Justifications for resentment

An anarchist

All of these people — back to Marx himself — spend far more time naming who deserves to be on the receiving end of theft and violence than working out how their ideal society would actually function, let alone building it.

This is the difference between a genuine grievance and a pathological one. Ressentiment only subtracts. It locates the entire source of its suffering outside itself and proposes to remove that source from the face of the earth. Take off the billionaires’ heads. Liquidate the favored men. Cut down the one who said the wrong pronoun. None of these are doctrines aimed at stability or coherence. They are justifications for resentment.

That is why these movements hate the language of self-improvement — why the manifesto sneers at lifting weights, at becoming confident, at building something. It is why all the blame falls on the health insurance CEO and none on the millions living with lifestyle-induced chronic disease. It is why billionaires’ heads become the cause of all your problems. To improve yourself is to admit you have agency over your own life, and agency is surrendered long before ressentiment swallows the soul. That is what the sane are truly up against. Not a single ideology, but the spirit that spawns them all.

Above is an excerpt from a post at Pergelator's blog. He swiped it entirely from My Daily Kona who swiped it from Liam Out Loud. It is a succinct, and I think very accurate, discussion of one of the currents underlying a lot of today's political violence. It is well worth reading it in full.