Anger happens. But only creation changes the world.

I’m about to make an ask that every cell in your body may scream is wrong, weak, disloyal-to-your-side, and even irresponsible.

But first walk with me.

“Kirk, people with your form of cancer can only expect to live another 18–36 months. We wish we could do more. ”

Surreal words for an eighteen year old to hear.

Decades later I remain here and report that when mortality moves from a mental construct to a living reality, an irreversible line emerges between what works and what doesn’t work in life. To waste one moment in the latter becomes the only tragedy.

What follows is born from this awareness as well as twenty years working in social impact and observing what works and what doesn’t.

The ask:

Can we leave our angriness for a state that is a more effective way to serve real change?

Given the world today, I know it’s a big ask.

There’s a lot to be angry at.

But if we are truly about positive change, if we truly want things to get better, moving to a different state than angriness isn’t just “nice”.

It’s an imperative.

Angriness and againstness alone do not actually change things, they are a station on the way to change.

Only creation changes things.

I use the word “creation” instead of simply “action” with intent. Throwing a rock is action. Creation is invention.

And for the sake of what is being proposed, we need to distinguish between spontaneous anger, and angriness — sustained anger.

Spontaneous anger naturally bubbles up in us. How can it not? How can one see the atrocities, how innocent are wronged — and not experience anger?

To be human, and to love and care, is to inevitably experience anger.

But there is a difference between spontaneous anger and the current epidemic of angriness — angriness as a way of being, angriness as enduring strategy.

Angriness as identity.

Angriness as lifestyle.

Angriness as badge.

Right now we take pride in our angriness. We mistakenly measure how committed each other is to change by how angry we are.

We judge others as not truly being for change if they are not as angry as we are, or, a favorite word now, as outraged.

On any social platform there is a competition to see who is the angriest — and therefore who is the most righteous — determined by who is the quickest and loudest in throwing anger and blame toward who/what seems deserving of it — who’s bad and wrong out there, or even who’s not doing good good enough.

A horde of hammers looking for nails.

Which would be fine if it didn’t work counter to changing the very things that make us angry.

Unless the new world we want is an angry world, anger can’t birth that world. Einstein:

“You can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created it.”

Any new world would actually need to be created, not angry-ed into existence.

Said best by Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, you build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

We mistakenly think this is true:

But it’s not. This is:

Are we against racism, human trafficking, climate change, bullying, and factory farms? Sure we are. Do they make us angry? Sure they do.

But when we become pragmatic about change, and we dare to leave the familiar territory of angriness and againstness, we can then identify what we are actually for, and holding that vision, create the better.

The greatest moments in my work are when leaders step through the threshold from simply being against what they don’t want, into being for what they do want, and then create from the latter.

By example, we don’t eradicate things like poverty and racism only by being angry and against them. If we are serious about eradicating racism we need to create initiatives and systems that generate equality, diversity and inclusivity. If we are serious about eradicating poverty we need to create initiatives that generate security and opportunity.

Leaders I work with have evolved anger at things like poverty and racism into creations designed to dismantle them:

> Bridges of cultural programming to reverse bias and bring diverse engineering grads into jobs in big tech.

> A dance troupe made of the disabled to unlock inclusion and innovation in organizations and the public at large.

> A social-entrepreneur activates fractional real estate ownership to enable local wealth generation in challenged neighborhoods.

> An ex-Wall Street ninja creates a healthy food chain for the underserved.

> A product design lead generates the diversification of the world’s most popular toy, making it the world’s most diverse and inclusive.

The powerful revelation they all had was seeing that if they evolved the againstness to the ills of the world into the identification of the world they want, they’d see new possibilities and create true change.

Angriness is an attachment to problem, creation is an attachment to solution.

The ego-mind likes to label these sentiments as idealistic but they are ultimately practical — there is no other way for change to happen.

Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

More examples of darknesses being converted by creation into betterment: the vaccine, micro-finance, a company breast cancer walk, the American Disabilities Act, reentry programs for the incarcerated, the personal computer, a neighborhood clean up, the Civil Rights Act, making 9/11 a national day of good deeds and service, etc.

Ghandi experienced anger at his people’s oppressors, but he changed history and propelled the independence of 340 million people when he defiantly walked to the ocean at Dandi and created salt.

The cycle of world war after world war only stopped when instead of engaging in anger and punishment toward the global perpetrators at their defeat (the genocide of six million people could validate punishment if anything could), the allies instead recreated and rebuilt two entire nations from literal ashes. They have become two of the most benevolent, peaceful, and contributory countries and allies on the planet, and there have been no more world wars.

After 5000 years of its committed practice, shouldn’t we ask the question:

“How’s angriness working so far?”

If angriness really worked to change the world, we’d be living in paradise right now.

Today, our addiction to angriness is big business. Fox and CNN make angriness as a product. Provoking anger and outrage creates viewership, viewership sells advertising, advertising creates revenue, revenue keeps executive kids in private schools and shareholders happy. Rinse and repeat per news cycle. They get profits and we get angriness.

Both “sides” are full of angriness, againstness, righteousness, blame, etc., believing wholeheartedly this is how they change things, and yet nothing changes.

They think they are on opposing sides, but they are actually on the same side — angriness.

Angriness masquerades as an agent of revolution and rebellion, but that’s a lie.

In the context of today’s world, angriness is conformity.

Outrage is compliance.

Blame is civic laziness.

Cynicism is irresponsible.

All of it is victimhood.

None of it is very ambitious as it pertains to real change. And today we need audacious ambition toward change. Nothing is more audacious than to dare to create a new world.

Creation is the most potent form of defiance.

Creation is the real rebellion.

And I hear the rumble: “But isn’t angriness necessary? Isn’t it necessary to maintain angriness in a world full of so much wrongness?”

I hear you, and my own angriness wants to second that with, “Hell yeah”, but, if we want to elevate angriness to the status of “necessary” and to be maintained in society as a means to an end, then we have to be willing to have its presence also maintained in places we may not agree with and live with the outcomes.

Behind every massacre and genocide is angriness.

Behind the steering wheel in Charlottesville is angriness.

Behind all shootings is angriness.

Do we want to keep saying angriness is necessary?

People think of their angriness as commitment to their cause, but it is really a commitment to conflict, not progress.

A true commitment to a cause would mean accepting our anger while moving on to the creation of things that actually solve for the cause.

If the world is on fire, we can point at fire, blame it, and scream about how bad fire is — or we create a well, bring up water, and pour it everywhere.

Again, to get angry is natural. Let’s accept the part of us that gets angry, but for the sake of true progress, not let it become angriness, and instead convert it into creation.

You and I have an even greater duty to positive change than our angriness.

What a world we’ll live in when we beat our swords into plowshares to till, seed and grow a new world together.

Here is the most incredible and miraculous thing about us — if we don’t like the world as it is, we get to create an entirely better one.

And in that it becomes impeccably simple:

Creation is the only way to better.

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“Against the ruin of the world there is only one defense — the creative act.”

— Kenneth Rexroth