Inequities are bound to occur; it is how we react to the perceived injustice that is key. “Natural” emotions such as the anger engendered by cheaters evolved for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t perfect and they don’t necessarily improve our lives. So resist the all-too-natural tendency to nurse a grudge.
A reader forwarded me the essay, which is difficult to excerpt. The author writes of “injustice collecting” as a natural psychological program built to protect us from being cheated repeatedly but which becomes dysfunctional in many modern contexts. Some of my thoughts.
1. As a friend of mine once pointed out, at work, we naturally resent the people who get paid more and work less than we do. We almost never notice the people who are paid less and work more than we do.
2. Sometimes it seems that a person would rather collect injustices than do something about them. That can be really harmful.
3. It seems to me that in the political realm, sometimes groups would rather collect injustices than find a way to move past them.
Thank you for this one.
+1.
On 3 – I think the distribution of “collectors” is independent of the identity of the group. You might think that some groups collect more, but it would be a function how much you experience.
> It seems to me that in the political realm, sometimes groups would rather collect injustices than find a way to move past them.
“They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”
Hoarding resentment kills. Forgiveness declutters the spirit. Is there anything more beautiful in American history than victims’ families of the Charleston church shootings of 2015, publicly forgiving the killer?
When I got to college, I noticed I was a natural grudge nurser. So I came up with my own religion. It has one commandment, “Thou shalt just f*$!ing let it go.” The swearing seems necessary to remember the commandment in the moment. I notice I am happier when I manage to follow it.
“Sometimes it seems that a person would rather collect injustices than do something about them. That can be really harmful.”
It is often more harmful when they collect injustices and then act on it. Examples of what can go wrong: French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Mao, Castro, Hugo Chavez, and for that matter, Portland Oregon.
The resentment, or “ressentiment” (“a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration”) , of non-college educated whites against minorities and immigrants was widely attributed by elites as the animus leading to Brexit, Trump’s election, and any other horror that came to mind. Some are still working from that framework: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/08/politics-racial-resentment-come-back-haunt-gop/. I can remember when stereotyping groups of people based on race or educational credentials was considered a moral transgression. Oh well, it remains boorish. Res ipsa loquitur.
On the other hand, Steve Sailer, perhaps, deserves some credit for ridiculing the recent growth in elite preoccupation with Emmit Till. https://www.takimag.com/article/the_emmett_till_effect_steve_sailer/
Rather than dealing in generalities about resentment, maybe looking at the particularities would be the better approach. Somebody said resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Maybe ascribing resentment to others is like that too.
Thomas Sowell, for whom I have the nothing but respect, gets into the ascribing of resentment in this column, a column that certainly appeals to my priors, but nevertheless , seems unpersuasive:
“President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” — a war that we have lost, by the way — bankrolled all kinds of local “leaders” and organizations with the taxpayers’ money, in the name of community “participation” in shaping the policies of government.
These “leaders” and community activists have had every reason to hype racial resentments and to make issues “us” against “them.”
One of the largely untold stories of our time has been the story of how ACORN, Jesse Jackson and other community activists have been able to transfer billions of dollars from banks to their own organizations’ causes, with the aid of the federal government, exemplified by the Community Reinvestment Act and its sequels.
Racial anger and racial resentments are the fuel that keeps this lucrative racket going.”
https://thenewamerican.com/the-politics-of-resentment/
Anger and racial resentment got the Community Reinvestment Act amended multiple times and prevented William Niskanen from succeeding in his advocacy of repeal? Hasn’t addressing the historical consequences of redlining been the most frequently proffered and so far persuasive, justification for the act?
Someone more cynical might argue that the payroll of the countless community organizations had even more influence, given that the act itself has accomplished nothing discernible. Anger and resentment seem to be just too easy an explanation for most things.
Arnold, Nando Pelusi refers only to individual behavior, not to group behavior. The column was published in 2006 and he doesn’t use the words group or social in his column. His last column in Psychology Today is similar to the extent that he refers to how a particular emotion (doomscroll) leads to gloom; see
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/locus-control/202008/the-doomscroll-is-happiness-possible-today
We should be paying attention to how emotions condition rational responses and decisions at the individual level, but we cannot extrapolate to group or crowd behaviors because we know that there are no two people alike and psychologists still know little about emotions.
The political formula of “use propaganda to agitate maximum resentment, and then weaponize it” has evolved and been refined to an art-form. We are running advanced, next-generation-level Soviet “Active Measures” on ourselves, and these techniques are unbeatable, un-mitigatable. They are ‘disruptive’ and ‘killer apps’ in the sense of being stronger and better adapted to the current media environment than any other form of influence or interaction, and thus, wiping everything else out.
