Last week, I put a man in an incel forum next to a woman whose family’s bay was recoded as a carbon offset, and I said they were living the same story. Simply putting two people side by side doesn’t prove much, so this piece explains the reasoning behind that comparison. I’m not claiming that shame psychology and political economy cause each other. Instead, I’ve noticed that when I read psychologists who study shame alongside geographers and sociologists who study how markets take hold of the living world, I find them describing what I take to be the same process: turning a relation into something measurable and manageable. In everything I’ve read for this series, the shame researchers and the geographers who study markets in nature rarely cite each other, though emotion researchers such as Mikko Salmela and Christian von Scheve have begun tying ressentiment to neoliberal capitalism. That makes the overlap even more interesting to me.

It starts with a hundred-year-old idea.

Scheler’s Self-Poisoning

Max Scheler published his study of ressentiment in 1912. He refused to start with a definition and described the thing instead: “Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects.” The emotions he names are “revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.” None of these produces ressentiment on its own. The poisoning happens only when the feeling is strong and has to be held down because the person feels unable to act on it: “Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out.”

The difference from ordinary revenge is the part I find most useful. Revenge has an object, and in Scheler’s account it ends: “The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken.” Ressentiment doesn’t end, because it has come loose from any particular object. It shifts toward “indeterminate groups of objects which need only share one common characteristic.” It also changes how the person values things, and here Scheler is careful in a way worth slowing down for. He starts with the fox and the sour grapes. When we can’t get something, we comfort ourselves by deciding it wasn’t worth much. But Scheler insists this is “not yet a falsification of values, only a new opinion about the true qualities of the desired object.” The values themselves stay standing: “The fox does not say that sweetness is bad, but that the grapes are sour.” Ressentiment goes a step further and reverses the values themselves, in what Scheler, borrowing Nietzsche’s phrase, calls a “falsification of the value tablets.” Nietzsche’s version, which Scheler quotes and then partly disputes, is the one people remember: “impotence, inability to retaliate, is to become ‘goodness.’” What matters most for this piece is how Scheler says the reversal happens. It “should not be mistaken for conscious lying.” It works earlier than judgment, in perception and memory, through what he calls “organic mendacity,” a mind that “admits only those impressions which serve his ‘interest.’” As he puts it, “He who is ‘mendacious’ has no need to lie!” So the resulting value judgment can be, to the person who holds it, “entirely ‘true,’ ‘genuine,’ and ‘honest.’” That also explains why argument so rarely reaches someone in ressentiment. You aren’t arguing with a lie. You’re arguing with a way of seeing.

Scheler didn’t name shame among ressentiment’s sources, though humiliation runs all through his account. The bridge to shame comes from later work, and I think it is the right bridge. Thomas Scheff proposes that shame is the master emotion of everyday life. Summarizing Lewis, he explains that shame does for our social bonds what fear does for our bodies: “Just as the instinctual emotion of fear signals danger to life and limb,” shame signals “a threat to a social bond.” If belonging is something we need, shame is the alarm that says it’s at risk, which is why it is so constant and so easy to miss. Scheff builds on Helen Lewis, who studied transcripts of hundreds of psychotherapy sessions. Her method, in brief, flagged emotions by the words people used, drawing on long lists of keywords tied to each emotion, and then examined every flagged episode closely. She was, Scheff says, “unprepared for” what turned up. Shame markers were “far outranking markers of all other emotions combined,” yet patient and therapist “seldom referred to shame.” They clustered in moments when the patient “seemed to feel distant from, rejected, criticized, or exposed by the therapist.” And the patient’s anger markers “were always preceded by shame markers.” Scheff’s gloss is plain: “Apparently one way of hiding shame is to become angry.” Scheff’s account of resentment comes close to Scheler’s territory: “Resentment seems to be an affect of shame and anger, with the anger pointed outward.” Unacknowledged, he writes, shame and anger can feed each other in loops that “create perpetual hostility and alienation.”

