Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin.

Robin:

Tonight we've agreed to talk about resentment. Mm-hmm. And there's some things that are really interesting about it. So I just looked up the Wikipedia page and I had written a blog post a couple weeks ago. But the key idea is that resentment is a reaction to feeling wronged.

Agnes:

Mm-hmm.

Robin:

It's one of several reactions. The Wikipedia page compares it also to anger as an alternative way to react, or contempt even, as a way to react to feeling wronged. And there's even the interesting observation here by Richard Solomon apparently that he thinks of anger as directed toward a higher status individual sorry, resentment is a reaction to someone who's higher status who's wrong view. Anger is someone equal status and contempt to someone lower status. But that may or may not be true, but it seems interesting. The interesting thing to me is that anger, contempt and resentment, all three are reactions we disapprove of. We tend to dislike those reactions in other people. yet they are plausibly reactions to being wronged. So there's a sense in which we dislike people around us who act like they feel they've been wronged. But the simple idea of right and wrong would be, if somebody's been wrong, we should be taking the side of the person who's been wronged. against the side of someone who's wronged them, yet our reaction here seems to be to push away or to be reluctant to associate with this person who seems to feel they've been wronged. Now, in my blog post, I suggested that The reason why we might be especially reluctant to embrace the resentful person is because it's basically their resentment instead of anger has revealed that they don't think they're going to get as much support in this reaction. That's why they've chosen resentment. If they thought they were going to be able to react strongly and get a lot of support, maybe they would have reacted with anger. And maybe we think they would have already settled this issue by dealing with the other person directly. Right. And there's an indirect relation here. They are expressing this relation to us. We are a third party. And although, I mean, you could act with resentment toward the person who wronged you, but it would still be a, a different reaction than you might've had as a more direct, angry confrontation.

Agnes:

The name for that is being passive aggressive.

Robin:

Yes, exactly. So anyway, so the interesting thing here is, is in my mind is this contrast between the definition, which is in terms of being wrong and the usual presumption that we should feel sympathetic and helpful towards someone who's been wronged and our distaste for anger, contempt and resentment.

Agnes:

Right. So I'll say that there seems to be something a bit insulting about the very fact that someone chose to express their resentment to you, which is they have a claim and they think this claim isn't strong enough to be generally recognized, but maybe they can strong arm you into giving them sympathy. because of something about you or of something about your relationship to them. And so they've marked you out as a target. Because if they just thought they had a legitimate grievance, yeah, I think you would say they would take it up with the person with whom the grievance is concerned and work it out. But instead what they're doing is trying to solicit sympathy from you. And they're doing that on the grounds that, not on the grounds that they're justified, but on the grounds that you stand in some relationship to them such that they think they can extract that sympathy.

Robin:

Well, let's compare this to anger then. So, you know, your associate feels they've been wronged by somebody else, and they've perhaps even expressed that to them, but they don't think they've gotten satisfaction. And so now in your presence, they're angry.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Do you feel similarly reluctant to embrace their anger? Is anger and resentment similar in this way, or are we more reluctant to embrace their resentment than their anger?

Agnes:

So I think that, you know, let's say like you and I are sitting in a room, in the same room, and I get an email. The email makes me really angry. I just directly express my anger. I do think that's very different from resentment. So one difference is like, you know, I'm sort of inviting you in a way to weigh in on the situation. And maybe you're going to tell me my anger isn't justified. It's kind of a flexible moment. But if I'm expressing resentment, it's like I've settled how I'm going to react to this issue. I don't really want your input as to whether or not I really experienced an injustice or not. And indeed, like I think in many cases, the reason we resent resentment is that we either think it is or that it promises to turn into a grudge. And we're not very tolerant of grudges.

Robin:

So I'm finding it strange that you say that someone who expresses anger to us is more tentative and willing to change their mind about it than someone who expresses resentment. Do you feel similar about contempt? Would contempt also be something that you are showing that you're willing to change your mind about?

Agnes:

So I guess I think anger is like, it's like a fresh passion. It's like something that, it's not even just that you're willing to change your mind. It's actually just likely to go away. Like it's a, you experience a flash of it. And at least the way I, what I associate with resentment is a kind of standing disposition that's very much like a grudge. And yes, I think that a flash of anger that you experience is more changeable than a kind of decided resentment. Um, contempt, I think often, like, I think you could, you could experience contempt in either way, but, um, often when you feel contempt for someone, it is because you have a whole, you know, kind of belief structure and emotional structure in you, maybe towards people of the kind of person that that person is or whatever. And then that is going to be harder to change.

Robin:

So part of the interesting thing here to me is our attitudes toward people who've been wronged. So the simple story is that, um, the simple story that I think we would tell about ourselves is that we don't like it when our people are wronged. We feel sympathy toward the wrong person instead of the person who has wronged them. Yeah. And that we might be even more energized and upset if we think someone who has been wronged has been unjustly not righted. Absolutely. All that's true. Right.

Agnes:

So as long as they're not resentful, we'll be super sympathetic.

Robin:

Okay, but in some sense, the resentment is exactly the claim. I have been wronged and I have not been appropriately settled.

