 |
| Look at this angry boi, like a lemon crossed with the end of a battery. |
From Wikipedia; "ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame to ones frustration.
The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.
This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defence mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws.
The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."
and that's why I like Pertuabo, Primarch of the Fourth Legion; Iron Warriors and all-round insanely resentful bitter-ass hyper-talented petulant man-child. Or more accurately, that's why I feel for Pertuabo, he is my worst self, realised, because if one thing defines my shit personality, its ressentiment.
Yes I could probably fix most of my problems.
No, I'm not going to.
Yes I want your respect.
No, I'm not going to ask for it.
Instead I will sit here silently resenting you for not automatically praising me.
Bitterness is the key, and a constant low-level anger mixed with poor self-esteem.
Resentment of beauty.
Resentment of social ease.
As a man probably/possibly somewhere on the aspergers spectrum, in some ways at least. Who's formative years from early teens to late 20's were spent regarded, in physical terms, as a vile thing, (and its pretty much too late for that self-image to somehow get worked out of my system), a kind of perpetually-guttering rage at people who are easily and fluidly social, and at sexual and emotional ease and success, and those who fit neatly into some real-world social context, who have a place in the world, that surrounds them and responds to them, (and if you take all of those, that pretty much includes everyone and everything) I find myself increasingly, and purposelessly, fruitlessly bitter.
I am a bitter man. I feel as if the world is slowly falling away from me and that the nature of society and perceived reality will be increasingly defined by people who's views and intuitions I do not share. Many times when witnessing these conversations I have thought of myself as a man a long way out of time.
Part of this is semi-honourable. The almost perfect synergy between slightly empty agreeableness and being 'marketable', between capital and being nice, so that the rapid reproducability of niceness is supercharged by the amount of money that can be made out of it, and that feeds back into the larger system of industrial cultural production as an accepted standard for behaviour, until the way you act in a board meeting or the way you act in an interview with your boss is simply the way people are supposed to act.
Although, I'm not really angry at nice marketable people for any good reason. I would be vaguely angry at them anyway. I just happen to be (slightly) correct this particular time by chance.
And yes I could probably do something about my loneliness and low-self esteem myself, because these are ultimately internal processes which bleed out into behaviour and the experiential world.
OR!!!
I CAN COVER MYSELF IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF INCREASINGLY COMPLEX CYBERNETIC ARMOUR!
AND BUILD A GANG OF SHIELD-BEARING MASSIVE IRON MURDER-BOTS WHICH ARE SLAVED *DIRECTLY TO MY WILL*!!!
 |
| Nothing will hurt me if I am surrounded by robots |
AND BUILD A GIANT STEEL LABYRINTH WHICH I CAN CARRY AROUND TO LIVE INSIDE AND ENDLESSLY RE-COMBINE SO IT IS *IMPENETRABLE!!!!*
IRON WITHIN, IRON WITHOUT MOTHERFUCKERS!
"'What happened to the man I knew who wished for no more war? The boy who drew such wonderful things?'
ReplyDelete'Nobody wanted them,' he said."
feels bad man
"Yes I could probably fix most of my problems.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm not going to.
Yes I want your respect.
No, I'm not going to ask for it.
Instead I will sit here silently resenting you for not automatically praising me.
Bitterness is the key, and a constant low-level anger mixed with poor self-esteem.
Resentment of beauty.
Resentment of social ease."
Too real :(. Except for the not asking for respect part, I've pretty shamelessly asked you and plenty of others for it in the past, usually to no avail because that's a dumb way to go about things, but such is life.
I've been feeling pretty rough lately too, throwing myself at a bunch of bullshit instead of the things I should be doing because those things are hard and scary.
Not going to give you any saccharine / perfunctory platitudes about how it'll be ok or you're not alone (except the above statement which is more a personal anecdote than a statement about the world at large). Things will just be what they are :/.
Hi Patrick,
ReplyDeleteWe've never met and I'm not a particularly fan of other humans, but I read your blog and you strike me as a genuinely delightful person. This is a great post. I hope you keep churning out more of this stuff, you're great at it!
Picador
"The truth is, brother, I have followed your campaigns carefully, and I noticed a pattern that disturbed and then alarmed me. Always you do things the most difficult way, and in the most painful manner. You cultivate a martyr's complex, lurching from man to man, holding out your bleeding wrists so they might see how you hurt yourself. You brood in the shadows when all you want to do is scream, 'Look at me!' You are too arrogant to win people over through effort. You expect people to notice you there in the half-darkness, and point and shout out, 'There! There is the great Perturabo! See how he labours without complaint!'"
ReplyDeletePerty is one of the failure modes of stoicism, I think - rage, resentment and insecurity imperfectly leashed by his fear and intolerance of weakness (in himself as much as, if not more than, everyone else).
I have grown - not comfortable, but accustomed, which is close enough - to being a flawed person on the periphery of things. There are worse places and people to be.
Anyway. Respect and admiration to you, out here in the half-darkness. Your work is one of the things keeping it 'half-', for me.
Glad to know that I'm not the only one who feels a kind of bitter kinship with Pert. I also just find him one of the more compellingly tragic Primarchs,the way he constantly made to become someone he hated to please someone he hated more, and every time he managed to wiggle out from under his toxic parental figure's thumb he'd find himself under that of another, stronger tyrant. First his father, then the Emperor, then Chaos. He never really had a chance.
ReplyDeleteAnd didn't have a chance, but not in the same way the truly doomed Primarchs like Angron or Kurze didn't. There were probably many other ways his story could have ended, were he not so resentful, not so resigned,not so toxically destructively stoic. Those around him forced him to be what he is, and instead of trying to fight back or disagree or even just say it's not what he wants Pert went along with it, kept it inside and let it destroy him. It didn't have to end like it did, and yet with Pert being who he is it absolutely did.
Delete"I feel as if the world is slowly falling away from me and that the nature of society and perceived reality will be increasingly defined by people who's views and intuitions I do not share."
ReplyDeleteI'm right there with you. Unfortunately, that seems to be a normal part of being a middle-aged human male. As is losing the ability to make real friendship bonds. It's probably neurochemical.
My therapist warned me about this before a moved across country a couple of years ago. I was like "No way. I'm charming and make friends easily." He replied, "I wrote a book about this." But I stupidly did it anyway. He was totally right.