June Tangney’s research explains why shame in particular takes this route. Guilt is about a behavior and leaves the self intact enough to repair it; people feeling guilt wish they “could somehow undo the deed.” Shame is about the self. It brings a wish to hide, “to sink into the floor and disappear,” or else what Lewis called a “humiliated fury” aimed at others. Tangney reads the outward turn as a defense: by redirecting the anger, a shamed person tries to regain some of the agency shame takes away. Her data fit that reading. Across studies of children, adolescents, college students, and adults, shame-proneness went with anger and, in a study of young adults, with indirect hostility, resentment, and suspicion, while guilt went with constructive ways of handling anger. Scheff and Tangney don’t mean quite the same thing by shame, and the difference matters here. Scheff points out that German and French have two words where English has one: Schande or honte for disgrace shame, Scham or pudeur for everyday shame, the “sense of shame” we treat as “a necessary part of our equipment as proper persons.” That everyday sense is, in his phrase, “our moral gyroscope,” and he calls it “especially important for social control”: we seldom feel it outright, but we are “constantly anticipating it.” Tangney notes that shame and guilt are commonly “assumed to serve adaptive functions at the societal level,” but the shame her research tracks is the kind Lewis described, “an acutely painful emotion” about the whole self, carrying “a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness.” That kind pulls attention away from “a distressed other” and back to the self. Scheff also counts guilt within the shame family, often as one of its “masks”; Tangney keeps the two apart. Read together, as I read them, the two accounts describe two forms of one alarm about the bond. In its everyday form, shame keeps us attuned to others and in step with shared standards. Turned into a verdict on the whole self, it defends the self against the very relationship it was meant to protect.

Mikko Salmela and Tereza Capelos make the link to ressentiment explicit. They name envy, shame, and anger that cannot accomplish anything as its main triggers, and describe its result as “a morally superior sense of victimhood.”

To put it in my own words, ressentiment protects a wound to someone’s sense of worth that can’t easily be healed and that no one will take responsibility for. It takes root when a culture creates many of these wounds but offers few honest ways to deal with them.

Not every grievance is ressentiment, and the difference matters for everything that follows. Tereza Capelos, Mikko Salmela, and Gabija Krisciunaite distinguish “two types of resentment.” The first, which they associate with what they call “anger proper” (an emotion with “a defined object, usually short‐lived,” that “generates action tendencies”), is “moral anger at injustices and wrongs that motivates individual or collective action seeking to correct or retribute the relevant injustice.” The second has “an indeterminate and ‘blurred’ affective focus on generic ‘enemies’ of the self” and is “marked by inefficacy, inaction, and anti‐preferences.” Anti-preferences are positions defined by what they oppose; in their study the examples are anti-feminist, anti-government, anti-immigration, and anti-democracy. Ressentiment’s bitterness, they write, is “expressed as dogmatic, binary anti-preferences, sustained through lasting rumination over remembered or imagined injustices.” A grievance organized around what it is against has nothing that would count as satisfaction. Scheler drew the same line a century earlier, in his account of what he called ressentiment criticism, which “does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism.” A different form sits at the center of protest movements, where indignation, “the morally grounded form of anger” in James Jasper’s phrase, motivates participation and directs blame. Jasper adds a caution: anger “is tricky, often linked to aggression.” What makes this form healthier, as I see it, is that it still wants the wrong corrected. Salmela and Christian von Scheve locate the fork in shame itself. Acknowledged shame “allows individuals to establish bonds with others who feel the same,” while those who repress it “remain in their shame or seek bonds from repression-mediated defensive anger and hatred.” So the question I’d ask of any grievance is not whether it is angry. It is whether it wants a remedy, and whether it moves toward other people or closes against them.

Buber’s Two Ways of Meeting the World

Martin Buber’s vocabulary names what ressentiment does at the level of relationship. In I and Thou, the relation to a Thou is “direct.” “No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou,” and “no aim, no lust, and no anticipation.” Buber doesn’t say memory is set aside. He says it “is transformed” in the meeting. The I of the other attitude, I-It, faces no Thou and “has nothing but objects,” which live, as he puts it, in the past. The difference is not between nice and nasty treatment. It is between meeting someone present and handling a record of them.

In a later essay, “Elements of the Interhuman,” Buber names three things that block genuine meeting between people. The first is seeming. Buber distinguishes two ways of being with other people: one “proceeds from what one really is, the other from what one wishes to seem.” In most of us, he says, “the two are found mixed together.” His example is a look. One person simply looks at the other. The second, concerned with the image his glance will produce, “‘makes’ this look.” Put two such people in conversation and Buber counts “two living beings and six ghostly appearances”: each man as he wishes to appear, as he actually appears to the other, and as he appears to himself. “Where,” he asks, “is there room for any genuine interhuman life?” Then comes the line that matters most here. Seeming is not a fixed nature. “It originates, in fact, on the other side of interhuman life itself, in men’s dependence upon one another. It is no light thing to be confirmed in one’s being by others, and seeming deceptively offers itself as a help in this. To yield to seeming is man’s essential cowardice, to resist it is his essential courage.” Here, as I read it, seeming meets shame. Buber doesn’t use the word, but the dependence he describes is the bond Scheff says shame guards. If I fear that who I am won’t be confirmed, an image offers protection: if the image is rejected, I am not. The protection has a cost, and the other person pays it. To keep the image working, I have to manage how the other sees me, and in Buber’s conversation between Peter and Paul each is so busy with images, his own and the other’s, that the two living people never meet. The other has become an audience for my image, someone to be handled rather than met. Buber names a second obstacle separately: an “analytical, reductive, and deriving look” that “tries to contract the manifold person… to some schematically surveyable and recurrent structures.” Seeming guards the self; the reductive look shrinks the other. Ressentiment, as I read it, needs both.

