My Ressentiments Exactly

Negation all the way down

There’s a video going around of psychologist-turned-manosphere guru Jordan Peterson debating a college student, if refusing to answer questions or even agree on the basic meaning of words can accurately be called debating. In the most viral moment, Peterson proves either unable or unwilling to articulate whether or not he is in fact a Christian despite the fact that he has been brought on to represent the Christian side in a program titled “1 Christian versus 20 atheists”. But while his performance has already been thoroughly picked apart by the Internet, I’m not particularly surprised by the incoherence of a man whose brain was turned to Swiss cheese by benzos and rewired in multiple Slavic rehab gulags. What interests me is how Peterson ended up in this position in the first place.

Few may remember it now, but when Peterson originally came to prominence he touted Nietzsche as one of his major philosophical influences alongside Carl Jung. Of course, his reading of Nietzsche was a typically shallow one that turned the proto-deconstructionist philologist into a self-help guru who exhorts us to embrace struggle and adversity and take responsibility for creating meaning on the path of our own Hero’s Journey. For Peterson, the ultimate expression of these values apparently found itself in grandstanding against his university bureaucracy over the subject of preferred pronouns, which he decried as an imposition by ‘woke moralists’ on intrepid truth-seekers like himself.

But the question remains: how does someone go from championing a philosopher known for proclaiming the death of God and works like The Antichrist to exhorting Christian values or agreeing, however confusedly, to represent the Christian side in a debate against atheists? Ironically, this tendency was described beautifully by none other than Nietzsche himself, in a process he termed ressentiment, where one’s notion of good is derived by inverting the qualities observed in a perceived foe:

…imagine the "enemy" as the resentful man conceives him—and it is here exactly that we see his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the evil enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea from which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good one," himself—his very self!

This explanation goes far beyond Peterson and in fact forms something like a general theory of the anti-woke mediaverse, whether it’s Russell Brand going from irreverent leftist comedy to appearing at the Republican National Convention as a born-again Christian, or the Red Scare podcasters going from ‘Sailor socialism’ to writing elegies of Henry Kissinger and issuing weekly calls for a purge of the homeless population. What begins with ‘we must defend transgressive art and comedy from liberal moralizing censorship’ ends at ‘we must defend Western Christian family values from liberal degeneracy’. In each case, the rhetorical pose has proven to be completely devoid of any consistent ideological content, defined solely in opposition to a nebulous enemy onto which all sorts of evils - often mutually contradictory ones - can be projected.