Politicians have always resorted to agitate emotions, including resentment. Democracy has massified the resort to emotions. Social media has elevated the resort to emotions to a new level. Since we know little about emotions, we have no choice but to treat them as noise. Can we control how much noise we hear and tolerate? Yes, we can lockdown ourselves, but at a price that it has become too high.
“We are running advanced, next-generation-level Soviet ‘Active Measures’ on ourselves…”
The problem that I see: there isn’t a we/us/ourselves anywhere to be found since there isn’t any collective fabric holding the thing together any longer. It’s more us vs. the various other competing identities or groups.
We were promised and assured that diversity based on class or ethnicity was our strength. I’m dubious about the long term prospects of this.
A Free Thoughts podcast with Cato director of polling, Emily Elkins, last July discussed resentment from their polling and that young people are actually angry when they hear or read about rich people. They kind of gloss over the rich pop star/athlete/politician whose wealth is not highlighted in what they hear or read.
“So let’s take that first one I gave you. It’s, “Very successful people sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.” Like a third of strong liberals agree with that statement compared to about one in 10 conservatives, so there’s… They’re three times as likely on this particular question.”
“17:53 Emily Ekins: Similarly, almost half of young people agree that they feel angry when they read or hear about very rich people, compared to only 11% of people over 65, so question after question that we asked about attitudes towards the rich, young people were 20, 25, even 30 points more likely than older people to express resentment and anger, so not just frustration, but anger with rich people. ”
“And so, what it seems like is that those who are emphasizing… People who feel a lot of malicious envy, they tend to have more an external locus of control. They feel like these external forces are shaping their lives. And what we found is that younger people are far more likely to feel an external locus of control than older people.”
That’s because young people grew up with day care and scheduled play and 13 plus years of schooling, where others are in control. It’s how they’ve been primed to experience the world.
Do you really want to quote Nando Pelusi? His wife Kaja Perina, through her position as editor of Psychology Today, has been complicit for some time with an unethical hypnotherapist who hypnotized someone without his knowledge or consent. The hypnotherapist refuses to vacate my mind, and I did inquire with TP to see how to stop the unethical hypnotherapist. The response I got showed that TP is in league with the unethical hypnotherapist. I’ve asked Kaja to end her complicity by stopping the unethical hypnotherapist, but so far she is unable to face the horrible thing she’s done. Could an ethical therapist be married to something like Kaja Perina?
I’m sorry to see that the unaccountability of psychology is trying to claim another victim. Let’s hope Kaja Perina and Nando Pelusi can make the right moral choice and stop this hypnotherapist. The ethics code says they should, but I wouldn’t deal with any psychologist, seeing how reluctant they are to be ethical.
And you really ought to understand that Psychology Today really isn’t into ethical conduct if Kaja is complicit with a hypnotherapist who hypnotized someone without his knowledge or consent and refuses to stop.
What I want you to do is make sure Kaja Perina understands that she needs to stop the unethical hypnotherapist immediately, and that no other task on her agenda is more important or more urgent.
Thank you for letting the world know about this. I know I won’t be checking out Psychology Today when I’m feeling low. I’d sooner check out Dr. Oz after what you’ve told us.
I don’t know if I’ll resent Kaja Perina and Nando Pelusi after they stop, but I know it’s not a grudge if I’m asking her to stop violating me in present tense. Once Kaja became complicit, she’s violating me every day, every moment until she stops the unethical hypnotherapist.
Right on, man!
I may be just one person trying to get free of an unethical hypnotherapist while the violator is in my brain, soon aware of my every thought or move, but if I don’t get free, it will be harder for others to get free of unethical hypnotherapists, because I’ve tried and failed with a corrupt Psychology Today.
I’m a man, and the abuse of power the unethical hypnotherapist did isn’t sexual. However, every case I’ve been able to read about involved a hypnotherapist raping a female patient.
Those women will have more trouble getting away from their rapist hypnotherapists, thanks to Kaja Perina, editor of Psychology Today. I would think that anyone who is against rape, as I am, would have a few choice words to say to her, and should also have a few choice words to say about an unethical hypnotherapist that refuses to leave when it’s not wanted.
No, I’m not kidding. Once one hypnotherapist knows that Kaja will help cover up for it, they must all know after a while. And then you add in all the other types of therapists, since the editor of Psychology Today knows a lot of psychology professionals.
With hypnotherapy, I’ve read a lot of cases since I wanted to know if anyone else was in the same situation. I could find no case like mine; the ones I did find were all the same. I have no doubt of what it means once Kaja let one unethical hypnotherapist use her.