Anger Is an Energy
Too little means it is barely worth getting out of bed; too much can lead to a poor analysis of the world's problems
"Johnny Rotten" by Marco Raaphorst is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
The UK entered a recession towards the end of 1990 and didn’t come out until April 1993. Unemployment hit 2m in March 1991; and the number of workers employed in manufacturing fell below 5m for the first time since records began around the same time. The mood in the country was fairly grim at the time, particularly for my contemporaries from Generation X (those of us born between 1965 and 1980).
I graduated in philosophy from the University of Leeds in the summer of 1991 at 21, in the depths of the recession, and didn’t see much future for myself in the UK. Philosophy graduates weren’t in much demand, particularly those with a penchant for noisy and angry music and no additional skills worth mentioning. Also, I had absolutely no intention of staying on at university to become an academic, let alone becoming an accountant or a lawyer.
Luckily for me, a friend of mine from Norwich (my hometown) had taught English in Madrid the year before and had told me what fun she’d had. I decided to follow in her footsteps and got a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) during an intensive summer course. I then moved to Madrid with just the clothes on my back and a rucksack with some clothes and a few books, as well as a little money to survive the first few weeks. I barely spoke a word of Spanish and didn’t know a soul. Even so, I found a part-time job teaching business executives at odd hours (breakfast, lunchtime, evenings) and I was off.
My original plan was to spend a year in Madrid, learn some Spanish and then head out to Latin America for more adventures. It didn’t work out like that, although I did go backpacking around Mexico later. Although I was extremely broke in my first year, I gradually found some extra classes and by the end of my first year got a better job as an in-house teacher at an insurance company, which I did for two more years,
During this time, I worked fanatically at my Spanish-language skills and picked up a qualification as a translator and interpreter. I also taught myself to use a computer, to type and gained some research skills updating guidebooks and writing a fanzine. I also met a foreign correspondent socially, who told me that the vast majority of correspondents had started as TEFL teachers. I hadn’t realised this before. The observation planted a seed - it is a clear example of emergent strategy in my own life.
Over my three years as a below-average TEFL teacher, enthusiastic amateur researcher and aspiring journalist, I gradually realised that I sometimes felt more at home in Spanish culture than I did at times in the UK. I also enjoyed being able to express my emotions in Spanish in a way that had always been difficult for me in English. I had lots of fun exploring Spain and Portugal, with memorable trips to Barcelona, Lisbon, Seville and other places at the weekends.
La movida madrileña was winding down when I arrived in Madrid, but I caught some of its last gasps and my older friends had some amazing stories. I also enjoyed exploring less angry music than I was used to, not to mention more sophisticated rhythms. While the youth culture was hedonistic and sleep-deprived, I liked the way that people in Spain still valued family links and inter-generational relationships.
Spain’s democratic Constitution was just 13 years old when I first arrived in Madrid. The country’s economy had been growing fast since the 1950s, although there was a recession in 1992 and 1993. Structural unemployment has always been an issue in Spain - there were more than 2.6m people on the dole in late 1991 when I moved to Madrid for the first time. There were also still a lot of heroin addicts in the early 1990s and I did get mugged more than once.
Coming from the class-obsessed society of the UK, though, I liked the fluidity of Spanish society, with unapologetic upward mobility being common among families that had moved to the big cities in search of better lives. Spanish women were also coming to the forefront of society after being held back for decades during a traditionalist dictatorship. Divorce was only legalised in 1981, ten years before I arrived in the country.
After spending some time back-packing in 1994 after leaving the TEFL world, I moved to London to retrain as a journalist in 1995. I was later sent back to Madrid between 1997 and 2000 by a real-time financial news agency. During this time, I began to explore meditation as a way of coping with the pressure of breaking news in real time. I also chatted up a lovely Spanish woman at a house party (also a member of Gen X). She would eventually join me in London and became my wife and the mother of our children. We later moved from London to Barcelona in 2005 to put down roots, while I worked to establish a financial-news startup in Iberia.
The mood in Spain, previously so open, optimistic and outward-looking, turned sour after 2008, when a long construction boom came to an end. La crisis lasted from late 2008 all the way through to 2014, with unemployment levels hitting record levels of 6.2m people in 2013 (the level is now back to 2.7m people). Many older Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and a significant number of my contemporaries from Gen X had a fairly dreadful time during la crisis, which overlapped with the early years of social media (Facebook granted the public access to the platform in 2006).
