anger

'Managers help people to see themselves as they are. Leaders help people to see themselves better than they are.'

- Jim Rohn.

'The thing is that you are making me angry.' That is what a feminist acquaintance told me once during one of my visits to my old flat in Kolkata, and as it might have happen to you at some time or another, the thought of that phrase just keep popping up in my mind, for years.

I don't remember anymore the infamous tug-of-war that made this young lady angry in the first place. Perhaps was the fact that I don't like popcorn, or perhaps it was that I said that whales are not a plague after all, like some suggested.

It is not that I have kept a grudge about it; not at all, but nevertheless, the thing just persisted suggesting me its idiotic nature but without words. You know, like one of those things that you know it is terribly wrong, but you don't know how.

How can someone turn us angry? Do we have dial, like a microwave oven, or can our anger be controlled by infrarred devices, like your TV control? Isn't it demeaning to ourselves to suggest that someone else is 'making' us angry, happy, sad, etc.?

Bluntly said, it means that someone is controlling our minds. Just the thought, the expression, the notion that someone is able to manipulate us in such a way is to admit that we are not free after all.

Chilling.

Indeed, we are free but from ourselves. For all that matters, it is just to fool ourselves to pretend that our emotions, whether good or bad, justified or not, are controlled 100% by outside forces.

If someone 'makes us angry', then we are admitting to ourselves and to the world that we have no control over our emotions, that we have no sophistication because our minds cannot detect what comes from inside them, and what comes from the outside, treating exterior ideas as our own, thus letting others 'make us', or generating its own and pretending that they are not, thus pretending that others are 'making us.'

If we go on thorough our lives with such a posture; if we always act in such a way in front of our troubles. If we let ourselves be easily angered, offended or outraged, and instead of admitting that it is us who becomes so instead of being manipulated into such a state, then we are transforming ourselves into slaves of a self that we pretend that it is not in our minds but elsewhere

If that self acts, for all matters, like another being that controls us and we do not recognise as our own concoction but pretend to be from someone else's then what happens is that we relinquish control over that piece of brainy real-estate by assuming that it is our neighbour's.

However, since nobody else is able to read our minds, nobody could care less about our little conspiracy and so, this 'alien self' becomes orphaned.

Therefore, by 'letting others' control our minds instead of admitting our own emotions, mistakes and ideas, we are starting our way to truly become slaves of and orphan master who has no tangible existence.

Quite a stupid way to become a slave, isn't it? And what's more: ideologies such as feminism were born to free a significant part of our world from injustices and ignorance, and these are being embraced every day by lots of people seeking to be freed from others who 'make them' poor, sad or angry.

Most do that just to feel gratified. A few might generate some new ideas about the fact, but for all accounts, those are exceptional individuals.

We are pretending to save ourselves by assuming that we are brutes with no control over our fate. Quite an escapism, don't you think?

Life is about choices. Feminism, like many other political ideologies and philosophies, was born to bring equality to nothing more and less that 50% of the world's population.

However, like many ideologies, it represents two kinds of people: those who think, and those who don't, because every new idea is always take and juggled with by people who seek to improve them, and by people who just want to feel better by letting others explain their world.

The problem with ideas is not who has them, or even what those ideas really are; after all, we have democracy for all the related house chores. The problem in this world, and what transforms ideologies in fanaticism is who do not have ideas, and just import them from their outside.

So, next time someone else is 'making you', if you truly want to feel alive, feel proud of your own concoction, and don't look for aliens in your soup.