Ressentiment Unbound

Two Modes of Empowered Ressentiment

In this follow up to Reading the Iliad: Mênis and Ressentiment, I want to descend into the unique problem of ressentiment as it has played out in the US through the last election. By turning from ressentiment to mênis, I want to avoid the psychologizing what is happening to the US today. Rather, my use of mênis seeks to retain an understanding of ressentiment, particularly its capacity to invent values, while being able to trace new movements when it is no longer weak. These movements are not the expression of a pre-existing psychology, but the historically contingent motions through factionalism. By shifting from ressentiment to mênis, I want to keep the focus on the exercise of power that no longer has weakened vengeance as an important characteristic. Far from being weak, this vengeance (right and left) is now very active and empowered. We need different terms to help us see new dynamics playing out.

My contention is this: we are experiencing two dominant ways in which empowered ressentiment is playing out as empowered mênis.

First, the woke left has embraced textbook Nietzschean ressentiment, inventing its values from vicitmhood and exercising a kind of woke tyranny that threatens cancelation of any (mostly white) person who doesn’t ‘respect’ or ‘recognize’ this victimhood. It is a profoundly dysfunctional moral compass. To ensure the constant threat of woke tyranny, the left has invented new ways to victimize its privileged identities—trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, misuse of pronouns, cancel culture are all inventions of the left. Finding strength in the repetitive embrace of weakness is exactly what Nietzsche captured as ‘the morality of the slaves.’

Second, the MAGA right suddenly finds itself with full state power. This form of ressentiment no longer needs to redirect its desire for vengeance into value creation. As I argued in my previous post, this unleashed ressentiment looks a lot more like Homeric mênis, the exercise of power against a social group focused only on enforcing the glorified status of a leader and his allies.

Mênis and the Moral Compass

The crucial difference between these two manifestations of empowered ressentiment is the status of the moral compass. The woke left has retained a moral compass, but it is powerfully lacking in self-reflection. Its once laudable values have become platitudes in the exercise of this tyranny—inclusiveness, diversity, equity have all become code words for ‘all white people are oppressors.’

The MAGA right’s mênis abandons ressentiment’s moral compass, which was merely a consolation for impotent vengeance. Now that vengeance no longer has weakness foisted upon it, ressentiment can drop the need for its ‘morality of the slaves’ that created values as a consolation in the first place. It simply pursues its own glorification and enrichment.

Both forms of empowered ressentiment are squaring off in a zero sum game threatening our republican institutions. Both based their actions on denigration of the other, which is textbook Nietzschean ressentiment.

But for Nietzsche, ressentiment’s value creation is a consolation and a tactic for its weakness. Yet it was value creation and therefore godlike.

Ressentiment that finds itself in power has warped our collective moral compass. On the right, control of state power is assured at least through 2026. On the left, woke power has been long entrenched in non-governmental institutions and remains so. Neither moral compasses will be capable of navigating a time that is deeply out of joint. Why? Because neither can orient to future that is anything other than retribution for a past conceived as unforgivable injustice perpetrated against a social group — i.e., identity politics.

Mênis, in other words, emerges from ressentiment’s empowerment on both sides of the factional divide, and mênis cannot be the basis for an upgraded moral compass as we move into a complex future full of challenges humanity has never faced and is unprepared to face.

In this sense, my views differ from both Fukuyama and Snyder, who are quite different from each other. Fukuyama sees history through a Hegelian lens—History is the movement of self-consciousness as recognition of dignity that is more and more inclusive. Fukuyama sees one movement of history, and it is driven by the psychological need for recognition. Snyder sees two movements of history: inevitability (progressives) and eternity (conservatives). Current history is a clash between competing ideologies.

Neither view is wrong. We live in multiple simultaneous dimensions of time, which includes our ideologies of time.

Time is more than our ideological conceptions of it, however.

Given the complexity of times, rhythms, and tempos, I see neither one nor two movements. For the purposes of this essay, I see the complex movement of ressentiment becoming mênis. Rather than competing visions of history, the left and right share a single vision that bifurcates into two different manifestations of mênis. This bifurcation unleashes an incandescence that is experienced as a profound disorientation because no clear trajectory for historical time has yet emerged.

In this essay, I want to focus on how this dynamic is playing out on the left.

Ressentiment and Victimhood

For Fukuyama, victimhood emerges from a violation of a psychological need—the universal need for recognition. This Hegelianism locks him into a progressive understanding of historical time, where progress is the self-consciousness of our universal, psychological need for dignity through recognition.

