[intense music] [voices whispering] [rain pattering] [dramatic music] [voices whispering]

[Peter] If God could not be cruel, there would never be justice on earth.

[Sjoerd] There has to be some kind of culprit to my suffering, who can be held responsible.

[Rahel] People think it's me who could have done otherwise. I could have done better.

[Grayson] There was scapegoating going on, and it's painful to think about. I'm not over it.

[Alexander] The other is fundamentally, maliciously attacking you and putting you down.

[Robert] What you have said hurts my feelings. You are not only wrong, but you are also morally wrong.

[Wendy] It became increasingly attached to its wound as its way of being able to reproach the world that it imagined had wounded it.

[Gyan] Humiliations, injury, the idea of pain. There's nothing else I can do, and I'll burn everything down. [intense music]

At its most minimal, it's an experience of suffering, or humiliation, or subordination that has as its response a moralizing denunciation or rancor against what it holds responsible for its suffering. And that means that instead of just experiencing the impotence, or the paralysis, or the frustration, or the subordination, there's a response that openly, that has a direct hostility toward, and reproach toward, what it takes to be its subordinating force. And I am careful to delineate that because it's not the case that its suffering is actually attributable to that force, but the agent, the one experiencing ressentiment imagines that this more powerful thing, this excluding thing, this humiliating thing, is the cause of its suffering.

We have, usually a very strong memory for unjust behavior of other people, a memory for suffering, a memory for humiliations. And if the humiliation becomes a permanent state of life, if someone hurts you, or humiliates you chronically, permanently, then in all likeliness, you will transform yourself into what psychologists would call a person of resentment.

So it's a tricky, it's a tricky emotion. I think ressentiment is kind of like sour grapes, where you want something, you can't get it, and instead of living with that disappointment, which is one of the worst emotions in my mind you have to experience, you invent a reason, "Oh they're sour, I don't want them." So you've actually changed reality. Those grapes that you wanted are now sour. I think it's often used in political scenes to describe disempowered people who don't know how to take control of their lives. I think conservatives and liberals alike use it as an insult word to describe people who aren't getting what they want. But I think the concept is a lot richer than that. It's not just a slur or an insult word.

So, a reactive attitude, but this is not the end of the story, because we have a lot of reactive attitudes. I mean, you always conceive the social world through some kind of concept, through some kind of, you always react to something, something that happens to you, something that you evaluated in a certain way, so, the reactive aspect of it as such is not the problem. The problem is how this reaction works.

In Nietzsche, which is what I'm mostly interested in at this point, ressentiment is an attitude that one has towards people who have a certain power, or a certain set of values that you yourself are not able to acquire or to live with. And instead of accepting that, you resent, if I can use the verb, those people who do have it. And you can have either one of two reactions. You can either try to revalue the values of these people so that they so that you no longer have to feel inferior to them. So, you make them believe things that make them equal with you. Or, you can revalue the values in such a way that you actually hurt them by imposing them on them.

So there has to be some kind of culprit to my suffering, who can be held responsible. Not that I can immediately take revenge on him if I'm resentful, because I can't. I can only do this in the form of postponed, and therefore, imaginary revenge. But this imaginary revenge is precisely what compensates me for my initial hurt. But it also means that ressentiment becomes a persistent condition. Because it's an imaginary revenge, it becomes self-perpetuating.

I would claim that ressentiment is a kind of ideology, a kind of subject formation that can occur under certain historical circumstances, and so it is possible that it pertains to different historical epochs. In postmodernity, I think it occurs precisely because some of the starting points of postmodern ideology came from a ressentiment position. It is good if you are from a marginal group. Why is that good, huh? Maybe you have some disadvantages, maybe you have some valuable experiences. But it doesn't mean that immediately, you know better, that's silly. In this sense, I think we have to state, in the first place, that postmodernism is the ideology of neoliberal economics. [intense music]

[TV Anchor] Workers at General Motors are facing an uncertain future this holiday season. The company announced it is stopping production at five factories. The move would cost some 14,000 jobs in North America. Yamiche Alcindor is back with reporting from Detroit. [intense music]

Our ancestors, in the Middle Ages until the 18th Century, lived in a world, especially in a rural context, where the expression of rebellion was not encouraged by the official culture. They were embedded within a religious system that preached resignation and confidence. And especially confidence in the wisdom of God, who put you exactly at that place in the world, that should become yours.

