Michael R. Sobocinski, Ph.D.

Picture two people you’ll never meet. One spends his evenings in an online forum that ranks and judges women, a space that tries to manage 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 as a carbon offset asset, in some distant spreadsheet. They live different lives and scroll different feeds, and if you asked each of them to name an enemy, they’d name different ones.

I believe their stories are more connected than either of them might think, and this overlap is more than just a coincidence. It’s a warning.

Two Case Studies That Aren’t Really Two

Start with the forum. Shame is the chronic, often unnamed sense of being just not enough, and when nobody acknowledges it, it doesn’t simply fade away. Helen Lewis, after reviewing hundreds of psychotherapy session transcripts, found that signs of shame appeared far more often than any other emotion, yet both patients and therapists rarely named it. She also found that signs of anger were always preceded by signs of shame. Thomas Scheff, the sociologist who built on her work, calls shame the master emotion of everyday life. June Tangney’s studies, with children and adults alike, link proneness to shame with anger and with handling anger destructively, while people prone to guilt handle anger more constructively.

Shame is about who you are, and unlike guilt, it doesn’t offer a clear next step. Guilt tells you to fix what you did: there’s something to correct, an apology to make, a way to make things right. Shame doesn’t give you that option, because it’s about your whole self, not just your actions. So shame usually leads in one of two directions. It can make someone want to hide, to disappear. Or it can become what Lewis called humiliated fury: anger directed at whoever seems to have exposed you. Tangney sees this outward anger as a defense: by turning anger outward, a shamed person tries to regain some control. This post focuses on that outward turn, but it’s not a rule. Many people who feel shame never react this way. Also, this isn’t a criticism of anger at injustice. Anger that seeks to fix a wrong and brings people together is different from the kind of anger discussed here.

Max Scheler described, a century ago, what happens to that kind of anger when it can’t be acted on. He used Nietzsche’s word for it, ressentiment: feelings like revenge, envy, and spite that get trapped by powerlessness and eventually become a lasting attitude. Ordinary revenge has a target and ends when the score is settled. Ressentiment drifts. It moves toward “indeterminate groups of objects which need only share one common characteristic.” This fits how some forums blame women as a whole.

Scheler didn’t name shame among its sources, though humiliation runs all through his account. More recent work by Mikko Salmela and Tereza Capelos adds it, naming shame, envy, and anger that can’t accomplish anything as triggers of “a morally superior sense of victimhood.” The online manosphere is a well-documented case. In their study of incel culture, Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna Tirkkonen describe ressentiment as the mechanism that turns loneliness into antagonism, and they find that these communities make loneliness worse rather than easing it.

Now the bay. Researchers, mainly geographers and sociologists, have studied how market governance recodes the living world as assets that can be bought and sold. The verb is Kathleen McAfee’s. The geographer called one version of this “green developmentalism”: the market approach to conservation of the 1990s, whose promise was that markets could save nature by paying for it. She called it “postneoliberal” because, unlike neoliberal economics, it tried to bring the environment into economic accounting. Under this market paradigm, “ecosystems are recoded as warehouses of genetic resources,” and nature “would earn its own right to survive through international trade.” Recoded is the right word, as nothing physical changes about the bay when it becomes an offset asset. The water, the fish, and the family’s knowledge remain. What changes is how the bay is described and valued. Now, it’s measured by “denominating diversity in dollars, euros, or yen,” and McAfee argues this kind of valuation “abstracts nature from its spatial and social contexts.” The family’s history with the bay is exactly the kind of context that gets lost.

The same recoding happens to what people owe each other, and that is the social shift. Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake distinguish two ways a society holds its members together. Affective solidarity starts from “the interdependency of the human condition”: people help because every life depends on others, from infancy through illness and old age. Calculative solidarity treats mutual support as “a type of reciprocal insurance system,” and it is “implicitly conditional: what is given is expected to be reciprocated, should the need arise.” They argue that individualism and neoliberal inequality together breed “an antipathy” to the first kind. In Europe they find “a growing belief” that “solidarity should be contingent on individual responsibility,” with the ideal citizen defined as “self-sufficient.” That is the bay’s recoding applied to a neighbor. A relationship of need and care gets redescribed as a contract, and a person who can’t hold up their end starts to look like a bad risk. Lynch and Kalaitzake also name what the arrangement breeds in the people it leaves behind: inequality that “generates feelings of suspicion, anger and resentment that fuel detachment from the body politic.” That is the forum’s vocabulary, reached from the economic side.

