Forgiveness In An Age of Anger: Brant Hansen (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Brant Hansen’s talk titled “Forgiveness In An Age of Anger at TEDxHarrisburg 2016 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Year of Outrage

Thank you. So last year, maybe you saw this, Slate.com declared last year “A Year of Outrage.” They have an interactive calendar where you can actually go in—you should do this—you can go on their calendar and pick a day from 2015. Whatever day it is, you can click on it, and it will tell you what everybody was upset about that day on Twitter.

That day on Facebook, everybody was mad about this. So it doesn’t even matter what day it is, there’s always something. We’re outraged, we’re ticked. It defines our politics, it defines the way people interact with each other on the road. We’re angry.

And I have a crazy idea about this thing, this anger thing, and I want to bounce it off you. Now, you should know this: I work in radio, so I encounter all sorts of opinions. I know my idea is crazy because people say, “That’s crazy, and you’re an idiot,” and things like that.

That gives me, I have subtle antenna for that sort of thing, and it makes it clear that they don’t think I’m on the right track. But when they start, that’s initially, but when we start thinking about it, this crazy idea might work. I actually made my own graphic to kind of illustrate how people process new ideas that I’ve learned from working on the radio. I did that myself, Windows Paint, so I have a gift for that, but that’s generally how it works.

Like, if this affirms me, yeah, and if it doesn’t, then no. This is how we’re wired.

I understand it. We’re human.

Understanding Anger

We get angry. Anger’s a human emotion. I understand it. Sometimes it’s helpful, like in a fight or flight scenario, it’s helpful.

But I had been raised, I was raised in the Midwest in church culture, and I was taught, well, there’s good anger, Brant, and there’s bad anger. The bad anger is, you know, the anger you shouldn’t have, but the good anger is righteous anger, and that’s when you should be angry, and you should never let it go. Stay angry. I was trying to figure out, well, how does forgiveness work into that?

I mean, that’s kind of a radical idea to let something go when people don’t deserve to be forgiven. Like, if they’ve done something, I can call my anger righteous, but am I the best judge of that? So, a few things, the crazy idea is this: we shouldn’t trust our anger, and we should forgive people. Now, that sounds nuts, but I want to address a few things, just questioning our anger just a little bit.

Questioning Our Anger

Number one thing I think we should question: why would I want to live the rest of my life in perpetual shock at how humans behave? Really, on the road, if I’m on 83, and somebody cuts me off, and I’m like, “I can’t believe they cut me off. I can’t believe this happened. Somebody cut me off.”

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Like, how many times have you been on 83 before? How many times have you been on Front Street? I can’t believe there’s construction going on. Maybe believe it.

This happens. Same thing with, like, your mom. I hear people complaining about, “Mom, I can’t believe my mom said this, I can’t believe my dad, I can’t believe my mother-in-law would say, I can’t believe my sister.” How long has your mom been saying stuff like that?

47 years. Okay, go ahead and believe it, because apparently this is what your mom does. Is it incumbent on me, at some point, to say, “You know what, maybe I shouldn’t be shocked anymore by how humans behave. Maybe this is how they are.”

I don’t want to be shocked. It doesn’t mean it’s okay. It doesn’t mean the behavior is okay. But I don’t want to be shocked the rest of my life, and just say, “I can’t believe someone would be this way.”

No, I can. People can be that way. They always have been. So that’s one thing I would want to ask.

Questioning Our Confidence

The second thing is, why am I so confident in my side of everything? Because we are. We’re very confident that we’re right. I learned this from a principal, about this, from watching a show, some of you won’t remember, but it was called “The People’s Court.”

Great show to grow up on. After school, I’d come home and I’d learn all about humanity from this show. But they would start with, the plaintiff would come in, they had this little half door, I guess, to keep kids out or something, I don’t know. But they’d come down the middle aisle, and they’d make, “Dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.”

And the guy would say, “The plaintiff claims,” I remember this case specifically, I actually remember this specific case. “The plaintiff claims that he and his family of seven were made violently ill by the pizza at the defendant’s pizzeria. They were food sick and so they’re suing for $1,500.” I’m like, well man, if all seven of them got sick, case closed!

What are we even doing here? It’s over. If they all got sick after eating pizza, what’s left? Well, the defendant comes in.

The defendant is actually the plaintiff’s brother, and he says he’s been suing him for everything for the last, like, he’s never been in his pizzeria, and I’m like, oh. Well, there’s an ancient proverb, actually in the Book of Proverbs, it actually says, “The first to testify always seems right, until he’s cross-examined.” Well, who’s the first to testify in my own head? It’s me.

