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Oliver Burkeman: Why Are We So Angry?

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Why is everyone so angry nowadays, and what is it doing to the world?

Oliver Burkeman: Why Are We So Angry?: Episode 1

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Oliver Burkeman: Why Are We So Angry?, Episode 1

What in our biological and social evolution made us so angry? Oliver Burkeman finds out.

To understand anger, we have to know what it is, and how it came to be. Oliver Burkeman discovers how our biological and social evolution made us so angry.

In the developed world we live in a blessed epoch where life has never been better. Infant mortality has been all but abolished, education is open to all, we have access to technology that would have been seen as the stuff of science fiction little more than a decade ago. We are safer and wealthier than at any time in human history. So why are we so damn angry about everything?

To understand anger we need to start with what it does to us physiologically, specifically how anger makes us act and think - or more accurately not think.

Oliver discovers why anger gave humans an evolutionary edge, developing beyond a basic animalist aggression to become what evolutionary psychologist Aaron Sell calls ‘a mind control device’ that gets us better treatment. He explores how nature, as well as the development of our cultural and philosophical attitudes of anger has lead us to the kind of anger we all feel today - and asks if we can take control of it?


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Oliver Burkeman: Why Are We So Angry?

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