The Flowers of Resentment

In their text The Light That Failed: Why The West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy, published in 2019, authors Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue for a very interesting (perhaps even profound) socio-psychological explanation for the current rise of illiberal, anti-democratic authoritarianism of the sort we see taking hold in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the work of French philosopher René Girard, who argues that imitation has long been a neglected dimension driving history and the human condition, the authors argue that the current rise of illiberalism throughout Europe has to do with resentment, a toxic consequence of imitation.

The most destabilizing form of imitation, Girard argues, is the imitation of desire. As the authors summarize Girard, we desire only because others desire something. Desire is, of course, more complicated than this, but, aside from the obvious question (can it just be desiring what others desire … all the way down? Surely there must be something about an object that makes it of a sort to be desired in the first place, that is: for what it is, or appears to be and not just because someone else wants it?), the point is simple: in desiring something just because someone else finds it desirable, you imitate the desires of another. So who are you? What do you really want? Just what others want? This establishes both inner psychological conflict, as well as obvious outer social conflict. “The more confidence that imitators have in those they imitate, tellingly, the less confidence they have in themselves. The model being imitated is inevitably a rival and a threat to self-respect,” especially if “the model is not Jesus Christ in heaven but your neighbor to the west” (p. 12).

Eventually, the mimicry wears thin, and in any case with only this parasitic identity, how can you really measure up? Mimicry isn't the real thing, is it? A copy of democracy is just a copy. Resentment seems to be around the corner. But crucially, at least for a while, the mimicry is politically and economically advantageous, right? Especially if you can get something you want in the process.

Building on the socio-psychological dynamics of imitation/resentment, then, the authors shift the thesis to a political-economic register, and argue that:

The origins of today's worldwide anti-liberal revolt lie in three parallel, interconnected and resentment-fueled reactions to the presumptively canonical status of Western political models after 1989. That is the thesis we wish to explore and defend, with all due awareness of its one-sidedness, incompleteness and empirical vulnerabilities. Our aim is not to produce a comprehensive and definitive account of the causes and consequences of contemporary anti-liberalism but to emphasize and illustrate one specific aspect of the story that has yet to garner the attention that we believe it deserves. To highlight the sometime hidden affinities among our three cases of reactionary nativism and authoritarianism, we have relied on a flexibly articulated and admittedly speculative but, we hope, coherent and revealing concept of political imitation (p. 13).

The real question is that if this is (at least in part) true of the current sociopolitical situation, then what is to be done about it? Is there a way out of the inevitable bind into which such socio-psychological dynamics locks one? In other words, what could the appropriate solution be, and could this be translated into diplomatic terms implementable on the international political stage? It’s hard to say; but in any case, that’s for diplomatic strategists to debate…

I recently made asimilar argument, using instead Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment—a key notion in his withering meta-critique of Western (which is to say, Judeo-Christian) morality—to explain what’s at issue in Putin’s war on “The West”. Either way you slice it, there indeed is much resentment from Putin (if not from Russians themselves), and from other non-Western nations, at the fact of (real or perceived) Western European/American predominance in world politics. But what I tried to point out is that this predominance is rooted in a real historical circumstance: that Western European, and then American power radiated outward from the source of the power which is modernity itself: the power achieved by the exploitation of a new kind of knowledge of nature, delivered by the “exact sciences” whose basis was to be mathematics.

This mathematical-scientific achievement, however we might wish to contextualize it, or to analyze it in detail, became the necessary condition for Western European and eventually American power—not just from the science itself, and the technologies engineered from it, but also from the very profound shift of “mentalité” such a development entailed. What we might call the “technoscientific” standpoint towards nature, self and world really rewired social, political and even existential relations to the point that, at the end of the nineteenth century, global conflict of a sort that was hardly conceivable decades prior suddenly became possible—and on a scarcely imaginable scale. What is important is not so much the technoscientific developments (and ensuing social change) themselves, but the fact of its geographical (and temporal) unevenness: certain regions developed faster and became more productive, industrially, and it was this rapidity of industrial-technical development that yielded the advantages that would, in time, become economic and therefore strategic, especially since economic more than military power would increasingly shape world affairs at the end of the nineteenth, and into the twentieth century.