Ghost deep dive companion to Post 3, "The Wound Doesn't Care What You Feed It"

Last week, I put a man in an incel forum next to a fishing town's carbon-offset spreadsheet and said they were running the same story. That's a claim worth more than a good pairing of images, so here's its actual shape: I'm not claiming shame psychology and political economy cause each other. I'm claiming that two bodies of scholarship that never cite each other, one built by psychologists studying shame and the other by political economists studying how markets metabolize the living world, keep landing on the same underlying move. A relation gets converted into a manageable, quantifiable object. That convergence is what I want to show you the argument structure behind, because the mechanism itself is more precise, and more useful, than the analogy.

It starts with a hundred-year-old idea that grows more relevant with each decade, not less so.

Scheler's Wound That Becomes a Verdict

Max Scheler gave the mechanism its name in 1912: ressentiment, a psychological process he distinguished carefully from ordinary resentment. Ordinary resentment has a target, a specific person, institution, or circumstance you hold responsible for a specific loss or injury, and it fades once that target is gone or the score is settled. Ressentiment persists because the target is never the point. What actually needs tending is the wound underneath it: an injury to a person's sense of worth, a humiliation or a diminishment that has no clear remedy and no one willing to own it. The wound is converted (Scheler's word is transvalued) so that the injury becomes proof of the injured person's moral superiority, and someone else, not necessarily the one who caused it, becomes responsible for a failure that would otherwise have no explanation.

Contemporary shame research explains how Scheler's insight works. Thomas Scheff calls shame the master emotion of everyday life: not the dramatic public humiliation the word usually conjures, but a near-constant, low-grade signal of threat to the social bond. Helen Lewis, combing through therapy transcripts, found shame markers appearing more often than any other emotional signal, and almost never named as such by either party in the room. Scheff's key finding, building on Lewis, is that shame markers reliably precede anger markers in conversation. He calls it the shame-rage spiral: shame that goes unacknowledged doesn't resolve; it converts and comes out as hostility aimed somewhere else.

Guilt and shame are often confused, but they're structurally different, and June Tangney's research draws the line precisely. Guilt says I did a bad thing, and it leaves the self intact enough to go make repair. Shame says I am bad, damaged, unworthy, and there's nothing left to heal. That unrepairable quality can go one of two ways: turned inward, it's one of the more reliable predictors of depression and chronic self-loathing in the clinical literature; turned outward, it's defended against by converting the unbearable verdict into someone else's fault. Tangney's own data specifically traces this second path. Shame-proneness correlates with anger, suspicion, and indirect hostility, whereas guilt-proneness correlates with empathy and constructive responses. This is a fork in the road. Ressentiment occurs when a culture manufactures a lot of shame and offers very few honest ways to process it.

Scheler's account is a century old, and more recent work has updated it for a media environment he never witnessed. Salmela and Capelos trace the specific contemporary pathway from shame and blocked anger to righteous indignation and collective identity repair, and link it to a broader pattern of backward-looking politics and wounded entitlement that reinforce each other in a closed loop: the mechanism Scheler named, operating at scale.

Buber's Two Words for a Relation

Martin Buber's vocabulary names what ressentiment actually does at the level of relationship. I-Thou is a relationship in which another being meets you as a full presence and asks the same in return. Buber calls this immediacy. Presence, in his sense, means meeting someone without running them through the memory of who they've been, the anticipation of what they'll do next, or a quiet calculation of what use they might be to you. These are exactly the operations that convert a person into an object, and Buber's claim is that a real meeting depends on holding them back long enough for the other's genuine otherness to emerge, someone whose being doesn't reduce to what you already know or need from them. He calls staying behind that filtered, managed self essential cowardice, and dropping it essential courage. Genuine presence also runs both ways. This means recognizing the other as a full self, not a role or function, someone whose own becoming depends on being met this way. I-It is what happens when that mutual holding breaks down. The other gets run back through memory, anticipation, and use, and becomes, once again, something ranked, priced, managed, rather than met.