Agnes:

You know, like once they resemble, they're taking care of that. They're feeling bad for themselves. You don't have to. It's really similar to how if somebody does something wrong, but they feel super guilty. And then you're like, all right, I don't need to be angry at you. You're punishing yourself. You've got it covered. And so it was like the resentful person has the sympathizing covered. They're already sympathizing with themselves. They're already feeling self-pity. So you don't have to pity them.

Robin:

But that is the usual story is that humans have norms where groups enforce norms. And so the idea is that if someone is wronged, then other people need to notice that and then communicate that to a wider community who then needs to discuss it and figure out what to do about it in order to deal with wrong. That is the standard concept. humans is that it's not about individual retaliation or reaction. It's about recruiting the group's consensus about how to deal with the wrong.

Agnes:

And look, I think that if you can sort of show, and this is often what resentful people try to do, that the wrong against you was not a one-off, but it was part of something systemic that is going to happen to other people in the future, that might happen to them in the future, then I think people will take it more seriously. But absent that, suppose it really was just a one-off, and suppose that there's not much reason to think it would happen again. Then I think, well, yeah, they still think that there should be some normative response, but again, it kind of seems like you got that taken care of yourself.

Robin:

I mean, the similar thing would, I presume, be true of anger. If somebody does something to you, steps on your foot or something, but there's no pattern to it and you get angry, then we expect it to go away and that we won't be so sympathetic. If there's a repeated stepping on your foot and you think there's some intentional pattern here, then you would get more angry and we would more support you in that.

Agnes:

It wouldn't need to be a repeated stepping on my foot. That would be one way to show it. But another way would just be, it's likely that other people's feet are going to get stepped on, even if mine only got stepped on one time.

Robin:

Oh, right. But it would be the pattern that would justify the different reaction. But that seems a symmetry here between anger and resentment. I agree.

Agnes:

And so I think that there's two. The question, does the person feel resentment? And the question, is it part of a larger pattern? are independent. And so if you say, the person feels resented, but it's part of, if you add the larger pattern, then I'm like, yeah, we are going to be more sympathetic. But I think that resentment versus anger, the difference is not whether it's systemic or not. The difference is, have they had time to process the response? And there's a way in which when they haven't had any time to process the response, we're sympathetic for them to just feel a strong passion. But when they have had time to like go talk to the person, deal with it or whatever, and they chose to deal with it by getting resentful, then that's like, you know, uh, a bad signal about them in a variety of ways.

Robin:

Well, so that's the interesting thing to pursue here, my mind. The kinds of way it's a bad signal about somebody to be resentful and whether or not we on reflection can endorse those sort of reactions. That's to me the interesting part because, you know, in one way you might think, well, they had a choice about say anger versus resentment or contempt as their reaction. You might've been subconscious, but Um, you know, we, it seems like we agree that had you thought you could press the issue and successfully prosecute the issue with them or with a wider audience, it would be more likely you would be getting angry. And that your choice to be resentful is more about your judgment that you weren't going to succeed at prosecuting with them or other people. And so you kept it in more, you retained a resentment, but that's a sign that you did not and were not intending to otherwise pursue it, at least. Right. So then, then if, so the question is, are there, what other things is it a sign, is resentment a sign of, or is this the major thing it's a sign of? But if this was the major thing it's a sign of, then it would seem like, well, if we thought your complaint was legit, but you thought you weren't going to be able to get, you know, um, satisfaction from it, then we, maybe we should be all the more sympathetic to you. But if we're thinking that the fact that you're not going to get, you don't think you're going to get satisfaction by getting angry and you choose resentment instead. Um, if we think that's the signal that, you know, you are in fact wrong, that you don't have a good case that you, you weren't in fact wronged, then it would make more sense to push away from you. But now it seems like our associates would see that reaction. That is, if we embrace the resentment, they will see that we are accepting their side of the story. And if we resist their resentment, we are doubting their side of the story, that they are in fact wronged.

Agnes:

I think that we expect angry people to sort of overestimate their chances of success. and to like stand up for themselves even when it's a bit unreasonable of them to think that they would succeed at doing so. And we kind of admire that and that's what it is to be like principled and courageous. at least one understanding of that. And so the person who's like, I don't think I'm going to win if I take it up with this person. So I'm just going to like bury it and like kind of kind of kind of mutter to myself about it. That person looks like a lame coward. And so we have a kind of distaste for such a person.

Robin:

Even though we might admit that, in fact, it would go badly if they were to go be angry.

Agnes:

Right. They ought to be, they ought to think it would go well. If they, if they really let themselves get angry, they would just think that. Angry person, angry people are kind of crazy and they have very bad estimates about like how things are going to go. And so there's a way in which they didn't let themselves get a, they didn't let the anger get away with them. And I think we don't like that.

Robin:

Although we tend to counsel people who do get angry too easily, more easily, to back off, right?

Agnes:

Well, right, because there's a reason. But the point is the resentful person is at the other extreme. So the point isn't to be as angry as possible. But if you find yourself storing away a lot of resentments, then, yeah, that seems to be a sign that you're a bit pusillanimous, small-souled.

