3. Blame and Resentment

BENEATH THIS NOTION OF unfairness and the obligation to right it are the implications of fault and contempt. There is an unspoken, but very real, contempt for the rich yacht owner, contempt for the factory owner, contempt for the executive—in other words, a general contempt for wealthy people. Today, there is an outpouring of contempt in the media for the drug companies, the oil companies, and the Wal-Marts of the world. In a nutshell, each proposition made at that evening’s dinner painted a picture of a villain, a victim, and an emancipator—in other words, the rich, the poor, and the proponent of those propositions (with the help of the State), respectively.

The message implied in each proposition is not simply that “the poor are too poor and the rich are too rich.” The very heart of each of the propositions is that the cause of the poor being too poor is that the rich are too rich. In one sense, we are told that the “haves” are at fault for preventing the “have-nots” from gaining wealth, and, in another sense, that if the “haves” had less, the “have-nots” would have more by default. The evidence shows that both these assertions are fallacious.

Expressions such as “filthy rich,” “selfish rich,” and “greedy rich” exhibit a deeply rooted resentment of the rich. As Robert Solomon explains, “Through resentment we make it sound as though we are lucky not to have those things that we want but don’t have. We feel self-righteous precisely because we are not rich.”² Jean-Paul Sartre said that resentment is an act by which we escape responsibility for a world that we find too difficult to accept. Still worse, resentment can give way to schadenfreude—taking joy in other people’s suffering. This vindictive form of resentment is revealed in statements such as, “They finally got what was coming,” relative to the news that someone wealthy has had a setback.

²Robert Solomon, The Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions, Lecture 8 (The Teaching Company, 2006).