Strange Conversations: Resentment Redux

One of the stranger conversations I've seen on the web is the one presently underway at Spengler's Forum. The participants are discussing the eventual demographic demise of the "liberals." Basing themselves on somewhat questionable data, they appear to believe that conservative Christian families are breeding at such a level that they and their culturally indoctrinated progeny will one day take over America. I kid you not. ...

One participant, calling herself booklady, writes:

I see the same thing happening in my parents country, Spain. The Catholic folks have the families and are fighting to maintain family values; while the more liberal Spaniards are having fewer or no children. As Spengler says, they chose a pleasurable lifestyle where children are seen as a sacrifice and a burden from their distractions.

Another commenter, ciroan, states the sentiment more irenically:

I look forward to the day when the liberal tribes - the abortionites, the sodomists, the tax-promoters, the blue-state metrosexuals (blue indeed!) - snuff themselves out once and for all. When the population of the United States becomes uniformly conservative, all will agree with one another, causing political and cultural disputation to dwindle almost to zero. Harmonious peace and prosperity will become the happy lot of each and every citizen. It will be not unlike utopia.

There's a term that has gained much philosophical study, resentment. Cloesly associated with envy, resentment differs at the psychological level in that it not only envies what or who another has or is but instead resents the very existence of another person.

In the vernacular, the psychological phenomenon is stated in the following way: "S/he's a waste of skin."

In his analysis of resentment as the outcome of alienation, Merold Westphal in God, Guilt, and Death writes that resentment comes from a sense not of lack of worth as a sense of power to be worthy or to become happy" “If I had the power, if father (God) hadn’t done that, I’d be somebody or something; I’d be happy now.”

These people obviously feel extremely unhappy that they can't be what they want to be and that they live in a society where others--liberals--are the source of that inability to become who or what they believe they can be. Liberals in their views create a society that espouses views that creates great unease and moral ambivalence, undermining the sense of certainty that they understand ethics and morality to entail.

According to Westphal, repressed envy causes resentment. In a person to person context, it is not a primary feeling but feeds on hate, envy, fear. It is the repression of a primary feeling such as hate or envy. Repression here means that the original feeling cannot be discharged in some action. The impotence from this repression and inability to act (from fear or weakness) is important to note.

Resentment can come from the following being repressed: revenge, hatred, malice, impulse to detract, spite, rancor, wrath, envy, joy when another fails. Envy--the most prominent form of social emotion in the US--is self-centeredness in the face of another’s excellence or something esteemed.

Think about how hard it is to admire someone else who is better at something you are not. One thinks: “What about me? What happens to me if they are better than I am?” Envy reflects the threat I feel to my self at the center of all that I find important about and in life.

In contrast to greed, envy doesn’t just want what the other has (good looks, say), but I must have it at the other’s expense. In existential terms, this means:
“I can forgive everything but not that you are – that you are what you are – that I am not what you are – indeed that I am not you."

The object of resentment cannot simply be allowed to live away or out of sight; no, they must simply disappear. So, when the folks at Spengler Forum fantasize about the demise of the liberals, they are playing out the trotured logic of their resentment.

The resentment can even become racist. As BabeThe GlazedHam, another participant in the conversation, has it:

And, of course, the answer is exactly as I've been trying to tell everyone: We are trading high IQ white leftists for low IQ brown leftists. Furthermore, the ratio may be as bad as 2 or more brown leftists [child or adult] for every 1 white leftist baby [who was either never made, or who was made and then murdered in an abortuary].

Furthermore, if Brooks's numbers are correct [only a 2.08 TFR for conservative women], then the conservatives aren't making enough babies to offset the flood of [low IQ] hispanics entering this country, and our nation is headed for a state of Castro-ite/Chavez-ian chaos over the course of the next half century.

PS: If you want to get really, really depressed, then read some of La Griffe du Lion's work on the economic results of importing so many low IQ peoples, e.g.

Resentment at another's existence--simply for being different and opposing those most cherished things that give my existence meaning--will find any reason to rationalize the most appalling acts of despair.