Robin:

So there's a related question, I think it's closely related, of to what extent, so, there's an old biblical saying about being slow to anger, I think is the phrase, right, and quick to something else, I can't remember the phrase. But I think the idea there, that we often counsel adults and children is that if you feel wronged just a bit, you should just let it slide and wait for a larger pattern of larger wrongs before you speak up. That you shouldn't complain about every little thing.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

But you might think the steps in between the first little things and the final blow up that you finally express yourself, the mechanism between that will be an accumulating resentment.

Agnes:

Right. So that's interesting. It's almost like we don't want there to be a threshold. And below the threshold, you just don't notice it at all. And then all of a sudden you trip that, you know, threshold and now you're enraged. We want that to be the pattern. And so even if there are these other, these lower level things, just like the right way to be is to be unresponsive to them, whether or not you're storing them up in memory or whatever, the point is you're not emotionally responding.

Robin:

So then, but I was suggesting that the plausible mechanism would be that you were slowly accumulating a resentment and then it passed a threshold by at which you expressed the resentment into anger or some complaint. You're imagining maybe a different way that you accumulate this?

Agnes:

Well, I wasn't actually thinking you would accumulate them because like say that, you know, you, I don't know, say, okay, say you interrupt me, right? And I, you know, I let it go by like five or six times. And then, um, uh, and then, you know, the 10th time I'm like, stop interrupting me. This in fact happens. Um, but I think, so that's a case where maybe I'm accumulating and then at a certain point, uh, you know, I kind of, it trips the, uh, amount, but I was thinking of cases where. With the lower level stuff, you just ignore it until you punch me in the face, and then I'm super mad. So I'm not super mad. I think that that is the thing I actually do, which is every once in a while go over my threshold and then get angry at you for interrupting me. That's not the good thing to do. The good thing is to to have stuff like interrupting be something that wouldn't bother me, I'm above that. But then if you punch me in the face, I'll like be really super angry.

Robin:

I don't think that is the norm for most people, though. I mean, I was just watching a TV show where a character, you know, did this thing of, you know, when they were finally pushed to make a complaint, they then gave a long list of pattern to show a pattern of their complaint. Yeah. So they were then

Agnes:

super unattractive when people do that. I associate this with women in relationships because my mom does it, so it may just be in my family. But I do it a little bit too, where you store up a set of grievances and you wait and then you spring them on the person. You know what it actually reminds me of, which is a weird association, but Sometimes when some, say you make an argument and the person doesn't quite know how to respond to you, they'll just talk and talk and talk. They like, well, they want to overwhelm you with the words. And so similarly says you want to overwhelm you with complaints by like, it's like you can't, but respond because I look, I have like 50 of them or something. So I, people do this totally, but it's not viewed as acceptable or attractive.

Robin:

Well, let me make the case for it here. It seems to make sense to me. So it seems like what we'd want is, if you're going to make a complaint, it should be a substantial complaint. That is, it should be a big enough thing that it's worth bothering anybody with, and the evidence should be clear enough that there was some pattern or intent to it. It wasn't just a random fluctuation. You should be complaining about big things with, you know, a consistency to them. That seems like the norm. And so if there are just big things that occur once in a while, then it might make sense, let the small ones slide and wait to complain about a big one. But if what someone is doing is just a sequence of many small things and never a big one, then it would seem like, well, what you want them to do is wait until they've accumulated enough small ones, and then show you the pattern of the small ones to convince you that yes, even though each one is small, they're adding up to a lot and there is a consistent pattern there. So that would seem, I mean, that even in a court room, you might think that would be, or if you were, you know, making a recommendation about how, you know, if to your boss about how we should treat some client or supplier, it's say, look, I didn't want to say anything, but we've got an issue here. And I would think the boss wants to say, either bring me a big issue or bring me a, you know, consistent pattern of small things that adds up to something big, but otherwise don't bother me. That would seem like the way the boss would want to, you know, set the standard.

Agnes:

Yes, I think that's right for bosses, but I guess I think that for a boss, managing everybody's relationships and feelings is like a secondary thing that they have to do. That's the backburners, like what you're trying to do, which is get the business done or whatever. But if my husband stored up these little irritations, like on this day you didn't do my laundry, and then on this day you did this thing, and is it adding up to a pattern? I'd be really annoyed at him. Why didn't he just bring it up from the very beginning?

Robin:

There isn't like... What the whole idea here was that some things might be so small, it's not worth bringing them up as an individual. It would only be worth bothering when they add up to a pattern.

Agnes:

I guess I think part of what it is to be in a good relationship is to make it be the case that there's just about no cost to bring anything up. I'm not saying it's going to be zero, but I'm saying you want it to be as low as possible. And so in effect, that's part of why not bringing things up and waiting until you have 50 of them is a bad signal about the relationship.

Robin:

If you're a subordinate and a boss, that is a relationship. So when you say relationship, you must mean a certain kind.

Agnes:

Yeah. It means that your relationship with like your spouse is like, is like someone who's like your boss, where they're afraid of you. And, um, they think that we are bringing stuff up.