The manosphere takes this way of seeing others and turns it into a system. Online masculinist communities rate attractiveness, rank status, and sort women into tiers, treating people as objects to be measured. Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna Tirkkonen argue that ressentiment turns incels’ loneliness into antagonism, and they find that “loneliness is exacerbated rather than alleviated through the incel community.” The vulnerability underneath is real. Joseph Vandello and his colleagues argue that manhood is widely seen as “a precarious state requiring continual social proof and validation.” In their account it is “elusive,” because it “is not a developmental certainty,” and “tenuous,” because “even once achieved, it is not guaranteed and can be lost,” and their participants saw manhood as more precarious than womanhood. When the researchers gave men feedback suggesting their performance was gender-atypical, the men reported more anxiety and threat in one study and, in another, showed more physically aggressive thoughts, which the authors offer as “initial evidence” of a link to aggression; the same feedback had no such effect on women. A status that has to be won, and can be taken away, makes any challenge to it feel like an emergency. The same authors are careful to clarify: “we do not suggest that threats to a man’s masculinity will inevitably lead to physical aggression,” and men “may restore threatened masculinity via nonaggressive means.” They add that where aggression is the most available way to restore status, they “believe that men will likely use” it. That caution shapes how much I rely on their findings. It shows the pressure first; the outcome depends on what other routes are open. In my view, when this pressure does lead to domination, it happens because a humiliated person tries to regain status by humiliating someone else. That doesn’t make it right. Understanding how a wound turns into domination is not the same as excusing what happens to those on the receiving end. These are real women with real lives, not just examples for someone’s theory of ressentiment.

The forums supply both the target and the reward. Roberta Liggett O’Malley and Brenna Helm, analyzing more than 8,000 posts from 703 users in two incel communities, found that perceived injustice offers “one avenue to incel membership” and that the esteem the forum offers “may be a vital draw.” The forum does provide esteem, and it also leads members “to re-interpret instances in their lives through the lens of extremist ideology.” Kayla Preston, Michael Halpin, and Finlay Maguire, coding 9,062 comments on another forum, found incels arguing that women’s use of dating apps “accelerates hypergamy” (their word for women constantly trading up to a more desirable partner), that highly desirable men use the apps to partner with multiple women, and that other men inflate women’s “sexual marketplace value.” The market vocabulary is theirs. Technology becomes the explanation, and the humiliation gets somewhere to point.

Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser trace a bridge from this to political economy. They read the shift from pick-up-artist culture to incel culture as a sign that “neoliberalism cannot cope with its failures, especially its promises of self-confidence.” Those promises are exposed as confidence games and “rerouted through networked misogyny.” Erich Fromm described the character this kind of economy trains, decades earlier. He called it the marketing orientation, rooted in “the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one’s value as exchange value.” The distinction behind it comes from economics. A pair of shoes has a use value, what it is good for, and an exchange value, what it will fetch. Fromm’s point is that on what he calls the “personality market,” people come to judge themselves by the second, experiencing themselves “simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold.” His image is a row of handbags on a counter, each trying to look as “attractive” as possible; the one that isn’t sold “would feel sad and convinced of its own worthlessness.” Such a person’s self-esteem is “bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. Hence one is driven to strive relentlessly for success.” And “others are experienced as commodities like oneself.” Byung-Chul Han adds the exhaustion. He contrasts the older disciplinary society of prisons and factories, governed by “May Not” and “Should,” with today’s “achievement society,” whose modal verb is “Unlimited Can.” Its members are “entrepreneurs of themselves.” Disciplinary society, he writes, “produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.” Losers is the word to notice, given the forums. When everything is supposedly possible, falling short leads to “destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression”; the complaint “Nothing is possible” “can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’” The achievement-subject has no boss but itself, and so “the exploiter is simultaneously the exploited.” 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 the argument leaves the individual psyche and enters political economy, and I think this is the part that doesn’t get said often enough. First, a working definition, since the word gets used loosely. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls the ‘thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule’ incomplete. His thicker version names four logics working together: economic deregulation that makes the market the model “for organizing the gamut of human activities”; a welfare state cut back and rebuilt as workfare; an expansive penal apparatus aimed at the bottom of society; and “the cultural trope of individual responsibility,” which supplies a “vocabulary of motive” (C. Wright Mills’s phrase) for building the self “on the model of the entrepreneur.” That fourth logic is where the two halves of this piece meet. Han’s entrepreneur of the self and Wacquant’s responsible individual are the same figure, seen from inside and from outside.