Many young Spanish people moved overseas, as I had done during an earlier recession, but many of those who stayed developed bitter, angry and argumentative personas on social media (even though many turned out to be more relaxed in real life). The first wave of anger took a left-wing form. A communist university lecturer and television commentator called Pablo Iglesias (born in 1978 and a member of Gen X), captured the mood among young people with a populist analysis of what had gone wrong. He founded a populist-left party called We Can (Podemos) in 2014; and it went on to capture 5.2m votes in its first general election in 2015 (its high-water mark in a national election).
Although many of my contemporaries posed as social-media revolutionaries during these years, I was mostly immune to Iglesias’ dubious charms, despite my sympathies for people struggling with unemployment and under-employment. First of all, I was lucky enough that the startup I had joined a few years earlier was thriving - it was moving from being a challenger brand to becoming the leader in its category. At the same time, I was raising a family, trying to pay down my first mortgage whenever we had a little cash to spare and doing a masters degree in my spare time.
Secondly, as a financial journalist, I could see that Iglesias’ analysis of the causes of the recession was mostly nonsense. Suggesting that Spain needed to default on its debt looked very silly to anyone who had done a little basic research on what happens to countries who had tried this gambit in the past. Also, his call for the creation of a public bank looked odd. The country’s cajas de ahorros (savings banks, which had a public element to their governance) were mostly in a much worse position than the publicly listed banks, which took decisions on behalf of their shareholders. The banks had mostly been better than the cajas at resisting political pressure to issue sub-prime mortgages during the boom years and had better balance sheets as a result.
The second wave of anger spread in Catalonia as a direct result of the first. A group of indignados (indignant ones) tried to stop the Catalan parliament in Barcelona in 2011 in protest at austerity and cuts. Artur Mas, Catalonia’s First Minister at the time, realised that he could benefit from the underlying anger if he changed the subject. He pivoted from mainstream nationalism to populist nationalism in the following months. He declared that the people of Catalonia had the right to “self determination”* in September 2012 and began a long downhill slide that led to the 2017 coup attempt under his hand-picked successor Carles Puigdemont.
Mas’ pivot to populism hit a raw nerve with many Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964, including Mas himself who was born in 1956) and members of Gen X. Many of the Catalan-speaking people who took part in the movement had watched how poor Spanish-speaking migrants to Barcelona had transformed the province from the 1960s. Many increasingly felt like strangers in a land that they felt should belong to them alone. Newcomers to Barcelona like myself, who hadn’t learnt as much Catalan as we should have done, received the brunt of their nativist anger, particularly on social media, but also in real life to a certain extent too as the movement divided Catalan society down the middle.
At the same time, British residents in Catalonia, including me, realised with horror that we might receive a double dose of populist nationalism after the 2016 Brexit referendum. If the Catalan independence movement had been successful in 2017, it would have crashed the regional economy, as we have discussed before.
The independence movement hit its high-water mark with more than 2m votes in the Catalan regional elections of 2017 just after the Spanish government intervened in the affair. While the core supporters of the movement tended to be middle aged or elderly, the rioters in 2018 were largely younger Millennials and some of the older members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2013). Many of the teenage rioters later drifted away from the independence movement in search of new thrills, little realising that a global pandemic was going to interrupt their search for excitement.
Perhaps strangely, the Catalan separatists and the left-wing populists who had originally organised around Iglesias developed strong links, as discussed before. Both movements now form core parts of the “Frankenstein alliance” put together by Socialist Prime Minister (PM) Pedro Sánchez in 2018, as discussed extensively in previous essays on this blog. Sánchez was born in 1972 and is a member of Gen X.
The third wave of populist anger was a direct reaction to the first two waves. Vox, a populist-right party, had been founded in 2013. It gained prominence with a role in the court case against the leaders of the Catalan coup between 2017 to 2019, as well as through its uncompromising hostility to Spain’s populist left and PM Sánchez. The hard-right party gained nearly 2.7m votes in April 2019, which went up to nearly 3.7m in the repeat election in November of the same year (its high-water mark).
