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For reasons never disclosed, Zero Books first accepted a bunch of submitted papers to publish in an anthology for the conference “Responding to Peterson in lieu of a debate”—then never moved forward with that publication. For months afterward, I would follow up with Doug1 to make sure things were still moving forward, and he would say they were. He even sent me a list of papers that had been accepted. Then contact ceased, and Zero Books chose to publish a different book on the topic, not using any of the papers they had originally said would be used for the volume. I don’t know why this happened, and I don’t really care. It’s just an important piece of background for anyone who was wondering what happened there.
Anyway, what follows is the piece I wrote for that book that never happened. Full disclosure: This piece was not accepted for that publication anyway. The reason I include it here is because anyone doing anything that broaches philosophy should have a working understanding of ressentiment critique. Not only is that unpacked in this piece, but I also expand on the concept with my own emphasis.
Introduction
Have you ever had a piece of food stuck in your teeth? Did someone point it out? Did you wish they had said something sooner? “Why didn’t someone tell me before I went to that job interview? Before talking to my crush? Before taking the sacrament?” Sometimes people don’t say anything because they don’t want to make you feel embarrassed, but how much worse will it be after going through an entire day assuming everything is fine to only afterwards realize nobody was willing to point it out? If friends say nothing, the person who draws attention to the food matter lodged in your teeth may be, at best, a child making an innocent observation, or at worst, an enemy or bully.
Ignorance of basic concepts can also function a lot like that thing that was stuck in your teeth. In fact, you cannot become a part of any human group without learning basic concepts shared within that community. Human individuals form a sense of identity given affiliation to, or separation from, groups. Any group of humans has its sets of interests, assumptions, and working concepts. To show ignorance of a basic concept exposes you as an outsider. Sometimes this is just a little awkward, but other times it leads to fatal error, especially when fundamental to the entire conversation. For instance, if you don’t understand “capitalism” the way critics of capitalism use it, or “privilege” the way it is used in critical gender or race theory, then you not only expose yourself as an outsider, but you probably sound foolish, and will say things that sound crude, if not malicious.
I argue that the same can be said for understanding the concept of ‘ressentiment’. One of the most compelling and concerning aspects of Jordan B. Peterson’s message is a point he borrows from Nietzsche, that ours is a culture of ressentiment. Not just our society, but especially “The Left.” This has become common fare for the Anti-SJW Industry to bemoan campus activism, “grievance studies,” and identity politics as being steeped in ressentiment.
Usually accusations of ressentiment go unexplained, and for those who have not studied this concept, it is often conceived of simply as “resentment,” which is not the same thing. Ressentiment goes a lot deeper, in fact, so deep that it’s arguably inescapable; however, to the degree that Peterson is correct, the left should check itself, because playing into ressentiment un-self-consciously is a lot like going through life with spinach stuck in one’s teeth.2 Too bad a bully had to point it out.3 Now it’s time to understand what it is, and then I will finish by showing why Peterson is an even worse offender than the left he castigates.
I. What is ressentiment
First things first: Wikipedia is currently mistaken about ressentiment. In the preamble to the Wiki article, ressentiment is construed as meaning little more than hostility towards an oppressor, or towards the strong by the weak. This is certainly how it is used in Anti-SJW Industry parlance, but this fundamentally misses an important point made by Nietzsche. Ressentiment is not just the ideas and ideology espoused by the weak when critiquing the strong. Rather, at a deeper level still, ressentiment is a way of gaining a sense of superiority on the cheap.
How does ressentiment help us gain a sense of superiority on the cheap? Let’s use an example. Imagine we live in a society that revolves around Tetris, the classic video game invented by the Soviets. Whoever has the highest Tetris score in the room is given the most respect and privileges. You have two options, play within this framework of values, or renounce this framework entirely. If you play within this framework of values, then you will either have to pay homage to the people who are better at Tetris than you are, or work tirelessly to become the best. If you renounce this framework, however, then you can, at least in your own mind, get off the hook entirely. You could even start a little club of friends who think Tetris is a stupid rubric by which to judge the worth of humans. Ressentiment goes a step further, though, by saying Tetrisism is itself bad.
Something can be conceived of as bad in either a moral or intellectual sense, or both. If it’s morally bad, we consider it evil, whereas we call intellectual corruption stupidity or ignorance. If Tetrisism, the ideology of a society built around Tetris achievement, can be portrayed as morally and intellectually bankrupt, then those of us who refuse to play are able to gain a cheap sense of moral and intellectual superiority and self-certainty by doing nothing.