Victimhood emerges from the violation of a human desire for dignity. The historical dialectic, therefore, will always be seeking out marginalized identities to recognize, and politics will demand that anyone who wants recognition show up as an identity with a grievance. This is, of course, a very limited lens through which to view the movement of political history. It is the tracing of a logic governing the movement of time.

This logic of recognition has licensed the woke left to create recognition as a trap to be met with a manifestation of mênis. If you misuse someone’s pronouns, you’ve created a microagression for which you need to be canceled, which in the university quite likely means being fired. This is not the basis for a moral compass. How will such a view of morality navigate a world of AI? It can’t and it won’t. It will continue to mire itself in manufacturing its morality of the slaves as both a distraction from larger issues and as the exercise of power that constantly seeks oppressors to attack. This is exactly the moral dangers of mênis that we saw in Homer’s Iliad.

It is the collapse of a moral compass, not its rejuvenation.

Mênis and Orientation of the Self

The moral problem of mênis is that it seeks to resolve the weakness of ressentiment as activated revenge. Its orientation places the perceived victim—the one who is slighted—at the center of the drama. All offenders, including their social groups, are open to retribution that is disproportionate to the offense.

Mênis is the violent imposition of selves and identities that are only understandable as a dialectic of victims and their oppressors. It constructs order as the violent demand to recognize the victim’s victimhood. This movement of mênis plays out in two directions today. From the right, it manifests as the glorification of a leader who promises a restoration of past greatness, but is really only interested in enforcing, often violently, his own status as leader, which involves disproportionate appropriate of the spoils over which he presides.

From the left, it manifests today as woke ressentiment that seeks to impose a broad-based morality of victim recognition, which we will dive into in what remains of this essay.

To break these two dead-end manifestations, we need to invent a moral compass that is capable of navigating away from selves and identities as the magnetic north. We need a truly and thoroughly navigational way of envisioning this moral compass. It does not go looking for identities (victims and oppressors), nor does it go looking for good and evil.

When I say ‘go looking for’ I mean moralities that have immovable magnetic norths. These are automatically dogmatic moralities.

We need a more complex and realistic notion of experience—one that understands orientation.

The Death of God and Ressentiment

Before we go any further, we need to understand the relationship between ressentiment and the death of God for Nietzsche. When we treat Nietzsche’s train of thought as standalone ideas, we are in danger of reifying those concepts into things. In this case, we shouldn’t separate ressentiment from the murder of God. The two are related to the genealogy of the modern moral compass.

This collapse of morality is what Nietzsche feared as the death of God, a death that was a murder. What did he fear? To murder God is to admit that He was always our invention. Nietzsche was afraid of the moral consequences of no longer being able to believe in something bigger than ourselves:

Isn’t the magnitude of this deed too big for us? Don’t we have to become gods ourselves just to be worthy of it?

In killing God, we implicitly recognize ourselves as gods, but is our moral compass up to the task?

The problem is this: the modern moral compass emerges from a weakened desire for vengeance—i.e., ressentiment as Nietzsche defined it in the Genealogy of Morals. This requires seeing oneself as victimized by an evil world. Without God as a way of injecting values into this victimhood, it is unclear where the need for victimhood would lead. For Nietzsche it was decádence. For the US, it has been in the two directions of mênis that I’ve been tracing.

Woke Ressentiment: Victims who need scapegoats

René Girard saw something different in the Nietzsche’s discussion of Christianity and ressentiment. He acknowledged that Nietzsche saw something in Christianity that others hadn’t. Christianity exposed previous religions as caught in cycles of violence and was, therefore, a myth that exposed the violence of previous myths.

But Nietzsche made ressentiment into Christianity’s essence, which meant that he missed the relationship between victims, scapegoats, ressentiment, and the mimetic cycle.

For Girard, we need to pull apart the dynamics of ressentiment by seeing it as a potential condition of the mimetic cycle—one of many possible conditions. Girard’s Jesus intervenes in the cycle (for example John’s story of the adulterous woman about to be stoned, 8:3ff) to diffuse its scapegoating power. This may lead to ressentiment—we don’t know what happens when the crowd disperses after being told ‘Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone’—but not necessarily so. In this sense, Girard can say that ressentiment might be Christianity’s child, but it certainly isn’t its father.

Therefore, we have to actively watch the dynamics of ressentiment playing out in any singular instance of the mimetic cycle. We should not install ressentiment as an essence to Christianity or any mass movement, including political factions. This installation of an essence blinds us to seeing exactly how the cycle might be working in any given movement.

