Given this biological analysis of anger, you may ask, What's the problem with anger and, in turn, moralization? If anger is a natural, instinctive emotion over which we have no control, why am I arguing against its expression in moralization? First of all, anger may be natural, but it is not completely instinctive in humans. As Ayn Rand rightly observed, emotions are-at least to a large extent-the products of ideas. We have control over our ideas and so, indirectly, we have control over our emotions, at least to an extent. Moreover, as the only species with self-consciousness, we have control over how we express our emotions. I'll unpack these points-that we have control over our ideas, indirectly over our emotions, and also over how we express our emotions-in a minute, but first let me note a caveat. I am not suggesting that we shouldn't experience anger, that it is possible to never experience anger, that it is bad to experience anger, or that we should repress, suppress, or deny our anger. I will repeat this point again later because it is easy to misunderstand what I am saying. The point applies equally well to sadness. No one wants to experience sadness; we all try to cause the least amount of sadness in ourselves possible, as we well should. But sadness is a natural human emotion that we all experience and it is important that we experience it fully and nonjudgmentally when it comes up. My point is simply that there are healthy ways to minimize the frequency and intensity with which we experience anger and express aggression and that there are good reasons to do this. Before I continue, though, let me note one more caveat: If you, like the monkey in my experiment, feel as though your life is in imminent danger-if, for example, you are threatened by a mugger-then everything I am about to say goes out the window. In situations like this, it is important that our amygdala kick in and signal honestly that we will fight tooth and nail to defend our lives. We don't have time to allow ourselves to empathize with our aggressor or meditate on our anger (as I will later suggest we do in other situations) and neither would we want to short circuit this life-preserving mechanism. My point is not that this mechanism is never useful-my point is that it is not useful in our society, that is, when our rights are being respected and our lives are not in danger, which is usually the case thanks to our police, judiciary, and military systems. That said, let us return to the question of why moralism is a problem.