Ressentiment-Driven Echo Chambers: The Oakdale Rodeo, Part 1

I want to use this short meditation to reflect on Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment and how pervasive it is in our modern media-driven economy.

I’ll start with energy, force, will, and drive. Nietzsche (as well as Bergson, Spinoza and Heraclitus) treated motion, energy and force as primary and not secondary. To see motion, energy and force as primary is to relieve ourselves of the need to reduce these things to the expression of something else — something more stable that gives a prior meaning to the motion as if the motion is its expression. In other words, energy does not emanate from a kernel of truth that reduces everything to an effect of this primal cause — not class struggle, not natural selection, not selfish genes, not the Oedipus complex. Rather, everything is always in motion and doesn’t have some inherent cause that would allow us to reduce all energy to effects of the primal cause.

This is what I think Nietzsche’s concept of sublimation meant, and it is fundamentally and crucially different than (simplified readings of) Freud’s parallel concept. For the easy reading of Freud, the Oedipus Complex is the cause of sublimation such that we can assume that any neurosis is an expression of the particular individual’s experience of this original and hidden complex. Not so for Nietzsche. For him, sublimation is not an expression of something prior to its existence. Sublimation is what energy, force and will do. It is how they show up in the world. They don’t have an essence that they express. Rather, expression as sublimation is the essence.

Ressentiment is sublimated energy with no essence to explain it. This does not mean that it cannot be analyzed and understood. According to Nietzsche, the acetic ideal comes into being by turning energy into ressentiment and holding onto it as a permanent human condition embedded in our souls. In fact, souls had to be created as instruments and repositories of this ressentiment. If we see ressentiment as an original condition, we see it as inescapable — if we see it at all. It is much more fruitful to see ressentiment through sublimation. Ressentiment is not an expression of Original Sin or an inherent “will to truth” or a natural and eternal sense of loss and frustration at the heart of the human condition. It is one form that human energy takes as it deals with other forms of energy with which it necessarily interacts. If there is anything original, it is force and drive:

A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect — more, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise. (GM 45)

The desire to reduce drive and will to expressions of something else — as their secret motivator that we must discover to truly understand them — is part of the ruse.

This alliance between ressentiment and truth is a crucial takeaway for me from my reading of the Genealogy this year. Ressentiment is one of the ways that our modern subjectivity is empowered, but it is a double-edged sword. On the one side, it grants us an interiority that is our own. We gained our “souls” as the seat of our will and our search for meaning by turning away from a desire for power that was not available to the common man in the first place. Ressentiment, particularly in the form of Judaism and Christianity, became an expression/sublimation of force that democratized this interiority — everyone has a soul as the thing that must be saved (Christianity) or “cared for” (Plato’s Socrates). Its coming into existence required techniques of self-reflection, self-observation, and self-correction that were, if not wholly new, intensifications of practices that were already there:

… all the concepts of ancient man were rather at first incredibly uncouth, coarse, external, narrow, straightforward, and altogether unsymbolical in meaning to a degree that we can scarcely conceive. The “pure one” is from the beginning merely a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with dirty women of the lower strata, who has an aversion to blood — no more, hardly more! On the other hand, to be sure, it is clear from the whole nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy why antithetical valuations could in precisely this instance soon become dangerously deepened, sharpened, and internalized; and indeed they finally tore chasms between man and man that a very Achilles of a free spirit would not venture to leap without a shudder. (GM 32)

This ability to intensify existing practices and their associated feelings and modes of attention is the power of ressentiment. It absorbs the powers around it and invests them with the democratizing power of personal meaning. But this subjectivity was purchased at a difficult price, and this is the other side of ressentiment’s double-edged sword. Nihilism and the “will to nothingness” is always hanging around. The possibility that meaning can fail to deliver itself is never very far away. Augustine’s disillusionment with Manichee can teeter on the brink of a nihilistic giving up if not for the will to truth and self-loathing that kept him going. Evagrius’ flirtation with nihilism was a bit more clear: “Happy is the man who thinks himself no better than dirt.”

Anger, self-loathing and nihilism are the price we pay for all of us having souls to care for and save. These emotions are always close at hand because they provide the animating power of our souls. They must be reactivated from time to time to reinvigorate the soul and remind us that we are here and that we have a self to take care of.

