Nietzsche minus the pep, of course. But its timing is good.

Clearing my Bloglines account just now (scanning dozens of feeds, and closing a few of them down) I see that someone has put the following message in a bottle and thrown it into the digital ocean:

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."

That being the entirety of what appeared in the box on Bloglines. No need to click through to the original post, of course. Just quiet acknowledgment that the cosmos has a wicked sense of humor.
December 13, 2009 4:30 PM | | Comments (4)

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4 Comments

By Shane Taylor on December 13, 2009 8:54 PM

And I read this post while taking a break from _Atlas Shrugged_, which is the Rube Goldberg of ressentiment.

By Scott McLemee on December 13, 2009 9:03 PM

True, that. (And like many another Russian writer of her generation, Rand was pretty well saturated with Nietzsche, so it's not like she could have been completely unconscious of this.)

By DrSelfAbuse on December 14, 2009 7:06 AM

Don't forget: He's not just good at ressentiment. He's the Champion.

By Scott McLemee on December 16, 2009 4:28 PM

Thanks, doc, but I suspect people will need some context to get your point. But clearly you do sense the context I'm writing in.

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