the problem of addictive rage

On Using Dopamine to Fuel Hatred

I have an admission to make; I have never made it before, at least not publicly.

I used to be addicted to my anger.

In the right situation, I could become enraged at almost anything: our horrible cable company; the supermarket butcher when I unwrapped the pork chops and they stank of rotten meat slime; the post office worker across town who engages customers in long conversations and ignores the growing line of people slithering out the door; our insurance company for keeping me on hold for two hours to approve an MRI for which I contractually do not need approval; the rude front of house person who put me and my wife at a makeshift table by the bathroom door rather than have people older than twenty-five sitting in the empty dining room; the neanderthals teeing off behind us, who don’t love it when one of us helpless ladies drives 250 yards to the green; my mother, for spending the grocery money we give her on thirty-one tubes of lipstick, despite the fact that she never goes out.

Hell hath no fury.

Years ago, in my heavy drinking, food-writer days — by heavy I mean a stiff pre-dinner cocktail (Manhattan, or Gibson) and a shared bottle of wine or two, which, for some, isn’t heavy at all, but I’ve stopped comparing — our Saturday nights would start out blissfully. Standing in the kitchen, cooking. My wife, who excels at precision, would be in charge of chopping the perfect mirepoix. I’m good at the sear-braise-sauce-reduce stuff. Music would be on: Coleman Hawkins, or Billie Holiday, or Shawn Colvin. Everything would be lovely, until, at glass of wine number three, I’d slip down the proverbial slope. Susan says she could actually feel it happening; the winds would shift. The pitch of my voice would drop. We would be talking about the garden, or an impending vacation, or a hike that we wanted to do. Suddenly, I could feel my tumbleweed of rage rolling along, picking up frayed bits of history and anger and ancient resentment: Susan’s ex-girlfriend from 1993, whom we’d supported for years early on in our relationship because she had not yet identified her as a grifter, despite all evidence to the contrary. Susan’s inability to stand up for herself. Susan’s potentially fatal allergy to the telephone. My having given up my apartment in Manhattan when maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t have.

Minutes later, we’d both be in tears. Susan would fly out the door and disappear into the night, without her cell phone. I would sit on the front steps and wait for her to return, which she would. I would apologize to her, and I would mean it.

It has not happened in a very long while; I have spent many hours trying to understand and unravel it, and am much more cognizant of what used to happen to me after the third glass of wine, when my dopamine fuse lit up like a Christmas tree. It frightened me, because I remembered the nights when my parents would be at each other — my father drinking his Dewars, and my mother, her Soave — and I’d watch as my mother’s eyes changed mid-argument, and there was no pulling her back. Or when my father’s uncontrollable furies resulted in his being incomprehensible and unstoppable, before being exhausted and spent. Or when a beloved cousin of mine screamed at the front desk clerk at our hotel in Paris, because our rooms weren’t adjoining; she pounded on the desk, and her anger funneled up the center of the hotel’s marble rotunda, and one by one, guests began peering out of their rooms and down into the belly of the space at this apoplectic person overcome with a rage so hot and pure that it was tactile and, in its form, perfect.

This is why The Bear is so addictive: it’s why we can’t look away. It is less the storyline than the pathological rage itself that locks Carmy in the walk-in freezer and pits him in a ferocious battle against Richie that gets to the place where one spits at the other in the throes of an indecipherable, dopamine-drenched verbal carpet bombing.

The thing that all of us — my parents, my cousin, me — experienced was our dopamine receptors lighting up like a pinball machine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward, and while rage is hardly pleasurable, our brains not only don’t know it; they don’t care. They just want more. That feel-good rush is addictive, which is why it is almost impossible to stop, because humans are biologically hard-wired for it. Just ask any addict, be their drug of choice porn, or booze, or lying, or Facebook, or sugar, or shopping, or pills. It’s rarely the act-of that does it; that’s beside the point. It’s the run-up, the plan, the sense of reward, the power on its way to fulfillment. This is why The Bear is so addictive: it’s why we can’t look away. It is less the storyline than the pathological rage that locks Carmy in the walk-in freezer and pits him in a ferocious battle against Richie that gets to the place where one spits at the other in the throes of an indecipherable, dopamine-drenched verbal carpet bombing.

But what would happen if the biological power of addictive rage could be harnessed, captured, and used to divide, to incite violence and hatred, to reinforce disinformation (like, for example, racist tropes and conspiracy theories)? In the heat of rage’s hot foreplay, it becomes impossible to put down one’s sword, as the Buddhists say. It becomes impossible to care about reason or nuance or so-called civility because: foreplay is foreplay, and it is meant to accomplish exactly one thing. As any teenager who has made a mistake in the backseat of his parents’ Hyundai will tell you, once on your way, it’s very hard to stop.

Much has been written about the addictive nature of anger and rage, and the neurobiological response to it; none of this is new information. And there are times when anger and rage are absolutely justified and necessary to achieve world-changing goals. When Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair, Jr., and David Richmond sat down at a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, they were enraged; they had had more than enough. When patrons of the Stonewall Inn turned on a police raid, they had had enough. When thousands took to the streets to angrily protest the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, they were saying: we have had enough. Enough. Enough.

What makes these acts of rage so different from addictive rage is that they’re fueled by grief, but also possibility and hope. This is the engine that powers them: the promise of change in the name of humanity and the lives of their children and their children’s children and my children and your children, of evolution from dark to light, and death to life. Addictive rage in whatever form it comes and whatever it results in — indiscriminate bombing of innocents; the use of rape as a tool to terrorize; poisoning the planet; hate-filled calls for ethnic cleansing lightly cloaked as just cause; the perpetuation of myth and historical trope as a way to justify a particular stance for those too young to know or even care; fighting over the origin of a food rather than feeding it to each other — is not fueled by hope; it is fueled by an empty, uncontrolled fury that is sticky as a mouse trap, and pathologically compulsive. It has nowhere to go and nowhere to settle, like the silver flecks in a shaken snow globe. It is rage for the sake of rage; it is the dopamine hit of the addict who has just tasted their first vodka. Addiction is the disease of more, so one will never be enough, and if vodka isn’t available, they will have to be fulfilled in another way. Because addictive rage, be it over the dining room table on a lovely Saturday night in New England, or on a geopolitical stage whose actors are willingly manipulated by social media, has no discernible goals; it has no end.

It will just keep running and running, and searching for more, always looking for the next hit.