Nietzsche claims that Judaism, Christianity, and Socialism mark decisive moments in Western history when entire cultures turned against the powerful class of masters and achievers. As with Tetrism, if all honor and prestige in a society is granted to the conquering elite, then the less powerful are able to gain intellectual and moral superiority through ressentiment by turning against the entire values framework itself. According to Nietzsche, before these decisive cultural shifts, being better came from literally being better or more powerful, from making a mark on the world, by courageously winning. However, with the rise of civilization, we all become like caged beasts that are most of the time unable to act on our animal instincts. Our will to power, unable to find immediate exercise or release, thus turns inward, and so begins the history of humanity and of morals.
“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited.”4 Notice that this quote reveals something later emphasized by Gilles Deleuze, that Nietzsche is not saying that ressentiment is a psychological function, but rather the inaugurating cause of psychological life itself. There is a sense in which, then, ressentiment would be inescapable, so why point it out? Because this is such a fundamental basis of our interior life that it is easily exploited, and it’s also easy to fall prey to taking insights revealed by ressentiment as some objective fact of reality, rather than one of the deepest seated forms of bias.
II. Nietzsche’s entire point
While the right-wing champions Nietzsche’s work as a critique of basic concerns for justice, it’s important to remember that criticism of something does not amount to wholesale disregard. After all, Nietzsche says in the first essay from Genealogy of Morals that, “Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced to it…”5 This means that intellectuals, himself included, are most of all implicated with the spirit of ressentiment. How so? Here he plays into the idea that the intellectual is someone who was unable to excel elsewhere in life. Being unable to dominate in sports, business, or politics, the thinker turns inward to cultivate an intellectual upper-hand. Surely Nietzsche is not saying that all intellectual endeavors are false or useless, so what is he saying?
It should be noted that anyone who tells you “Nietzsche’s entire point is…” is already wrong. Nietzsche is a complicated and notoriously conflicted thinker. Like his Christian existentialist counterpart Soren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche’s thought is always working through contradictions. For instance, Nietzsche himself was a weak man, plagued by painful and debilitating illness, yet he came to the defense of the strong. You could also argue that Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of intellectuals, an ascetic critic of ascetics, and a moralizing critic of moralists. This makes a lot of sense if we keep in mind ressentiment.
In no way was Nietzsche trying to rid the world of ressentiment (and thus make the history of humanity more brutish and stupid), but rather, he sought to show the historical conditions for our sense of morality, and with it, the basis for the guilty conscience. Anyone who grows up in a morally suffocating, guilt-festering, religious environment, will understand why Nietzsche, son of a pastor, concerned himself with the historical origins of guilt, the ways guilt is used against us, and how our need to feel morally justified leads to sick and manipulative ideology. The point is not to renounce all values, but to show how value is historically constructed and culturally relative so that we can become freer spirits and invent a new system of values.
III. How we can use ressentiment
For reasons that will become evident, I lead this section off with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., at his Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, August 16th, 1967.
“There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
We should not use ressentiment to discredit the existence of morals per se, but rather as a check for self-criticism. Are we truly concerned with morality, or about feeling morally superior? Do we really care about intellectual charlatanism, or are we simply looking for cheap intellectual superiority? Do we really do good deeds out of a sense of moral obligation to the other, or as a cheap sense of entitlement over others? This is why ignorance of the concept of ressentiment can make you look more foolish than a person with spinach in their teeth, because if a Christian or a socialist moans on and on about how bad this person is, or how corrupt that institution is, a lot of the time the cheap sense of superiority they are gaining in this demonstration is painstakingly obvious to everyone else.
We should, then, remain self-critical and always ask what kinds of cheap thrills we get by discrediting others. At the same time, let’s not let others off the hook.
While Peterson likes to cherry pick, stereotype, and strawman the left as ressentiment-riddled campus radicals who would rather change the entire social order when they can’t even clean their own bedrooms, he seems to have missed the hilarious fact that this Anti-SJW Industry currently making him rich is itself entirely founded on ressentiment.
Unlike the ressentiment of certain campus radicals, however, his goes a step further. You see, whereas the campus radical has to actually take a stand and go out in public to advocate for a less exploitative social system, Peterson is making a career out of telling people to basically do exactly what their parents and society has already told them to do, i.e. clean your room, mind your own business, get a job, and raise a family.
