Hardly a new observation, but I just quote posted this on Bluesky in response to someone who had copped flak for writing an obituary of a talented black female scientist, Gladys Mae West.
“Nothing drives sexist racists more wild than evidence that there are women of colour smarter than them, who achieved more than they will ever achieve despite having various feet belonging to sexist racist inadequate bullies on their necks.
It destroys their (unwarranted, obvs) sense of superiority.”
We ALL are not the people we were sure we would be when young. We didn’t keep the discipline, the faith, the et cetera (and if we can’t cope with acknowledging our frailties, well, there’s always someone who our feelings of self-loathing can be projected onto, some social scapegoat.)
Fwiw, Samuel Johnson dealt with this in his usual astonishing style in the superlative (imo, ymmv) essay “What Have Ye Done?”
The philosophers have a word for it of course – ressentiment
In philosophy, ressentiment (/rəˌsɒ̃.tiˈmɒ̃/; French pronunciation: [ʁə.sɑ̃.ti.mɑ̃] ⓘ) is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. The concept was of particular interest to some 19th-century thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration.[1] The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even 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 defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy to insulate themselves from culpability.
What is to be done about ressentiment? I guess the solutions are improved vocabularies, realism and, well, reducing economic insecurity (universal basic income, universal basic services), reducing economic inequality, and outlawing at least the most egregious of the envy-generating mechanisms (advertising at everyone, but especially children).
Will this happen? No, of course not. We will race into the climate apocalypse with escalating ressentiment among our many many problems. While that unfolds, it’s on people of good faith to call it out, and try to defuse shituations before they escalate.
This, this is why I never bred.
PS The latest Letter from an American (Feb 4, 2026) by Heather Cox Richardson has a long section on the Wilmington Massacre in 1898 – tl:dr –
PPS Trump and the AI images of the Obamas. He used to be able to hide it a bit. Now he simply can’t. Enraged by a black man smarter than him,…
marchudson.net 
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