The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Among those who have been interested in the question of ressentiment was Friedrich Nietzsche. It is alarming how specifically he diagnoses the type. At one point, he writes that any psychologist who wishes to study the subject must recognize that “this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today, so it flowers like it always has done, in secret, like a violet but with a different scent. And just as like always gives rise to like, it will come as no surprise to find attempts coming once more from these circles, as so often before to sanctify revenge with the term justice—as though justice were fundamentally simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged—and belatedly to legitimize with revenge emotional reactions in general, one and all.”4 For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!’” This is something that must be averted, for the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy “confuse themselves with the sick.”5 He returns to the subject again and again, as though circling to get exactly to the root of the thing he is attempting to diagnose. Eventually he makes...