Start with nature. The geographers James McCarthy and Scott Prudham argued in 2004 that what was largely missing from critiques of neoliberalism was “a recognition that neoliberalism is also an environmental project, and that it is necessarily so.” Noel Castree’s later synthesis prefers the process word, neoliberalization, because what gets called neoliberalism is “an ongoing, unfinished process” rather than one coherent program. The mechanisms he lists include privatization, marketization, deregulation, and market-friendly reregulation. To picture it (this is my illustration, not his case), a fishery might be privatized into tradeable quotas one decade, have its wetlands enrolled in a carbon-credit scheme the next, and have its water rights auctioned after that, each market layered on the last.

Not everyone sees this as a loss. The geographer Kathleen McAfee studied the version that took hold in international conservation in the 1990s. She called it “green developmentalism” and described it as “a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm.” Its promise was that markets could save nature by paying for it, and she states that promise in the paradigm’s own terms: nature “would earn its own right to survive through international trade.” The critique I’m making doesn’t deny that motive. It concerns what pricing does to the thing being priced. Under this logic, McAfee writes, “nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems are recoded as warehouses of genetic resources.” Recoded is the precise word. On the day a bay or a forest enters the ledger, nothing about it has physically changed; what changes first, as I see it, is which description counts. McAfee is clear that the effects don’t stay on paper: drawing these places into markets brings “material and cultural outcomes that do more to diminish than to conserve diversity and sustainability.” Valued by “denominating diversity in dollars, euros, or yen,” nature is abstracted, in her phrase, “from its spatial and social contexts,” and the people whose history is bound up with a place are exactly the context that drops out. Once a forest’s worth is a price, the idea of something mattering because it simply exists (not priced, not optimized, just there) becomes harder to say out loud, let alone to defend in a policy argument. That is the operation Buber names at the level of a person. The living world gets converted from something to be encountered into something to be managed.

Jason Moore pushes the point further. “Capitalism does not develop upon global nature,” he writes; it “emerges through the messy and contingent relations of humans with the rest of nature.” On his account, ecological crisis is not an interruption from outside the system. It comes from capitalism’s own need for cheap food, energy, and labor, and so “the world-ecological limit of capital, in other words, is capital itself.”

Who Pays, and Why That Isn’t an Accident

A serious version of this argument has to ask who carries the weight, because the costs aren’t spread evenly. Wacquant’s account of the United States, culminating in the 1996 welfare reform, gives the clearest frame I know. That reform, in his account, replaced “protective welfare” with “disciplinary workfare,” which makes public assistance conditional on “behavioral obligations” and treats recipients “not as citizens but as clients or subjects.” Its partner is prisonfare, the expansion of “the police, the courts, and the penitentiary” in the same poor neighborhoods. His claim is that the two work as one, “coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class,” meaning the people at the insecure, low-wage bottom of the labor market. One pushes them off the aid rolls; the other ends up “holding them under lock.” He is careful to add that this did not happen “according to some master scheme”; the fit between the two is “partly designed and partly an emergent property.” The result is a “centaur state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom.” And it does something the first half of this piece would predict. Workfare and prison together, Wacquant writes, “stamp the precarious fractions of the proletariat from which public aid recipients and convicts issue with the indelible seal of unworthiness.” That is shame administered as policy.

Michelle Yates names the category this produces. Capitalism, she argues, “speaks a logic of human disposability.” When capital no longer needs people as workers, they become “surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life,” “little more than the human-as-waste.” Yates sets “the redundant worker” beside “the residuals from the production process itself” as two by-products of the same logic. Disposable is her word for people. I’m extending it to a bay recoded as compensable damage, and her own pairing of workers with production’s leftovers is why I think the extension holds: same operation, different object.

Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake name what gets lost on the social side. They contrast an “affective, morally-led form of solidarity,” rooted in “the interdependency of the human condition,” the plain fact that every life depends on others, from infancy through illness and old age. They set it against the calculative kind that now dominates in Europe. Calculative solidarity works like “a type of reciprocal insurance system,” “implicitly conditional: what is given is expected to be reciprocated.” They also note a growing belief that solidarity “should be contingent on individual responsibility,” with the ideal citizen defined “as self-sufficient.” Their argument is that individualism and neoliberal inequality together breed “an antipathy” to the affective kind. And they name what the arrangement breeds in return: inequality “generates feelings of suspicion, anger and resentment that fuel detachment from the body politic and undermine the trust that underpins social solidarity.” heir “resentment” is the everyday kind, not Scheler’s. The next step is mine: left unacknowledged, that resentment and anger can harden into what the first half traced, and those feelings wear away the solidarity that might have answered them. Neoliberalism doesn’t need to abolish solidarity to do its damage. It only has to recode it, which is the same move markets make on a forest once it has been translated into a unit of ecosystem services.

My Take

What strikes me, working across both literatures, is that each arrives at the same pattern on its own terms. Scheler wrote long before carbon markets existed, and the shame researchers I reference focus on therapy rooms, online forums, and populist politics, not wetlands. Still, the pattern repeats. A wound caused by circumstances no one fully chose gets turned into a moralized story that shields the person from feeling the pain directly, but at the cost of a relation (to another person, a bay, or a species) that could have been encountered instead. I don’t think this overlap is just a coincidence, but I want to be clear about what I’m claiming. It’s not that Buber, Scheler, or the political economists already made this point, though Scheler came close: he thought ressentiment must be “strongest in a society like ours,” where formal equality goes “hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.” On the political side, Salmela and von Scheve come closest. Reading them together lets me make a stronger claim, and that claim is my own. Under pressure, a person turns a relation into something manageable, and a system does the same thing to a whole population or landscape. The real question is whether this is one mechanism or just the same move happening twice for different reasons. My answer is that it’s one mechanism. Buber never wrote about carbon markets or incel forums, but the gap between meeting a person and managing or objectifying one is the same as the gap between a policy and the forest it puts a price on. That’s my take on his idea, not his own argument, and I believe it holds up.

Go Deeper

  • Ressentiment by Max Scheler. The original text, dense but short, and worth reading once for how carefully he separates ressentiment from ordinary revenge.
  • “Ressentiment: The World-Improving Poison” by The Living Philosophy (December 2023). An accessible walk through Nietzsche’s and Scheler’s accounts and their 21st-century politics, if you want the concept without the primary text’s density. It goes further than I do, treating ressentiment as an engine of social progress; I’d draw the line between grievance that wants a cure and grievance that doesn’t. Link: thelivingphilosophy.com/p/ressentiment.
  • Man for Himself by Erich Fromm. The section on the marketing orientation, in the chapter on character types, is a few pages long and reads as if it were written about social media.
  • “The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle” by Heidi Blake (The New Yorker, October 2023). A reported deep dive into how carbon-offset markets work in practice, and what gets lost in the translation from forest to tradeable credit.

References

Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Louis A. Coser from the German text of 1915 (electronic text; its print version is named as Marquette University Press, 1994). Quoted without page numbers.

Thomas J. Scheff, “Shame in Self and Society,” Symbolic Interaction 26, no. 2 (2003): 239–62. Helen Block Lewis’s findings (Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, 1971) are cited as Scheff reports them.

June Price Tangney, “Constructive and Destructive Aspects of Shame and Guilt,” in Constructive and Destructive Behavior: Implications for Family, School, and Society, ed. Arthur C. Bohart and Deborah J. Stipek (American Psychological Association, 2001), 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): 191–203.

Tereza Capelos, Mikko Salmela, and Gabija Krisciunaite, “Grievance Politics: An Empirical Analysis of Anger Through the Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment,” Politics and Governance 10, no. 4 (2022): 384–95.

Mikko Salmela and Christian von Scheve, “Emotional Dynamics of Right- and Left-Wing Political Populism,” Humanity & Society 42, no. 4 (2018): 434–54.

James M. Jasper, “Constructing Indignation: Anger Dynamics in Protest Movements,” Emotion Review 6, no. 3 (2014): 208–13.

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

Martin Buber, “Elements of the Interhuman,” in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. Maurice Friedman, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 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.

Joseph A. Vandello, Jennifer K. Bosson, Dov Cohen, Rochelle M. Burnaford, and Jonathan R. Weaver, “Precarious Manhood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1325–39.

Roberta Liggett O’Malley and Brenna Helm, “The Role of Perceived Injustice and Need for Esteem on Incel Membership Online,” Deviant Behavior 44, no. 7 (2023): 1026–43.

Kayla Preston, Michael Halpin, and Finlay Maguire, “The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men,” Men and Masculinities 24, no. 5 (2021): 823–41.

Jack 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).

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (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.

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

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): 107–46.

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 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018786379.

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.

Revised October 2026: attributions corrected and every quotation rechecked against its source.