Ressentiment powers today’s media-driven economy. The legacy of the internet in the US is not an increase in freedom or a new lease on life for our democracy. One of its major outcomes is the commodification of our attention and the cultivation of continuous ressentiment. We are “impressions” that can be priced on a CPM (cost per mille) basis. Our modern Revenge of the Nerds has been the sublimation of incredible talent not to solve our greatest problems, but to commodify our attention and sell it to the highest bidding advertiser. Rational discourse is a poor strategy for driving higher CPM’s. Long-term, cultivated anger is much more profitable. We are encouraged to see all of our ills as effects of something else that we can be angry about — too many immigrants, loss of heterosexual family values, and all the other codes and dog whistles for ressentiment in our post/meta/modern society. Even better, if we see these things as somehow out of our control, our ressentiment can drive even higher levels of anger and frustration — and CPM’s.

This is not the death of truth as some commentators would have it, but a reinvigoration of the will to truth as the fuel of our commodified ressentiment. “Alternative facts” can only be lamented as the Death of God if you ignore how these facts work. No one peddling alternative facts is saying that the truth doesn’t matter. I’ve never been in conversation with or heard anyone on the right say that the truth doesn’t matter and we can just make it all up. They are saying that they have uncovered the real truth of the situation and you should be pissed off about it. If you’re not angry, you just don’t understand. This is emphatically not a Death of God or Death of Truth situation: it is a powerful intensification and weaponization of the will to truth. The weaponization is what is new. The left’s willingness to miss this point only serves to fuel their own weaponized ressentiment.

To be clear and somewhat repetitious, a weaponized will to truth is central to this attention economy; it has not done away with it. Storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not a will to nothingness; it was a supreme act of a will to truth. The anger that drives such action doesn’t happen without the crowd believing in something. Nihilism doesn’t have that kind of galvanizing power. It is anarchic, yes, but it lacks the focusing force that can only be provided by a belief that your anger is justified because you believe that you know something that others don’t. It is easy to find community in truth-fueled ressentiment, especially if media outlets like Fox News, Parler, and other right-wing sources provide a broad base of anger-generation funded by the CPM model. MSNBC on the left does no better. They just haven’t brought about a storming of the Capitol — at least not yet.

My approach in the face of all of this has been to avoid playing the game of “my truth is better than yours.” I think that this is a futile game to play as if somehow we can restore to a CMP-driven nation of 350 million people a consensus about what is true and what is false. (Hanzi Freinacht’s appreciation of the Green Social Liberal consensus holding sway as the meta-ideology of the Scandinavian countries is certainly made possible by the much smaller populations of those counties. Norway has 5.5 million people.) Restoring consensus isn’t likely to be an effective strategy in the short term. It will only lead to more liberal ressentiment as it miserably fails.

Ideally I find it better to try to defuse the weaponization and intensification rather than argue that my interlocutor is wrong. It does no good to offer facts alternative to the truth on offer. Rather, we need to be better at cultivating our disposition to the truths that we are told in our echo chambers. Stoicism has helped me. Nietzsche has helped me. Plato has helped me. Heraclitus has helped me. From them, I get a cultivated ability to handle paradoxical concepts without demanding clarifying resolutions (Heraclitus, Stoicism), embracing ignorance as a virtue in dialectal conversations (Socrates), reason as a self-calming disposition to frustration before it becomes anger (Seneca), and the use of provocations to distrust my initial impressions (Heraclitus, Nietzsche).

This doesn’t mean embracing a nihilistic relativism or believing that all truths are equal. This would be lunacy and oversimplifying in the wrong direction. Just because there is no essence to discover doesn’t mean that we’re stuck with no analysis possible and an inability to understand anything. It just makes the work of understanding harder. There is still a traceable set of forces at work in ressentiment, we just shouldn’t try to resolve the explanation to “a subject,” to use Nietzsche’s term. Rather than trying to drive toward a final understanding where we’ve arrived at the truth, we should see energy and force as “purely plastic” (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase). We must concentrate our attention more on how energy sublimates itself in the face of other energies that may be opposing it. This is where I find Nietzsche’s thought most powerful for me. Rather than seeing opposing forces — liberal vs conservative, progressive vs reactionary, savage vs civilized, intelligent vs stupid, everyday Joe’s vs intellectual elites, immigrants vs natives — I find it far more illuminating and productive to see these oppositions as Nietzschean sublimations.

