The Resentful Class and Its Origins

British psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple analyzes the motivations behind the summer riots in Great Britain. The real culprit is not income inequality or lack of opportunity or the bad behavior of financiers... it's resentment.

Resentment is a powerful, long-lasting emotion that usually is self-serving and dishonest (I have never heard a criminal complain that his defense lawyer is upper-class, as he often is), as well as useless. Resentment is undoubtedly part of everyone’s psychology, at least potentially, and few of us have never heeded its siren song. A population’s general level of resentment, however, is not a natural phenomenon that one can analyze in purely mechanical terms, as if it increased geometrically with the Gini coefficient. Britain itself has been far more unequal in the past without widespread riots’ breaking out, so it is clear that we cannot understand people’s behavior without referring to the meanings that they attach to things.

Read it all.

For decades, progressive intellectuals have been stoking these resentments by pointing out how unfair the world is and liberal governments have been nuturing a sense of entitlement that has naturally led to a greater and greater sense of resentment, not only among the have-nots but the haves as well.

Comedian Adam Carolla recently picked up on this theme with his epic and profane rant against the "self-entitled monsters" we've created.

And another comedian, Louis CK perfectly captures the unattractiveness of this attitude in this bit:



Dalrymple, who isn't as funny, puts it this way:

One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.

Tangible benefits, on this view, come not as the result of work, effort, and self-discipline: they come as of right.

UPDATE: Two old quotes from Dalrymple (whose real name is Anthony Daniels):

Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier.

An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced—with awful consequences—by an awareness of "rights" and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.

Does anyone doubt that?