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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8728 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I want to talk about Ressentiment, specifically the intro to a book I read of the same name by Max Schaler. I'm surprised the motte/rationalist circles haven't discussed it more, because it seems extremely relevant to the culture war. Here's the definition given in the book:

Ressentiment is an incurable, persistent feeling of hating and despising which occurs in certain individuals and groups. It takes its root in equally incurable impotencies or weaknesses that those subjects constantly suffer from. These impotencies generate either individual or collective, but always negative emotive attitudes. They can permeate a whole culture, era, and an entire moral system. The feeling of ressentiment leads to false moral judgments made on other people who are devoid of this feeling. Such judgments are not infrequently accompanied by rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from.

The reason I bring it up is that I see this emotional pattern as the driving force behind modern politics. More on the populist right surely, but the left also has a weird sort of ressentiment in which they kind of hate their own culture, see whiteness / western civ as a stain that they can never get rid of.

Importantly though I think the right falls into the definition of being 'impotent' FAR more than the left, which as this quote explains is crucial to the whole process of ressentiment:

Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values. This, in turn, lets the venom of ressentiment permeate the person's whole inner life and experience, so that the order of values and the order of loving positive values is in a state of disarray. Reasoning about values can not stop the emotive disorder to occur and continue. It might at best recognize the disorder when, for instance, a ressentiment-subject says, "There is something wrong with me." But this is very rare among those subjects, and it neither nullifies the experience of the disorder felt among positive and negative values, nor does it help to rationally recognize the higher values to be attained, i.e., to let the grapes simply what they are, namely, sweet. A insight in emotional experiences is at a rational inventory of oneself. Rational logic is no cure in a flawed experience of values.

Ultimately I know a ton has been written about this topic, but curious what folks here think of the idea?

Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?

Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.

Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values.

impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?

You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."

But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?

Personally I resonate with the concept and feel it quite often. So does the friend who recommended the book to me.

I think it helps illuminate a specific pattern of emotion.

Is it what the main character in Notes from Underground is suffering from?

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