Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the...