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(1989). Anger: the misunderstood emotion.
"The anger that fuels revolt does not arise, therefore, from objective conditions of deprivation or misery. As long as people regard those conditions as natural and inevitable, as God's Law or man`s way, they do not feel angry about them. So sociologists speak instead of 'relative deprivation,' the subjective comparisons that people make when they compare their actual lives to what might be possible. Alexis de Toequeville observed that 'evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested,' and the freed slave Frederick Douglass put the same idea more passionately. 'Beat and cuff your slave,' he wrote, 'keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog, but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude.'" (p. 261)
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