Grievance politics and market extraction look like separate problems. They're the same relational failure, and ignoring that costs us more than we think.
Michael R. Sobocinski, Ph.D.
Picture two people you'll never meet. One spends his evenings in an online forum where women are scored, ranked, and sorted into tiers, a place built to manage a very real loneliness by turning it into contempt. The other lives in a fishing town where the bay her family has worked for three generations was just recoded, in a spreadsheet somewhere, as a carbon offset asset. Different lives. Different feeds. Different enemies, if you asked each of them to name one.
I want to show you why they're closer to the same story than either would guess, and why that convergence isn't just an interesting pattern. It's a warning.
Two Case Studies That Aren't Really Two
Let's start with the forum. The psychological literature is fairly consistent about what's happening beneath the surface: shame, the chronic, searing, and often unnamed sense of being "just not enough," doesn't simply sit there when it goes unacknowledged. It often transforms. Thomas Scheff and Helen Lewis traced the mechanism decades ago: unacknowledged shame precedes anger with striking regularity, and June Tangney's research confirms that the pattern holds across ages and contexts.
Shame indicts who you are as a person, and unlike guilt, it doesn't come with an obvious next move. Guilt says "fix the thing you did": there's an act to correct, an apology to make, a way to close the loop. Shame doesn't offer that off-ramp. There's no single behavior to repair when the verdict is about who you are. That unrepairable quality is what makes shame so volatile. Left to sit, it can turn inward: unacknowledged shame is strongly linked to depression, chronic self-loathing, and a corrosive sense of being fundamentally wrong that can wear a person down for years without ever announcing itself as shame. Just as often, though, it turns outward instead, defended against by converting the unbearable feeling into something the self doesn't have to experience directly. That outward turn is the one this post is tracking. So it has nowhere to go but out — aimed at whatever's closest: a partner, a rival, a whole category of people who can be made to carry the blame instead. Max Scheler gave that resulting move its name a century ago: ressentiment, the injury reinterpreted so the wounded self becomes righteous and someone else becomes responsible for a failure that otherwise makes no sense. The manosphere is one of the clearest documented cases: precarious masculine status, converted through organized misogyny into exactly the righteous-victimhood pattern Scheler described, with online communities rewarding and amplifying the conversion rather than relieving the original wound.
Now the bay. A separate body of literature, built by economists and political geographers rather than psychologists, traces something that sounds unrelated: how neoliberal governance "recodes" the living world (forests, water, atmosphere) as assets, offsets, and investment frontiers. Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake name a parallel move on the social side: affective solidarity, grounded in the plain fact that human life is interdependent, gets displaced by calculative solidarity, in which help becomes conditional and dependence becomes a mark against your competence. Loïc Wacquant and, separately, Michelle Yates document who pays for this most directly: populations rendered not just disadvantaged but disposable: a word that describes ecosystems recoded as compensable damage just as precisely as it describes human beings recoded as surplus.
The Same Operation, Different Object
Put them side by side, and something clicks: both stories describe the same move. Martin Buber gave us the name for it in the first post of this series: the conversion of a Thou, a full presence to be met, into an It, a thing to be managed, ranked, priced, or discarded. The forum does it to women. The spreadsheet does it to a bay. A punitive welfare system does it to a person deemed economically redundant. The content and the target are almost incidental. What's constant is the operation: something that could have been encountered gets converted into an object instead because relation (the actual, effortful, uncertain kind that recognizes and honors difference) isn't available or isn't being offered.
The "potential prior to one-and-many" I worked through in the last post shows up here at street level, not in a philosophy seminar. If relation is more basic than separateness, and if the self was never the isolated unit our economics and psychology sometimes pretend it is, starving that need doesn't make it disappear. It makes it look for a substitute. Grievance is one substitute. Extraction is another. They're not two different diseases. They're the same hunger, fed two different ways.
Why This Is the Peril, Not Just the Diagnosis
What worries me most is that neither substitute has a natural stopping point. The platforms that circulate grievance reward the most emotionally divisive material, deepening the very disconnection that produced the grievance in the first place: a closed loop with no built-in brake. Extraction works the same way. Once nature has been recoded as an asset and an offset, the vocabulary for defending anything as intrinsically worth protecting (not priced, not optimized, just there, mattering on its own terms) becomes harder and harder to even say out loud. Both systems can run indefinitely because they were never actually about the stated target. The incel forum was never really about the women it ranks. The carbon-offset spreadsheet was never really about that particular bay. Both are downstream of a self or a system that has stopped expecting to be met and has started managing instead.
"We're more connected than we admit" isn't just a nice sentiment to close a blog post. Ignore it, and the wound doesn't go quiet. It goes looking for the next available target: a new outgroup, a new frontier, or a new population classified as surplus. A system built to manage rather than meet has no internal reason to stop on its own.
My Take
The same evidence that names the danger also names the way out, and it's no coincidence that the vocabulary appears in both literatures independently: commoning, conviviality, and mutual aid on the economic side; recognition, encounter, and being genuinely seen on the psychological side. A self that has somewhere to be confirmed doesn't stop needing recognition. It just stops needing an enemy to supply it. That's not a policy fix, and it's not naive to say so: it's the actual mechanism, according to the same research that documents the harm. We keep treating grievance politics and ecological extraction as separate news categories, requiring separate experts and separate fixes. I don't think that's just inefficient. I think it's part of how the wound keeps finding new places to go unnoticed.
Go Deeper
"Ressentiment: The World-Improving Poison" by The Living Philosophy — the easiest on-ramp here, walking through Nietzsche's and Scheler's accounts side by side and connecting them straight to today's culture wars.
Ressentiment by Max Scheler — the century-old primary text that named the mechanism this post keeps circling back to, for anyone who wants the fuller argument.
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han — a short, sharp account of what happens when a person is set loose to optimize themselves without limit.
"The Rage of Lonely Men" by Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna K. Tirkkonen (Topoi, 2023) — the clearest documented case of loneliness converting into organized misogyny, and the source behind this post's manosphere example.
References
Thomas J. Scheff, "Shame in Self and Society," Symbolic Interaction 26, no. 2 (2003): 239–262 — shame as the master emotion and the shame-rage spiral.
Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, 1971) — the therapy-transcript research behind this post's claim that shame markers reliably precede anger.
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 — the shame/guilt distinction underlying this post's account of why shame "has nowhere to go but out."
Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994 [1912]) — the transvaluation of injury into righteous victimhood.
S. Milli, Micah Carroll, Sashrika Pandey, Yike Wang, and A. Dragan, "Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media," PNAS Nexus 4 (2023) — the platform-engagement mechanism behind this post's claim that grievance-amplifying content is systematically rewarded.
Kathleen McAfee, "Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 2 (1999): 133–54 — on how recoding nature for market valuation displaces the vocabulary for defending it as intrinsically worth protecting.
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.
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.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970) — the I-It/I-Thou framework applied throughout; no direct quotation used.
This is the third piece in a short series on taking connectedness seriously as ontology, not just sentiment. The first, "It's Time to Take Connectedness (Ontologically) Seriously," named the diagnosis. The second, "The Philosophy Behind Taking Connectedness Seriously," traced its philosophical ground. This piece asks what happens when the diagnosis goes unheeded.