The problem, Scruton argued, is when “resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,” Scruton concludes. At that point resentment becomes “an existential posture” adopted not “to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. . . . That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.” Another word for what Scruton is describing is nihilism.