Robin:

We have dozens of kinds of relationships in our lives. So when you say in a relationship, you don't mean all of those relationships.

Agnes:

So I'm asking which kinds of intimate relationship is what I meant. So I think those are the contexts. within which we get annoyed about the expression of resentment and all that. That's what I was sort of thinking of in the background.

Robin:

I think we also resent, get resentful of resentment in most of these other relationships as well, actually. I think it's not just intimate relationships where we have these attitudes toward resentment.

Agnes:

I don't think that, I'm not sure that we express resentment except to people who are in some sense are intimate. So like to a boss, you wouldn't express resentment. What you would do is lodge an official complaint in accordance with whatever the rules are, unless the boss were your friend.

Robin:

I disagree. That is, well, so there are many ways to express resentment. Maybe we should take the detour into how resentment is expressed. Uh, but it's commonly like one way to express resentment would be to make a direct complaint, even go to go on to a story and, you know, what Wayne and whale and cry. But often people express resentment through very minor. degrees of whether their eyes roll, for example, or they, they have some distance, a little coldness, maybe their voice becomes more monotone. People express resentment in a lot of little ways like that, that, uh, and to people who are, you know, not very well known to them. So for example, maybe the last time you went to the coffee shop, the person at the cash register took too long and you're a little resentful of that. And maybe this time you're a little colder when you make your order. Right. That's a way people express resentment in many kinds of relationships. So I think there's a whole range of ways that we express resentment often just by being coming in more distant, cold, uh, less engaging. And people do take up on those cues that you might ask somebody else what's with him, you know, what's with him. He seems cold. Uh, you know, did I do something? And then they might, if they know, they might even tell you, well, don't matter about that last time.

Agnes:

Yeah, all that just seems bad.

Robin:

But it still says resentment is a thing in many kinds of relationships, not intimate, just intimate relationships.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And this idea of accumulating, you know, before you express it will apply to many of these things. Maybe you think intimacy is an exception to those.

Agnes:

Maybe the thing to say is just like, There are, there are, there exist relationships where that mood is a failure. And, you know, maybe you're right that it's not in the context of the coffee shop, but that insofar as you're sort of an idealistic person like me, you're going to want to believe or dream that all of your relationships could be held up to the norm of like the best relationship. Um, but maybe they can't, maybe that's unrealistic. Fine. Um, uh, but still, if we want to get at like, what is annoying about the resentment? I guess I think. it's best to think about it in the place where it's at home, which is, like, in the intimate context.

Robin:

I think there may just be different expectations different people have about that context. You know, people talk about different love languages or something, but there's some sense in which people... Different hate languages. Yeah, that people from different backgrounds may just have different expectations about what close relationships are like.

Agnes:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. No, but that's really interesting. I mean, I think that's an interesting way to think about it is that people have different hate languages and that people don't, that's not a thing that people think about that there is variation there, but just like one person might show you that they love you by getting you a present and another might show you by praising you and another by like cooking you dinner and another just by like not exploding at you or whatever. Those are all different love languages. it seems to me people have different hate languages and maybe the people who find resentment and maybe it's not everyone who find resentment annoying. Maybe it's just people like me who think if you have a complaint you should just make your complaint to the person who you're complaining to and it's either big enough to be worthy of their attention or small enough that you shouldn't be noticing it either. But that may just be one hate language.

Robin:

Well, so let me make a case for an alternative hate language.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

which is, you know, if there's a person that you're somewhat close to, and you know there's things they're reluctant to show in general about themselves, they have some, you know, degree of internal things that they typically try to hide and not show. And then if they are willing to show those to you, but not to most other people, you might think of that as a positive sign about how close They've allowed you to get to them. So in that framing, if you might think someone who is resentful about people around them, but usually shuts up about it. And then with you as willing to complain about them, you might take that as a sign that they saw you as close and that you were close to them. And even, and even if you're not so interested in all the things they're complaining about, you like the fact that they were willing to complain to you and they aren't to most others.

Agnes:

Okay, but that's just... I mean, I guess I would view that in the way that I would view any other kind of costly signaling where they could also just say, look, if we're really like blood brothers, we got to cut our fingers. Or like, let's show that we're each willing to chop off an arm for the other. I mean, do we really care about each other?

Robin:

This doesn't seem like that.

Agnes:

This person... It is. It's a false. They're making me listen to their boring resentments. I have to suffer, and that's going to be the proof that they really care about me. Um, okay. Like, cause it seems to me that there's two different claims that you could be making. One of them is that each of us could take pleasure in the fact that the other one was willing to make us an exception to the general rule, which is that we don't reveal these things to most people. I'm granting that. But then there's the second thing of, how fun is the thing that we're doing? That's independent of the first thing, right? Now, my view is it's intrinsically not fun for anybody. But maybe you think, or maybe some people just enjoy this. And I think maybe you're right about that. So that might be idiosyncratic. But if it is idiosyncratic, I don't understand what they're enjoying. So let's just repeat the first thing. You can't just repeat that. It's like now we're in the special zone.

Robin:

Consider that there might be more or less artful ways to express resentment.