Ressentiment is inseparable from, not only an imaginary revenge, but first of all, a postponed revenge. And revenge cannot be exercised now, it has to be done later. That means that it can be, the feeling of revenge, or the longing for revenge, can be invested in long-term projects. Traditionally, this is the church, or the priest who says, "Okay, take your frustrations to me, "and I will make sure that nothing is forgotten, "and that in the end, you will be paid back, "and the enemy gets their due."

But what to do if you do no longer rely on God's rage bank? Let's not remember that the classical God of monotheism was an angry God, whose anger could very easily be aroused, and whose strictness, even cruelty, was essential to His character. If God could not be cruel, there would never be justice on earth, and not even beyond. The cruelty is the price for postponing immediate revenge, and that has something to do with the genesis of resentment.

The task of the priest is to pacify the ressentiment in a given population. And he does that by moralizing it, by rendering it morally illegitimate. Scheler constantly reduces the emancipatory claims of minority movements to ressentiment, in a way, to morally disqualify them. So what does the What does a priest do? The priest depoliticizes a population. And where are these functions of depoliticization nowadays? I mean, they are everywhere.

People who use fear mongering to mobilize a broader population, like on a perceived threat. So when I think of, how anti-black racism works in the U.S., it's based on fears of, not just anti-black, but anti-immigrant, and its attendant racisms. It's based on this fear that white people are losing something. I think that white fragility is a great way to mobilize people into feeling themselves to be under threat. And so, you know, people in the U.S., maybe in politics, who mobilize that fear, could certainly be the priests. People who find populations of Americans and people living in the U.S. to scapegoat as a cause for their fears, those are certainly priests.

I would not be too much surprised if one day, scholars of the future will demonstrate that the invention of that strange social character we call the influencer has been one of the strong symbols of the spirit of this time, you know, because the influencer has already a deal with the follower. And the follower, with the influencer, that they exchange poisons. Unluckily, we do not talk enough about the toxic, toxicological qualities of human communication. [intense music] [shouting in German] [horns honking] [crowd shouting] [chanting]

Today, I think ressentiment has come to the, or I think it's more commonly called resentment, has come to the attention of an intellectual public and a reading public trying to figure out what the rise of a populist right is fueled by, what the sentiments are that fuel it. And it's pretty obvious that one of the sentiments, or affects of that rise, has to do with ressentiment vis-a-vis declining imagined futures, and security, and place, especially for a white working and middle class in Europe and the United States, consequent to global outsourcing of jobs, privatization, the dismantling of the welfare state, all the things that 30, 40 years ago, made those classes not only feel they had a certain economic security, but also a pride of place as whites.

There's a huge part of the electorate, around 30% in Europe, in most countries, who are disappointed and angry people, and they vote for the party that expresses anger. No matter what else they promise, but if there is an anger index to a certain party, it's attractive to them. And of course, the big ruling parties in the last decades have been parties of of calming down anger in the public perception. They were always telling the story that everything is fine, and that we are so rich and well-off, and we are the happiest people in the world. But this does not correspond to the way how a huge part of the population feels, and how they feel, how their conditions of life have developed over the last decades, and especially how their hopes and aspirations have developed in the last decades.

There's a tremendous amount, and tremendous number of people who feel, often with good reason, that they've been pushed aside by the powerful groups in society. And the more these groups are interlaced, which has been happening more and more with immigration, and the rise in power of certain, up to now, oppressed minorities, who become accordingly much more visible and much more powerful, groups that used to be in power are beginning to feel ressentiment against other groups that seem to be usurping the power from them, and groups that were not very powerful, resent or feel ressentiment against the groups that already possess the power in question.

