Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

RESENTMENT 217
fatigable and insatiable in its outbursts against the happy, and equally so in
disguises for revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when will they really reach
their final, fondest, most sublime triumph of revenge? At that time, doubtless,
when they succeed in pushing their own misery, indeed all misery
there is, into the consciousness of the happy; so that the latter begin one day
to .be ashamed of their happiness, and perchance say to themselves when
they meet, 'It is a shame to be happy! There is too much misery! ,50
There can be no doubt that Nietzsche here forecasts one of the most
momentous developments of the twentieth century, which alone made
possible effusions such as Paul Tournier's on the subject of true and false
guilt-feelings. Or again one need only recall the innumerable masochistic
writings in which Westerners indulge in shame and self-indictment
because of the inequality between them and the so-called developing
countries. Nietzsche sees this development as the biggest and most
fateful of misunderstandings. The world in which the happy and successful
begin to doubt their right to happiness, he regards as a world turned
upside down. Nietzsche follows this by writing about what he calls the
tremendous historic mission of the ascetic priest in a society. The priest
acts as a deflector of resentment by telling the sufferer searching for a
cause, an instigator or, to be exact, a guilty instigator, of his suffering,
that certainly there is a guilty person, but that person is the sufferer
himself. 51 Nietzsche believes that even if this were objectively false, it
would still deflect resentment from action dangerous to society. A
Marxist would here reproach Nietzsche with accepting religion solely as
an opiate for the people in order to avoid class war; but seen against the
background of this book, Nietzsche's view, devoid of religious sentiment,
may have been realistic in that fundamentally no society can be effective
or even attain a tolerable social climate, if it does not possess that kind of
belief that will bring the underprivileged man to see, if not himself, then
the effect of blind chance as a cause of his condition. We have already
seen the dead ends in which primitive peoples stagnate as a result of
conceiving that every misfortune or loss of asset experienced by the
individual is deliberately engineered by a fellow tribesman.
Nietzsche examines resentment in many forms, and also its physiological
manifestations, as a reactive and enduring mode of behaviour.
50 Op. cit., Vol. 13, p. 160.
51 Op. cit., Vol. 13, p. 162.