Mutual Ressentiment

 

Nietzsche's greatest accomplishment was the discovery of that curious, ambiguous, and often delightful principle of human civilization, ressentiment.  

Sometimes two people or two groups of people can hold each other in mutual ressentiment.  Sometimes a  class of people may be both resented and resentful, envied and full of envy, self-deceiving and the hidden object of other peoples' self-deceit.  An example of such a class might be a merchant class.

Indeed, the Ayn Randian "objectivist" worldview, and its more sophisticated and interesting cousins, such as Austrian economics and, far more sophisticated still, game theory, all bear the unmistakable signs of being steeped in the thick aromas of ressentiment.  The most extreme example of this specific kind of ressentiment comes from the "anarcho-capitalists" like Murray Rothbard.  Their dream of homo economicus is their own utopia, their own idealist dream of a pure world in which people like them - or like they imagine themselves to be - can rule with impunity, a world unstained by effects of the other kinds of power, the skills they lack and thus consider to be a kind of cheating - that is, interpersonal skills, the ability to form close and trusting friendships, family, care and the flowing of emotions, or, in other words, what they would consider manipulation.  A community of homo economici would be a pure community in which these kinds of skills would not exist, and in which no one would ever have to develop them and thus one in which every individual, shorn of all human ties, would be "free" to exchange anything for anything else in a purely quantitative way, to compete ruthlessly, and so on.

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