Agnes:

Oh, sure. If they're presented in an artful way, that's a whole different game. If they're funny and charming, that's great.

Robin:

Okay, but there's a continuum of that. So people might well enjoy exchanging artful resentment. That is, they could have a little ridicule, maybe make a joke at someone's expense, maybe exaggerate them for humor effect, right? That's actually pretty common.

Agnes:

Sure, but when we were saying people don't like resentment, I did not think we were talking about comedically expressed, witty, elegant resentments. I think people like those.

Robin:

But there's a continuum. That's not a binary. So the question is, there could be a degree of enjoyment in terms of how artful or fun it could be.

Agnes:

Well, the whole reason why you got to make it funny is that it's intrinsically a bad thing. So you got to, like, add some funny sauce to it. Otherwise, it sucks. Like, our conversation right now is not very funny. It doesn't have to be funny because there's another good that we're achieving.

Robin:

Under your theory, comics would never express resentment because that would just be attacks on their audience and they would then be funny about other things. But in fact, comics often use resentment as the core material of their jokes and their monologues exactly because the audience can enjoy that even more than other kinds of humor.

Agnes:

My theory predicts that because you might just think we all just have more practice with humor in the arena of resentment. So the comedian has more practice making that kind of humor and receiving it because that's the part of our life that we have to add humor sauce to because it sucks.

Robin:

But once we've practiced it enough, it can no longer need no longer suck, right? We get So as you may know, the history of cooking is that people typically had to cook with whatever food was available. And now often some of the best dishes are the dishes made out of the not such great foods that people took a lot of work to make into great dishes. So we might think of, you know, the conversations around resentment as things we've worked hard over a long time to take minimal materials into spectacular dishes.

Agnes:

Sure, but it seems to me that's going off in a branching away from our original topic. Our original question was, why do people dislike resentment? I was holding it fixed that it was not artfully expressed, especially artfully expressed or comedic or whatever resentment. And I think you're just right that if it's artfully expressed or comedic, then people don't dislike it. And in fact, also, it's true, you're right, that that's part of why we learned to do this. We want to make our resentments, I guess, palatable to other people, so we learn how to do it in a funny way. But still, your underlying question was, why do we even have to add funny sauce? Why isn't this just something where the other person is like, oh, no, you've been wronged. Let me step in.

Robin:

So here's another angle. Sometimes we are resentful on behalf of a larger group of which we happen to be a member. And then people often bond together of their shared resentment with some outside thing that harms them all. And in some sense, for example, a great deal of, say, Marxism or socialism is built on resentment against capitalists or the rich. And other kinds of politics are often built on resentment against other shared enemies.

Agnes:

Like libertarians bond together, shared resentment against Marxists.

Robin:

Or the state or the state, which is what the liberty anyway, but apparently like some of our strongest bonds and most celebrated feelings are often senses of shared resentment.

Agnes:

Yes. So I think people do kind of like resentment when they can share it. That's true. So they're, in effect, I guess, when you're expressing your resentment to someone, there's a feat you have to perform. We might think of the feat as selling your resentment. So you sell them your resentment, either if you express it artfully and humorously in such a way that the experience of hearing your resentment is entertaining for them, Or if you get them to resent it with you and now you can do co-resenting and people like that. And then the failure to sell them is when you just don't do either of those things.

Robin:

And so it seems like this is an important observation about social norms. We might say, well, when somebody is wronged, then not only do they need to tell other people about having been wronged, They typically need to find a way to sell their being wronged in order to actually have much of a chance of getting, um, you know, compensation or, or some getting right, writing the wrong. Um, it's not enough merely to point out that you've been wronged to gain support. So this might also be true in anger. It might be true that also simply being artlessly angry or not, you know, shared angry might also fail to produce a sympathetic or useful response when you express your anger.

Agnes:

I think that people do not expect angry people to express anger artfully. Anger is like, it's a real passion, right? Where it just comes out of you and you can control it. And like your face changes color. You don't change it. You don't decide to make your face turn red. It does turn red. Your voice, you lose control over the volume of your voice. You lose control over your, your gestures. And I think we understand that about anger. We sometimes are afraid of anger. or afraid of people who are expressing anger, but we don't have the distaste for them that we have for the resentful people.

Robin:

So Cyrano de Bergerac, I'm remembering a movie like that. It's interesting that there's this emotion there that he's expressing, which is a bit of contempt through artful criticism. Um, and so it's, it's clear that he is, doesn't have a friendly feeling toward the other person, but he's not letting himself get angry. Right. But he is reacting and dissing the other person. Right. So, uh, in some sense, um, we often want people to maybe sit on the edge of anger and contempt. but they're controlling the anger enough to instead be artfully contemptuous.

Agnes:

Right, so I think we want a choice, okay? Either you are angry where you're not controlling it and it's going to be kind of short-lived because it's like a passion that wells up your heart rate, whatever. Either you do that and just let it get away with you Or you do artful resentment, where the artfulness can either be a matter of that it's humorous or that you make the case that other people should join you in the resentment. But what you're not allowed to do is be resentful, but be artless about it. Because once you're resentful, it's like you're controlling it. You're not angry. You're not letting your passions get away with you. You have the space to make choices, to ruminate, to decide. So make something of it. Do something with it. Don't just be grumbling and repeating your grievances over and over again. That's not acceptable.

