It’s All Your Fault

by Theodore Dalrymple (September 2010)

As a man, of course, I do not gossip: but, now retired, I do sometimes discuss my erstwhile colleagues with others of my erstwhile colleagues, out of purely scientific interest.

Now it so happens that the other day I was having a scientific discussion of precisely this nature when the name of a mutual acquaintance came up. My interlocutor said that he did not like him, in fact he would not speak to him. I asked him why not.






I have found it worthwhile to examine the advantages and disadvantages that accrued to me by the exercise of my resentment, and why it should be necessary to guard against it, for like some epidemic disease to which one has never developed immunity, it is likely to recur at any time.


But it is one of the joys as well as the sorrows of being a man, as against being, say, an amoeba, that one creates oneself. A shortcoming seen and understood can almost always be overcome, in part if not in whole, by conscious effort. It is no excuse for a man to be violent to a woman that he saw his father behaving thus, if he also knows that it is wrong for him to hit a woman (this, you will be no doubt relieved to hear, is not one of my failings).
Therefore, I could have learned many of the things that my parents did not teach me but should have taught me. I have had time enough, but alas not inclination or persistence enough. The initial fault was perhaps theirs, but the subsequent fault was undoubtedly mine.

But it does have its compensations of a kind. They are sour, but just like the taste in fruit, so the taste in compensations can run to the sour end of the sweet-and-sour spectrum.


But the real reward of resentment is that is changes the polarities of success and failure, or at least of the worth of success and failure. The fact that I am a failure in a certain regard shows that I am not only more sensitive than a vulgar success in that same regard, but really I am morally superior to him. To become a success, he has not had to contend with all that I have had to contend with to become a failure. Really, I am better than he, if only the world would recognise it.

I hope by now that it is clear that I know all this by acquaintance rather than by mere report. This means that many of the failures and failings that I once attributed to my parents were really attributable to my resentment. When I say this, of course, I do not want to make my resentment into an entity that exists independently of my own conscious behaviour, otherwise I shall start resenting my resentment, and looking for the causes of why I should be so resentful: my genes for example, or something else to resent.
Resentment, therefore, is a labyrinth, and if I may be excused a mixed classical metaphor, it is necessary to cut its Gordian knot. This can only be done by a person consciously deciding to do so, and realising that his resentment is not only useless (if pleasurable) but harmful. And this is true even if some of the things that he is resentful of or about have or had an objective existence, and are rightfully to be regarded as injustices.
Now it is my belief, in part deriving from attending to the motions of my own mind, that resentment is pre-eminently the emotion or mode of feeling and thought of our time. When the social historians of the future, if there are any, come to characterise our era they will not call it the age of the atomic bomb, or the financial derivative age, or even that of the 100 per cent mortgage, they will call it the Age of Resentment. For everyone is on the qui vive for the supposed causes of his victim status that are deep-seated, beyond not only his control but beyond repair, at least without a total revolution in human affairs.




The other great thing about resentment is that there is a potentially infinite supply of it. Resentment is not a zero-sum game. Because A resents B does not mean that B cannot resent A, just as much or even more. Nor can objective conditions ever affect the supply. A billionaire can resent just as well as a pauper: and, of course, vice versa.
Attend to the motions of your own mind, and you will see that this is so.

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