It's a global phenomenon because, I mean, I think here, I do have to go to something like neoliberalism, that, you know, when the world is now connected under neoliberal economy, and neoliberalism economizes everything, you know, not just the economy itself, but society as a whole, and disconnects your personal identity with larger social forces. Under this kind of neoliberal rationality, which is a global phenomenon, it is then not surprising that you find similar kinds of, you know, resentments about identity, observable across the world.

So this kind of ideology that, or the narrative, the neoliberal narrative that focuses so much on responsibility, and everyone should, I mean, is in charge of his own destiny, should set in the position to be so. This creates a situation where people who are, that people have the strong, I mean, they experience their own powerlessness and inequality and the disrespect that they experience in everyday life, but at the same time, they think, "It's me who could have done otherwise. "I could have done better."

Well, certainly one of the things we have lost is a very strong sense of common publics and caring for the common. And when I describe this kind of stratification, it's only the tip of the iceberg of what neo-liberalization has done to throw everybody back onto their own resources, but also, to make inequality absolutely legitimate in every domain, such that those who are not the top 20%, not the winners, are increasingly left out, and left in the cheap seats of every possible domain, and I mean right down to the way that classes of boarding are organized for airplanes, where the global elites, often black, brown, female, but mostly white male, march forward, sit down in business class, push aside those poor people in boarding group number five, who don't know what happened to their world. [intense music]

[Reporter] They are the two most famous planes in the skies: Air Force One, the most secure airplane in the world, and Trump's own plane, perhaps the most ostentatious.

If you're complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave. You can leave right now.

[Crowd] Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. Send her back. [dramatic music]

Thomas Frank said it in America, Trump was like the fuck you middle finger that the proletariat showed to the establishment. And in this sense, it's attractive to them. It's not because they like it, they hate it as well, but they think the others hate it more.

We see today, certain parts of the United States population, which finds itself not in the privileged, or at least in the position they thought was a privileged position up to now, not all of them were. Certainly, most people in the American working class, though they had good lives, were not part of the elite in any way, and they were more or less on the lower levels of the class structure of the supposed nonexistent class structure of the United States, now see themselves as suffering because strangers, African Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, are coming into the country, and taking away what belonged, by rights, to them. But it didn't belong, by rights, to them in any sense whatsoever. If anything belonged by rights to anybody in America, it was to the native population, which was decimated in the most cruel, crass way possible. People took the land away from them, and they just got used to the idea that it was theirs.

Part of the mobilization that is bringing to power authoritarian nationalists is a mobilization of this ressentiment, and a focus, giving it a direction for the humiliation, the suffering, the displacement that it feels, and making that focus into a form of very powerful political xenophobia, and move to close the doors, build walls, chase immigrants out, demand that France is for the French, America should be great again, Poland should be white, we know the slogans, all the slogans that we have of the rising political right today.

In India, for example, the right wing Hindus feel that they've been denied their place. And they've been denied their place by what they call minority appeasement; that the successive congress governments, in the name of secularism, have actually discriminated against the authentic people of the country, and have appeased Muslims who are, they don't call them foreigners, but you know, there is a sense in which they're illegitimate. It's the same kind of sense of being aggrieved that you also notice among Trump supporters over here. Bernie Sanders did a kind of a town hall meeting with Trump supporters, and you know, Bernie Sanders' view was that, you know, these people went over to Trump only because of NAFTA and because of trade, and really, their resentments were genuine, and were based on really class, even if they didn't recognize it. So, it was a very interesting town hall where he's trying to convince them, and this person is saying, "Mexicans came to our town, "and they took away all the jobs." And Bernie says, "Well, you know, "isn't that because of NAFTA?" "No, but we can see, you know, "these Mexicans are taking our jobs." And he's trying to say, "But you know, "all the money is going to 1%." But this person was not having it, you know. He was just saying, "Immigrants, immigrants, immigrants." Obviously, so you have a a kind of a class resentment, but without class consciousness. And so, this becomes, your plight is not because of a certain kind of class forces, but it is because the foreigners have come in, and they are endangering your very existence. Not just your job, they're endangering who you are.