Robin:

I think we do have different standards relative to children though here. I think it might be more okay for a child to express resentment to their parent or an adult, say, because they don't need to assert an equal or high status. It's okay for the child to assert a lower status and then gain sympathy from their sincere, pure resentment.

Agnes:

I mean, maybe this is different in different families, but like... In my house, when children do that, they do not get sympathy from me or their other parents. And that does happen to me sometimes with my children, that they're sort of resentful and they're expressing grievances, and we're just like, we have no patience for it. Like, I think we find it distasteful, just as I was describing for an adult, just distasteful, and like, you know, if you have a Um, like if there's something practical that can be done and you can give a reason why something should be done, give your reason. We'll explain why not. We'll talk it through. But no, don't just keep repeating it. Don't, um, uh, don't keep like, uh, harping on it. Um, and don't be muttering to yourself. That's one of our household rules, no muttering to yourself. You're not allowed to arrogate to yourself this little secret anger that you nurse in your muttering breath that is not going to come under the criticism of your parent telling you you're being unreasonable. You're not allowed to nurse that, I think. That's our view in our household, hence the no muttering rule.

Robin:

So I'm thinking about this in comparison with sort of macho norms, where, say, men or even boys are told, you know, to either react angrily or suck it up.

Agnes:

But don't act weak. Yeah.

Robin:

And then in the modern world, we've often tried to resist that norm by explicitly telling people it's okay to cry, or okay to go away and be by yourself for a while, or do you need a safe space? It seems to me there's a bit of a conflict here.

Agnes:

Or maybe we can be a bit selective about which parts of macho we like. So like, I think it's okay to cry. I even think like if kids want to scream, you know, just like just scream cry, just be like completely out of control. I'm that's fine. And I don't think you should shut that down. I just think, like, I make my kids do it in their own room because I don't want to hear it. You know, I tell them, like, it hurts when you're screaming. So just go do it. Go scream in your own room. I'm fine with screaming. I'm not fine with muttering to yourself, even in their own room by themselves. No, don't mutter to yourself. That's a bad thing to do, right? So crying is fine. If you fall down and you hear yourself cry, that's fine. Then you feel an emotion. You're expressing the emotion. That's not a problem to me. The problem to me is when you're, like, cultivating this grievance to yourself and you're learning to take pleasure in it, which is what you're doing as you're muttering to yourself. And you're setting yourself apart from the people around you and saying, well, secretly in my heart, I know that I'm right. All that just seems really bad. And what you should do is either be brave enough to have the confrontation with someone or just be tough enough to not worry about it. Maybe parts of muchismo are actually good and other parts are not.

Robin:

ways we express a weakness. And you're saying there are other ways that it's okay to express weakness, but not this particular way to express it.

Agnes:

Exactly. Right. I'm saying we can be selective about which kinds of weaknesses are okay.

Robin:

But then people might disagree about which kinds of weaknesses it is okay to express. And that's a big sort of disagreement people often have in the world in terms of, because sometimes, you know, for some people they say no weakness, never express any weakness. I mean, so, so for example, in, um, debate, uh, I was often, I often have tried to sort of summarize the best point of view of the other side and then respond to it or something. And many people have told me never give in at all at a debate. Never admit any weakness to your side. Never acknowledge any positive points to the other side. That's a mistake, they say in debate. Always, you know, say your stuff is the best and theirs is the worst. So that's a norm about admitting weakness. That is, I think, you know.

Agnes:

I don't think you really are admitting weakness there, though. I just think they're misunderstanding. I think what you're doing is you're sort of showing off that you have enough argumentative strength, argumentative power, that you can take in all of their counter-arguments and you're still convinced by your side. That is, you, in order to be convinced by your side, don't need to be blind to a whole bunch of stuff.

Robin:

Of course, but that sort of counter-signaling argument isn't exactly the common argument about why you should be willing to show weakness. People said exactly what it is about macho people. They say, hey, if you were strong, you'd be willing to cry sometimes. You're afraid to cry.

Agnes:

But I agree about crying.

Robin:

But resentment is another way that you could show weakness and therefore be strong by being willing to show it.

Agnes:

But I think that the thing that I, like I had a more specific account of why this is a bad kind of weakness. which is that because you're not simply overwhelmed by a passion, but rather you're at the point of controlling it, you're not simply giving in to anger, what you're really doing is cultivating in yourself an ability to take pleasure in the pain of being wronged. And I think that's what resentful people are doing, and that's what they're asking you to do when they want you to share resentments. Insofar as people are enjoying that and finding it fun, it's because they have taught themselves to take pleasure in being the victim and being wronged. And that's a bad thing to take pleasure in. People shouldn't learn that. They shouldn't cultivate it. You should, you know, snuff it out in your kids. And that yes, it's a form of weakness, but I think it's a form of ethical weakness. It's a way to be a bad person. And so those sorts of weaknesses, no, they don't amount to some kind of deeper strength.