I don’t have somebody else’s motivations in mind. I can’t know their motivations. I barely know my own. It’s hard to be honest about my own, but if you notice, all the narratives we write about any conflict we have is, “I’m the victim.”

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We don’t know what the other person’s angle is, but I guarantee that theirs is, “I’m the victim.” Why am I so confident in myself, always thinking I’m right?

Does Anger Help Fight Injustice?

The third thing I think we should question: does it really help me fight injustice to be angry? Because a lot of people will say, “No, I need anger because it helps me fight injustice.”

I would propose to you that it doesn’t. Now it might at first help you to do something, at first, give you a burst, again, for fight or flight, it’s very understandable, very natural, it’s a good thing, but it actually doesn’t help your judgment over the long term, and you know this, your anger doesn’t help you make better decisions. You don’t see the Incredible Hulk suddenly stop, “Maybe I should move some money to my 401k.” You know, it’s not like you’re going to make judicious decisions, and in fact, I have proof of this, in terms of fighting injustice, you’re better off being clear-headed, consistent, relentless, cunning, compassionate.

These are not things that are synonymous with anger. We don’t want our police, and they’re charged with fighting injustice, that’s what they’re charged with doing. We don’t want them angry. We don’t want judges angry.

We want them to carry out justice in a clear-headed way. What’s weird about this is anger can actually stop you from taking action. We think, no, it’s good for action, no, no, action is good, remember that, action is good against injustice. I’m not saying don’t fight injustice, what I’m saying is don’t confuse your anger for actually doing something, and people do this.

There was a University of British Columbia study recently about social media activism, and they found that the people who click on activities, and actions, and causes, and they’re upset, or they post about something, are less likely to actually do something, and the reason they postulate, and it makes sense to me, is you feel like, “I took a stand, I got angry,” well, but you didn’t do anything. “I tweeted,” okay, but it actually wasn’t sacrificial, it just helps you feel good about yourself, and you can check that box, like I did something. Your anger will fool you into thinking you’ve taken action, but action is actually what we need to fight injustice, not anger.

The Physical Effects of Anger

Another thing about anger, too, now that I think about it, it’ll kill you, if you hold on to it forever, it has deleterious physical effects, maybe you’ve seen Robert Sapolsky talk about this, he’s a Stanford neuroendocrinologist, and he talks about how animals, like him, humans, are wired with a fight-or-flight reflex, but for them, it’s over in 30 seconds, one way or the other, like a zebra’s running away from a lion, all of this physiological stuff happens, but it’s over soon, it’s over, but for humans, we’ll hold on to it indefinitely, we’re the only ones who can do that, but over time, all those physiological responses are not supposed to be sustained.

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It’s funny, too, because looking back on my upbringing, and as somebody who looks to the Bible and sees things that are wise, the people who taught me about righteous anger could never find that in the Bible, it’s not in there, only God’s anger is righteous in the Bible. But they would say, they’d use a particular verse of Christian scripture, which is, “In your anger do not sin,” and they would say, “See, it’s not sin, so it must be good,” but the rest of that verse, they always conveniently not memorize, it continues on, and it says, “And get rid of your anger before the sun goes down,” don’t hang on to it, it will kill you, it will poison your relationships with your neighbors, it’ll crop up in ways that you don’t realize in your other relationships, it’ll change your life for the worse.

Living with Forgiveness

We live in Midtown, and our neighbors do crazy stuff all the time, and we probably annoy them, too, unwittingly. Our next-door neighbor left a dead gopher in his backyard this last week, so we’re like, “Can you do something about the gopher, please?” We all have different views on life, it’s okay, dropping it makes life a lot sweeter, we can make this an ongoing family feud, but why?

Jill Bolte-Taylor, the neuroanatomist, and if you’re familiar with her story, she actually had a stroke, I think she was 37 years old, but she kind of reset her whole brain, and she was able, as somebody who’s into neuroscience, to kind of spectate on her whole life.

Now her brain restarted, and she said she was much happier after her stroke, and a big reason why, she said, I love this, she said, “I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be mad at.” Well, if she can live that way, apparently we can do this, apparently you could actually decide, you know what, I’m going to try to just forgive people, and it’s not because they didn’t do something wrong, they did, they did. That’s why forgiveness is hard, but it actually makes your life better, and sweeter, and freer, it makes your neighborhood better, it makes Harrisburg better, it makes us all better.

Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it.