardware store so he can buy some paint to cover the graffiti. Taunted again by the teenagers, he explodes in rage.

He grabs one of the boys by his hoodie and screams in his face “Do you think this is fucking funny?”. He lets go of the boy and throws his bike after him as he runs away.

He returns to his van and hurls a tin of paint over it in rage. A security guard asks him if he’s going to clean up the mess in the car park. His fury deepens and he grabs a screwdriver points it at the security guard and tells him to fuck off.

On the drive home, his wife and daughter are visibly upset as he tries to calm himself down. At home, in the final scene, he and his wife speak in the bedroom where he breaks down in tears. We learn that he had a violent father who abused him as a child and he is determined not to become that man. Importantly, we also learn that he has never been violent or physical with his family.

Much was made of this final episode. Many found it shocking that this father was so full of rage. Some suggested he was a kind of monster, that this sort of anger was unacceptable and dangerous.

As a father, I watched it and was incredibly moved. And my reaction was mostly one of recognition. Angry? Of course he’s fucking angry.

He’s a man who was abused as a boy. He’s avoided becoming the violent man his father was, and is a loving and hardworking father. Yet his son has committed murder and is now about to go to prison. He is wracked with his own guilt and confusion. His business is collapsing, his humiliation is very public and he is being taunted, for no reason other than cruelty, as a padeophile.

Given all of that, good God, I’d be fucking livid.

And in truth, I felt his rage as I watched - I really felt it as if I knew it. The sheer helplessness of his situation, the grief, the shame, the collapse of his world.

I know that I, too, have that rage somewhere inside me. And I know that it is important that I know this about myself, rather than live in denial.

And why wouldn’t he, or I, feel that anger? Who gets to decide what we feel and how feel it?

“This behavior, this trait in the other person that causes you to react negatively—do you realize that he or she is not responsible for it? You can hold on to your negative feelings only when you mistakenly believe that he or she is free and aware and therefore responsible. But who ever did evil in awareness?”

— Anthony De Mello

This is one of the central cultural impacts of modernity on masculinity - the notion that all emotions are weak with the exception of anger.

This father was not a man seeking to inflict hurt or violence on to others, it was a man in utter desolation who knew no other way to respond - for he had not been raised or socialised to know any other way to respond.

In that final scene with his wife, we see him expressing his own shame, telling his wife she was the far better parent than he, that it is he alone who has failed. She reminds him that’s not true.

They cry together, they embrace, they laugh and show their love for each other, two people who have been together since they met at school. Their love is moving and present throughout the show.

But few wanted to talk about this. It was far easier to talk about the angry monster, a denial of the reality of what it means to be human, that we can be full of rage and full of love in the same day.

And in this framing was a limiting of what men are allowed to be, that anger is also not acceptable.

I understand where this stems from - a fear of the violence and abuse that so many men inflict on women and on each other, since the beginning of humankind. But denying men their anger or stigmatising it as an emotion only makes things worse. Repression of emotion is only ever a temporary illusion.

The anger that breaks a man down into boys,
that breaks the boy down into equal birds,
and the bird, then, into tiny eggs;
the anger of the poor
owns one smooth oil against two vinegars.

— Cesar Vallejo

The essential nature of anger

Anger is a fundamental emotion, one that we all experience and usually quite early in life. The American neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp proposed the existence of seven primary emotional systems in the brains of mammals: Seeking, Lust, Care, Play, Anger, Fear and Sadness.

His work itself was pre-dated by foundational research on human emotions. In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions and Robert Plutchik’s Emotions Wheel (1980) defined eight basic emotions.

Numerous other studies and even spiritual traditions define a variety of basic emotions, varying from six to as many as ten. And all of them include anger as a basic emotion.

Panksepp proposed that anger was an ancestral inheritance, one that was instinctual but could be moderated by the sophisticated cognitive processes of the modern human brain. In his research with Margaret Zellner on the emotional systems, he described anger as an emotion that can support “goal-directed behaviour”.

“Some of these necessarily or indirectly lead to the physical harm or damage of things or people -- but some do only psychological harm, while others may involve no harm at all, as is the case with assertive actions to get one’s needs met. However, we do believe that all of these behaviors still deserve to be grouped under one umbrella because of what they have in common: effortful action.”

- Jaak Panksepp and Margaret Zellner

In other words, with appropriate consciousness and mental function, anger can provide the essential fuel to take action.

