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The Society of Resentment
Philosophy's interest in resentment in the Western world goes back a long way. It is present in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (...
The Society of Resentment
As the inequalities and discriminations of neoliberalism increase, we will increasingly live in societies of resentment: total fragmentation of feelings of injustice, the intensification of conflicts between victims and the impossibility of articulating struggles against capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal domination. These struggles leave the real aggressor unscathed and relieved by the fact that the forces and reasons for resistance and struggle against him are divided and effectively diverted from the targets that could benefit him. One of the dangers of the proliferation of the society of resentment is this: the perpetuation of the power that causes it. The other danger is the increased difficulty in distinguishing real damage from illusory damage, real causes from illusory causes, and real victims and aggressors from illusory victims and aggressors. This makes it more difficult to effectively punish, in a substantive and procedurally fair way, the real damage suffered by real victims against the real aggressors. Resentment puts an end to hope for a fairer society. Resentment replaces the Spinozist dialectic between fear and hope with the dialectic between hatred and revenge. Revenge aspires to the transfer of power, not the transformation of power. Without this transformation, there will be no hope for a better world.
