Martyrism

Why are some good people so angry? Self-righteous? Indignant and pained and angst-ridden and, well, angry??
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Especially those who work in the nonprofit world - doing the hard work of changing the world, confronting evil and social injustice, overcoming the obstacles of inequality and prejudice and racism, laboring to change every day life for people trapped in under-served and neglected communities?

The most common forms of self-induced rage and anger are common in sacrificial (martyr?) servants in the nonprofit world and among disaffected political base of protest political candidates (conservative, liberal, libertarian, socialist, any and every kind).

In order to justify the radical change they see as necessary - overturning institutions and conditions and religious traditions that foster or protect or perpetuate evil, practitioners of self-induced rage work hard to gin up their anger as a daily exercise.

And they call it passion.

It gives them permission to fume, complain and rage against people who won't listen to them and their message.

They get more and more fuel for the fire of their anger because they don't win over doubters or the indifferent. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a form of emotional immaturity that is troublingly common in political and nonprofit worlds.

It's a sickness cultivated in these worlds - martyr-ism is the word I use to describe the problem.

And this sickness is a combination of narcissism feeding off distorted E.Q. guaranteeing irrelevancy.

Maybe this is why job satisfaction in nonprofit work is such an issue. And maybe this is why so many nonprofits go out of business every single day (as in, 100+ globally).

Maybe this is why cynicism is so prevalent in the base of all our political extremes (and religious fundamentalism as well).

Maybe...