If another oversteps his bounds, it is no personal failing to grow angry. When we are shoved, anger gives us the strength to shove back, and take back the ground wrongly taken from us. The "two wrongs don't make a right" mentality, is the self serving creation of those who wish to practice aggession without fear of meeting resistance, and the cowards who seek to appease them. Let us not be counted among them.
But we are human, and it is reality that we will fail. Yet it is a hard learned truth, that in order to live right, we must occasionally let ourselves go a little wrong. Even when anger is based on an irrational reaction, it is still real, and still must be dealt with. It must be used up, in some fashion. Otherwise, it will accumulate and poison one's relationships.
Merely pretending that anger is not there won't make it go away. That merely drives it below the surface of one's consciousness, where it becomes a free floating hostility that distorts one's view of reality, because one has denied oneself the opportunity to know that it is there. Worse still, one has denied oneself the opportunity to know why it is there, making it easier for that anger to attach itself to an innocent party, in an overeaction to some unrelated act - and much harder for one to work out that anger. This isn't the end of anger, it is the beginning of passive aggression, and maybe years of counseling.
Worst of all, one will be piling up victims along the way, as one "does one's own thing" to whomever is unlucky enough to cross one's path, out of the 'best of intentions'. (Picture a sickly smile). When and where this ethic is adopted, the venom tends to build up, over time. Each helps the accumulation of it in others, through his own unthinking actions, and this custom leaves the recipient with no real way of removing it from his system. What was merely anger, in time can grow into a hate, that is barely concealed by a veneer of socially mandated friendliness.
This is not a system that I am recommending, and not just because it isn't traditional. It is one that I am unalterably opposed to, because experience and observation have taught me that groups who adopt it, never last for long. This may be fine, for those who rootlessly drift from place to place, but I would maintain that it makes for much less than a full life.
Also, it is a matter of the social contract.
The concept, in crude form, for those who haven't encountered it before, is that in adopting certain behaviors, we help strengthen the expectation that they will be engaged in, so the ones we adopt for ourselves, should be the ones that we'd want to see in general usage. When such becomes the case, it is as if the members of a society had made a contract with each other, to abide by this set of mutually beneficial understandings. It is the existence of such an unstated understanding, that constitutes the presence of a society.
In application to this case, seeing the harmfulness of this custom we have discussed to society as a whole, as conscientious members of our society, we will try to avoid doing anything that would help promote this as a custom. Like, for example, adopting it ourselves. True, the impact of our own little group would be negligible, but if everyone opted out of his social responsibilities on that basis, the social contract would soon crumble into dust, and the society defined by its existence, would fade away.
This is not to say that we should imagine that customs must be good ones to make universal, if they are to be legitimate. A society that is bound together by a network of established relationships, instead of being an undifferentiated mass of barely interacting individuals, will maintain a certain structure, like the living organism that it is. Practices will not spread out, like a drop of blood in a stagnant pond, until they permeate the entire world. Rather, they will travel along the lines of association, start meeting resistance at certain points, and be contained by that resistance to a certain segment of society.
As that which is lost by one tradition may be compensated by the gains of another it comes into contact with, we should not imagine this to be a problem in need of a solution, any more than a doctor should seek to give the cells of the liver of one of his patients, the ability to act as skin cells. To do so, failing to recognise that each segment of our society has its own role to play, and its own way of life adapted to the needs of that role, would be to mortally wound the body politic. Ironically, it would be to adopt a practice that mustn't be made universal, in the name of universalism.
Our conception of the social contract, then, in a networked society, would be local, not global. The concern, in adopting a practice, is not based on some fantasy of the practice diffusing to places that the lines of contact will not take it to - though that becomes a relevant concern if we seek to start promoting it through media that cut across social lines. (Ie. if we evangelise, and widely publish, like the promoters of political correctness, or the "Born Again" Christian movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s). Instead, one considers the implications of the spread of a practice as a local custom within one's own social circle, when assessing one's own practices.
(This may seem to conflict with the value of limited egalitarianism. The conflict is an illusion, based on the subconscious, and false presumption that each will wholly be a part of the world of every other person on the planet. Limited Egalitarianism, like the Social Contract, is best understood as a local phenomenon, applicable to sets of individuals who directly interact with each other, and is applicable to the extent that they do so).
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