RAGE RITUALS

     Anybody living in the Postmodern English-speaking world well understands that outrage is more or less a defining characteristic of our society. It's not that people focus reasoned or righteous anger at gross injustice; what we tend to witness in just about any community setting today is something more like a temper-tantrums or schoolyard playground fights except that people well beyond the toddler stage engage in it. Trigger Warnings are even put out as disclaimers on some news stories or opinion pieces. Even in my small town recently the library's copier was severely damaged after someone went berserk and started trashing the place.

    As surprising as it sounds in today's America, these outbursts not infrequently result in consequences, such as the case mentioned above where the outburst occasioned Malicious Mischief charges. Apparently, however, some opportunists have figured out a way to cash in on Ameroboob Anger: introducing the Rage Ritual. 

    Rage Rituals are a variation on an earlier scam from the 1970s called Primal Scream Therapy. The earlier version mostly preyed on people of higher income levels who never grew out of the rich spoiled brat stage---adjusted for inflation, it cost about $45,000 of today's dollars. The modern version is much less expensive though consumers don't get the advantage of a private setting: they get a stick and sent out to a secluded spot in the woods. 

    According to the promoters of this new trend, the overwhelming number of participants in these programs are women, whom they claim have an excess of repressed rage in our culture. Speaking for myself, I haven't especially noticed much actual repression among the fair sex; but I suppose that we must defer to the experts here and ignore the complaints about mean girls and videos of women brawling on social media as fake news.

   I suppose too that, in a culture where wearing diapers is considered a profound political statement, this kind of trend was inevitable. However, an especially troubling aspect of it is that there is a strong element of the occult involved. 

  "For years, self-described 'Spiritual Fairy Godmother' Mia Magik has led rage rituals in Scotland. She began doing them for herself and her friends, before adding them as an option to her wellness retreats...During the rage ritual, Magik guides the participants to sit with their deepest emotions, walking them through warm-ups and deep breaths. Typically, she tells them to conjure 'every person who’s ever crossed you, who’s ever hurt you, who’s ever ignored your boundaries or taken advantage of you or abused you in any way.'" 

   This is diametrically opposed to what most traditional religions teach. Could anyone imagine Jesus reacting to injustice or abuse in this way? Religious teachers taught that one overcomes Evil with Good: or to put in clinical terms, one learns firsthand how abuse and injustice actually affects people and they mature spiritually either by practicing better behavior or helping others who experience the same feelings. To put it in more mundane terms, it's part of growing up. Running around screaming, striking, and breaking things is neither spiritual, reasonable,  nor mature. The occult aspect of this kind of 'therapy' teaches one to focus on oneself and symbolically striking out in revenge. 

  Rage Rituals are a regressive form of behavior, from the clinical standpoint. As practiced, they actually reinforce the tendency to react violently under stress. Given how much these charlatans change for these sessions, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes if one of their clients gets the idea that they may have been cheated. 

  In the larger scheme of things, the rage that we constantly see in our culture is not only fanned by media and political propaganda (and both our politicians and media figures set terrible examples of behavior), it is the direct result of the decline of the family, schools, and churches: figures once associated with civilizing authority. As one social psychologist stated: "The decline of institutionalized authority in an ostensibly permissive society does not, however, lead to a 'decline of the superego' {i.e., the Conscience} in individuals. It encourages instead a harsh, punitive superego that derives most of its psychic energy in the absence of authoritative social prohibitions from the aggressive, destructive impulses within the id {i.e. primitive instincts}. Unconscious, irrational elements come to dominate its operation. As authority figures in modern society increasingly lose their credibility, the superego in individuals increasingly derives from childhood's primitive fantasies about his parents---fantasies charged with sadistic rage---rather than from internalized ego ideals formed by later experience with loved and respected models of social conduct."

   In other words, the long-standing neglect of children in our culture is starting to bear its fruits, of which both Rage Rituals and their less-organized and spontaneous eruptions are a symptom. These are social problems entirely of our own making; and we need to stop pretending that it will all go away by denying or ignoring it.