From the psychoanalytical perspective, James Hollis writes “The Indo-Germanic root angh ("to constrict") gives rise to the English words angst, anxiety, angina and anger. Perceived threats to the well-being of the organism involuntarily and repeatedly occasion this range of emotions. The child instinctually, intuitively, knows what is needed and feels both anger at betrayal and sorrow at the loss of the necessary nurturant Other.”

Anger, then, is a natural emotion, a healthy and essential response, especially if it is conscious and safely expressed. It often signals some other unspoken need or unfelt emotion.

And when repressed, anger can often be referred or displaced, leaking out in surprising ways or onto unsuspecting people.

“Isn’t it an intellectual tragedy that we have so little basic animal brain research on the nature of anger—such a pervasive problem in so many individual lives as well as our society as a whole?”

— Jaak Panksepp

As well as a general repression and stigmatisation of anger, what is also lacking in modern developed nation cultures are the rituals and practices that might help boys, before they become men, to know and work with their anger.

I once spoke with a Jungian consultant who had also been a martial arts instructor alongside his wife for over 20 years. They had both witnessed many boys and young men enter the dojo ready to fight, only to be easily taught a lesson by someone smaller but more experienced. What they had to learn very quickly, he said, was how to control and channel their anger.

Mobs, heroism and counter-anger.

The UK riots last year had echoes of the January 6th US insurrection in 2020, where mostly male mobs stormed the Capitol building.

It is worth noting - for it is easily forgotten - that although the people storming the building were mostly men, the people protecting the building and the people inside were also men.

I was deeply moved and shocked by the story of Michael Fanone, a Washington DC police officer who, in attempting to hold the line against the rioters, was dragged into the crowd and beaten unconscious. His own anger and his skill with aggression almost certainly saved lives - in hearing the emergency call for support, he came from across the city to defend the politicians who would later scorn and betray him.

Michael Fanone amongst the mob at the Capitol, image from Politico.

The reasons behind this horrific episode of violence are too varied and complex to capture here or perhaps to even fully understand at all. But one of the key underlying conditions surely is the large constituency of dispossessed and alienated men that the US has created through its economic and political ideologies over the last few decades - the same shifts and forces that led to the UK riots.

And here, the political and social context is essential when talking about men. We will likely see more of this as we witness more brutality and oppression as late-stage capitalism crumbles. What we are already seeing is a collapse in living standards and a frantic response by those in power to the realisation that their power is finite.

Their answer is not to try to solve this but to turn people on each other, and, for some political parties, alienated men are the ideal constituency to prey on. Their anger is being stoked and harvested.

Our anger, if we feel it appropriate, should be directed at the tiny elite of people and institutions that orchestrate so much of it.

Understanding anger is not the same as tolerating violence. Understanding anger is not the same as accepting or inviting it. Understanding anger is the route to fighting for a change of conditions that mean our rage at the world becomes less necessary.

Rather than treating it with some avoidant or shaming response, men’s anger needs to be legitimised through an understanding and channelling of it.

There is a reason why, over the last four decades, governments all over the world have dismantled or weakened workers unions - it prevents men from collaborating and directing their anger at those who are oppressing and exploiting them.

We forget that patriarchy is an elite game, and that even those men who appear to be ‘winning’ are usually losing. We have now reached a point where even the wealthy middle-classes are stressed, unhealthy, addicted and constantly not feeling enough.

They are chasing the modernist ‘retirement fantasy’ that one day they will have enough to stop and then they will get to truly live their lives, doing the things they really care about and spending time with the people they love.

I know many of these men. As they slowly come to terms with the realisation they will never be in the 1%, a bitterness can take hold, and forms of depression or acting out can occur. An ugly unconscious anger can arise too, causing incredible harm to themselves and to those around them. In our culture, we simply call this midlife.

What if instead this anger were directed at their own systemic oppression where it might have great impact on creating better circumstances for everyone?

What if this anger were a signal for men to remember what they are truly longing for underneath it all?

War

As I bring this drawn-out piece to a close, tensions in the Middle East have intensified once more as the US and Israel have bombed Iran. The murdering seems to have no end.

It would be reductive to frame this death and destruction as a result of male anger, even if it does hold a kernel of truth.

But more importantly, would it not be normal, healthy and justified to see some male anger in response to this endless warmongering that only makes us all less safe? Where is it?

“Rage is here because love is needed.”

— Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

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