As for who pays most directly, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant traced what happened to poor Americans over the quarter-century that culminated in the 1996 welfare reform. This reform replaced “protective welfare” with “disciplinary workfare,” making public assistance depend on behavior, especially on taking paid work. In his account, recipients are treated “not as citizens but as clients or subjects.” Prisonfare is his name for its partner: the expansion of police, courts, and prisons aimed at the same neighborhoods. His claim is that these are not two policies but 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 and the other ends up “holding them under lock.” The resulting state is, as he puts it, a “centaur state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom.” Michelle Yates goes a step further. When capital no longer needs people as workers, she argues, they become “surplus populations,” “little more than the human-as-waste.” She calls this a “logic of human disposability.” Disposable is Yates’s word for people, but she sets “the redundant worker” beside “the residuals from the production process itself” as two by-products of the same logic. I think it fits a bay recoded as compensable damage just as well.

The Same Operation, Different Object

When you compare these two stories, they both show the same pattern. Martin Buber gave us the name for it in the first post of this series. A relation to a Thou, he writes, is “direct”; the I of the I-It attitude “has nothing but objects.” Both stories share 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 pushed into the most precarious work. The details and the target are almost incidental. What stays constant is that something which 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.

If relation and connection are more basic than separateness, as the last post argued, and if the self was never the isolated unit our economics and psychology sometimes suggest, then starving our need for relation doesn’t make it disappear. Instead, that need looks elsewhere to fill the gap. Grievance is one substitute, and extraction is another. 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. One audit of Twitter’s engagement-based ranking found that the algorithm boosted “emotionally charged, out-group hostile content.” Users said they didn’t actually prefer the political posts the algorithm picked, and readers ended up feeling worse about people on the other side. That looks to me like a closed loop with no built-in brake: the feed deepens the very disconnection that led to the grievance in the first place.

Extraction works the same way. Once nature has been recoded as an asset and an offset, it becomes harder to talk about protecting anything for its own sake (not priced, not optimized, just there). Both systems can run indefinitely because neither was ever about its stated target. The incel forum’s misogyny is real, but on my reading the forum was never only about the women it ranks. The carbon-offset spreadsheet was never really about that particular bay. Both are downstream of a self or 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. If we ignore this truth, the underlying wound doesn’t heal. It looks for a new target: another outgroup, a new frontier to exploit, another group to classify as surplus. A system built to manage rather than meet has no internal reason to stop on its own.

My Take

I believe both stories offer the same way out of these ever-escalating cycles. Erich Fromm described the trap plainly: a person whose worth is set by the market has self-esteem “bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others.” Buber, writing about what happens between people, uses the same word for what that person is missing: “It is no light thing to be confirmed in one’s being by others.” A self that has somewhere to be confirmed still needs recognition. It stops needing an enemy to supply it. That isn’t a policy fix, and I don’t think it’s naive to say so. We keep treating grievance politics and ecological extraction as separate news categories, with separate experts and separate fixes. I think that separation is part of how the wound keeps finding new places to go unnoticed.

Go Deeper

Ressentiment by Max Scheler: the century-old text that anatomized the mechanism this post keeps circling back to, short and dense, for anyone who wants his full argument.

“Ressentiment: The World-Improving Poison” by The Living Philosophy (December 2023, thelivingphilosophy.com/p/ressentiment): the easiest on-ramp here, walking through Nietzsche’s and Scheler’s accounts and connecting them to today’s culture wars. 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.

Man for Himself by Erich Fromm: the chapter on character types includes his account of the “marketing orientation,” the self that experiences its own value as a price.

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han: a short, sharp account of what happens when a person is set loose to maximize their own achievement.

“The Rage of Lonely Men” by Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna K. Tirkkonen (Topoi, 2023): the study behind this post’s manosphere example.

References

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.

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

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.

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

Smitha Milli, Micah Carroll, Yike Wang, Sashrika Pandey, Sebastian Zhao, and Anca D. Dragan, “Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media,” PNAS Nexus 4 (2025).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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. For the full argument, see the deep dive, “Scheler, Buber, and the Political Economy of Ressentiment.”

Revised October 2026: attributions corrected and sources rechecked against the texts.