There is a practical outcome of this. I either avoid echo chambers or try to complicate them. I don’t do social media anymore. I rarely watch the news other than scanning headlines from time to time. The driving force of an echo chamber like Fox News or MSNBC or IG or Twitter or FaceBook is to make us angrier and more certain of our beliefs. The other side is not only wrong, but dangerous in its wrongheadedness and stupidity. This makes compromise into a weakness and strengthens the power of ressentiment. If I’m in one of my liberal echo chambers, I might take up a stance that Heraclitus might have taken — provocation to see the situation with a bit more complexity. A typical situation for me among my liberal friends is the absolute incredulity they have for the willingness of the right to undermine our democracy. For my liberal friends, mass-scale democracy is America’ greatest achievement. So I’ll turn the tables on them. What if you don’t think that America’s greatest achievement is democracy? What if you think its achievement is its capitalist economy? You’re likely to see democracy as optional. As long as our laws and policies support the growth of our capitalist economy, then all is well. Of course I don't believe it’s that simple. The point is to stop the effects of the echo chamber by slowing down and de-intensifying conversations that tend toward ressentiment-driven certainty. When it works these conversations become somewhat less self-assured.

To be clear, I’m not trying to “see the other side’s point of view” — that’s equally silly and smacks of relativism. To cast the problem as two sides warring against each other is just an effect of sublimation. It is a fiction that we create in order to come to some sort of re-affirmation of our own ressentiment. Of course, the fiction becomes reality. Broadcast and social media effectively sort their audiences into increasingly weaponized factions. The stories we tell ourselves become the reality in which we live, and they reinforce the reality every moment by making us ever more certain that we are right in the group we have chosen. But the groups have chosen us. Political engagement today means to chose a group to identify with and to adopt its particular flavor of ressentiment.

To the contrary, once I can see “opposing sides” as expressions of sublimation, my attention can focus elsewhere. I can try to see the way in which “both sides” are ossifying effects of each others’ continual responses to far more complex forces. Dueling forms of ressentiment is a recipe for disaster — capitals are stormed, true texts are chosen, books are banned, school curricula are remade, politically correct speech becomes a weapon, one side is “woke” the other is MAGA. As the inability to communicate across well-sorted groups becomes less and less viable, we are encouraged not to find common ground. Our ability to listen is sublimated into decoding the dog whistles of “the other side.”

My point is not to wish for a utopian form of communication where “all of us” can agree. My point is that seeing energy, force, will and drive as expressions of something more essential to them disables us from seeing each other’s reactions as just that — reactions and responses to multiple sublimations of force happening around us all the time. As reactions that are not necessarily driven by essences, I see them as malleable. I can choose to respond differently.

Productive response, however, is difficult in a US culture that allows dueling forms of ressentiment to create and reinforce each other. I’ll provide a personal example. In April of 2022, I visited my family in California. They live in the conservative stronghold of the Central Valley. Growing up there in the 1970’s and 80’s, it was not that way. It has been transformed into a conservative bastion through a long process that I don’t fully understand. On that visit, I ended up at the Oakdale Rodeo. Here was a very dense concentration of the political ressentiment of the right. It was far less of a rodeo than a political rally. T-shirts saying “Black. Gun. Matter.” and “Make America Drink Again” and “Trump 2024” made up one of the acceptable uniforms for the crowd. If the Revolution is just a t-shirt away, it is not the Great Leap Forward that Billy Bragg hoped for.

Side note: My son’s observation was that only about 7 different uniforms where acceptable. However, what was universal to all of the uniforms was stabilizing gender identities. The uncompromising ability to identify who are men and who are women is absolutely required in this crowd. And only two options are available.

I felt stultified and angry. I had spent my life trying to get away from these people. Now here I was in the middle of their lunacy. I really tried to step back from my anger, but it was very difficult. When I was able to voice my anger (with the sympathetic audience of my wife, son and mom), I found myself focusing on how the right seeks to create its own Other by simultaneously denigrating itself (“Make America Drink Again,” “Keep going until the wheels fall off”) and elevating itself as the representatives of real American values (gun rights, rodeos, and National Guard flyovers — they couldn’t get the Air Force). In the process, I definitely felt like an elitist, not because I’m inherently better than them but because they want me to feel that way. They need me as their Other, which was reciprocated. I repaid that desire with interest.

To be clear, I was pissed, and I had a very difficult time, even now as I write this, to abstract myself from the ressentiment that emerged (and continues to hang out) in my soul. The situation not only seemed inescapable, it was inescapable. It was a strangely intense combination of anger without an outlet — ressentiment. I couldn’t even pretend to be friendly to anyone. This may say more about me than the situation. Maybe I was projecting more into their disposition than is warranted, but I don’t think that’s a complete story. It was a very intense experience of ressentiment folding back into myself as it evolved into an absolute despair for the future. I was cut off from others and cut off from my own ability to even rationally try to understand the situation. I kept trying to embrace an anthropological disposition to diffuse my ressentiment, but that didn’t work consistently. The most I got out of this experience is a better understanding of how ressentiment works as an experience, and how difficult it is for me to control in our modern cultural and political situation.