Robin:

Okay. So let's make the best case for resentment from the resentful person's point of view. Okay. If I go through the world and then I am wronged, and I feel that I am low status and have low power, and many of these wrongs are relatively small, then I feel like I can't demand satisfaction on all of them all the time. I will have to be selective. And so I will have to collect an account of when I've been wronged and how. and maybe even take my time to reconsider. So a norm might be, if you initially think you're wrong, maybe you aren't wrong. And a reasonable person will then take some time to reflect on whether they're wrong or not. And only on reflection, perhaps embrace this feeling that they've been wrong because they've given it some consideration. And then I might want to choose my battles as I'm told is a wise thing to not just, you know, fight on every possible one, but to look for the cases where I would have the best chance of getting support and making my case with having a clear set of, you know, sequence of evidence and being able to, you know, look for the clearest cases I could find testimony on things like that. And if in fact, you know, I'm weak or, you know, uh, there's, you know, reasons why the world isn't aligned to me, I might need to sort of sit with these complaints for a long time. And look opportunistically for other people who might share these complaints that I could, you know, share with them. And then, uh, we could together figure out what to do about them. It seems like this is the case for resentment, which is it's about like, not just blowing up about everything and complaining about everything. Every time something pops into your head, it's about being a person who is going to be more restrained than that, going to not react visibly to every little thing and complain about it, but you know, take some time, accumulate things, reflect, ask yourself, look for allies, choose your battles, and then at some point still remember that you've been wronged and be able to actually complain when you finally get to it. In order for that to happen, you'll have to have remembered it somehow. And resentment is the process of remembering that you've been wronged.

Agnes:

I feel like you're in some alternate possible world that's not that far from this when you were a Marxist. I think you very well articulated how solidarity works. Solidarity is all the weak and oppressed people collecting and holding on to their grievances and finding each other so that as a blob, they can be more powerful than they individually were. I guess I think that maybe If that's your plan, if you're like, I'm being mistreated by the boss or something, but I'm too weak to go up against the boss. Maybe me and all the other employees will get together and then we'll nominate someone as our spokesman. Our spokesman is going to say to the boss, here are all our complaints. then I guess if you're one of the weak ones, maybe you're probably not gonna be chosen as spokesman anyway, right? So I'm not sure. The question is like, to what degree do you really need to hang on to the resentment? Do you need to hang on to like the memory or the knowledge of them, but do you need to?

Robin:

Well, you need the energy that will push you to do something about it.

Agnes:

But you're too weak to do anything about it.

Robin:

Well, no, but together, You can do your part of a bigger thing.

Agnes:

And so the idea is that energy is going to propel you to do the part of it.

Robin:

Right. Now, I mean, as a concrete example, you and I recently read the novel Germinal. And in that novel, characters are have, you know, have been living a life and they know that there's some things they don't like, but they've been forgetting about it. And then somebody comes along to get them to pay attention to latent resentments and to revive them and inflame them. And then they together take action and it doesn't work out very well for them.

Agnes:

Right. So, so I think that like, um, I find it very striking and salient that the miners, their everyday lives, though they were filled with privation and suffering and they were very unsafe work conditions, very badly paid, et cetera, they didn't have standing resentments about those things. They didn't have filed away resentments. They just didn't have resentments. But once someone came along and taught them that they're supposed to see those things and be resent about it, for example, they were able to. So they had the material. They had the raw material for grievances. But it's not that they were storing them away. And so that suggests maybe you don't need to be storing them away. Maybe you don't need to go through life like, ready to be, you know, to form these grievances to save them up for later. Um, because you can just later decide... Well, somebody did.

Robin:

Some characters had to, you know, save them in order to then inflame the rest. You know, it's like fire, like not everything needed to be on fire all the time, but there had to be some flames kept going so that they would be ready.

Agnes:

Right. But the people who inflamed them were just other miners. They were people who this whole organizing activity was their shot at being a certain kind of elites. And, like, probably that's always the way it goes with the people who, so to speak, represent the workers. I mean, in general, the people who represent the workers have a huge amount of contempt for them, even if they belong to that group. They're like, this is my chance to prove that I'm not just a regular migrant. So I don't actually think they just had the same old grievances as everybody else. I think they had, like, special aspirations to, you know, be a higher class of person, namely, like, a union organizer rather than a mere laborer.

Robin:

But in this context, that's virtuous, if in fact it's virtuous for them to act on this.

Agnes:

Sure, sure. So like that makes sense. So the thing that, you know, the quote unquote union organizers are doing in principle, I mean, in the novel, nothing they do makes a lot of sense, but in principle, the thought, I can organize these people and we can get better working conditions for these people who are working under really terrible conditions. All that makes perfect sense, but you don't... I guess I'm not sure that they need to feel much resentment for that. I'm not sure anyone needs to feel resentment.

Robin:

Well, I mean, if you think that in your life, you're typically going to be the person who takes an initiative to do something in your life. Then, uh, if you are feeling wronged, you can either just completely forget about them or you can remember them. And then if you remember them, they'll be available to you to maybe do something about. And it'll be hard to remember them and care unless there's some degree of, you know, emotional strength behind that memory. People feel like they should keep a bit of it alive so that it's available to them to to act on later.

