More than one Post has come in lately from Posters who do not present like normally Angry People at all, that is, they don’t act out by shouting obscenities, flipping over office desks and beating up the Boss, and such like that; but that they go home and PLOT REVENGE.
At first this did seem a bit odd to me, but I accepted it, but after more incidents cropped up and I had more time to think about it, it occurred to me in the first 3 or 4 Decades of my Life, I never heard of Such a Thing as ‘Plotting Revenge’, except as a kind of exaggerated silly notion. Nobody ever DID IT! So why is it happening so often NOW?
Well there have been some very considerable Cultural Phenomena’s that have taken place in just the last few Decades. For a while there was the Dungeons and Dragons Craze. I never got involved, but I believe it was all about Fantastic Role Playing – Pretending to be Larger Than Life Characters behaving in Exaggerated and Overblown Ways. If any of these D&D People stuck with It too long, well, possibly they could have been NORMALIZED to these Exaggerated Behaviors – in this Case, they would no longer see PLOTTING REVENGE as all that Silly.
Then there is Computer Gaming. I never got involved in that either, but I have been exposed to some very horrible movies that have come out, and when I asked my friends about them, they told me that they were Based on some Computer Game or another. Well, these Games, then , also seem Exaggerated and Overblown.
Anyway, I am still Thinking About It All, but my first instincts would be that PLOTTING REVENGE is not Angry Behavior, in the normal sense. Yes, PLOTTING REVENGE is motivated by Hate (when People Say they “feel Angry”, what they Mean is that they “Feel Hate”). But with Normal Anger, while the Trigger Moment or Outburst may strongly Preoccupy the Mind for a Day or Two, with the PLOTTING REVENGE People, we hear that they dig in for the Long Haul and Obsess for months at a Time. And they do it in Solitude. It is an Escape into a kind of Alter-Reality where they are a sort of Heroic Figure poised in a Struggle against some Absolute Evil. It probably makes them feel very Self Important which is probably a clue to their Motivation.
Anyway, does anybody have any Thoughts upon this?