The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

After the sins of incontinence, Dante visits an area of hell characterized by anger and violence. Beck underscores the fact that anger is a natural reaction to threats and injustice, and so the impulse itself is not necessarily problematic. Much of our anger, however, stems from perceived threats to our ideals, values, and identity, and that perception is often little more than a veiled sense of fear at the prospect of changes: “Such things feel morally threatening, and we react to them by becoming almost reflexively resistant and oppositional” (131, emphasis in original). This reflexive self-righteousness can go to great lengths to defend its own ideals, even when they are relative constructions of one’s own culture. Self-righteousness adopts an air of simply knowing it is right, whatever evidence to the contrary may be presented. Such reactions, Beck says, “are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking” (133).

This perspective of “righteous error” leads to violence in three main ways: “by attacking other people, ourselves, or the way things are” (135). The temptation is to lash out at one of these three things for the reflexive threat we feel, pouring blame on another group of people, on our own perceived shortcomings, or on the things that happen to us.