Love and resentment, understood not as emotions but as moral judgments, are the two poles of relations with our fellows that emerge from GA’s scene of human origin. The basis of love in this sense is our intuition of mutuality with others, as in the command to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” that is at the heart of human sociality. This intuition is found as well in Hillel’s negative version, “Do not do to another what you would not have him to do you.” In the nascent human context in which it emerges, it is a remedy for mimetic rivalry; its first manifestation in an individual is deferral, Derrida’s différance, of his attempt to appropriate a good also desired by others.
In obeying the command of my conscience to renounce seeking to appropriate a common object of desire, I am not merely shying away from possible conflict, I am judging that it would be wrong to take for myself what I realize belongs equally to all. And by the same token, I would judge another who does not abort his attempt at possession as worthy of resentment—my own and that of the group—for having disobeyed this moral imperative.
It is in the context of this first conscious inhibition dictated by our conscience, our intuition of right and wrong, that the originary hypothesis situates the nascent human scene. On this scene, our relationships with objects are mediated by the signs of language, which themselves originate in aborted/deferred gestures of appropriation, the simplest of which is pointing—which, in the sense of “look at the moon and not my finger,” is done only by humans.
But given the sacred imperative of reciprocity, in the inverse situation where it is the other who breaks the symmetry of the triangular configuration, we cannot help resenting him. Whether or not its implicit accusation is valid, resentment is a moral reaction.
The epistemology of resentment
Hierarchies of wealth and power exist in any but the most elementary societies, and it is impossible to prevent those lower in such hierarchies from resenting those who are higher. But the ethic of hierarchical societies judges such resentment in principle as illegitimate, immoral: legitimate differences of wealth and status must be accepted by all, and religious doctrines distinguish between the equality of souls and the inequalities made necessary by the functioning of the social order.
No doubt the introduction of conscious morality does not mean the end of mimetic conflict, but it permits the emergence of cooperative behaviors that keep such conflict in the margins of the social order. In contrast, the emergence in the modern world of what I have called the epistemology of resentment—the intuition that, contrary to previously held religious and societal doctrines, it is this sentiment, familiar to all, that is the true guide to personal morality—inspired the first modern challenge to the established order.
The French Revolution was grounded on what its participants saw as the demystification of the monarchy’s privileged inequalities, for the first time conceived as injustices. Louis XVI’s fatal convocation of the Etats-Généraux in 1789, by bringing together the three “estates,” among which the unprivileged status of the Tiers-Etat stood in clear contrast to the two others, tragically exemplified the ancien régime’s failure to adapt to the emergent conditions of nascent modernity.
In this historical context, then, we may speak of the epistemology of resentment as an equilibrating factor, a warning to the community that its system of privilege could no longer claim legitimacy and keep order in the society. But it also provided a precedent that could be revived through the a priori application of the revolutionary model to all privilege, whether deserved or not. And the success of the French Revolution in overthrowing the monarchy provided a guarantee to the less privileged in all circumstances to view their status as the product of a potentially reversible historical injustice, ushering us into the modern world.
Whence the perennial problem of this world’s “free” or market societies, constantly obliged to convince their members that they are not in fact nests of privilege, in contrast to the “totalitarian” autocracies whose ruling oligarchies tolerate no contestation of their decisions. Such societies, classically idealized in Orwell’s 1984, seek to weed out the least trace of resentment among their populations, including in many cases even within the family. And it is notable that although the ancient world insisted on the instability of tyrannies, those of today have shown themselves to be remarkably stable, even when clearly unpopular with their general populations, as today in Iran or North Korea.
Resentment and antisemitism
The most striking lesson of the past few years has been to remind us that the most enduring cultural manifestation of resentment in Western civilization—and, sadly, an increasingly frequent theme of these essays—is antisemitism. Indeed, the simplest definition of antisemitism is resentment of the Jews, the ancestors of Jesus, who may have denounced the Pharisees, but never renounced Judaism.
Indeed, it is only very recently that those whom John Paul II had the grace to recognize as the Catholic Church’s “elder brothers” have been viewed with such equanimity. Whence the suspicious air of fraternity between Catholic nations like Spain and Ireland and the perpetrators of the October 7 pogrom. Indeed, one is tempted to say that the truly significant revelation inspired by that massacre was the emergence, after centuries of religious wars, of a latent kinship between the two younger Abrahamic religions.