Agnes:

So I like, you know, that. I guess that the sort of the thing that sort of trips, I mean, I think you're making a good argument, but the thing that trips me up is like it's really hard. to think of any way that you could keep that alive that didn't amount to nursing a grievance, or to put it in the other way that I was putting it, learning to take pleasure in your own victimization.

Robin:

Taking pleasure, I think, is too strong. You could just say to learn to be comfortable with, or retaining a memory of,

Agnes:

I mean, you're going to retain a stronger memory and it comes at you more readily.

Robin:

Right. But I don't think most people go so far as to take pleasure in their resentment, but I think they do.

Agnes:

And I think in so far as they're going to enjoy retelling these things where your resentments, if that's fun for people, that's because they've learned to make it fun. They've learned to enjoy their own suffering.

Robin:

And this is a bit of a puritanical attitude you have here, that you don't like a pleasure exactly because it's a pleasure, all else equal. Everything else is fine except that they're getting pleasure out of something. That's the terrible thing.

Agnes:

No, they shouldn't be getting pleasure out of suffering. That's right. But I think what you're sort of revealing is that there's a trade-off here that hadn't occurred to me, which is that Unless you learn to take pleasure in your suffering, in general, other things equal, you're not going to want to be thinking about your suffering all the time or remembering it. You're not going to, your mind is not going to want to go back there to those moments and relive its pain. And the result is going to be that you sort of forget that and that anything you can't act on immediately, you just don't act on. And then maybe you failed to better your condition in ways that you otherwise could. And so there's this question, well, are you going to better your condition as much as possible? Or like, but that might, that might involve learning to become comfortable with slash enjoy your own suffering. Are you going to be sort of stoical, but then maybe you don't better your condition as well.

Robin:

So I think we've mentioned this before. Young children don't remember very much about their previous emotional states. They don't accumulate grudges so much. They have an immediate reaction and then they forget about it. And, you know, as we become adults, we learned to remember longer. about our previous emotional states and to hold, to remember them in some ways. So it sounds like in some ways you're recommending we become more like younger children. You're, you're, it's an innocent stance you're taking here. You prefer the innocent reaction to the, you know, adult mature reaction.

Agnes:

Yeah. And like, I think you're right. And it, it's a thing where at least stereotypically, people just become more and more like this as they get older, right? So like old people have tons of grudges, whether or not it's true. And so this is like, yeah, and I think that there are some people who are inclined to be like, yeah, this is a way in which getting older messes you up. Because you have all these grudges against all these people you're close to.

Robin:

You have all these little things. But you also have all these gratitudes. So let's remember that gratitude is the reverse remembering. You can't be grateful unless you remember things that happened before. And so if you are sometimes resentful and have a grudge and sometimes grateful, that's both a sign of remembering things for a long time.

Agnes:

Yeah, it's true. It seems to me you could remember the good things and not the bad things. And I also just think people more remember the bad things than the good things. So especially the people who do remember the bad things remember them much more than they remember the good things. They displace the good things.

Robin:

But long ago, this is why like one factor theory of why relationships still last, which is just that gratitude doesn't last as long as resentment. Uh, and so as, as you accumulate, you accumulate more resentments and less gratitude. And so in the, eventually that's the thing that stands out most in your mind is all the resentment. I don't know why this is true. I mean, it seems somewhat dysfunctional, but it does seem to have some rough capturing reality there.

Agnes:

Well, it might exactly be that in order to accumulate the resentment, you had to train yourself, right? You had to actually learn to develop habits of taking pleasure in your own pain in order to sort of... But same for grateful realists, right? No, I think that just enjoying pleasant things and then enjoying going back to them in your mind is something you would do naturally and you wouldn't need to develop a whole habit, a whole disposition

Robin:

Actually, I think people are reluctant to be grateful because often gratitude sort of elevates the person you're grateful toward. But I think people have to train themselves to be grateful because they are often naturally reluctant to be grateful exactly because then I guess they feel like they have to treat someone better.

Agnes:

Yeah, I agree. That's right. So, but maybe let me say this, which is that we kind of don't have to, like, you would have to train yourself to be grateful if you're going to be grateful. People tend not to do that training as much, but like people really do the resentment training. No one skips that one. And so if you, you know, went in for the resentment training, but not the gratitude training, then by the end of your life, you would have made yourself into a machine for the accumulation of resentment. Maybe, so maybe the moral of the story is, if you're not going to go for the machismo route that I'm suggesting, and you are going to store these recipients, you've got to create a parallel machine that stores the good things with at least as much, you know, kind of felicity as the bad machine. Otherwise, for all the ability you have in lobbying for yourself, you're just going to end up with a bunch of broken relationships where there's nothing for you to lobby for.

Robin:

I think I can support that advice.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And I think we're about out of our time.

Agnes:

Yeah, we are. We've gone for an hour.

Robin:

So it was nice talking. Talk again.

Agnes:

Yep.