The politics of bitterness

It would appear that we have to revisit the concept of ressentiment, to explain the envy, bitterness, hatred and desire for revenge that undergirds the transparent “anonymous” attack of the “legacy” of former President Jagdeo.

Born from their belief that they should have occupied his position because of the “heritage”, they lacked the strong qualities that Jagdeo displayed during his tenure, and became frustrated at their impotence to achieve those values. They finally and insidiously transvalued their original desire for strength and decisiveness to propose that their own weakness is superior.

In this perverse scheme, Jagdeo, who led this nation out of the economic wreckage wrought by the PNC and rolled back the armed gangsters who would have destroyed the very foundation of the Guyanese state, is now dubbed “unsuccessful”.

The danger of ressentiment is that because the qualities that define a successful leader are not found in every Tom, Dick and Harilall, the Opposition’s petulant and envious transvaluation is superficially attractive. It is easy to covet and hate the successful and believe one’s weakness is superior: its excuses one’s inability to be successful.

The latest expression of this ressentiment is the full page ad in the Kaieteur News that cherry picked a number of occurrences and morbidly twists them to malign the then President Jagdeo administrations. But what is behind rage is that Jagdeo is emblematic of the leaders of the poor countries that have moved their countries from Third World to First World, but not from their ranks.

But today the sentiment of ressentiment is confined not only to the political sphere: it is also being assiduously fanned in the economic realm. There is a steady drumbeat of envy and hate directed at those entrepreneurs that have been successful in the past decade.

In the classic vocabulary of ressentiment, these businessmen are deemed to be “corrupt, avaricious and driven by greed”. Their lifestyle is deemed “effete, decadent and debauched”.

But simultaneously, these envious naysayers bemoan the underdeveloped state of our economy. They ignore that the countries that developed exponentially under strong leaders also encouraged a strong entrepreneurial culture. Such a culture is always built on the profit motive.

China is a good example of this phenomenon in the present. For over half a century, the Chinese attempted to develop their economy on what was deemed a more egalitarian basis. Man would work for each other and not for profit. The model failed abjectly.

After 1978, under a strong leader Deng, China accepted that the profit motive could not be ignored and accepted foreign direct investment where profits could be accumulated or repatriated.

Today China has a burgeoning middle class and as many billionaires as the USA. More Chinese have been lifted out of poverty than at any time in history. Will the Guyanese victims of ressentiment – especially their proxies in the media such as SN and KN – denounce this achievement because of the profit motive? Will they condemn it as greed? Do they begrudge the lifestyle of the Chinese billionaires?

The fact of the matter is that no country has lifted itself out of poverty – be it the England of the 18th century, the US of the 19th, Japan, South Korea and the Eastern Tigers etc of the 20th – but on the efforts of an entrepreneurial class motivated by profits. Rockefeller and JP Morgan were rewarded for their vision and foresight as are today Bill Gates and Steven Jobs. In Japan and South Korea, they went further.

Strategic industries were identified and the owners were facilitated with preferential credit etc to build world class corporations. Those owners became extremely wealthy but the country also rose as a whole.

If the concern is that the wealth must be distributed in such a way that all citizens benefit, that is another matter. Wealth has to be first created before it can be distributed.