A Culture of Violent Ressentiment

An insatiable lust for violence and destruction is bubbling up in the collective psyche of the worst among us.

An incel Marxist goes on a shooting spree in Montreal and leaves behind a 104-page manifesto. Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered and a significant number of people celebrated. Luigi Mangione assassinated a CEO and countless people called him a hero. Others will tell you, in supposedly polite company, that they wish the attempts on Trump’s life had succeeded. I open X and a post about a trans person murdering someone for misgendering them has thousands of likes from people insisting it would be justified. Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire launched a wave of calls to eat the rich. On Facebook I find a page called Guillotines for a Better America, with a post claiming “all of your problems are because billionaires have heads,” and commenters debating whether they should execute millionaires too. One says all capitalists — which presumably means everyone who owns a business or a home. Another proposes starting with the wealthiest, waiting seven days, killing the next, and repeating until things improve, as though French Revolution-style slaughter were the surest road to prosperity.

We are told these are all different. And in scale, perhaps they are — some carry lethal consequences, others are only confessions typed into a screen. Most people treat them as unrelated problems, each with its own thing to blame. I believe they are deeply linked. The murderer, the celebrant, and the online daydreamer all hold the same conviction: that blood is the only path to a better world.

In each case, people argue over the cause. With the Montreal killer, one camp calls him an incel, another points to his Marxism, another to his anti-Zionism. Each reading holds some truth. But they share one flaw — they all assume the belief came first and the violent impulse second. That these were ordinary people until an idea entered them, took hold, and drove them to something horrific. Radicalization as infection.

Corrupted people do not stumble into dangerous ideas. They go looking for them.

Ideology can and does corrupt people. But the opposite is the more compelling explanation: that corrupted people seek out ideologies to justify their twisted aims. Centuries before the comment section, Nietzsche diagnosed this in his own time. He called it ressentiment — not ordinary anger, which comes and goes, but the slow poison of those who surrender all hope and autonomy, come to see themselves as perpetual victims, and resent the world for it. And ressentiment is creative. It does not merely sour a person on the inside. It builds values, justifications, entire moral systems designed to make a grudge feel like justice.

Nietzsche wrote that every drive within a person wants to become master, and once it rules, it philosophizes in its own spirit. The feeling takes the throne first. The philosophy is what the feeling dictates. We imagine we reason our way to our convictions and then feel accordingly. More often it runs the other way. The emotion seizes power, then conscripts whatever ideas will make its bloodlust feel virtuous.

These people say they want a better world. The guillotine page talks about co-ops and worker ownership. The killer’s manifesto promises an end to the loneliness that wrecks ordinary men. The activist swears the violence is self-defense for the oppressed. We are told this is idealism that has lost its way. But watch where the energy goes. The guillotine crowd is vivid, specific, and delighted about the killing. The Montreal manifesto spends pages detailing who must be liquidated and how, and offers only a flimsy sketch of the communal society that supposedly justifies it. All of these people — back to Marx himself — spend far more time naming who deserves to be on the receiving end of theft and violence than working out how their ideal society would actually function, let alone building it.

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