Social ressentiment - in the terminology of Max Scheler - “must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where… formal social equality, publicly recognised, go[es] hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property and education”. For ordinary people, such a divergence can only make sense by evaluating themselves negatively. By admitting that they lack all “badges of ability”, the poor man and woman can lay to rest the question that has followed them all their lives: the question of why - despite their best efforts - they got nowhere in life. Assuming personal responsibility for a society that failed them, not only do they feel the pain of inadequacy - they resent themselves for feeling it.

Yet shame by itself, Gilligan continues, is not a sufficient condition for the exercise of violence. In order to construct a comprehensive account of violence, one must consider additional factors. From a developmental perspective, for example, a person who has been charmed but has not yet developed the capacity for other feeling states - such as love, empathy, guilt or simply the fear of retribution - is more likely to project feelings of humiliation outwards. As for the social determinants of violence, a similar result can be expected when a person lacks other means of earning respect, such as formal education, occupational skills, financial options, or even some standing within the community. It is these social factors that prove decisive in highly unequal societies such as South Africa, for, without personal resources of any kind, one does not need to have been shamed as a child - whether the medium was physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. As described in the previous section, a society can be sufficiently shaming all by itself for the affected individual to act out in horrific ways.

The thing is, poverty in its absolute sense does not generate shame - it is relative poverty that does the damage. It is not for nothing, therefore, that South Africa - one of the most unequal societies in the world - is known also for being the protest capital of the world.

To begin with, proponents of decolonisation almost never acknowledge one basic fact - that most poor and working-class students have suffered the indignity of being miseducated for twelve years of their lives. South Africa’s schooling system ranks consistently amongst the worst in the world and by the time these students enter elite universities, they are hopelessly prepared for academic life and struggle to cope with the unrelenting institutional demands. But instead of acknowledging these difficulties as areas for personal development, like Aesop’s fox they conclude that the grapes must be sour because they are unreachable.

I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?