The social utility of anger and other so-called negative emotions.
by Tim Leogrande, BSIT, MSCP, Ed.S.
🗓 JULY 2 2026 • 14 MIN READ
by Vince Silenzio, MD, MPH
The distinction we often draw between logic and reason on one side, and emotion on the other, is in many respects a fiction. It is a simplifying device our limited powers of understanding use to approach the far more difficult question of what it means to be an embodied intellect: a creature that thinks, feels, remembers, suffers, judges, loves, fears, and acts in the world. Reason and emotion are two indispensable perspectives on intelligence itself. When we treat them as separate and unequal faculties, we risk misunderstanding the mind, distorting our understanding of moral life, psychological health, and human behavior. We also risk reinforcing a toxic cultural habit: the tendency to dismiss difficult emotions as irrational, dangerous, pathological, or inconvenient, rather than asking what they may be trying to teach us.
What follows is an important corrective to that habit. It invites us to reconsider anger, grief, fear, sorrow, and despair not as failures of reason, but as forms of embodied knowledge. Such emotions can be destructive when denied, disowned, or left unexamined. But they can also clarify, warn, connect, and mobilize. They may tell us where harm has occurred, where dignity has been violated, where love has attached us to what can be lost, and where justice demands more than polite resignation. It reminds us that to think with both the heart and the head is not a retreat from reason. It is reason restored to its human setting. Reason without feeling risks becoming sterile abstraction; emotion without reflection risks becoming ungoverned force. Each requires the other. Each is a pillar holding up half the sky, bound together in embodied and social existence. Neither can successfully bear the weight alone.
- Dr. Vince Silenzio is an academic physician, public health researcher, and retired professor whose career has bridged medicine, psychiatry, global mental health, and computational epidemiology. His three-plus decades of work has spanned dozens of countries and six continents, and has focused especially on youth suicide prevention, including suicide risk among sexual and gender minority youth, and on the social, cultural, and structural forces that shape mental health across populations and across the globe.
Pick any year from the last decade and hold it up to the light. Odds are good that it contains, in no particular order: widespread social unrest, large-scale protest, political violence or the credible threat of it, and legislative efforts to make voting harder for groups who already face significant obstacles. The U.S. is midway through a transformation as consequential as the Second Industrial Revolution — evolving from a twentieth-century national industrial economy into a twenty-first-century global and digital one (Sosnik, 2021).
Roughly half the country believes these changes are happening too fast, while the other half thinks these changes aren't happening fast enough. This is a roundabout way of saying there’s no shortage of things to be angry about. But what’s conspicuously absent from the national conversation is any serious examination of whether that anger might actually be useful. While the news media and politicians discuss the many causes of socioeconomic disparity and political divisiveness, there’s almost never any discussion about the utility of the so-called negative emotions.
Back in 1995, I sensed a change was coming when a book titled Emotional Intelligence hit The New York Times bestseller list. Its author, Daniel Goleman, is a journalist and clinical psychologist. While rereading parts of the book recently, I was reminded why I was intrigued when it was initially published. This book interests me because I think with my feelings.
I don’t mean to imply that I’m anti-intellectual. Far from it. In fact, I’m consistently guilty of overinflating my intelligence. Still, I think emotion isn’t an inferior form of knowing, but something that makes knowledge possible. Too often, especially in the West, we want the brain without the burden of consciousness: cognition without vulnerability, intelligence without emotional consequence, and reason without the unruly wisdom of the body. This may be because we are, for better or worse, children of the Enlightenment and our culture has almost nothing good to say about so-called negative emotions. Everything from grief to rage is labeled unhealthy, dysfunctional, or destructive.
America is permeated by a fundamental fear about the power of raw emotion combined with a set of normative beliefs about what constitutes rationality. This emotion/reason dualism overrides our thinking about feelings, telling us that reason is stable and trustworthy, but feelings are a slippery slope. Even when our culture encourages us to get in touch with our feelings, the invitation is almost always conditional. We are told to feel, but only if those feelings are positive, manageable, and not destructive in any way. The result is that any painful, uncomfortable, or disquieting emotion is labeled a threat to health, happiness, harmony, and spirituality.
What’s missing from this calculus is any sense that emotions — whether we label them positive or negative — can be very powerful teachers. Collectively and individually, we experience frustration, grief, fear, anger, and despair. Yet we are conditioned to devalue, disavow, shame, ignore, shun, distract, and entertain them away. The more we ignore these emotions, the more we engage in self- and communally-destructive behavior. This isn’t the result of these emotions in and of themselves, but of our refusal to extend our mindfulness to them.
“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy.” (Lorde, 1984)