Absolutely. And it's painful to think about. I just, I'm not over it. I do think that, that he mobilized by creating false causes. It just feels like a classic example. I'm not saying that the folks who voted for Trump didn't have actual, what do you call it, don't have actual and real concerns and demands, but I think that there was scapegoating going on. The way that white supremacist people and groups mobilized around him, is a real cause for concern because, of course, white supremacists make a point of blaming people of color and women, right, they're also misogynists. And trans people, they're also transphobes, right. White supremacists are all those things. [dramatic music]

[Crowd] No Trump, no wall, no USA at all! No Trump, no wall, no USA at all! No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!

[Man] Who are the fascists?

[Protestor] You are, you fucking idiot!

Am I?

Yeah.

[Man] I'm the fascist? Am I trying to silence you? Am I trying to silence your ability to speak? [tense music]

Ressentiment is an emotion that can't be reserved for any kind of political camp, I would say. It's a mode of it's a mode of reacting to whatever one experiences, and that can, of course, occur on the left. I mean, a very easy way to answer your question would be that, at least the left at least is in danger of having ressentiment against those who have ressentiment.

From 1980 on, the center left, social democrats in Europe, could only distinguish themselves from their opponent, on the cultural level, not on the economic level. And that meant this was, I think, the starting point for identity politics and for all these symbolic kind of consolations. And this introduced a new attitude in the left, which was this attitude of speaking carefully and responsibly, and not calling anybody by a name that would hurt the other person, which is totally opposed to the way how the left had been speaking for centuries since, I don't know, since the French Revolution. So the left was always to be known by the fact that they would speak bluntly, that they would speak in a language that is clear and calls the matters by their names.

Yeah, so when people say that they can no longer express themselves freely because of political correctness, I'm always curious about what they mean. I think when it's, you know, in the area of gender now, people get nervous all the time that they're gonna mess up, and then when they do, they want to blame it on something like political correctness and say, "Well, I didn't mean to hurt anybody. "Why does everybody have to be so politically correct?" I think that that kind of covers over the issue, which is that people do, trans people, gender nonconforming people, non-binary people, are becoming mobilized, and are demanding basic no-cost respect that we be treated with dignity in restrooms, that people use our names consistently, that people learn what our pronouns are instead of assuming them. These take emotional effort, but there's no material cost there, right. So when people evoke this language of political correctness as something what limits expression, I just don't think that's real. I think that what we're calling political correctness is a refusal to take seriously another person's demand for respect.

When the right attacks social justice, they are defending tradition, moral order, traditional moral order, and market justice. When the left engages in social justice, it's challenging the order that is arranged by traditional moral values and markets. So, political correctness is a kind of terrible code for this battle. The right is accusing the left of trying to restructure society so that it's more fair, less organized according to social powers that reproduce hierarchies of race and class and gender and much else, and the left, in turn, understands the right as defending that order, and they're both right, but political correctness is the term that the right uses to explain our tyrannical approach to telling them what to do and how to think, and in fact, what we're trying to do is not tell them what to do and how to think, but how to make a different world.

My basic line is that the cultural left that has engaged in a number of symbolic pseudo politics, that this cultural left has to be attacked from the left. It is a game where the cultural left and the rightist populism are perfect accomplices by claiming that anything that is against the cultural left is rightist populism. This feeds both sides perfectly, and I think we have to break this accompliceship of these tacit accomplices. [dramatic music]

[Woman] Why me? [speakers saying "why me" in various languages]

In the late part of the 1980s and the early part of the 1990s, I was struck by a feature of left political culture, especially in the United States, in which what seemed to me the great exciting part of what we now call identity politics, what we then called social movements, it seemed to me that identity was being, in some ways, packaged and commodified as an experience that had a wound at its core, and if it had to give up that wound, it ceased to exist, it ceased to be anything other than disenfranchised or subordinated, and so it became increasingly attached to its wound as its power. It became increasingly attached to its wound as its way of being able to reproach the world that it imagined had wounded it. It became increasingly attached to its suffering as its expression, and as its constitution.

