It's Futile. It's Destructive. It's Blinding. But this universal
emotiondoes have its rewards. It assures us of our own impotence. And it
allows us to hang on to our image of ourselves as fundamentally
good-whatever our actual behavior. By Theodore Dalrymple.
OF ALL THE FUTILE AND DESTRUCTIVE EMOTIONS TO WHICH HUMAN BEINGS
ARE PREY, PERHAPS THE MOST UNIVERSAL IS RESENTMENT. SURELY THERE CAN BE
FEW PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT WASTED MANY HOURS OR EVEN YEARS OF THEIR LIFE
DWELLING ON THE WRONGS SUPPOSEDLY DONE TO THEM. IN MY EXPERIENCE, PEOPLE
GENERALLY SPEND RATHER LESS TIME DWELLING ON THE WRONGS THEY HAVE DONE TO
OTHERS.
SINCE WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF PERPETUAL INJUSTICE, EVERYONE SUPPOSES
HE OR SHE HAS REAL CAUSE TO FEEL RESENTFUL. BUT THE RESENTMENT WE FEEL IS
BY NO MEANS PROPORTIONAL TO ITS ALLEGED CAUSE.
Even people who, by all standards, have led extremely privileged
lives full of opportunity manage somehow to resent, often very
forcefully. They compare their lives not with those hundreds of millions
of people less fortunate than themselves, but with an impossible ideal or
with the very few who are even better off than they. No one, after all,
is so fortunate that he or she does not know of someone even more
fortunate.
By contrast, people who have experienced horrifying treatment
during civil war or other calamities are often singularly free of
resentment. This is further proof, if any were needed, that this most
destructive of emotions is more dependent upon inner need than upon outer
circumstances.
Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the
damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and
psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with
selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own
mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.
Personal resentment has played an important part in recent history.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin lived and breathed it. Men who become
dictators never forget the trivial slights experienced in their youth and
avenge themselves upon their former tormentors when they achieved power.
One of the first of the hundreds of thousands of deaths for which the
Ethiopian dictator Mengistu was responsible was that of the man who had
refused him a scholarship to the United States. The dictator of
Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema, who killed or drove into exile a third
of his tiny country's population, was so uncertain of his own educational
accomplishments that he took anyone who wore glasses or possessed a page
of printed matter as an intellectual and had him killed. These examples
could, alas, be multiplied many times.
I recently attended a rally in Naples addressed by Mussolini's
granddaughter, Allesandra. There were only about 500 people, but even
this small number managed to raise a frighteningly deep-throated chant of
"Duce! Duce! Duce!" (to the accompaniment of the fascist salute) in the
courtyard of the castle in which the rally took place.
La Mussolini, who is glamorous in an overblown way, was clearly
bored by the whole proceedings, except when it was her turn to speak. To
an observer, it was transparently obvious that she cared as much for her
supporters, and in approximately the same way, as a poultry farmer for
his chickens. Any promise she made them was self-evidently false and
worthless. As I looked around me, at the faces contorted by a hatred
expressed in unison, I was surprised by how many of these latter-day
Fascisti were lame (like Goebbels) or otherwise impaired, small and mean
men who were searching for an enemy whom they could blame for their
dissatisfaction.
Most resentment, however, does not result in political action and
remains fixed at a purely personal level. Among my patients, it is clear
that this emotion fulfills an important function: to disguise from
themselves the extent to which their own decisions and conduct have been
responsible for their unhappiness. People prefer the role of immaculate
victim of circumstance to that of principal author of their own
misery.
Parents are perhaps the most common object of resentment, the
people who are most frequently blamed for all our failings and failures
alike. How many times have I heard a patient recite a litany of complaint
about his mother or his father, about how one or the other of them, or
both, destroyed his self-respect, or prevented him from achieving
anything worthwhile by undermining his confidence! (In my youth, I too
played this game.) I can scarcely recall a single patient, though, who
made any allowance whatsoever for the upbringing his parents received in
their turn. Original sin was committed not by Adam and Eve, but by our
own parents, who sprang into the world fully formed. Their faults, unlike
ours, derive from a pure ill-will, rather than a faulty childhood.
There is a kind of sour pleasure or even a bitter happiness in such
resentment, whatever the object it happens to attach itself to. With many
people it becomes almost a vocation or a way of life. They revolve the
injustices from which they believe they have suffered around in their
heads almost like a mantra. They find the repetition reassuring: for
something that is untrue attains an aura of truth if it is repeated often
enough.
Tags:
blame,
calamities,
circumstances,
civil war,
criminal,
destructive emotions,
human beings,
injustice,
prey,
resentment,
rewards,
scant attention,
victim