Ultimately, no doubt, the Islamists don’t really care for the “Sunday people” either, although their hostility to the “Saturday people” is clearly more urgent—especially now that, instead of attempting to conquer Europe by storming the walls of Vienna, they have chosen the more insidious method of mass immigration. Nor have there been any serious epidemics of Islamophobia in these countries, even in the face of the negative effect of this immigration on welfare costs and criminality.
On the contrary, as Hamas has pridefully pointed out, the pogrom’s principal effect in the West has been to provoke, along with hostility to Israel, a stampede of recognitions of the mythical state of Palestine, among the first being those of France and Great Britain, the two principal West European victors of WWII—as if the honeyed words of peace and brotherhood would magically efface those in the charters of Hamas and its fellow jihadists that vow to annihilate the Jewish state.
A last word on Jew-hatred
Daniel Greenfield didn’t mince words in his 9/30/25 Substack article: Western Leaders Recognizing a ‘Palestinian’ State aren’t Antisemitic. They’re Suicidal. (https://substack.com/inbox/post/174984136). For indeed, killing “the elder brother” is an attack on the roots of the self. The bottom line of today’s antisemitism is civilizational self-immolation: the suicide of Western Civilization.
Greenfield’s point is emphasized in his final paragraph:
The drive for a ‘Palestinian’ state is a civilizational death wish out to destroy the civilized world. Those who collaborate with it want war, not peace, and they are as willing to destroy their own countries as they are enthusiastic about bringing down Israel. The only supporters of a ‘Palestinian’ state are the enemies of civilization and their useful idiots.
Greenfield isn’t interested in whether this “civilizational death wish” is something inherent only in Western civilization, or in human civilization per se; but that only makes his point the more powerful. As David Horowitz’s heir at the head of the Freedom Center that bears his name, Greenfield is, like Horowitz himself, a critic of the “New Left” that emerged from the 1960’s with the aim of fomenting Marxist revolution in the West.
Greenfield is not fundamentally concerned with the long-term history of what I have called the epistemology of resentment, although that is indeed what he is describing. But where the sans-culottes could not only justify their resentment with the evidence of the old regime’s caste hierarchy, but seemed fully justified in envisaging that a casteless society in which everyone would belong to the Tiers-Etat would bring greater prosperity to all, a century later in Nietzsche’s time, le ressentiment—a term that in earlier times had designated rather the aristocrat’s indignation at failure to recognize his privilege—had come to appear as a threat to Western civilization, a threat against which the racially superior Übermensch—and we all know who came to embody this role—would become the sole recourse. But in the ensuing conflict, the Western democracies were victorious, and created the United Nations to ensure that no such disturbance would henceforth threaten the casteless world order.
And now, indeed, eighty years later, no one talks of a “master race”: the leading “revolutionary” movement is accessible to all… provided they submit. The genius of Islam is that we must experience religion as submission, seeing the divinity not as a liberating force teaching us right from wrong, but as a wise dictator offering us the recourse of blind obedience that deprives us—or more precisely, obliges us to deprive ourselves—of the least chance to do evil.
And we might imagine that Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and the rest might put up little resistance to this chance at perfection. But this could occur only once the Jews, the originators of the doctrine that guarantees their own exemplarity, had themselves been obliged to choose between death and submission. For the true end of monotheism, in short, is not, as the Biblical religions taught, the golden rule of mutual love, but the free choice of submission to the iron will of the Creator, who knows what is best for his creatures.
Thirty-odd years ago, Western civilization in its Judeo-Christian mode seemed to have triumphed over its totalitarian variants. But now the West has come to understand that its hubris, freedom of conscience, the poisoned gift of the “chosen people,” cannot be allowed to survive, lest it lead humanity to destroy itself. Our only chance of survival is through the universalization of the Muslim Umma, submitted to the will of Allah. Only then will resentment be no more.
In the Koran, as in the Torah, humanity chose evil over good and was cast out from the Garden. But it can redeem itself if it but humbly submit to the will of the Creator, as dictated to his Prophet.
Then again…