My first book was titled Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision, and
explored a world I knew from growing up in an Italian American family, one
where common ailments (stomachache, headache, fever) were often attributed to mal occhio or “evil eye.” My point here
is not to revive that story, but to point out that the operating principle
behind mal occhio in our tradition
was envy: an outsider sees
something—a quality, an object, a trait—that he or she admires, and beneath that
open admiration lies a corrosive envy. The admiring person, evil eye cultures
believe, either desires to have that object (a beautiful baby, say) for him/
herself, or wishes it harm. Behind it all lies envy, supported by the fact that the evil eye complex, in Roman
times, was known simply as invidia,
the word for envy. One of the side effects of the evil eye belief was a
cultural inhibition on display, and on the individualism which leads to
boasting. In evil eye cultures (usually villages), it is more prudent to keep
one’s possessions and gifts under wraps, to downplay any good fortune one might
have, so as not to incite envy and the resultant harm from evil eye. Socially,
this tends to act as a check on runaway egos and tends to keep things, at least
overtly, more or less balanced.
Modern
societies, of course, pretend to be free of such superstitions, and indeed turn
them on their head, but in truth, our industrial societies are more shot
through with envy than we might suspect. We can see that this is the case by
looking at any number of TV commercials, where the possession of a new car or
any other shiny object is gazed at with wanting and pure envy by a neighbor. We
are all, as eager consumers, meant to envy those who have beautiful or
desirable objects (including women or babies) and to work hard to be able to
get them. Objects, that is, are desirable not to satisfy a need, but simply
because they appear to confer some magical quality on those who have them. The
well-known commercial in which Jessica Simpson (herself a desired object) gives
voice to her naked desire is one of the best cases ever made for this idea: She
extols the benefits of Direct TV broadcast on something she calls “1080i,” and
then adds the punchline: “I totally don’t know what that means, but I want it.”
What more needs to be said about American commerce and its mania for inciting
raw lust for objects or services consumers don’t really need?
This raw desire is
partly what Pankaj Mishra writes about in his fascinating book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present
(2017). For Mishra, the key concept driving the seemingly motiveless violence of
terrorists and mass murderers and groups like ISIS in our time, is what he terms
ressentiment. This French word
connotes something akin to the English ‘resentment,’ but with more overtones
and implications. Mishra quotes several well-known thinkers about this key
idea, beginning with Hannah Arendt, who describes ressentiment as “An existential resentment of other people’s being,
caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness…”
The French critic Rene Girard develops this further with his term ‘appropriative
mimicry’—desiring objects because the desires of others tell us that they are
something to be desired. This sounds like a primer for American advertising.
But Mishra explains Girard further as follows:
the
human individual is subject, after satisfying his basic needs, to ‘intense
desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he
desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems
to possess…If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being,
desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even
greater plenitude of being’ (66).
This is a key concept here. It is
not just objects themselves that are desired; it is being, a state of mind or emotion which is hard to define and
which masses of people feel but have no way of satisfying because they’re not
even sure what it is (like Jessica Simpson, who admits to having no idea what
it is she wants so much). All they know is that certain fortunate others seem to have it, and seem to have it because
they possess certain objects; and so, to get being, the envious masses focus
their desires on the objects or lifestyles of the elite.
There
are a few other key ingredients that contribute to the toxic stew of our time,
and Mishra traces them out at great length. Here, what’s important is to lay
them out briefly. First is the general idea in most modern cultures that all
are equal and therefore have the right and the capabilities to get anything
they desire. Of course, this is a myth but it is a myth that has been promoted
relentlessly since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution (see our
Declaration of Independence). What it leads to in modern societies is the
unlimited expectations that all modern populations exhibit—not just in advanced
societies, but now in developing cultures as well. And of course, modern media
exacerbate this situation with advertising and related media that are full of
images of apparently rich and satisfied westerners enjoying all the fruits of advanced
industrialism.
The
other key ingredient is the fact that, in the face of these almost unlimited
desires and aspirations, most people simply cannot satisfy them. Most people,
that is, are as powerless as insects in comparison to the elites in advanced
societies, and know that they are
powerless. They find this humiliating—as Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of
the first to articulate. The result is that we get individuals, and whole
societies, whole continents composed of envious and humiliated outsiders. These
are the masses of people who want and feel they deserve what others seem to
have, others who are conspicuously enjoying a wealth of possessions and a sense
of “being” that comprises their ultimate desire, but which is simply beyond
their reach. They can’t have it, and yet they are constantly goaded by what
they see in the media—this is literally the purpose of modern media, to instill
desire for useless goods in as many people as possible—to try to get it. And
this leads to envy of those who have it. Envy and powerlessness and ressentiment.
The
outcome of all this unsatisfied desire and powerlessness, in Mishra’s telling,
is the resort to violence. In a world where some few have multiple dwellings
and more goods than they know what to do with, and increasing capital to always
get more, those who are so powerless they have barely enough to survive are
eventually induced to do something.
But what is to be done? Where can all this desire be satisfied? Where can
something to change the world be found? And here is where demagogues come in.
