As I thought about the general psychology of violence and protest in our country - in relation to both my clinical work and the particular milieu of my academic life - one word seemed to capture it all: alienation. Whether in relation to the state, communities, institutions, working environments, families, spouses - even one’s sense of self - it appeared to me that South African protestors were raging against an abiding disconnect between internal desire and external reality, or a state of alienation written into both the objective conditions of life in the external world, as well as their internal, subjective experiences of that world.

What is of immediate interest to me as a psychotherapist is that the dominant political trend of our time - identity politics - is profoundly psychological, being organised around the injured dignity of oppressed groups. Each group, that is, claims a misattunement between a felt group identity and an outer world that rejects it. For proponents of identity politics, therefore, the problem of dignity turns on a society that is pathologically invalidating. Human beings are first and foremost social beings, and when social formations compromise the dignity of marginalised groups as a matter of routine, the consequences are devastating, involving either self-hating shame or envious resentment.

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.

According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence refers to a situation in which the oppressed cannot but assess their predicament through the terms of reference provided by the oppressor, and thereby unwittingly participate in their own subjugation. By contrast, the protests that have shaken South African university campuses over the last five years signal a conscientisation about the workings of symbolic violence. All the talk of intellectual colonisation, Eurocentrism, whiteness, privilege, epistemic violence and so on is university-speak for a perceived system of knowledge and an encompassing institutional culture that makes it impossible for black students and academics to participate as their white counterparts’ equals in intellectual life.

That is why the influence of the middle-class ressentiment should not be underestimated. There is, of course, a substantial gap between the ivory tower and the street - but it is equally true that what happens on university campuses filters into public spaces. I mention this because research conducted in the middle of the twentieth century showed how followers of facist movements were most likely to come from the lower strata of the middle classes who, because their strivings for self-improvement were continuously blocked, were most susceptible to developing feelings of ressentiment.