Resentment

Resentment Contrasted with other Emotions

It is useful to contrast resentment with envy. Envy involves a painful awareness of another person's desired advantage and the blend of discontent, ill [Page 659]will, and resentment that this awareness can produce. Thus, some sense of resentment or sense of injustice seems to be a common ingredient of envy. However, scholars emphasize that the resentment found in envy is highly subjective because it lacks social approval. Furthermore, it often results from a need to rationalize the ill will associated with the emotion. In its purest form, resentment follows a clearer-cut, seemingly objective, injustice and enjoys greater social approval. In some cases of objective injustice, resentment can appear as moral outrage or righteous indignation as was the case in the race riots of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Like envy, resentment can be fueled and exaggerated by rationalization. The wrong may even be imagined. In some cases, it may have originated from envy. But compared to envy, it is less likely to spring from a questionable starting premise.

Another important distinguishing feature of resentment is that, unlike envy, it need not arise from a social comparison. Much of the social science research on resentment focuses on people's reactions to disadvantage, but the range of situations that cause resentment is actually much more than disadvantage. We can resent being ignored when we are entitled to have a say in a group decision, for example. We can resent an insult or injury. We can resent tax rates or university parking policies. In other words, we can resent both unfair procedures as well as unfair distributions. Envy, however, is nonsensical without an explicit social comparison.

Finally, the action tendencies associated with resentment are more evident than with envy. When people feel resentment, because they perceive that they have been unfairly treated, they are liable to take action to remedy the wrong. Examples of open political violence have been explained by noting the resentment caused by group members being deprived of something to which they feel entitled and deserving. Envy can lead to actions, but because the emotion is socially repugnant and unsanctioned, these actions are more likely to be covert.

It is also useful to distinguish resentment from ressentiment, an emotion derived from Nietzschean ideas and further developed by another German philosopher, Max Scheler, in the early 20th century. Ressentiment refers to a state of mind resulting from chronic impotence and inferiority. It entails a devaluing of what one secretly craves but cannot obtain. It is like resentment in that it is a negative emotion often containing anger and frequently linked to deprivation. However, unlike resentment, it is passive rather than active. Ressentiment, generally, leads to self-debilitating inaction as a means of numbing the pain of inferiority. In contrast, resentment often leads to action to redress the perceived wrong.

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