Jordan Peterson on the Sin of Resentment

Rather than covet what we do not have, let us be grateful for the gifts and the traditions that have been passed down to us. Though he does not say so specifically, what Jordan Peterson ultimately calls upon modern, autonomous, post-Enlightenment individuals to do is to heed the commandment to honor one’s father and mother.

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson (432 pages, Penguin Portfolio, 2021)

There is an important detail about the second tablet of the Ten Commandments that is too often overlooked today. Commandments six through nine are hardly surprising, as they forbid the active and destructive sins of murder, adultery, theft, and lying. But what are we to do with the final commandment, the one that forbids us to covet our neighbor’s donkey or house or wife?

Surely coveting is a victimless crime. After all, I have not actually robbed or injured or swindled my neighbor. I have only desired things that he possesses, and I do not. What’s wrong with that? Does it really need to be proscribed by God and put on the same level as murder and adultery?

God, of course, knows what he is doing! When we covet what our neighbor possesses, we give ourselves over to envy, and envy leads to resentment, and resentment, when nursed and fed for years, bears a bitter fruit that tears apart families and communities and nations—and the envier along with them.

There is a strange but revealing aspect about envy. Whereas many people are willing to admit, and even brag about, their indulgence in gluttony, sloth, lust, wrath, pride, or greed, nobody ever admits to being guilty of envy. They may be burning up with envy and using it as an active or, more likely, passive-aggressive weapon against everyone around them, but they never ever admit to it.

The problem, they will insist, is not that they are envious, but that somebody has victimized them and scandalized their refined sense of fairness and equity. They are not driven by resentment, but by a clear, indisputable knowledge that society is systemically unjust, and so it is only right and proper that the person who has what they lack does not deserve what he has. The problem is not with me but with “the man” or “the system.”

***

Jordan Peterson

Although the fans and followers of Jordan Peterson are numerous, loyal, and growing, there are scores of critics who hate and despise him, comparing him to Hitler and accusing him of racism, sexism, and homophobia. On the surface, it is clear why there are so many who hate Peterson. He defends publicly the traditional view of marriage and the sexes and has refused to kowtow to the aggressive ideologies of LGBTQ+, critical race theory, grievance studies, and identity politics. In fact, in January 2022, he resigned from his tenured position at the University of Toronto because of his refusal to play the progressive game of diversity, inclusivity, and equity—or, as he likes to call it, DIE.

But I think there is another, deeper reason why Peterson is hated and that is because his books, speeches, and podcasts expose the rampant envy and resentment that seethe under the surface of the western democracies of Europe, Canada, and America—that is to say, those democracies that have provided their citizens with a quality of life that, in the past, was only experienced by the very rich and privileged. Peterson’s merciless, unapologetic exposure of the dangers of envy and resentment does surface in his 2018 bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, but it plays a far more prominent role in the sequel, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

Peterson is a firm and fearless writer who does not tiptoe around truths that most people would prefer to keep hidden, but he is also a highly compassionate one. Thus, he begins Rule XI (“do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant”) with a sympathetic admission of how difficult life is and how all of us have good and logical reasons for harboring resentment.

“You have your reasons for being resentful, deceitful, and arrogant. You face, or will face, terrible, chaotic forces, and you will sometimes be outmatched. Anxiety, doubt, shame, pain, and illness, the agony of conscience, the soul-shattering pit of grief, dashed dreams and disappointment, the reality of betrayal, subjection to the tyranny of social being, and the ignominy of aging unto death—how could you not degenerate, and rage, and sin, and come to hate even hope itself?” (303).

Peterson admits this freely and with great sympathy for those who have been dealt a bad hand. But it does not stop him from finishing his opening paragraph with this challenge and invitation: “I want you to know how you might resist that decline, that degeneration into evil. To do so—to understand your own personality and its temptation by darkness—you need to know what you are up against. You need to understand your motivations for evil—and the triad of resentment, deceit, and arrogance is as good a decomposition of what constitutes evil as I have been able to formulate” (303).

Although Peterson does not write from the point of view of a Christian theologian, he does not shy away from using the word evil to describe the mindset of the unrepentantly, self-righteously resentful person. As the many personal stories he tells show, Peterson was and is a good father, and he is well aware that good parents must repeatedly remind their tantrum-throwing, equity-demanding children that life is not fair. Those who do not make that truth clear end up sheltering them from the realities of suffering, and so leaving them open to feelings of bitterness and victimization when they experience betrayal.

When I was growing up, the commonsense thinkers warned against raising one’s children to think the world is a fairy tale. But Peterson is wiser. He knows that a true study of such fairy tales as Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White will arm children against the kind of disillusionment that so often leads to resentment. The parents of Sleeping Beauty think they can protect her from the evil of Maleficent; instead, they leave her helpless against the “Terrible Queen” who transforms into the “Dragon of Chaos” (325).