It's easy to derive the notions of political correctness, or the need for political correctness, or the need for safe spaces, or the hypersensitivity to trigger words, to ressentiment. At the same time, the eagerness with which so many of us like to make this derivation, seems to me to be also part of a, of a counter-moralizing discourse, which still capitalizes on this notion of ressentiment, and maybe is still therefore also a symptom of ressentiment.

Is there a connection between the whole idea of safe spaces, the whole idea of never using language that could be insulting to anyone, are those aspects of academic and public life today connected with ressentiment? Well, in some way, I think they are. In what way? They're connected because they are, by and large, the denial of the values that one perceives the other group, whatever the other group happens to be, to be. And they are an inherent suspiciousness of the other, thinking that the other, whoever, again, the other is, is fundamentally maliciously attacking you, and putting you down.

The longing for safe spaces is always also, I'm not saying it coincides with it, but it's inseparable from, from a tendency to self depoliticize. Yeah. It couldn't be otherwise, precisely because it is a way of reinvesting hurt in an unchecked way. There is no critical other allowed. It's a way that makes, a safe space is a setup that guarantees that you are the owner of your hurt.

A British sociologist wrote a beautiful book about what happened to the universities, and the infantilization of academic life. And Furedi tells there that it has become common in his seminars and seminars of sociology in British universities that students address each other, not by saying, "I disagree with your argument," but by just saying, "What you have said hurts my feelings," as somebody who pertains to this or that group. "And you're not only wrong, "but you are also morally wrong. "You committed a sin that you hurt my feelings." And I think we have to see the cruel dimension of a power game that is being played here, and the cruel dimension of silencing people by doing this, because these very vulnerable and sensitive people are not sensitive at all when it comes to un-personing the other and saying the other is a perpetrator, where they were racist, sexist, ableist, or whatever kind of disrespectful guy, because there is no recovering from having been called something like that.

My view about university is that you go precisely in order to become someone that you were not before. So, the whole idea of a safe space, which is in a way, targeted at keeping you just as you are, is, I think, a very, very dangerous aspect of university life today. And that, and also what they call trigger warnings; trigger warnings where you tell your students, "Well, you know, something will upset you. "Something that I will say in my lecture will upset you." Yeah, I want my students to be upset. I want them to be upset, and I want them to argue back with me. I don't want them to get up and leave because I used a bad word. I want them to say, "why did you use it?"

I don't think that safe spaces exist. Any survivor will tell you that. Any marginalized person that's been to any kind of consciousness-raising meeting or support group just knows that those spaces aren't They have the promise of safety, but I think that it's often misconstrued as a guarantee. So, I just think, experientially, safe spaces do not exist. I think that the university's mobilization of that term in order to I don't know why they're using it, protect students from further harm? Is that what safe spaces are for? I'm not sure. I think that making spaces accessible is what we should be focused on. So, are university campuses accessible? How does it feel for a survivor of violence to be on a campus where she knows people are carrying concealed weapons? And if it feels bad, you know, that's okay. But there needs to be space for her to experience that and say something about it, and not feel like she can't be there and has to leave. Same goes for the classroom. My students need to know that if they become activated in the course of my class, they can stay or they can leave. And I hope they'll stay. You know, I'd rather have my students crying or arguing in class than not doing either of those things, or leaving.

