I’ve spent my entire life trying to answer this question.
I’m an altruist. I was born an altruist. There is a growing body of evidence that altruism is genetic, and that an altruist has no more choice in being an altruist than a sociopath has in being a sociopath. Certainly I know that my compulsion to help others is so uncontrollable that I could no sooner refuse than I could cut my own throat. In the limbic brain are “mirror cells” responsible for allowing us to empathize, to project ourselves into another person and ask how we would feel in that person’s situation. Sociopaths have too few or malfunctioning mirror cells; altruists have too many. When I see injustice or unfairness, I feel pain as if it was happening to me. My choice was to live with the rage and pain of the entire world… or find some way to do something about it.
In the beginning I tried a long, long list of things, methods I’d been told could be used to fight injustice. I invested time volunteering for political parties, reading political literature, talking to politicians, writing letters to the editor, and so on. It didn’t take me long to realize that I could spend my entire life doing that and not change one single thing. So I went to college and began studying journalism; if I couldn’t effect change myself through the system, I could alert others to do the same. It took me even less time to realize that “alerting others” does sweet fuck-all when (a) there are so many others creating the problems who have much, much bigger megaphones, and (b) most people don’t really care for anything beyond either themselves, their family, or their tribe, depending on the efficacy of their mirror cells. It was then that I decided that “sending a message” and working within the system was a total waste of time.
Once I had realized that “the system” was a shell game designed to waste the time, energy, and resources of the small handful of people trying to fix the problems, it wasn’t hard to decide that my choices were either to learn how to swallow my rage or to begin smashing my way out of the system and forcing the world to change through sheer manifestation of Will. You’re in a similar situation right now. You can either internalize your anger or externalize it; that is, you can either focus the Thanatos—the destructive urge—on yourself, or you can focus it on someone else. The towering, white-hot, unconquerable mountain of rage I live with can’t be let entirely loose without harming a lot of people who don’t deserve it. I’m forced to swallow a lot of it and have therefore been forced to live my whole life with untreatable clinical depression. But there are times and places where, through careful planning and understanding of the broader situation, I have been able to simply let loose; to stop swallowing that anger and turn it wholly free, gibbering and howling. See my avatar? That photo of me comes from a newspaper article about an action I organized. The rage and passion you see here is real, the monster let loose complete with flecks of saliva in my beard.
The way I was able to find something I could profitably invest my rage in was to work backwards from my goals, something I now teach young organizers. I had to decide what it is I really wanted, what I would consider my “goal line.” Then I methodically worked out what skills, resources, and pre-conditions I would need to bring it about. These things were also out of my reach, so I needed to work out which skills, resources, and pre-conditions would need to be available to reach those steps. Then I repeated the whole thing again and again until I reached a point where I already had everything I needed to achiever it. The result was a very clear, step-by-step map of everything I needed to have and know and do to to fix the terrible injustices which burn my soul like fire.
You need to sit down with your husband and figure out what your goal line is. You can’t do anything until you know exactly what it is you’re aiming for. Do you want to stay where you’re living now? Punish your landlord? Punish all landlords? Completely destroy the oppressive system of rents and propertariansism? Whatever it is, when you’re both in agreement that this will satisfy your rage, you need to figure out how to transform your anger from hot to cold. Flaming, incandescent rage is good for charging a line of riot police, but it’s counter-productive when you’re trying to make plans. You must learn how to use your anger to make you cold and focused. That cold rage can allow you to ignore hunger, fatigue, despair, and fear, and keep you going long after everyone else has given up. You’ll know when your anger has switched from hot to cold because it’ll feel like a big lump of ice in your chest. You’ll feel remarkably calm, but with an impossible, sharpened-to-a-razor-edge focus. Once you’ve got that, you can begin working out the steps necessary to fix your situation, working backwards from your goal. And when you reach the point where you’ve got a direct path between where you are now and your goal, it’s simply a matter of having the necessary force of Will to take step after grim, furious step to walk that path.
Many years ago, I was in city hall, in a meeting with a bunch of city councillors and the city’s legal department. We had set up a street newspaper distribution system so panhandlers wouldn’t have to beg; they could sell newspapers instead. They liked it because they felt better about themselves and made more money. Passsers-by liked it because it wasn’t just people with their hands out expecting a gift. The police liked it because they stopped getting complaints. It was win/win for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for the business associations, who are totally butt-blasted about street vending, and have spent decades and huge sums of money shutting it down. We had been getting around the anti-vending bylaws by having people distributing the newspapers “for a suggested donation.” At this meeting, the city’s lawyers had just announced they were changing the definition of “vending” in the bylaw to mean “handing anything to anyone without the intention of getting it back.” It was completely outrageous, and it meant the end of our program.
I remember very clearly what happened next, because every detail is etched in my memory in incredible detail. I remember who was present, what the room looked like, where I was sitting at the table, what the clock read, and what I was wearing. I had just finished saying that we wouldn’t let them shut us down, that we’d break their law and fight it in court. The city councillor sitting across from me visibly sneered, leaned forward, and said, “Do you think we care? Go ahead. We don’t care.”
And at that moment I got a surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline like I’ve only rarely felt before, and generally only in life-threatening situations. I knew then that I was either going to reach across that table and smash the councillor in the face – or I was about to dedicate a significant portion of the rest of my life to making her care. My rage flipped from hot to cold and I made the iron-shod existential decision that I would do anything necessary to make her care. I don’t remember what happened after that. The rest of the meeting is a blur in my memory. But the moment of my decision is burned into my soul with fire. And I have spent the subsequent 15 years organizing the street, going to war with the police and business and city hall and any son of a bitch who gets in my way. And my cold rage is just as strong today as it was that day when I sat across from a city councillor and dedicated my life to shoving her words down her throat.
Right now you’re feeling powerless and helpless because you don’t know what to do. If you can work out a plan and use your helpless rage to focus yourself on that path, you will find that you have the strength of force of Will to do whatever is necessary, whether it’s fighting in court, picketing the landlord’s home, convincing media to cover your story, or putting a bullet in your landlord’s brainpan.
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