Yes, Peterson admits, people who are truly victimized by their family or society will sometimes give way to resentment, but it is “often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment” (339). It is these people who bolster and defend their resentment with deceit as a way of preserving their illusory, self-serving belief that the world is stacked against them, and they are an innocent victim.

“[T]he deceitful individual,” Peterson explains, takes “it upon him or herself to alter the very structure of reality. And for what? For a wish based on the idea that whatever egotistical falsehood conjured up by the act of deceit will be better than the reality that would have transpired had the truth been enacted or spoken. The liar acts out the belief that the false world he brings into being, however temporarily, will serve at least his own interests better than the alternative” (345).

Deceit, in turn, is bolstered and defended by an arrogant belief that this new structure of reality conjured up by resentment and deception “will stand on its own powerfully, without being revealed and destroyed as reality itself straightens and reforms, as it inevitably will. This is the arrogance behind the liar’s belief that the lie has somehow permanently altered the form of the world, so that now life in the world can be conducted as if that lie is somehow real” (346).

***

Earlier, in Rule VI (“abandon ideology”), Peterson traces how the sheltering of children leads both to individual resentment and to the adoption of totalitarian ideologies that destroy the individual and society alike. For the last half century, he argues, parents have abdicated their responsibility to instill responsibility in their children, teaching them instead “to demand what they are owed by society.” Unfortunately, by lifting all burdens from their shoulders, we have “left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment” (161).

Rather than struggle with the complexity of life in a complex world, they gravitate toward simple ideologies that reduce that complexity to a series of simple causes and strawman villains. The follower of such ideologies “generates a small number of explanatory principles or forces” and “grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance” (170). Peterson describes such ideologues as smart but lazy, prone to cynicism, arrogance, pseudo-intellectualism, and self-righteousness. They are like fundamentalists in their unyielding rigidity but lack the one saving grace of the fundamentalist: humility before the mystery of transcendence.

The resentful ideologue eventually falls prey to what Nietzsche called ressentiment, a psychological defense mechanism by which an individual enviously blames his feelings of frustration, insecurity, and inferiority on objects and systems outside himself. With the precision of a brain surgeon, Peterson dissects the process of ressentiment, clarifying the exact relationship between self-destructive resentment and society-destroying ideology.

“Ressentiment—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system. The former, the system, is deemed by fiat to be unjust. The successful are deemed exploitative and corrupt, as they could be logically read as undeserving beneficiaries, as well as the voluntary, conscious, self-serving, and immoral supporters, if the system is unjust. Once this causal chain of thought has been accepted, all attacks on the successful can be construed as morally justified attempts at establishing justice—rather than, say, manifestations of envy and covetousness that might have traditionally been defined as shameful” (174-175).

***

Does Peterson offer any hope that this causal chain can be broken? Thankfully, he does. The chain can be broken if we will seek to be responsible, even and especially when those around us forsake their responsibilities; stop our complaining and find wisdom in traditional structures and institutions; bravely uncover and wrestle with painful memories that we have repressed; and refuse to do that which is ugly, base, or deceitful.

And then there is a more excellent way, a way that is, at its core, profoundly Christian. The great foe of and antidote to resentment is gratitude—which is why Peterson finishes his book with Rule XII: be grateful in spite of your suffering.

In Christianity, one cannot receive God’s grace unless he first comes to a realization of his sinfulness. In a similar way, Peterson insists that you cannot “be appropriately grateful or thankful for what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying sense of the weight of existence. You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so” (357).

In the absence of gratitude, resentment will lead us to a nihilistic, anti-life view of the world. We will become, like Satan himself, the great adversary and accuser of all that is good, all that is hopeful, all that is human. Our ideologies may begin with a utopian promise that we can remake ourselves and our world, but they always end with lies, social engineering, and mass murder.

How do we hold back the forces of dystopia? By being grateful to our family and friends, and to something else that will sound naïve and primitive to many a modern cynic. “To be grateful to your society,” Peterson explains, “is to remind yourself that you are the beneficiary of tremendous effort on the part of those who predeceased us, and left this amazing framework of social structure, ritual, culture, art, technology, power, water, and sanitation so that our lives could be better than theirs” (369).

Rather than covet what we do not have, let us be grateful for the gifts and the traditions that have been passed down to us. Though he does not say so specifically, what Peterson ultimately calls upon modern, autonomous, post-Enlightenment individuals to do is to heed the fifth commandment—to honor one’s father and mother. And let us not forget what Paul has to say of that commandment: “Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (Ephesians 6:2-3; KJV).

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now. 

The featured image, uploaded by Gage Skidmore is a photograph of Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas, 15 June 2018. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.