So, I think it's been a terrible mistake to import the idea of safety, intellectual safety, and emotional safety, into a university environment, with one exception. For as long as I can remember, I have considered it important for minorities of any kind, or injured groups of any kind, to have places where they can huddle. That has always been the virtue of women's centers, of LGBT lounges, of black student unions. Those are really important political, social, and emotional places. They give people who otherwise are often thrust into deeply alien, or just inegalitarian environments, places to go, to retreat from those, to recover from those, but above all, to think about their experience, and whether it's consciousness-raising, or whether it's therapy, or whether it's political strategy. So, I think what's become confused, is the importance of having those places, and confusing that with the university writ large. And I think that confusion has been damaging to students' understanding of what education is about and for, but I also think it's been damaging politically, 'cause it's so easy to mock. And mock it, the right has done. [intense music]

[Reporter] This marks the day the U.N. was officially born. At its inception, 51 countries were represented. [crowd chanting] [marchers' feet thumping] [speaking in foreign language]

[Man] Liberation just like the ANC.

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and nonviolence.

Whose bodies?

Our bodies!

[Woman] People united, will never be divided! [tense chaotic music]

Now, the idea that something as quote, evil, is ressentiment, can have a positive aspect to it, is an essentially Nietzschean idea, who, Nietzsche himself thinks that nothing is purely bad and purely good. "Even Christianity," he says, "has been extremely valuable," even though he thinks of it in those terrible terms. Why? Because, he said, "It teaches people discipline." And discipline is a necessary condition for accomplishing something that goes beyond it. In a kind of less serious mood, he says, "Well, you know, "there is a great accomplishment of the church. "We, anti-church, anti-Christians, "are its great accomplishment." They wouldn't have existed without them, [laughs]. So yes, it's important to see what good things, if any, could come out of ressentiment. And ideally, a Nietzschean should be able to find it.

And the essential difference is, is that between rage, which can be expressed and look for revenge, which means re-establishing, fixing the balance of offenses, in contrast with resentment, where there is no way to fix the balance, that leads to a permanent attitude of resentment because anger and hatred and rage that could not be expressed, enter into the structure of the personality, and form a body of resentment, almost under a certain stress, and always looking for opportunities to find a let-out on indirect ways. And that's, people of resentment are also called toxic people by those who encounter them.

I like the disruptive character of active resentments. I think that historically, we've often tried to pick and choose which heroes we look to for liberation efforts. I think we often forget that the rights we have now are owed to marginalized people who were rowdy and loud, and not taken very seriously. There is a variety of ressentiment that is emphatically committed to freedom, not as kind of liberal equality where differences get leveled out, but where we use difference as a strength rather than a weakness.

You know, this idea of, let's say, humiliation, or the idea of injury, the idea of pain, can also lead to a different kind of a direction. My example would be someone like Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Indian Dalit leader, who, you know, as he grew up, we know he experienced, of course, caste discrimination, being asked to sit at the back of the room in a class, not being allowed to drink from the same well as his upper caste school mates. But he didn't let that indignation into a kind of a dead end where he says, "Well, there's nothing else I can do, "and I'll burn everything down." That experience, then, leads him to really formulate a program of democracy. And it's no accident then that he is the chief draft person of the Indian constitution. We have to understand how is it that the doors are closed so that you think that the only avenue is a kind of a reactive energy. [intense music]

I think ressentiment itself has to be pried open to produce an egalitarian desire. In my reading, my understanding, I don't think that's what it wants. I think it wants to punish. [intense music]

Ressentiment wants to drag down, like the smaller inequalities become actually the bigger, the more comparison there is. It will always look for new inequalities to legitimate itself. [intense music]

If the weak are the good, then it is clear that they must remain weak. Political excess would mean that nobody has to be weak. We create conditions where nobody is weak. [intense music]

It's not getting better. So the sense of loss, it's not getting better. The gap between those left behind and the others has become [sighs] I mean, has become wider, but also more obvious. [intense music]

I'm afraid that the years to come will show the globalization of resentment to an unexpected extent. And the next future will probably show a climate change in the sense that we should prepare ourself to strong toxic rains. [intense rock music] [male vocalist screaming] [intense rock music]