Demagogues are those who, like many of the leaders in our world today (and many
more in the past) provide easy solutions to the powerlessness and frustration
of the masses. Mishra cites some of them: Narendra Modi in India; Vladimir
Putin in Russia; Recip Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; and of course, Donald Trump in
the United States. All use the same formula, one perfected by Hitler and
Mussolini (and D’Annunzio in Italy before him): they promise to bring the
nation or group to a power and glory that apparently reigned in the past. For
Mussolini, it was to restore Italians to the greatness of the Roman Empire. For
Putin, it’s to restore Russia to the superpower status of the Soviet Union. For
Trump, it’s to Make America Great again (by restoring a presumptive greatness
that reigned in the immediate post-World War II period.) And more than just
promising restored national greatness, the demagogues point out that those who stand
in the way of this greatness are not the real culprits, the power elites and
the system that favors them, but rather the scapegoats—the Kurds in Turkey or
the Muslims in India or the undocumented immigrants in America. Once these troublemakers are either expelled
or collared with draconian controls, so the promise goes, all the problems will
vanish. It is reminiscent, of course, of the classic scapegoats used by Hitler
and the Nazis, where all Germany’s troubles were attributed to the nefarious
workings of the Jews. And wherever there are scapegoats, there is the
corollary, the deflection of anger to the now-legitimated targets of violence.
For the real satisfaction for those who are powerless and humiliated and
envious lies, when all else fails as it always must, in violence.
Mishra
focuses both on those who, historically, promoted theoretical violence like
Nietzsche and Wagner in Germany and the Futurists like Marinetti in Italy, and
on the more recent devotees of violence for its own sake like Timothy McVeigh
(who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City), Ramzi Yousef (bombed the World
Trade Center in 1993), and Omar Mateen (massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in
Florida). They are the real exemplars of the anger that Mishra seeks to
document and understand: “For them the act of violence is all; they have no
vision of an alternative political reality on a global or even local scale,
like the one of a classless society” (292). That is to say, unlike even the
anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these
modern purveyors of violence—and those who join ISIS come instantly to
mind—seem to have no need for justifications or rationalizations for their
violence. Like those who drove airliners into the World Trade Center on 9/11,
the act of violence is sufficient unto itself. Mishra puts this in historical
context, citing the first aerial bombing of Libya by Italians in 1911, as
“confirm(ing) that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and
empowered by technology, saw violence as
an existential experience—an end in itself, and perpetually renewable” (248).
That it kills innocents in no way diminishes its appeal, and may even enhance
it. In a sense, these killers have had enough of rationalizations and
justifications; all have failed them over time; every program for equality and
restitution has failed and ended in further powerlessness. Mishra puts it this
way:
Simply defined, the energy and
ambition released by the individual will to power far exceed the capacity of
existing political, social and economic institutions. Thus, the trolls of
Twitter as much as the dupes of ISIS lurch between feelings of impotence and
fantasies of violent revenge (341).
For certain people whose envy and
frustration are great enough, this can sooner or later lead to the fatal
decision to turn fantasy into reality, as with the suicide killers of ISIS,
whom Mishra reads as follows:
In all cases they move from feelings
of misery, guilt, righteousness and impotence to what Herzl [Theodor, a founder
of Zionism] called, admiringly, the ‘voluptuousness of a great idea and of
martyrdom’: a grand vision of heroic self-sacrifice in which a life of freedom
can finally be achieved by choosing one’s mode of death (295).
So there it is. In
a world where freedom and self-determination are promised to everyone, but one
in which millions are prevented from ever reaching anything like freedom but
are subjected to constant humiliation instead, the feelings generated can lead
to the heroic vision of the martyr’s death; the suicide bomber who kills innocents and
may even be aware that his act will fail, like all previous ones, to bring
about change, but who at least can achieve the freedom of choosing his own
death.
Thus
does envy lead to ressentiment and ressentiment, in a surprising number of
cases, lead to the violence we are becoming accustomed to. And thus does our
modern world, impelled by a capitalist system that depends on inciting envy in millions
of consumers, come to resemble, more than we might imagine, the overheated
world of the Italian village. The problem—and it is serious—lies in the fact
that so far, the modern world has no safety valve like mal occhio to mitigate the toxic effects of all this supercharged
envy. There is no set of practices to tamp down the rampant individualism and
desire that seem to be the inevitable product of our diseased economic/political
system. Instead, the opposite is true: the gulf between the few rich and the masses
of the poor engendered by global capitalism is driven ever wider, in the
process dramatizing the open wounds that must eventually lead to explosions
among those left out; to violence among the marginalized, who are growing more
and more marginalized and enraged by the day. And to the rise of more and more
demagogues who seek to divert that legitimate anger onto convenient scapegoats
for their own self-aggrandizement. Whether, in this century, it will take the
kinds of bloodbaths that erupted in the 20th century for people to realize they
are being led down a fool’s path to armaggedon, is still to be decided; but with
everything conspiring to drive envy and humiliation ever higher, the signs do
not look good.
Lawrence DiStasi