When we install ressentiment as Christianity’s essence, it becomes possible for a group of people to see Christianity itself as a victimizer and thus as a scapegoating mechanism rather than its undoer. Again, this can be true—ressentiment might be in certain circumstances Christianity’s child but never its father. To make it universally and essentially so is to lose its moral power to expose the scapegoating mechanism.

Making ressentiment into Christianity’s essence makes Christianity into a scapegoat—we are all victimized by it. A perverse moral compass emerges that uses victimhood as a kind of tyranny—what I’m calling mênis. This mênis retains the cunning of ressentiment and becomes what Nietzsche thought Christianity was—the manufacture of victimhood as the essence of a moral compass rooted in vengeance.

When empowered on the left, this de-Christianized ressentiment demands that everyone ‘take the side of the victim’ and uses that demand as a new scapegoating dynamic that Girard called an ‘other totalitarianism’:

This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 180-81)

Girard, writing this in the late 1990’s, was prescient. He saw the consequences of untethering ressentiment from Christianity, which would lead to the birth of a neo-paganism that looks a lot like the woke left of today. This morality seeks to imitate Christ’s redemptive power, but without the ability to see the scapegoats it habitually creates and needs.

We can push further. This tyranny retains the inventive victimhood of ressentiment insofar as it continuously invents new dynamics of victimhood and scapegoating. Micro-aggressions that lead to new forms of sacrifice—i.e., cancelations. This is the fundamental innovation of the left’s empowered ressentiment now showing up as mênis that takes the side of the victim.

We can push even further. When Girard says that Christianity takes the side of the victim, we should read him as encouraging us to take the side of the scapegoat, not to justify the scapegoat, but to see the cycle at work. The woke left separates the victim from the scapegoat and invents a perpetual economy of victimhood to manufacture new scapegoats that it can sacrifice/cancel on its woke alters of moral purity.

Mênis and Recognition

This is its moral perversity, which makes the politics of ‘recognition’ into a problem of mênis on both sides of the factional divide. When we reduce ressentiment and mênis to psychological desires for recognition, we risk understanding the specificity and singularity of our historical moment. We seek to make it familiar and wrap it in terms of clarity.

But perhaps we don’t need predetermined clarities at this moment. Perhaps we need the capacity to drop familiar categories and to see things anew. We need to navigate without a fixed magnetic north where familiar categories like psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, philosophy and all the other ways we have divided up consciousness to bring clarity to a sea of pure experience have become rote blinders and the substance of so much ‘commentary’ on our current incandescent time.

Mênis turns recognition into an endless cycle of vendettas where new identities are formed out of manufactured victimhood. They bring with them the necessity for creating micro-aggressive scapegoats, and these identities will destroy the very movement of time itself in the name of reducing everything to a confirmation and continuation of victimhood.

In this economy of recognition, ressentiment becomes mênis as the exercise of a cultural power (via humanities departments and woke HR departments in corporations) runs around seeking recognition as a trap for those who aren’t up to speed on the ever-changing rules of the game. Empowered ressentiment in this game does not seek the glorification of a political leader so much as perpetual victimhood that pulls everyone into its intentional vortex.

We end up with a perverse moral compass that treats victimhood as the fixed and inflexible magnetic north. Victimhood enacts vortices of identities to be recognized, but the only mechanism of recognition is the mimetic cycle that creates micro-aggressive scapegoats on hyperdrive. It is the action of blood-thirsty, victimized gods demanding sacrifices to keep their victimhood activated.

This is no basis for a rejuvenated moral compass. It is certainly not capable of dealing with the active mênis on the right, whose disorienting and destructive tactics toward The People can only be met by reconstituting The People as envisioned by the Constitution—as a temporal entity committed to a ‘more perfect Union’ that can never finally arrive. The People exists only as a commitment to be a People and thus to negotiate in good faith the inevitable conflicts that will always be with Us.

This does not require a prior definition of what The People is. It does require, however, a sensitivity to temporality and how history is unfolding through an incandescent contingency. One of the ways to deal with this is not to focus on psychological needs for dignity and identity, but by focusing on how the mimetic cycle keeps churning out victims and scapegoats.

When we do so, we find ourselves back again to Nietzsche filter through the critiques of Girard. We find the Nietzsche, not of the Genealogy, but the Nietzsche of Zarathustra, who sought not the death of Christianity but the redemption of humanity from its propensity for revenge—‘up until now, man’s greatest expression.’