http://www.nationalreview.com/node/420010/print The Nietzschean Concept That Explains Today’s PC Culture
By Jonah Goldberg — June 19, 2015
‘God,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “is dead.”
God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting pronouncement about Nietzsche.
But before the German philosopher departed this mortal coil, he had some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was “ressentiment.” Similar to the everyday word “resentment,” ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of morality. In ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the enslaved were ignoble.
The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language, resented their plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to launch a real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality and rendering them evil in the popular imagination.
Wrote Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals:
It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to the inversion with their teeth . . ., saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God . . .”
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