The manosphere is one of the clearest documented cases of I-It logic operating in the context of domination. Online masculinist communities score attractiveness, rank status, and sort women into tiers, a literal, mechanical operation performed on other people. A 2023 philosophical analysis of incel culture directly argues this pathway. Loneliness converts into misogyny through ressentiment, and the community that forms around the conversion rewards it rather than relieving the loneliness underneath it. Vandello et al.'s research on precarious manhood shows that the vulnerability behind this is real and structurally produced (men are expected to prove their status continuously rather than possess it once), but the same research is clear that vulnerability doesn't determine the outcome. Most men who feel it don't become dominating. Among those who do, the pattern documented in the research is specifically relational: a humiliated self restores its own sense of worth by turning someone else into an object of humiliation. None of that makes it acceptable. Understanding why a wound gets converted into domination is not the same as excusing what the conversion does to the people on the other end of it, who bear the cost of someone else's status repair. They're real women living real lives, not case studies for somebody else's theory of ressentiment. The incel community itself supplies both the target and reward for that restoration. O'Malley and Helm's qualitative study of incel forums found two things driving membership: a felt sense of injustice and a search for esteem that the forum reliably provides, at the cost of reinterpreting the member's whole life through an extremist lens. The resulting ideology, which incels call the black pill, treats women's use of dating apps and a small class of naturally dominant men as the technological cause of involuntary celibacy, converting felt injustice into a totalizing worldview that gives the humiliation somewhere to point, per Preston, Halpin, and Maguire's analysis of the same forums.

Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser already trace a version of this bridge directly. They read the shift from pick-up-artist culture to incel culture as neoliberalism failing to keep its central promise, that enough self-improvement buys you confidence and a lasting sense of self-worth, and they argue that the failure gets exposed as a confidence game, then rerouted through networked misogyny into real violence against women. Fromm and Han never wrote about the manosphere specifically, but their frameworks explain why this failure was structural rather than incidental. Fromm's marketing character names a self whose worth is secured by exchange value rather than realized through encounter: a person primed to treat both others and themselves as commodities on the same market. Han's account of the self-exploiting achievement subject explains the resulting exhaustion. There's no threshold of accumulated status at which market logic declares itself finished. You can win the ranking and still feel the deficit because the deficit was never really about the ranking.

How the Same Logic Gets Written Into Markets

Here's where the argument leaves the individual psyche and enters the political economy, and where I think the real payoff of this post is, because this is the part that doesn't get said often enough. The scholars James McCarthy and Scott Prudham established something political-ecology research now treats as foundational. Neoliberalism doesn't just fail to regulate nature adequately; it materially reworks environments, turning a river's flow or a forest's growth into something that can be owned, priced, and managed for return. Noel Castree's follow-up work sharpens the point. It's an ongoing process, neoliberalization, in which market logic keeps getting inserted into how the living world gets governed. A fishery might get privatized into individual tradeable quotas one decade, then have its carbon-sequestering wetlands turned into a separate credit scheme the next, then have its water rights auctioned off after that, each new market layered onto the last rather than any of it ever being called finished. Valuation, enclosure, privatization, and financialization are all part of the same mechanism. Not all economists agree with this framing. Advocates of conservation through market mechanisms contend that pricing strategies are the most feasible political approach to safeguarding ecosystems on the scale demanded by this crisis. The critique here doesn't rest on denying that motive. It rests on what pricing does to the thing being priced, regardless of its intent.

This claim reaches its deepest form in Jason Moore's world-ecology scholarship. Capitalism doesn't act on a separately given nature from outside it. It emerges through a web of life in which human and extra-human natures are dialectically constituted together, which makes the ecological crisis a systemic function rather than an external interruption, generated by the system's own need to keep finding cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials, converting the conditions of life into inputs while exhausting the ground those inputs grow from.

The same logic puts on a green vocabulary without changing its structure, and Kathleen McAfee's work on ecosystem-services markets traces exactly how. Once a forest can be represented as a carbon stock and a wetland as a bundle of tradeable services, the very idea of something mattering because it simply exists (not priced, not optimized, just there) becomes harder to say out loud, let alone defend in a policy argument. That's the same operation Buber names at the level of a person. The living world gets converted from something to be encountered into something to be managed.

Who Pays, and Why That Isn't an Accident

A serious version of this argument must ask who actually carries the weight of it, because the costs aren't distributed evenly across an undifferentiated humanity. Loïc Wacquant's research on the punitive turn in neoliberal governance gives the clearest frame. The state reorganizes around workfare, which pushes precarious populations into unstable labor, and prisonfare, which disciplines the populations that the same insecurity renders disruptive or redundant. Wacquant's framework is influential but not uncontested. Some criminologists argue that it overstates how coordinated the punitive turn was across different states and decades. The pattern he documents, precarity managed with labor discipline on one end and incarceration on the other, holds either way. Michelle Yates names the resulting category directly: people rendered surplus to capital's own calculations, and therefore treated as disposable rather than merely disadvantaged. Disposable is the exact word for what happens to a bay recoded as compensable damage and to a person recoded as a category, dominated and dehumanized, or regarded as surplus. Same operation, different object, same outcome.

