Resentment: Socialism's Bitter Core

Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Nietzsche thought that resentment is the ultimate basis for conventional morality. Human societies, he said, were once theocratic, under the control of a priestly class that mediated between the gods and men. But this hegemony was periodically threatened by exceptional individuals, persons intensely motivated by some grand vision of accomplishment.

In response, the priests promulgated one or another version of what Nietzsche called "slave morality": All men are equal, turn the other cheek, those who suffer are morally superior, etc. This is the morality of the weak who resent the capabilities of the strong. It's the morality of the unexceptional majority, of the herd, driven by resentment of the exceptional. The priests claim divine sanction for this version of morality, and thus do they maintain their own power.

Nietzsche had in mind the warrior-conqueror, like Alexander the Great, who embodied the set of heroic virtues that defined nobility. Slave morality turned the ideal of nobility on its head: it re-defined noble virtues, and even the notion of nobility itself, as evil, and established their opposites as the moral Good.

In the modern world, the same applies to the founder of a business empire. John D. Rockerfeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, etc., were once looked up to as ideals of energy and accomplishment. Modern liberalism devalues and stigmatizes the personal characteristics and behavior that made those men successful, and it defines morality by their opposites. Resentment is why the fact of "trickle down," the explosive expansion of societal wealth produced by capitalism, comes to be vilified as "trickled on." Resentment is why the socialist ant hill is exalted on moral grounds, while its unbroken record of economic failure goes unremarked or denied.

Critiques of socialism almost always land wide of the mark. Every critique of socialism must begin with the recognition that socialism is fundamentally a moral system, not an economic one. It is the secular embodiment of slave morality, and resentment is its bitter, irreducible core.

Byron