'What a Company of Hare-Brains Have Done'

“Look into our histories, and you shall almost meet, with no other subject but what a company of hare-brains have done in their rage.”

His science, by our standards, is dubious but Robert Burton’s gifts as a diagnostician of human nature are unrivaled. Look around and what do you see? Legions reveling in anger and rage. That’s how some people know they are still alive. They are the most sustainable of fuels. In the same paragraph in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton calls anger “the darkening of our understanding, and a bad angel.” Self-centered anger may be another name for original sin. Of the angry, Burton writes: “They are void of reason, inexorable, blind, like beasts and monsters for the time, say and do they know not what, curse, swear, rail, fight, and what not?” The continuity of anger across human history and the mayhem that results is remarkable. Consider Gibbon’s well-known observation in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

  

Or when Gulliver gives the King of Brobdingnag “a brief account of Affairs and Events in England,” and describes His Majesty’s reaction:

“He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting ‘it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.’”