Vox’s reactionary Spanish nationalist rhetoric has tended to resonate more with men than with women. Strangely, I know a handful of passionate male Vox supporters, who claimed to be far-left revolutionaries a decade or so ago; and now rant about feminism instead of corrupt establishment politicians. Obviously, populist-right yarns pack a bigger emotional punch than populist-left narratives. Having said that, those of us with friends, colleagues and family members from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community tend to be immune to Vox’s ultra-conservative and traditionalist pitch, which often acts as a dog-whistle to bigots.
A fourth wave of anger has exploded this year. Farmers and people from rural areas, many of them allied with Vox, have taken to the streets to protest against environmental regulations. The movement began in France before moving to Spain and elsewhere. As a city boy, I am largely immune to this movement’s appeal, although I can sympathise with the plight of troubled farmers and lorry drivers without necessarily sharing their analysis of what has gone wrong - just as I sympathised with the Millennials struggling with a brutal recession a decade ago without necessarily agreeing on the need for a communist revolution.
Rise
There are some overlaps in the narratives of each of the four populist movements we have discussed today, but they can also be very different from each other and even oppose each other fiercely. Having said that, they all share a common core: they are all based on anger. And, in the words of punk and post-punk singer John Lydon (formerly known as Johnny Rotten), “anger is an energy.”
Lydon is a Baby Boomer, born in 1956 to Irish immigrants to London. He struggled with ill health in his childhood; and his doctors deliberately made him angry as a way of helping him recover from a coma. His first band, the Sex Pistols, hit a nerve in the UK and further afield with an angry debut single in November 1976. Unemployment in the UK was rising fast at the time from 1m people at the start of the decade to 1.5m by 1978. By the time the singer’s second band, Public Image Ltd, released the song with the line about anger being an energy in 1986, UK unemployment had been above 3m since 1982. It fell below 3m in 1987 and went down to 1.6m by the end of 1989 before spiking again just in time for my graduation.
My feeling is that there is a Goldilocks aspect to anger. Without any anger at all, we might never get out of bed, as Lydon’s doctors realised in the 1960s. A little anger can fuel projects, if we control it and channel it, as former hardcore singer Henry Rollins describes. Anger can also appeal to voters in a way that technocrats with spreadsheets find it hard to replicate.
However, combining excessive anger with resentment can lead to black-and-white narratives that fail to map well onto the real world, as we have seen in today’s essay. Angry people tend to be less analytical, less tolerant and less self-aware than they should be, as a little reflection and self-reflection will show us to be true.
Finding yourself unemployed in a recession is awful, but that doesn’t mean that you should encourage the government to default on its debt. Realising it is becoming harder to order a meal in your mother tongue in your hometown must be dreadful, but that is no excuse for trying to smash constitutional democracy. Seeing the world getting softer is a bitter pill for some old-fashioned men, but that should not be taken as an excuse for voting for bigots. Also, the energy transition is going to be tough for some people in the countryside, but that doesn’t mean we should go on happily emitting greenhouse gases or denying the reality of climate change.
The links between a stagnant economy, unemployment and populist anger (and also hyper-inflation in other places and times) suggest that institutionalist politicians should focus on finding a balance between setting incentives for private investment and public investment. Economic growth and creating the conditions for job creation should be among the highest priorities for elected officials. An angry population that is worried about how to pay next month’s rent will always be an unpredictable population. Narcissistic populist leaders will always be keen to sell magical solutions to angry voters, with inevitably disappointing results.
Finally, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it before: if you find yourself consumed by anger and resentment, please consider learning to meditate! It is easier to rewire your brain by trying to spend some time observing your emotions (including anger) that it is to change the world outside your head.
If you really do insist on changing the world, though, please think about founding or joining a startup. Getting involved with startups will give you a far better chance of designing tomorrow’s world than any politician or activist, even if most startups fail. Our institutions are hard to change, but they create a space for risk-takers, misfits and rebels to experiment and innovate without asking for permission from anyone.
As regular readers know, angry populists can be very annoying on the internet. As always when we discuss these issues, the comments are closed. If you subscribe, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Further Reading
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen
The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values by Marlene Wind
*Catalan nationalists and legal experts use the phrase ”self determination” differently. Nationalists think it means “the right to secede.” However, legal experts say that the right should actually be considered “the right to participate in a democracy.” Spanish democracy defines sovereignty as belonging to the whole Spanish people and being indivisible. This ticks the box for self-determination, but is a difficult hurdle for secessionists in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
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