IV. An essential mechanism of the Anti-SJW Industry
If we keep in mind that at the heart of ressentiment is a desire for cheap intellectual or moral superiority, then it would make sense for the media to develop mechanisms for feeding this desire. After all, capitalism is about connecting us with the products we desire, right? It should come as no surprise, then, that the media has done exactly this. Whether it’s mainstream or alternative media, we should always be suspicious of any news or commentary outlet whose bread and butter consists of cherry picking instances of stupidity or evil on the part of a perceived “Other,” whether these are Democrats, Republicans, anarchists, or socialists.
The Anti-SJW Industry has been selling this image of hysterical feminists, terrifying antifa protesters, and stupid sounding students for years, but only with the rise of Jordan Peterson did the notion suddenly come to popular fruition that the uniting force between all of these stereotypes is a fearful “postmodern, feminist, neo-Marxist plot to undermine Western values.” Sure, this idea has been around for some time, dating back to the early days of German National Socialist conspiracy theories about Jewish Bolsheviks, but Peterson has brought it to the mainstream.
More than just cherry-picking positive instances that confirm our biases, people are even susceptible to using negative instances, the evidence that should contradict our biases, as confirmation of their prejudice. Slavoj Žižek uses an anti-Semite as an example of how deep this us/them ideology can go. When an anti-Semite meets his Jewish neighbor who is on all counts not just a normal person, but actually a dutiful citizen and a caring neighbor, the anti-Semite thinks, “’You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide behind the mask of everyday appearance—and it is exactly this hiding of one’s real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature!” In this framework the Jew is always either a bumbling idiot or a sneaky genius up to no good. Now anything the ‘Other’ does can be rendered as data for confirming the anti-Semite’s prejudiced worldview.6
This “either stupid or sneaky genius up to no good” dichotomy provides a razor’s edge with which to cleave all data from the other into boxes that help us make sense of the world, but even more so, that feeds our desire for cheap superiority. If I see the other look stupid, then I, by default, feel smart because I’m not a part of that stupid tribe. If I see the other look like a sneaky genius who is up to no good, then I gain a sense of de facto moral superiority.
Peterson, Shapiro, Rubin, Pinker, and so many more of the Anti-SJW Industry would have you think that anyone trying to criticize the shortcomings of society, or pushing for improvements, must be causing more harm than good; you are, therefore, naturally smarter, because you aren’t wasting your time, and in fact, you’re even more moral because at least you’re not out there causing more chaos. Don’t these radicals realize we’ve never had it so good? They should be praising capitalism and thanking the 1%!
Ultimately, we all need a sense that we are not blundering fools and that we are doing more good than harm in the world. This desire, though, is exploited by those who would have us do nothing to resolve historical injustices or undermine institutions of oppression, exploitation, and alienation. “Focus on yourself and what’s close by” is good advice if your immediate life is a wreck, but it’s also a cheap evasion of responsibility for contending with the bigger issues in life that some of us, especially Peterson and his fan base, disproportionately benefit from.
Rather than resist the desire to feel good about ourselves through moral or intellectual pursuits, we must instead maintain vigilance against getting these boosts through interpassivity, which is this sense of gaining both by doing nothing. Peterson puts himself on the altar of culture as a sacrifice for free speech, free thought, and freedom from responsibility of changing the conditions that disproportionately distribute precarity to marginalized people.
Peterson says you don’t have to change anything outside of your bedroom to feel more moral than those who fight for justice; you don’t have to read Judith Butler to try to understand where gender feminists are coming from, just shake your head at videos of hysterical people who are reduced to this intellectual trend and congratulate yourself for how sensible you are in comparison. No need to read, in fact, he will do it for you—just go get a job in the STEM fields, bucko.
Sure thing pops, I mean professor, but first, I just need to point out that you have something lodged between your teeth.
1 Doug Lain was the face of Zero Books, as well as the voice of its podcast arm, Zero Squared. This year (2021) he got bought out by the founders of ZB who started Repeater… I don’t know the details.
2 It makes you look stupid, but more importantly, this ignorance undermines intellectual efforts.
3 Retrospectively, I’m not so sure he has ever really been a bully. Bad word choice.
4 Basic Writings of Nietzsche, pg. 520
5 Ibid., 469
6 The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 48-49