There's a vocabulary for what gets lost here too. Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake call it the difference between affective solidarity and calculative solidarity. Affective solidarity grows from the plain recognition that human life is interdependent and treats care as morally basic. Calculative solidarity is thinner: help becomes conditional, need becomes suspect, and dependence is coded as a mark against a person's competence rather than an ordinary feature of a life lived among others. Neoliberalism doesn't need to abolish solidarity to do its damage. It only has to recode it, precisely the same move markets make on a forest once it's been translated into an ecosystem-service unit. Both are the price of admission for being taken seriously by a system built to see only what it can measure.

My Take

What strikes me, working across both literatures, is that neither needed the other to arrive at the same diagnosis. Shame researchers weren't reading political economists. Scheler wrote a century before carbon markets existed. However, you obtain the identical structure twice. A wound produced by conditions nobody fully chose gets converted into a moralized story that protects the wounded party from having to feel the original injury directly, at the cost of a relation — to another person, or to a bay, or to a species — that could have been encountered instead. I don't think that convergence is a coincidence, but I want to name what kind of claim that actually is. It isn't that Buber, Scheler, or the political economists already said this. It's that reading them together makes a stronger claim available, and that claim is mine to make. What each literature independently found, on its own terms, is the same operation showing up at two different scales. An individual self converts a relation into a manageable object under pressure, and a system or worldview does the identical thing to an entire population or landscape. Whether that's one mechanism or the same trick played twice by unrelated pressures is the real question, and my answer is one mechanism. Buber never wrote about carbon markets or incel forums, but the distance between meeting a person and managing one is the same distance that opens up between a policy and the forest it prices. That's my extension of his category, not his own argument, and I think it holds up.

Go Deeper

  • Ressentiment by Max Scheler — the original text, dense but short, and worth reading once for how precisely he distinguishes the feeling from ordinary resentment.
  • "Ressentiment: The World-Improving Poison" by The Living Philosophy (Substack) — an accessible walk through Nietzsche and Scheler's account and its 21st-century politics, if you want the concept without the primary text's density.
  • "The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle" by Heidi Blake (The New Yorker, October 2023) — a reported deep dive into how carbon-offset markets actually work in practice, and what gets lost in the translation from forest to tradeable credit.

References

Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994 [1912]).

Thomas J. Scheff, "Shame in Self and Society," Symbolic Interaction 26, no. 2 (2003): 239–262.

Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, 1971).

June Price Tangney, "Constructive and Destructive Aspects of Shame and Guilt," in Shame: Interpersonal Behavior, Psychopathology, and Culture, ed. Paul Gilbert and Bernice Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 127–45.

Mikko Salmela and Tereza Capelos, "Ressentiment: A Complex Emotion or an Emotional Mechanism of Psychic Defences?" Politics and Governance 9, no. 3 (2021).

Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner Classics, 2000).

Martin Buber, "Distance and Relation," in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. Maurice Friedman, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 49–61.

Martin Buber, "Elements of the Interhuman," in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. Maurice Friedman, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 62–78.

Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna K. Tirkkonen, "The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of 'Involuntary Celibates' (Incels)," Topoi 42 (2023): 1229–41.

J. Vandello, J. Bosson, D. Cohen, Rochelle M. Burnaford, and Jonathan R. Weaver, "Precarious Manhood," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1325–39.

J. Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser, "From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism," International Journal of Communication 13 (2019).

Kayla Preston, Michael Halpin, and F. Maguire, "The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men," Men and Masculinities 24 (2021): 823–41.

R. O'Malley and Brenna Helm, "The Role of Perceived Injustice and Need for Esteem on Incel Membership Online," Deviant Behavior 43, no. 9 (2022): 1026–43.

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

James McCarthy and Scott Prudham, "Neoliberal Nature and the Nature of Neoliberalism," Geoforum 35, no. 3 (2004): 275–83.

Noel Castree, "Neoliberalism and the Biophysical Environment: A Synthesis and Evaluation of the Research," Environment and Society: Advances in Research 1, no. 1 (2010): 5–45.

Jason W. Moore, "Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation and Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology," Journal of World-Systems Research 17, no. 1 (2011).

Kathleen McAfee, "Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 2 (1999): 133–54.

Loïc Wacquant, "Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity," Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (2010): 197–220.

Michelle Yates, "The Human-As-Waste, the Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism," Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1679–95.

Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake, "Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The Impact of Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism," European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 2 (2018): 238–57.

This is the deep dive behind "The Wound Doesn't Care What You Feed It," the third piece in a short series on taking connectedness seriously as ontology, not just sentiment.