Civility in the age of rage: why we need to work together and calm down

This Opinion piece is by Craig Silliphant, a writer, editor, critic, broadcaster and creative director based in Saskatoon.

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Is it just me, or do we all seem to be a lot angrier these days?

One minute you're cool and the next you're unleashing the giant green monster within and roaring, "Hulk smash!" When the moment passes, you're left with nothing but shame and tattered, oversized pants.

Plenty of things make me angry. Some are big, like racism and homophobia. Others are little, like people who post their Wordle scores online every cussin' day.

The problem is the angriest people are getting scarier. They send death threats as easily as waving to their neighbour. They spray paint anti-Chinese sentiments on Vietnamese donut shops. They storm a stage to demand satisfaction by smacking Chris Rock in the mouth.

I will concede that maybe the Oscar telecast would get some actual viewers if it added some thrilling duelling action. Loser goes straight into the In Memoriam segment.

Choking on anger pie

Thankfully not all of us are terrible human beings, but it does feel like ordinary people are losing some of their politeness and civility.

A famous philosopher once said, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Okay, fine, it was Yoda in The Phantom Menace. Coincidentally that movie is so bad it fills me with eye-popping rage.

But Yoda is right. Anger is a poison you intend to feed someone else, but end up eating yourself. There are a lot of calories in anger pie. It really bungs you up, too. There aren't enough prunes in the universe to help pass the hard pebbles of indignant fury.

Last week I saw a Facebook post about liking pineapple on a pizza. You'd think they'd said they wanted to make out with Hitler. The commenters went nuclear. People raged at the idea that the poster might have a personal opinion, different from theirs, about the subjective taste of something.

Then came the backlash. The other side hollered that if you don't allow pineapple on pizza then you're a woke snowflake discriminating against our Charter of Freedoms of Unfettered Fruit Consumption.

There were insults, name-calling, and someone Gordan Ramsay-screaming in all caps, "YER A TRUDEAU LOVER! I SEEN HE EATS PINEAPPLE! I'LL TAKE YOU AND YER BOYFRIEND TRUDOPE TO THE TRAIN STATION!" 

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you have to admit it was frighteningly believable. You've probably seen several threads like it in the past week. 

Where is all this anger coming from? 

COVID fatigue? Trump-style politics? Hulk-causing vaccines?

Sure, the pandemic and politics drive a lot of it. But the real engines are social media algorithms. The AI knows that Trump, Trudeau, or whatever other topic will burrow under your skin and compel you to keep doom-scrolling. 

Once they have us, they can feed us anything. Conspiracy becomes reality. Bill Gates puts dinosaur DNA in our beer. COVID was caused by psychic lasagnas from space. The Earth isn't round, it's actually sort of a parallelogram.

Disagree and you go from family to enemy. Before you know it, you're so wound-up that it makes complete sense to lay a smackdown like Will Smith playing whack-a-mole on speed. 

Meanwhile, the dot-com billionaires and politicians who see the opportunities in dividing us get richer. They socially engineer things like, you know, the end of democracy. 

Take back civility

So how do we fix this?

More weed? Free Slayer albums for cathartic head-banging release? Yoga? The Purge? The Yoga Purge?

Here's a radical idea: maybe we just listen to each other? Discuss things calmly?

They want us to be dumb, angry mobs. I say we make like we're in a heartfelt Tim Hortons commercial and roll down the rims around our hearts.

We're more alike than we think. Let's take civility back.

After all, we've got crucial things to figure out together, from ending wars to curing diseases to deciding whether pineapple belongs on a pizza.

It does, by the way. I mean, how can you even have a Hawaiian pizza without pineapple? THEN IT'S JUST A HAM PIZZA! WHAT STUPID IDIOT SOCIOPATH WANTS THAT? HULK SMASH!

Sorry. Deep breaths. Urge to Hulk subsiding. All good.

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