How Individualism Fuels a Politics of Petty Personal Grievance

harvesting petty grievance is easier than tapping into a singular ideal

Image by Richard Drew, courtesy of AP and WBUR

In my book, Our Worst Strength, near the end, I offer my attempt at a philosophical contribution: America has perfected the concept of the “rights-enabled consumer.” This product-and-service-consuming individual is the primary locus of all thought, action, and policy in America. We grow up feeling entitled to maximum personal autonomy as young adults and to consume more and more as we age (and most of us do).

From this perspective, it becomes clear that the modern civil rights movement has been driven by a desire for better-paying, safer labor conditions that enable a comfortable leisure lifestyle of consumption. Civil rights are about enabling the opportunity to become a content rights-enabled consumer.

This ‘rights-enabled consumer’ in America has not only learned to ignore collective forces shaping her everyday choices, including technological ones, but also to deny their existence actively. The possibility that our 'civil freedom’ simply allows us to be better manipulated by massive market forces and our imaginations is too horrifying to explore, much like we all ignore the low odds of adaptation to the real world encountered by a prison inmate upon their release in old age.¹ Many kill themselves without the structure of prison life.

We moderns, in America and abroad, distract ourselves with the fantasy of autonomous consumption and personally fashioned lifestyles. In this churning stew of possibility and excessive choice, many create their miserable disappointments out of thin air. I did this in my failed academic career. No one forced me to dream such a dream. But many encouraged me to do it…

How Modern Forms of Shame Fuel Mass Grievance

To support our lives as rights-enabled consumers, we have also quietly propagated a callous supporting ideology of personal responsibility defended by a fanatical belief in individual privacy. We are free to curate our own lives, but we are fully responsible when we fail and stumble. Shame has contracted to the shame of personal failure. Our failures often have little impact on our family members or friends because we do our best to conceal them behind the veil of privacy our society encourages us to wear. Many who know us may not even understand the ‘failure’ in question or why it matters. Only those who live with us have to deal with our shame and its emotional consequences.

In America, we allow large, geographically dispersed segments of the population to self-implode (drug addicts, the mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, alcoholics, autistics, etc.) and ignore their misery, relying on the state to provide entitlement assistance. We are not culturally empowered to invade a person’s privacy to get them help or assistance when they stumble. When we try, we get rebuffed. We hang back and wait for the lost individual to raise their hand in a moment of deep self-reflection. We may honestly not understand what they need to expiate their shame and move on. Not when it’s a highly nuanced career or romantic fantasy.

There are now many more ways to perceive failure or personal slight than in eras past. Even social status is purely context-dependent, susceptible to sudden reversal in an hour when some troll comments on your post. The casually dressed CEO gets bumped off his flight, and no one cares. The poorly educated tow truck driver can’t charm a local banker into a bridge loan because he has no connections like his father once had. The frustrated, retired couple who overspend their pension income by 30% and file for personal bankruptcy because they refuse to cut down their spending. As you can see from this real-world list, not all of these insults and grievances are even valid, but that won’t stop some individuals from harboring a grievance about them, from hiding these failures from everyone around them.

This grievance behavior operates on a continuum, of course. Some of us are pretty mature, while others are, even temporarily, adrift in every possible basic social measure, including relationships, finances, and contentment. The latter are fodder for every manner of cult, conspiracy theory, clickbait commentary, and addictive substance. The former don’t recognize the country they now live in.

The shame of personal failure, regardless of how superficial or delusional its basis, often leads to grievance and then rage, especially in men. I’ll say it once more. These grievances do not have to be tied to a serious issue to disrupt a person’s emotional state. The grievance could be a self-created problem (e.g., inability to commit to one partner or reduce spending in retirement). In a society like America, we manufacture this kind of personalized rage on a massive scale. Yet, the basis of the original grievance could be any of a hundred different things. We can not reduce it to inflation or divorce. This barely hidden rage fuels a politics of deeply personal grievance in the absence of meaningful group support, strong, highly committed relationships, or effective therapeutic intervention.

In traditional human communities, socially generated rage is either absorbed and expiated by peers (often through intense public rituals) or channeled into more functional group conflict, particularly in eras when the kin group provided 90% of one's sustenance and a significant amount of protection. This may not make the aggrieved individual ‘happy’ but it often neutralizes the antisocial potential of their rage. The local community stands protected.

The Leap to Grievance Harvesting In Politics

As large-scale democratic nations appeared in the 18th century, democratic citizens initially voted in line with their group interests, such as ethnicity, caste, or class. If you had a grievance at the voting booth, it was identical in origin to every member of a group to which you had a strong allegiance (usually an ethnic or occupational group). In a hyper-individualistic consumer society that worships individual achievement and success, however, this is no longer true. A culture of maximal autonomy ironically enables a voting culture of grievance irrespective of group identity and based in bizarre forms of self-created shame that are impenetrable to outsiders.

This is, in part, how we get personally aggrieved blue-collar African-Americans voting for a confirmed racist who has no concern for unions, healthcare access, or middle-class welfare. Dude is pissed because two divorces have left him living a moldy apartment (and he has made effort to explore how this came to be). Voting against one’s many interests is incredibly easy in a culture of personal achievement and equally personal grievance.

Politics appears to be the struggle between groups, on the surface. The more polarized a nation becomes, the more likely it is to reify the political groups in conflict (Nazis vs. Woke Crazies) and view their ideologies as primordial, almost instinctual.

In America, however, our polarized extremes distract us from the real issue in our uniquely fragmented society: politics has become a frantic, inexact game of attracting hundreds or thousands of personal grievance patterns to your candidate. These grievances do not necessarily share many commonalities, except for a desire to resolve them. Somehow. Anyhow. Including a vote for the most angry, pissed off looking candidate possible. “Anyone who seems as discontent as I.”

Sadly, this has enabled us to elect a President who is a grievance-wielding master. His nonstop externalizing and self-victimization attracts those in the throes of a million disparate grievances. Millions of Americans see in him the apotheosis of their grievances, the most relevant of all possible political surrogates—a mirror to their wounded selves.

Nothing about 21st-century America encourages compromise at the daily level. My favorite snacks, my favorite streaming shows, my favorite YouTube channel, my favorite anything and everything. Until my preferences shift…

Once a party adopts a 'grab bag of all known personal grievances' platform, it uses our own incredibly distorted self-absorption against us. This is the art of sociopathy as a political movement - transferring your serious AND silly grievances onto external enemies (immigrants, federal employees, the opposing party, racial minorities) without any remorse for doing nothing about your original ‘problems’, for not trying to help you in any way, for using your grievance as political fuel.

The darkest irony here is that our culture of unrealistic personal ambition and consumption fuels the intensity of our personal grievances, as well as bizarre dreams lost and unfulfilled, and relationships sabotaged for largely personal reasons.

We don't all succumb to bizarre petty grievances, but tens of millions of us do. We all know someone like this—the person who has become victimized by their unrealized fantasies of life and unattained, frustrated lifestyle consumption.

American culture breeds mass resentment and alienation. And anger.

And, in feeling grievances born of our individual failures to attain even the most superficial of ideals, the aggrieved easily look to a father-figure to avenge them rather than a leader who can re-center them and re-shape the collective forces that divide, seduce, and delude us- most important of us is our unsupervised imagination.

We look to a leader who validates our pettiness and/or irresponsibility, without taking responsibility to become self-aware and mature.

By inventing grievances that our grandparents would not even recognize, we multiply the power of the grievance-wielding politician —the smooth-talking, anger-wrangler.

1. https://www.wunc.org/health/2024-03-22/formerly-incarcerated-higher-risk-suicide-after-prison-release-study