Max Scheler and the psychopathology of the terrorist

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Manfred Frings

Translated into the failed aspirations of humans, this example reveals a significant trait of resentment: During experiences of repeated failure and discontent stemming from an impotency, there takes place a devaluation of the positive value of sweet grapes aimed at in vain. They lose their sweetness. Yet the opposite also holds: the negative value of sour grapes is gradually upgraded into a false positive value because that is all there is of grapes. In this psychic, reciprocal resentment-driven process of downgrading and upgrading there lies a tragic factor. While positive values are downgraded to negative ones, says Scheler, the positive values remain "transparent" throughout the downgrading. The unattainable sweet grapes keep challenging the fox's desires from behind the pretended sour ones, no matter how much the fox may belittle and scorn the sweetness of the grapes that are unreachable.

(6) Resentment is imbued with feelings of being hurt. Hurt feelings beg for reactions. Every resentment calls for reaction. The impotency builds up an indignation that creeps through resentful souls day and night, but only to feed into a psychic longing for reaction that, in turn, is likely to prompt its execution in a hostile act. Impotencies can have two effects: either to defer hostile acts forever or to lead to failed attempts. These failures can never appease feelings of resentment directed against an entire hated class of people.

Concerning the latter, Scheler mentions a particular case that happened near Berlin in the summer of 1912. A criminal unable to own a car, and being resentfully envious of those who did, tied a wire connecting two trees on opposite sides of the road, so that the heads of the oncoming drivers or passengers could now and then be cut off. Yet no matter how much he reveled over each head rolling down the street, and no matter his increasing satisfaction over each head cut off, his resentment did not subside. Scheler states that such a case is typical of resentment. (3)

The preceding crime is remindful of roadside bombers because in both cases it does not matter for the perpetrator who is killed in the vehicles as long as someone of a resented class of people is killed, whether an automobile owner or an infidel. Any repetition of acts of terrorism such as roadside bombings illustrates the terrorists' frustration in not getting even with the entire class of humans they resent, no matter how often they try.

According to Scheler's analysis, it might well be the case that when the same acts of terror are repeatedly committed, the terrorists' resentment stems from their envy of a desired but unattainable power that a class of people possesses. "The most powerless envy is also the most terrible envy," says Scheler. (4) It is an "existential envy," or an envy of the very existence of a class of others possessing this power, success, social and political station. This extreme resentment vents itself in the phrase, "I can forgive you everything but not that you are what you are," as Scheler notes.